00:00:00 ◼ ► So I've got a little bit of weird setup this week. Next week is the time that I am hypothetically
00:00:06 ◼ ► going to be not at home, which is a semi-inconvenient time from the perspective of--though there's
00:00:15 ◼ ► nothing going on next week, right? But nevertheless, I thought, "You know what? I should probably
00:00:26 ◼ ► recording and speaking to you this week for my MacBook Pro, and if everything sounds like
00:00:40 ◼ ► Yeah, definitely, and we will talk about it. But yeah, if it all sounds like garbage, don't
00:00:44 ◼ ► blame Marco, blame me. I've changed everything except my microphone and the preamp. But like,
00:00:53 ◼ ► cabling got changed, the computer got changed, everything is different, and so I figured,
00:00:58 ◼ ► "You know what? If I'm going to screw this one up, then let's screw this one up and not
00:01:07 ◼ ► Did you by any chance get the, you know, oxygen-free, gold-everything, solid monster cables?
00:01:14 ◼ ► No. No, this guy who used to work at Staples, I hope I'm not right, told me that it was
00:01:26 ◼ ► No, I just was reprimanded a little bit by telling customers not to buy the super expensive
00:01:45 ◼ ► right now, but I really am having a good time, and it's really, after months of misery,
00:01:53 ◼ ► You know, it's funny you say that. Something I wrestle with a lot, I carry with me a lot
00:01:59 ◼ ► of guilt about a lot of different things. Not white cars, coincidentally, because those
00:02:03 ◼ ► can just happen to you, as a listener wrote to us, which I won't say any more than that,
00:02:15 ◼ ► going away soon, and not for a whole long time, but long enough, and I'm really looking
00:02:23 ◼ ► But on the same side, or not on the same side, I guess on the flip side of the coin, I feel
00:02:28 ◼ ► like all of us, every single one of us, the three of us, everyone listening, we all need
00:02:33 ◼ ► to take care of ourselves by whatever means we possibly can. Maybe that's buying something
00:02:47 ◼ ► You know, whatever the case may be, I don't think any of us should feel guilty about taking
00:02:52 ◼ ► care of ourselves and our loved ones, even though I totally agree with you and I totally
00:03:10 ◼ ► challenging for us when we're on our vacation because even though none of the restaurants
00:03:15 ◼ ► in this little town that we love so much are particularly remarkable, we still really love
00:03:21 ◼ ► these restaurants. Like, I don't know. I've not experienced. Is it Boom Boom or Bang Bang
00:03:30 ◼ ► Yeah. Fair enough. Well, it's Bang Bang Shrimp at what you call them? What's the Outback-owned
00:03:43 ◼ ► my assumption and my expectation is that it is legitimately very good, but in the grand
00:03:49 ◼ ► scheme of things, like, it's not earth-shatteringly good, right? And so these restaurants at this
00:03:53 ◼ ► place that we're going, they're good. They're good restaurants, but they're not earth-shatteringly
00:04:01 ◼ ► nights, which is a very unusual thing for us, and go to these restaurants in years past
00:04:05 ◼ ► and experience them and eat at these restaurants, and we really love that. And, you know, there's
00:04:18 ◼ ► enjoyed that, and Aaron always enjoyed that, and they enjoyed that. And I'm a little bummed
00:04:22 ◼ ► that that's not going to be part of the shtick this year, unless on the extraordinarily slim
00:04:28 ◼ ► chance there's, like, literally nobody else on the patio, and then maybe I would consider
00:04:33 ◼ ► it, maybe, but even then I'd probably just get takeout. But have you done anything, Mark,
00:04:37 ◼ ► or have you had your Boom Boom Sauce? Well, first of all, the Boom Boom Sauce can be ordered
00:04:46 ◼ ► Boom Boom Sauce on my eggs since we've gotten to the beach, because the very first day I
00:04:52 ◼ ► went there and I ordered, you know, you had to, like, give them a list, like text a list
00:05:01 ◼ ► that list was a tub of Boom Boom Sauce from the deli. And I can get it whenever I want.
00:05:07 ◼ ► It's just like a Ken's food service thing. You just have to order, like, a whole gallon
00:05:15 ◼ ► can't get it, you know, like, in regular consumer-sized amounts. And I decided to just leave it be,
00:05:32 ◼ ► kind of keep the same and bring with you wherever you go, year-round, anywhere in the world.
00:05:38 ◼ ► You know, you can, if you want to, you can have a lot of things be exactly the same all
00:05:45 ◼ ► my iMac here, and I, and you know, I continue most of my work here and everything. But it
00:05:57 ◼ ► seasons or certain times of year or whatever, whatever that is, to have, like, a different
00:06:02 ◼ ► lifestyle. And one of the reasons I like it here so much is that the nature of Fire Island
00:06:09 ◼ ► forces a different lifestyle to a large degree. There's no cars here. You get everywhere
00:06:19 ◼ ► sidewalks, and you know, it's charming. And, like, part of a recipe for charm is to take
00:06:27 ◼ ► something that you have to do all the time and add inconveniences to it that are something,
00:06:35 ◼ ► add inconveniences that result in a pleasurable but more difficult requirement. So, for instance,
00:06:46 ◼ ► and drive home. You have to either order for delivery, which I don't usually do if I can
00:06:58 ◼ ► here in the summer when the weather's nice. There's no cars in the way. There's no hills.
00:07:07 ◼ ► to the grocery store and then bike home. You take these things that in everyday life are
00:07:12 ◼ ► kind of too easy in a lot of ways, or they've gotten too easy or they've gotten too routine,
00:07:21 ◼ ► ways that result in charming outcomes. Either you get more exercise, you get fresh air,
00:07:26 ◼ ► you get to ride a bike around, you know, that kind of stuff. So this place forces a certain
00:07:31 ◼ ► lifestyle that includes a lot of that kind of stuff. And this is where, you know, I wear
00:07:36 ◼ ► my Apple Watch a lot more here. I do different kinds of exercise here. I started running
00:07:44 ◼ ► - We should talk about that sometime. - Yeah, yeah. Running at home is, where I live at home,
00:07:49 ◼ ► running is-- - Oh no, that would not be fun. - It's pretty unpleasant most of the year.
00:07:53 ◼ ► Just for weather reasons, it's pretty unpleasant, and it's a very hilly, very hilly neighborhood.
00:07:58 ◼ ► So running at home is not incredibly pleasant. So at home I like to row on a rowing machine.
00:08:04 ◼ ► But here, I like to run, it turns out, because it's a really nice place and a really nice
00:08:08 ◼ ► time of the year to run. I like having a more different lifestyle here. Like, just to be
00:08:14 ◼ ► different as much as possible. Like, I wear different clothes here. I have different priorities
00:08:19 ◼ ► here. So anyway, I forgot, how do we get on this topic? - I don't even know, blah, blah,
00:08:27 ◼ ► - And the Boom Boom Sauce. - So the Boom Boom Sauce is one other thing that I add to that
00:08:36 ◼ ► for my breakfast when I'm here. At home, we make scrambled eggs a certain way, with spinach
00:08:46 ◼ ► Boom Boom Sauce, or fully deviled with Boom Boom Sauce on top. So it's a whole different
00:08:51 ◼ ► lifestyle. It's part of the charm of shifting into this mode. And yeah, I like having more
00:08:59 ◼ ► of those things. Like, I use different headphones out here. Just everything is a little bit
00:09:09 ◼ ► from what I do the rest of the year. - Yep, I'm glad that you're there. You sound happy.
00:09:14 ◼ ► Not that you sounded unhappy before, but you sound a little bit airier and, yeah, I don't
00:09:18 ◼ ► know if that's the right word, but like happier, more jovial maybe. So I'm excited. - Oh,
00:09:31 ◼ ► was my birthday, as you mentioned. Thank you for that. It turned out that the day before
00:09:47 ◼ ► spaced really far apart, so they don't have many, you know, there's not a lot of tables.
00:09:51 ◼ ► And you have to wear masks the entire process unless you are sitting at your table. So to
00:10:05 ◼ ► at your table outside far from everybody else with no mask on when you were at the table
00:10:09 ◼ ► and eat your food. Part of my birthday celebration is I got to go out to a restaurant for the
00:10:13 ◼ ► first time in months. And it was amazing. And we know it's a decent restaurant. It's not
00:10:20 ◼ ► like a mind blowing restaurant. It's a nice restaurant, but it's not like, you know, mind
00:10:27 ◼ ► this time and you've had at best takeout food, which again, we weren't actually doing that
00:10:57 ◼ ► nice. And that was a fantastic way to celebrate. So if you have the option to do that safely
00:11:04 ◼ ► where you are, I suggest it. You know, you don't have to do all the time. And obviously
00:11:20 ◼ ► help on us. Like, you know, if like, don't feel guilty about going to a restaurant, feel
00:11:27 ◼ ► a business right now. Cause you know, restaurants, as we mentioned before, like restaurants
00:11:31 ◼ ► are not even in the best of times, a high profit business with a lot of, you know, runway
00:11:37 ◼ ► to go three months or whatever it's been with either significantly reduced or no profits.
00:11:45 ◼ ► Not a lot of restaurants can absorb that help your restaurants go to them, spend a lot of
00:12:25 ◼ ► I'm sorry. That's what I meant. I'm sorry. Yes. Well, anyway, so I definitely was wrong
00:12:29 ◼ ► without question and I don't know, I haven't talked with the guys about where they think
00:13:01 ◼ ► extremely, is heartening a word? I know disheartening, whatever the opposite of disheartening is,
00:13:22 ◼ ► might want out of membership, possible improvements we could make to it. Surprisingly, most people
00:13:28 ◼ ► seem very happy with exactly what we already launched, which is kind of fun. We have heard
00:13:39 ◼ ► into a lot of different things, no guarantees. We're going to see what we can do. There's
00:13:46 ◼ ► into a lot of that stuff as well. As for the, like, you know, what you get, everybody wants
00:13:52 ◼ ► cooking with John. That is true. That is absolutely true. John, is it going to happen? Talking
00:13:58 ◼ ► about everybody. I saw about the same number. Well, I saw more requests for Destiny. Maybe
00:14:09 ◼ ► of these things yet. So we thank you for the innovative ideas. We will keep them in mind.
00:14:18 ◼ ► that we are working on and that we do plan to launch, unless we've run into some massive
00:14:28 ◼ ► launch a quote bootleg feed, which is a feed that basically gives you recordings of the
00:14:43 ◼ ► when this will be done. But this is something that we are, you know, again, unless some
00:14:48 ◼ ► massive showstopper comes up that we can't foresee, we do plan to do this sometime fairly
00:15:00 ◼ ► of us with WDC stuff, so it might not happen before that, but we're trying. We're working
00:15:10 ◼ ► the often requested unedited feed. And that's for better and for worse. You know, unedited
00:15:22 ◼ ► might, depending on how we do it, you might hear a Skype artifact here or there, or you
00:15:35 ◼ ► the audio quality will not probably be anywhere near as good as the final released show is,
00:15:48 ◼ ► what we are broadcasting on the live stream. People have requested that in large numbers,
00:15:52 ◼ ► and so we are working on that. I don't think any other standout requests are, have been
00:16:20 ◼ ► happy with the membership signups and everything, but realistically it's still a tiny fraction
00:16:25 ◼ ► of the listeners. But for that tiny fraction, it's a new relationship with our listeners.
00:16:30 ◼ ► Like, you know, not that, you know, ad sales and everything is particularly indirect. It's
00:16:43 ◼ ► line from listener directly to us. So I do want to provide something that everybody likes.
00:16:47 ◼ ► And so I'm, I assume that this, the offering will evolve over time, but right out of the
00:16:56 ◼ ► Yeah, we don't know what the timing will be in terms of when any bootleg will be available.
00:17:02 ◼ ► We're also at this point making no guarantees about, you know, oh, it'll always be, you
00:17:13 ◼ ► for as good sounding as we can reasonably get with as little work as possible. But again,
00:17:22 ◼ ► really crisp recording of one of us. We'll just see, and it can involve, it can evolve.
00:17:26 ◼ ► You know, if we start with the bootleg and we do it immediately, but it sounds like dirt
00:17:30 ◼ ► and then we realize, well, maybe you'd rather do it in the morning, but it'll sound really,
00:17:34 ◼ ► really good. Maybe we'll do that. We'll see. But we are committing to barring, like Marco
00:17:39 ◼ ► said, any major showstoppers. We're committing to having that sometime as soon as can reasonably
00:17:43 ◼ ► be hoped, given that the most busy time of the year starts in a few days. So we're going
00:17:53 ◼ ► it wasn't flattering to me, was that a lot of people said, well, I don't know if I want
00:17:57 ◼ ► to stop listening to the ads because the ads are really good and I find stuff that I like
00:18:02 ◼ ► in the ads. And that's the idea. That's what the ads are there for. And I just wanted to
00:18:12 ◼ ► that doesn't mean you have to use the member only feed. You can continue to listen to the
00:18:26 ◼ ► our own ads, but other podcasts ads. So that's a perfectly reasonable thing to do. But yes,
00:18:31 ◼ ► in summary, thank you so very, very, very much. It really does mean an incredible amount
00:18:37 ◼ ► to all three of us that so many of you have opened your wallets specifically for the three
00:18:42 ◼ ► of us. And that's extremely, extremely kind. And I'm really flabbergasted at how the response
00:18:58 ◼ ► the ARM Mac dev kit thing that we talked about last show. If Apple is going to roll out a
00:19:12 ◼ ► test their applications. And we talked about a bunch of stuff and then we got a bunch of
00:19:15 ◼ ► feedback about different theories. The first bit is when I was talking about how console
00:19:21 ◼ ► development works, how you get a dev kit for a console and it's not like the console. Right.
00:19:25 ◼ ► And that's just something that is, you know, that game developers deal with in the console
00:19:36 ◼ ► ago in the console world, the Xbox 360. That was the generation where everybody decided
00:19:41 ◼ ► to use PowerPC CPUs in their consoles, including Microsoft with the 360. The one of the early
00:19:59 ◼ ► was like, "Isn't this weird? Microsoft getting a bunch of Macs and it's not even part of
00:20:04 ◼ ► their Windows thing. It's all, you know, they're getting them to do development work on the
00:20:23 ◼ ► it looks like the person got actual Xbox 360 games up and running on a Power Mac, which
00:20:28 ◼ ► is totally weird. So yeah, development hardware. That was internal, obviously. I'm not sure
00:20:33 ◼ ► it was ever sent out to game developers, but it probably was, knowing the way console development
00:21:08 ◼ ► anybody except for maybe people inside Apple. Like the Mac Pro is the only Mac that Apple
00:21:18 ◼ ► I can imagine, and it's really expensive and they're not going to sell more of them by suddenly putting ARM
00:21:58 ◼ ► ARM computer that, yes, I know they have the T2 and everything, but this is like a whole separate thing that would have totally
00:22:33 ◼ ► So they're already doing, like, they're having to engineer motherboards and I/O and power management,
00:22:38 ◼ ► all this stuff in a desktop and laptop context that's all going to be a little bit different
00:23:08 ◼ ► engineering platform that's standalone, just ship an early version of that as a dev kit.
00:23:18 ◼ ► Unless they already did it internally, but I think honestly the timeline of the Mac Pro, it was
00:23:23 ◼ ► probably too late. Like, presumably they were working on the ARM Macs on a timeline that started
00:23:38 ◼ ► times in their past. They used to sell a Mac with a 486 PC inside it, I don't know if you remember that one.
00:24:13 ◼ ► talked about this last time, but it's like, oh, well, you know, suggesting that they ship early
00:24:18 ◼ ► versions of a Mac that they're going to make. What about just hacking together something, you know, like back in the day
00:24:28 ◼ ► working Intel Mac out of the pieces that we have. We're never going to sell this, we're never going to sell a Pentium 4 Mac, but we've got
00:24:33 ◼ ► this big case, and we can get a motherboard and we'll shove it inside the case and ship it out, and that's our, you know,
00:24:38 ◼ ► their dev kit for Intel Macs, right? You've got a Mac Mini case. These days, you know, they don't, I don't think they're going to
00:24:43 ◼ ► use this, you know, $700 fancy drilled out Mac Pro case, but a Mac Mini case is readily available,
00:24:48 ◼ ► and it's really easy to shove a tiny little ARM-based computer inside there, like, I mean,
00:24:53 ◼ ► the Raspberry Pi's that Casey has, or you could fit five of them inside a Mac Mini case.
00:24:58 ◼ ► And, you know, ARM CPUs are probably relatively small and power efficient, and no problem using a Mac Mini case,
00:25:08 ◼ ► and presumably there will eventually be an ARM-based Mac Mini, but that doesn't matter. Like, again,
00:25:18 ◼ ► to any Intel Mac that they were making, other than the fact that they use a cheese grater case, and eventually
00:25:23 ◼ ► they made, you know, Intel Macs in the cheese grater case, but everything about it was different.
00:25:28 ◼ ► They never used that motherboard, they never used that CPU, they never used any of that stuff, right?
00:25:33 ◼ ► So, they could take a Mac Mini, shove some guts in there, and distribute that. That's a pretty cheap way to do it. It's cheaper than even
00:25:38 ◼ ► doing a laptop, because you don't have to worry about the screen and stuff, although, again, it might be annoying to people to have to hook up
00:25:43 ◼ ► an external display if they don't have one. Apple TV, in the same vein, how about an even smaller
00:25:48 ◼ ► box? Hey, we've got this little rounded, black rounded rectangle thing that already has an ARM CPU in it.
00:25:58 ◼ ► variant, then maybe they can share some hardware with that. That could work too, it starts to get a little
00:26:03 ◼ ► bit too small and a little bit too cute, but hey, who knows, stranger things could happen.
00:26:08 ◼ ► Getting even more cheaper, you know, going down the line from a card for your Mac Pro, or a Mac
00:26:13 ◼ ► Mini, or an Apple TV, how about this? Marco mentioned the T2. Macs have had little ARM CPUs
00:26:18 ◼ ► in them for a while, especially ones, I can't think of starting with the Touch Bar, the T1 powering the
00:26:23 ◼ ► original Touch Bar, I forget what the number was. But anyway, most Macs have a T2 in them now.
00:26:38 ◼ ► The T2 is no slouch. You know, it's basically a similar CPU to what was in the iPhone 7.
00:26:48 ◼ ► dev work on it. Unfortunately, the T2 is doing stuff in there. It's not just hanging around for the hell of it, right?
00:27:03 ◼ ► and although you could probably eek out some more headroom in the thing by shoving something else, it's not even
00:27:08 ◼ ► running, like it's running Bridge OS or whatever the hell, like it's, it's busy. The T2 is
00:27:18 ◼ ► you know, it's taken a while for the T1 and T2 chips to shake out in terms of driver support
00:27:23 ◼ ► and having weird issues, not just related to the Touch Bar, but in general. I really don't think Apple
00:27:28 ◼ ► would try to shoehorn anything else onto that T2. I really think it's busy doing other things, running a different operating system.
00:27:38 ◼ ► something in future Macs maybe that has more headroom, I don't know. But like, I feel like the chips
00:27:48 ◼ ► I wouldn't want the thing that's controlling Reads and Writes for my SSD to all of a sudden be running
00:27:58 ◼ ► Another suggestion was cloud. Hey, why do they have to give anyone hardware at all? Why not just say,
00:28:03 ◼ ► we have a bunch of virtual ARM Macs in the cloud and you can just sort of remote desktop
00:28:08 ◼ ► into them and run your software on there and just trust us those are all running on ARM. That way we don't have to
00:28:13 ◼ ► distribute hardware to anybody. It's kind of laggy, but you don't really care. And, you know, you just want to make sure
00:28:28 ◼ ► Not that I'm saying Apple doesn't do, you know, it doesn't have any cloud expertise. Obviously things like
00:28:38 ◼ ► and, you know, Cloud Kid. Apple has gotten a lot better at the cloud stuff than it used to be.
00:28:53 ◼ ► the end, developers would much prefer to have hardware in front of them. You know, reducing the lag,
00:28:58 ◼ ► being more realistic, having more control over it. You know, if you have to like mess with it or reset it or poke it or
00:29:08 ◼ ► And like Marco said about the ARM card, that seems like a lot of work for a thing that's just going to be
00:29:13 ◼ ► a brief transition and then eventually we'll all just have ARM Macs to test on. So I don't think that's going to happen.
00:29:23 ◼ ► there'll be no ARM hardware at all. All there will be is like an ARM simulator, essentially, an ARM emulator
00:29:28 ◼ ► that you run on your Intel Mac. And it, you know, it's an actual emulator that emulates
00:29:33 ◼ ► all the ARM hardware. Like, it's like, you know, not even like VMware because VMware uses native
00:29:53 ◼ ► kind of solution that involves actual hardware. I don't think they would go through the pretty big
00:30:03 ◼ ► is figuring out how to emulate x86 on ARM, not figuring out how to emulate ARM on x86. So that also
00:30:28 ◼ ► with all these discussions, just because Apple has done CPU transitions twice in the past and we
00:30:33 ◼ ► can look at what they did during those times for helping developers really has no bearing on what they'll do this time.
00:30:38 ◼ ► It was a long time ago. Things have changed. Apple has changed. Developers have changed. The world
00:30:43 ◼ ► has changed, which is why I think it's worth even just discussing all the different options like cloud and software only and
00:31:03 ◼ ► a CPU transition and also not at the developer conference telling developers how it is that they're
00:31:08 ◼ ► expected to port their applications because that's kind of the point of telling developers
00:31:13 ◼ ► they want to know this. So we'll have the answer to this in a week or so I think. Yeah, the more people wrote in
00:31:28 ◼ ► release the ARM Mac Mini today. It could just be the first ARM Mac. Like, okay, here's the Mac Mini.
00:32:13 ◼ ► whatever the next big version is of Thunderbolt and USB, I think it's basically unified now.
00:32:18 ◼ ► But I don't think that's out yet. And I don't think that's anywhere near ready to be out yet.
00:32:38 ◼ ► They could have some kind of weird Thunderbolt hack, or maybe it could be kind of like the
00:33:03 ◼ ► But in the context of a dev kit, it might not matter so much. But it's something that they do have to solve.
00:33:28 ◼ ► USB 4 seemed like the kind of thing that would be worth waiting for before they even release these things.
00:33:43 ◼ ► I'm not too worried about the Thunderbolt thing. Because it is free and open and anyone can license it.
00:33:48 ◼ ► The relationship between Apple and Intel is such that I would imagine that Apple would have no problem
00:34:16 ◼ ► So I feel like they could definitely, and this would have been things that they've been working on for years.
00:34:23 ◼ ► And when they started that project, Intel was probably enthusiastic about it because it was probably 3.5 years ago.
00:34:28 ◼ ► And same thing with USB 4. The same way that Apple purportedly had such influence on the USB C connector and everything.
00:34:38 ◼ ► So I'm not really worried. I feel like Apple will have the iOS situation sorted out when they need to.
00:34:50 ◼ ► Like it doesn't have to have any relation to any hardware they're ever going to ship if they don't need it to.
00:34:55 ◼ ► I also thought about things like, are they going to provide different amounts of RAM so that you can test your app
00:35:01 ◼ ► with different amounts of RAM? Stuff like that that you don't really think about in iOS land because everything is just the same.
00:35:07 ◼ ► But on a Mac, are they going to give dev kits with only 8 gigs of RAM because that is the minimum that people would probably have?
00:35:14 ◼ ► Or are they going to give them with 16 because otherwise it might be hard to test some really big apps on it?
00:35:19 ◼ ► Who knows? I think all those little tiny questions are all probably big pains in the butt to Apple when developing such a thing.
00:35:25 ◼ ► And we don't even think about it really because it just hasn't even come up in our speculation level at this point.
00:35:38 ◼ ► Because nobody's going to be running an ARM Mac on existing hardware or an ARM Mac OS on existing hardware.
00:35:44 ◼ ► So if they know that the minimum amount of RAM going forward is 16 gigs, then I guess that's what they would provide, right?
00:35:56 ◼ ► So even if 8 exists in the wild, it doesn't matter for the purposes of this conversation.
00:36:00 ◼ ► That's true, but does that mean if you're developing Photoshop for ARM, you have to build it on a 16 gig machine because that's the only configuration they offer for the dev kit?
00:36:12 ◼ ► They could ship it with tons of RAM and just let people use the memory pressure tool to simulate what it would be like to have less memory.
00:36:18 ◼ ► I feel like that's the least of people's concerns. Most people just want to get their software so it doesn't crash.
00:36:23 ◼ ► It doesn't issue illegal instructions or use some data format or byte ordering that makes the ARM CPU flip out.
00:36:34 ◼ ► Todd McCann writes, and this is kind of related, "Thoughts on how Apple spins it if the ARM Macbook Air is faster than most or all of the MacBook Pro models?"
00:36:45 ◼ ► This is a really interesting question, and I'm sure there are examples in history where this has happened.
00:36:50 ◼ ► I guess the October event that Marco and I were at where they kind of didn't really talk that much about the difference or how much quicker the iPad Pro, the then new iPad Pro was than the MacBook Air.
00:37:02 ◼ ► And I think just focusing on battery life perhaps would be the most obvious answer to me.
00:37:09 ◼ ► Not even talking about speed but more saying, "Hey, this new MacBook Air," if that's what it is, "This new MacBook Air gets 89 billion hours on one charge. It's amazing!"
00:37:18 ◼ ► And it's great and so on. And not even really talking about speed. And, "Oh, it's also very fast."
00:37:28 ◼ ► Why wouldn't they brag about the speed? They would say, "This new ARM MacBook Air is faster than our old MacBook Pro."
00:37:34 ◼ ► And you may say, "Well, if you don't have a new MacBook Pro, what you're saying is the MacBook Air is faster than your current MacBook Pro."
00:37:42 ◼ ► And of course the MacBook Pro will eventually become ARM or whatever. But they're comparing it to their old model.
00:37:50 ◼ ► And I don't think they would hurt the sales of the... Because pros are buying the existing Intel MacBook Pro or Mac Pro or whatever because they needed to run their existing software.
00:38:01 ◼ ► Or I don't think it would say, "Oh, I was going to buy a MacBook Pro, but now that the ARM Macs are out, I'm going to buy that and not be able to run any of the software that I need to run."
00:38:10 ◼ ► I think this is not actually an issue. I think they would brag about it like crazy and say, "Isn't this amazing? Now our lowest end computer is faster than the highest."
00:38:17 ◼ ► And honestly, that's not an unrealistic thing to imagine. Certainly in single-threaded it should be.
00:38:22 ◼ ► And then maybe even multi-threaded, depending on how many cores there are in the MacBook Air ARM CPU thing.
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00:40:30 ◼ ► Tim Cook wrote on Twitter, "The unfinished work of racial justice and equality call us all to account.
00:40:44 ◼ ► Today, I am proud to announce that Apple's Racial Equity and Justice Initiative with a $100 million commitment."
00:40:51 ◼ ► You just had to show us up, Tim. We put some links in the show notes. People have been donating, but you've got to show us up. I see how it is.
00:41:00 ◼ ► In all the things with companies announcing that they're giving some amount of money, the sport on Twitter is to calculate what that would be based on a normal person's income.
00:41:15 ◼ ► $100 million at least is a number with a little bit of heft, but honestly compared to Apple's market cap or whatever the amount of cash they have on hand.
00:41:28 ◼ ► Anyway, there's a good video attachment if you want to see Tim emoting into the camera.
00:41:34 ◼ ► All this corporate communication in the coronavirus world is weird because it is higher production value than you sitting in front of your computer in a dark room for your Zoom meetings.
00:41:44 ◼ ► It's not up to Apple's usual standards. I guess Tim probably did come into the office and maybe had someone set up a camera or maybe did it himself, but it's kind of quaint to see prosumer-level media coming out of these multi-bazillion dollar corporations just because we're all social distancing.
00:42:03 ◼ ► And totally unrelated, Apple's head of diversity and inclusion has left, which is a little uncomfortable.
00:42:15 ◼ ► Well, I don't think any of us know. This just came out today, so I don't think any of us know enough about the situation to know is this a good thing or a bad thing.
00:42:21 ◼ ► It's just that things are happening, let's say, on these fronts at various companies, and Apple is no exception. I'll put a link in the show notes of the story where you can read about it.
00:42:30 ◼ ► And with the exit of Christy Smith, who is "leaving Apple to spend more time with her family," I don't know if that's a euphemism, but that's what the press release said or the quote from Apple said in this article.
00:42:48 ◼ ► Literally every time some high-powered executive or high-profile executive leaves or gets fired or whatever, they always say to spend more time with their family. And I like spending time with my family. That's the kind of thing I might actually do. But does that really happen in these cases?
00:43:04 ◼ ► It has to happen. When high-powered executives actually stop working, like they've made their millions and they don't want to work anymore, they are leaving to spend more time in their-- so it's got to be true at least once in everybody's career, right? Unless they don't have a family or something.
00:43:19 ◼ ► But it is a euphemism. So we'll see. If the person immediately gets another job at another company, then it was obviously BS. But if they don't and they never work again, which is totally plausible for people at this level in Apple, that they would have enough money to not have to work again, especially with all their stock and everything, who knows?
00:43:33 ◼ ► But anyway, Diversity Inclusion will be reporting to Deidre O'Brien, who is the head of HR, which she's also put in charge of retail. Am I remembering that right? Yeah. Keep up with all the palace intrigue at Apple. But anyway, things are happening over there. They've given $100 million and the head of Diversity Inclusion is out. Hopefully things are changing for the better.
00:43:53 ◼ ► Indeed. So I mentioned earlier that I am recording on a brand new computer this week. I received my 13-inch MacBook Pro, I think late last week, if I remember correctly, and I am using it to record this episode just to play everything safe and get that out of the way before I have no alternative options very soon.
00:44:14 ◼ ► And I thought I'd talk about what I think of modern Mac laptops, because if you recall, I had one of Marco's beloved 15-inch MacBook Pros when I was still at my jobby job, which was two years ago now, by the way, my how time flies.
00:44:30 ◼ ► And at the same time, I had my beloved MacBook Adorable, which is the single-port MacBook, just MacBook, not MacBook Air, not MacBook Pro, just MacBook. That thing is still kicking aside from occasionally typing more letters than I've asked it to.
00:44:46 ◼ ► And I think it will soon become Aaron's computer. And she will finally, after all these years, retire the one that has gone in the drink like 17 times. So that's exciting. But yeah, I finally got this 13-inch MacBook Pro.
00:45:02 ◼ ► I don't know if I ever said it on the show, but I did end up going with 32 gigs of RAM and one terabyte hard drive. I did that because I figured, and the same reason I went MacBook for one of the reasons I went MacBook Pro rather than Air, I want this computer to last a few years. I don't want to have to replace this in a year.
00:45:18 ◼ ► He says now, not knowing what the ARM MacBooks look like, but I don't want to be forced to upgrade this in a year. And so I want something that will last a bit. And I don't want a 16-inch, even though I would absolutely have that if it was my only computer, since it is not my only computer.
00:45:35 ◼ ► And I have this wonderful iMac Pro actually right behind it right now. What I did was I went 13-inch because I really want something as close as I can get to my adorable, but that's actually useful. So here we are. And I have my first Touch Bar MacBook Pro.
00:45:52 ◼ ► Because I've only ever used this. I've only ever used the Touch Bar at the Apple Store for like five minutes or my dad's 13-inch MacBook Pro that's a couple years old now for like five or ten minutes. But yeah, I thought I'd talk about a few things. First of all, I've been touting for a long time, and in fact this is probably going to come up in an Ask ATP later, if we have time anyway.
00:46:12 ◼ ► I've been touting Brew Bundle, which is kind of like Bundler on Ruby. And what it basically does is it allows you to say, "Here's all the Homebrew stuff I would like to install." And you just put a list together.
00:46:28 ◼ ► And then you say, "Okay, Homebrew, look at that file and download all the things." And this can also include GUI apps, it can include Mac App Store apps. And it works really well.
00:46:40 ◼ ► And part of the reason I've gotten to this point of believing my computers are to some degree ephemeral is because all the stuff I really care about is in the cloud or on my Synology.
00:46:51 ◼ ► So like code, for example, is on GitHub. Pictures are on the Synology and in the cloud. And I don't really have like Office or Pages documents anymore. That hasn't been a thing for me in years.
00:47:03 ◼ ► And even still, I have that on the Synology and in cloud services. So what makes these computers feel ephemeral is that I can basically type one command and get 80 to 90 percent of the way to having my computer be the way I want it to be.
00:47:17 ◼ ► My installations are just that. They're installations. They don't tweak settings. They don't adjust this or that to just the way I like it. But it does work out really nicely to get kind of a base state, like a foundation of the pyramid, with only really one command, which is super awesome.
00:47:38 ◼ ► That being said, I was doing this, I was having it install some things, and I don't remember if it was that Xcode, you know, doing the Xcode installation or if it was somewhere else. But all of a sudden, what? Oh, no. Oh, that's a fan I hear. I haven't heard a fan come from a laptop in years.
00:47:56 ◼ ► Oh, I don't like this at all. This isn't good at all. And here it is. Me, the guy who makes fun of you two idiots, for being so deeply offended by any sort of noise whatsoever. I'm mostly looking at you, Jon.
00:48:08 ◼ ► Any sort of noise whatsoever. And suddenly I find myself, after having two or two and a half years, whatever it's been, of not having a fan in my laptop, I hear this thing just spin up and I'm just disgusted by it.
00:48:19 ◼ ► And it's ridiculous how just gross it felt. Now, with that said, it doesn't spin up the fans very often. It's not been egregious by any means. But it was so startling and striking that even as I was watching TV and kind of multitasking, I could still hear these fans and I found it so incredibly gross.
00:48:39 ◼ ► Now, that being said, the Touch Bar. I am only a week in and I don't know what to think about the Touch Bar. My initial impression was, "Oh, this is kind of clever." And then it became, "I can't get to volume easily. It's like a two-step process for volume and for brightness."
00:49:00 ◼ ► And who knew how often I adjusted volume and brightness? I guess I do it a lot because it's really annoying having to do the little slidey dance. Like, I know you can keep your finger on the Touch Bar and slide left and right and that is kind of nice.
00:49:13 ◼ ► But I don't know. I find not having the Control Strip frustrating. Now, I should state plainly up front, I haven't really done any sort of system-level tweaks to the Touch Bar.
00:49:23 ◼ ► I haven't gone in to figure out, like, I think there's a way you can always have the Control Strip active or do other tweaks like that. And I haven't really done any of that.
00:49:31 ◼ ► I also haven't noticed any particularly stellar use cases of the Touch Bar. I've only done a smidgen of Xcode development on this thing. And so I have a feeling once I get used to the options that Xcode puts on the Touch Bar, I might end up liking it quite a bit more.
00:49:46 ◼ ► But because I touch type and because I don't look down at my fingers while I'm typing, I just don't see it that often. And this is not an original thought. People have been saying this for years now.
00:49:55 ◼ ► But I just don't see it that often. And it's... it doesn't offend me. Like, I'm not grossed out by it. I'm not sure it has really brought anything to the table, though.
00:50:06 ◼ ► And then I installed BetterTouchTool. And now I used BetterTouchTool years and years and years ago when it was, like, pretty new. And I used it because I wanted to get some more interesting swipes on my then-brand-new Magic Mouse.
00:50:16 ◼ ► And then I hadn't... I put it away after having used it for, like, a year or two and hadn't looked back since. But I was vaguely aware that you can do some nifty stuff with the Touch Bar and BetterTouchTool.
00:50:26 ◼ ► And so I installed it, and I think that has changed, dramatically changed, the way I feel about the Touch Bar. Because what I have right now is I have it set up, and it's very simple at the moment, but I have it set up such that it has a little battery meter for when the battery is being discharged.
00:50:47 ◼ ► It has a little icon, which is a little emoji, that's a button that will let me flip back and forth from day to night mode, which I don't really do that often, but I found it's often enough that I'm using this machine, like, at night, where I'd prefer it to be in dark mode.
00:51:02 ◼ ► And for whatever reason, it doesn't automatically switch to dark mode until either I'm not using it or it's well after sunset, whatever the case may be. So having a little toggle on there is really cool.
00:51:13 ◼ ► And I also wrote a little shell script that will figure out how many members we have, and I put a little thing on the Touch Bar that'll show me right there how many ATP members we have, which right now is not that exciting because it's pretty much leveled off, but at first was super freaking cool!
00:51:30 ◼ ► I have this little display on my Touch Bar that shows how many members we have. How awesome is that? And so I have this little, like, widget area on there.
00:51:45 ◼ ► You should have, like, oh, God. I'm picturing you coding away on your fancy new laptop and accidentally brushing against the thing that changes to dark mode, and having your whole screen change to dark, and then you brush it again and it changes back to light.
00:52:02 ◼ ► Talk about, I know it's in theory non-destructive, but that is a severe change. I mean, that's my question for you, I guess. Do you find yourself accidentally brushing your fingers up against the Touch Bar, or has that not happened to you yet?
00:52:13 ◼ ► Not that, it definitely has happened, but not that often. I can't recall a time I have grazed the dark mode toggle that I've set up.
00:52:20 ◼ ► But one thing I have noticed, and I don't know if it's because I am hitting the Touch ID, which by the way, I didn't even have this in the show notes, but oh, man, Touch ID is nice. Like, just for one password, if nothing else, Touch ID is super nice.
00:52:32 ◼ ► I use, my Apple Watch is always on my wrist, so for unlock, it doesn't really get me that much, but for one password, it's great.
00:52:39 ◼ ► But anyways, to answer your question, I feel like maybe because it's Touch ID, maybe it's something else, but I feel like I'm grazing the Siri button fairly often when I have the little minuscule control strip or whatever it's called, where it's just three or four icons.
00:53:03 ◼ ► I keep, I think, three or four things there, so I have, in the upper right, I always have the show desktop thing, because that's F11 or whatever normally, and so it puts it kind of near where it was.
00:53:22 ◼ ► I've tried Better Touch Tool. I ran it for a few days. I couldn't really get into it myself.
00:53:27 ◼ ► It's not really my style of how to do things, and I just couldn't figure out a configuration I liked, and it's just a little fiddly for me.
00:53:37 ◼ ► You know, I don't want to make this whole thing about how much I hate the touch bar, because we don't have time for that again.
00:53:46 ◼ ► One thing I actually like about it is the auto-fill suggestions on filling out web forms.
00:53:52 ◼ ► That is the only thing about it that is an improvement for my life, because otherwise, it turns out all that stuff you mentioned at the beginning of this,
00:54:07 ◼ ► And with the touch bar, what used to be one key press is now at least one tap, because you have to tap to open up the volume thing, and then you have to slide it over.
00:54:18 ◼ ► And even if you do the thing where you tap and hold and just move your finger, you're still doing at least one tap.
00:54:23 ◼ ► And it's worse, because you have to look a little bit more closely to see if you're actually hitting it.
00:54:27 ◼ ► And if you're watching a video, the touch bar will have probably gone to sleep since the last time you touched it, so first you have to tap it to wake it up.
00:54:37 ◼ ► And so it makes this very common thing have more friction than it had before, sometimes significantly more.
00:54:45 ◼ ► And then what's even better is quite often, I don't know if you've been using it long enough to run into this yet, quite often the touch bar will just freeze.
00:55:01 ◼ ► And it's had this problem ever since the touch bar started almost five years ago, or almost four years ago.
00:55:07 ◼ ► It's just buggy, so in addition to being questionably designed and of extremely controversial utility, it's also just been really buggy its entire existence.
00:55:21 ◼ ► It has gotten no love, no changes, no updates, and apparently no bug fixes for its entire life.
00:55:29 ◼ ► And yet someone loves it so much, whose opinion matters so much, I think it's Phil, that it's on every single pro laptop and you cannot remove it.
00:55:40 ◼ ► Someone really important loves this thing and refuses to offer an option without it, but not enough to actually make it good.
00:55:48 ◼ ► Or to fix its basic bugs. So it just drives me nuts. Everything about it drives me nuts.
00:55:55 ◼ ► But anyway, you can keep going with the positive parts of this review, if the touch bar is actually one of those things.
00:56:00 ◼ ► Well, and Jon, you never really interact with the touch bar because you're always on an external keyboard, is that right? Even with your work computer?
00:56:06 ◼ ► No, I use the keyboard a lot now. Because I got tired of switching back and forth, so I just use it.
00:56:11 ◼ ► Especially since now I'm kind of wandering around the house to escape my kids and their Zoom meetings for school, at least.
00:56:16 ◼ ► So a lot of times it's good that I'm on a laptop for work, so I'll go someplace else and actually work on the laptop as a laptop.
00:56:22 ◼ ► But I've long since given up on the touch bar. I used it for more than a year to try to do all the tweaking, remove the buttons, customize. I just never ended up using it.
00:56:31 ◼ ► I don't accidentally hit it that much anymore. I think I probably accidentally hit the area where Siri was, because I was accidentally activating Siri all the time.
00:56:39 ◼ ► And once I removed that, that wasn't a problem. But I have it set to be "pretend you're a bunch of keys" mode.
00:56:44 ◼ ► So it just shows F1, F2. That's it permanently. It doesn't even change per app anymore.
00:56:49 ◼ ► Because I was getting distracted by it changing. Like I said, Xcode changes to custom things. Safari shows the thumbnails.
00:56:56 ◼ ► I didn't even need that visual noise in my life. So now it literally is a worse version of buttons for me.
00:57:02 ◼ ► Yeah, I'm not trying to convince either of you that you're wrong or anything. But my initial impression is, "Hey, that's a neat thing." And I like it so far.
00:57:12 ◼ ► Yeah, that's true. I'm not convinced I will like it again, or I will continue to like it in a month or two.
00:57:24 ◼ ► But in general, the laptop is really great. Hey, did you know what, guys? I have a actually breaking piece of news.
00:57:32 ◼ ► Having more than one port on a laptop is really fucking convenient. Who knew? Who knew that that would be so convenient?
00:57:46 ◼ ► Turns out indeed. Oh, God. It was so delightful not having to get a dongle out just to plug in two things at once.
00:57:57 ◼ ► And that actually brings me to one of the things I've been plugging in fairly often is an Ethernet adapter.
00:58:04 ◼ ► Because one of the few things that I wish was still on these computers. You know, I could live without the SD card, whatever.
00:58:10 ◼ ► I don't even necessarily need an old USB port. Like, I'd probably prefer it, but I don't need it.
00:58:25 ◼ ► But I would totally take an Ethernet jack. I would even take one of those heinous like pop-out ones we were talking about last week.
00:58:35 ◼ ► But anyway, I've been plugging in these dongles. And the particular USB-C Ethernet dongle I had, that I've had since the adorable was new.
00:58:43 ◼ ► For whatever reason, and maybe this is something I missed, but it has been extremely flaky.
00:58:48 ◼ ► And it seemed that it was particularly perturbed about being placed... How many alliterations can I get in here?
00:58:54 ◼ ► It was particularly perturbed about being placed on the... No, not the port side. Darn it! I almost had another one.
00:59:00 ◼ ► On the right-hand side of the computer. And I don't know, aren't there like some weird differences about the left and right side ports or something like that?
00:59:09 ◼ ► There have been certain models where the, I believe the right side ports didn't have as much data transfer bandwidth on the Thunderbolt controller as the other side ports.
00:59:20 ◼ ► Just because like the CPU only had a certain amount of bandwidth or a certain amount of PCIe lanes or something like that.
00:59:37 ◼ ► It would matter if you're hooking up big monitors and stuff or massive RAID arrays that actually max out that bandwidth.
00:59:43 ◼ ► Sure. And so I have a new USB-C Ethernet adapter coming, because I suspect this one is just a piece of garbage.
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01:01:33 ◼ ► "Am I gonna want to return this in a week after we know potentially what's going to be happening with an ARM CPU and new fancy laptops?"
01:01:43 ◼ ► And I think I stand by what I said last week, which is I can see myself folding when it comes to some sweet new industrial design,
01:01:55 ◼ ► or even just a spray-painted black color, because, God, I wanted that black polycarbonate MacBook so badly.
01:02:02 ◼ ► But short of that, I don't think I want to be on the bleeding edge of an ARM transition.
01:02:09 ◼ ► Sitting here now, I don't have any Mac apps, I have no plans for Mac apps, and I don't think I want to go through all the, I don't know, like, pain of having all of my software stop working,
01:02:25 ◼ ► I don't know, and we don't necessarily need to get into it, but say stupid stuff like FFmpeg and YouTube DL and other shell stuff that I use really often.
01:02:40 ◼ ► I mean, I don't have any interest in building this from source, although I know I could.
01:02:44 ◼ ► Like, how is that stuff going to work? And you two can treat that as rhetorical or not, but I don't think I want to be on the bleeding edge of having all of, having my entire toolchain not work.
01:02:54 ◼ ► And so even if there is some sweet and sexy new MacBook announced next week, even if it has some sweet new industrial design,
01:03:02 ◼ ► sitting here today, ignorance is list, I don't think I would want to, oh yeah, oh yeah, that pun just happened.
01:03:11 ◼ ► I went there. I'm going to get so much email. Anyway, I don't think I want a new ARM laptop right now in two or three years. Oh, yes I do.
01:03:20 ◼ ► But sitting here now, I don't think so. Am I crazy to think that or does that make sense?
01:03:26 ◼ ► Well, we went through one transition when the Mac, one CPU transition when the Mac had a bunch of, you know, command line utilities, right?
01:03:34 ◼ ► So the PowerPC to Intel happened in the Mac OS X era. And so we know how this shakes out.
01:03:40 ◼ ► What happened when, you know, you have PowerPC to Macs and you had whatever, FFmpeg or, you know, Wget or whatever the hell you were using from the command line.
01:03:48 ◼ ► And then the Intel Macs came out and yeah, the people who maintain those projects tweaked the make files so that they built on x86 Macs.
01:03:54 ◼ ► I mean, you may say, oh, well, they were just going to x86 and that's easy. All those things already built in x86.
01:03:58 ◼ ► But like it's not the same. We have different compilers, different operating system. You can't just use the Linux makes file on a Mac.
01:04:03 ◼ ► Anyone who's tried to compile something from source knows that unless the program is very simple.
01:04:08 ◼ ► There are obviously tweaks you have to make. I don't think I've ever gotten one to work.
01:04:12 ◼ ► Yeah, there are obviously tweaks you have to make. But yeah, I feel like the, this gets into a whole other issue that we may touch on in a little bit.
01:04:18 ◼ ► But like the people who maintain these projects, whether it's YouTube DL or FFmpeg or whatever at the time of the Intel transition and probably now, it's not unreasonable to think that some of them, some of those developers who work on those projects might be using Macs themselves.
01:04:33 ◼ ► And so are therefore highly motivated and in a position to know how to, you know, make it so that they build on the ARM Macs.
01:04:40 ◼ ► And obviously the more obscure the command line utility you're using, the less likely it is that some will actually update the make files for it.
01:04:51 ◼ ► That's my hope unless something really terrible happens related to this, which I think is the topic that I just moved up in the notes because I want to touch on it now because I won't have a chance to talk about this once the B2C goes and we know all the answers.
01:05:10 ◼ ► I was thinking about this after last week's show and we were going through like, oh, here's what the ARM Mac looks like it's coming.
01:05:23 ◼ ► But a lot of the feedback, as evidence from the follow up about the dev kits has been, OK, well, we talked about what's likely to happen.
01:05:33 ◼ ► And one, you know, my description of a theme that ran through all that feedback is the thing in the notes here is a new breed of Macs.
01:05:48 ◼ ► You don't have to. There's nothing about an architecture transition says you have to change the rules of the game and really, you know, read it.
01:05:59 ◼ ► So if there's something you want to do, do it now, because when everything's up in the air is the perfect place to do it, like get all the pain out of the way at once.
01:06:08 ◼ ► A lot of the pain they've gotten out of the way already just from like getting off of 64 bits that aren't that 32 bit ARM CPUs like, you know, all the deprecating old APIs, getting rid of carbon, like lots of stuff has happened leading up to this.
01:06:20 ◼ ► But transition to ARM gives Apple the opportunity to really rethink everything about this product line all the way up to and including.
01:06:29 ◼ ► No one suggested this, but I thought of it. And again, the least likely thing is you don't need, you know, this new line of ARM based computers that run a Mac OS, like they don't even need to be Macs.
01:06:43 ◼ ► They don't. They could run an operating system that's not called Mac, just like they made iPad OS like, wow, brand new operating system.
01:06:49 ◼ ► I mean, we all know it's the iOS that you're running before you just gave it a new name.
01:06:56 ◼ ► And now we have a new brand name for these computers that are basically, you know, running Mac OS.
01:07:01 ◼ ► But we're going to give that operating system a new name because the one that runs on ARM is not Mac OS.
01:07:12 ◼ ► I don't think this is going to happen. The Mac has a huge amount of value in it or whatever.
01:07:15 ◼ ► Like that's at one end of the spectrum. If you view this as a spectrum, the other end of the spectrum is what we talked about last show.
01:07:19 ◼ ► It's like, oh, they'll be Macs, but they have ARM CPUs and, you know, like a normal transition.
01:07:23 ◼ ► Between those two endpoints, though, there's lots of interesting things that can happen.
01:07:27 ◼ ► And I was just musing about them. One of them is you hear a lot of people talk about, oh, will I not be able to run non sandbox applications anymore?
01:07:35 ◼ ► Will everything need to be notarized? Will it only, will I only be able to install apps from the Mac App Store unless I go into a developer mode?
01:07:42 ◼ ► All the stuff that we talked about in terms of security and running signed software and all the way down to, oh, will I be able to build FFM peg and just run it?
01:07:49 ◼ ► Oh, because it's not signed or whatever. Will I not be able to download arbitrary applications without doing stuff like disabling system integrity, whatever the equivalent of that may be, like disabling security features?
01:08:03 ◼ ► Again, nothing about the ARM transition says that that has to be the case, but we know Apple has wanted to and has been working towards making the Mac more secure.
01:08:11 ◼ ► As secure as iPads and iPhones or whatever, this transition is an opportunity for them to change the rules of what constitutes a Mac, to change all those rules about what software can be installed.
01:08:24 ◼ ► So I don't think any of that is likely because, again, what the hell's the point of the Mac if you're just going to make it into an iPad running a weird OS, right?
01:08:33 ◼ ► But I'm on the lookout for things like that happening now. And even though, obviously, getting rid of the Mac and calling it something else is ridiculous, I'm not putting it past Apple to give this new line of ARM-based Macs some kind of prefix or suffix or other kind of branding that distinguishes them from the Macs that came before it.
01:08:54 ◼ ► Again, I don't think it's likely. We talked about the likely stuff last show. This is my last chance to say, "Here's all the weird stuff that could happen, probably won't, but could happen."
01:09:04 ◼ ► I don't know what the hell they would call it. I don't know what the prefix or suffix could be.
01:09:09 ◼ ► But it is an opportunity to distinguish, again, especially if you're changing the rules, to distinguish this new line of ARM-based Macs from the previous ones.
01:09:16 ◼ ► If you're changing the rules about what software can be loaded and sandboxing and third-party software and they're more locked down or whatever, and you have a boatload of good news to share, like, "Hey, the batteries last a long time and these are super fast," or whatever, you can tack on a bunch of maybe not-so-appealing things in that same package and brand it as, you know, whatever.
01:09:36 ◼ ► I'm not even going to speculate what a name might be, but those are all things that are up in the air. This goes back to what I was saying before, which is like, just because what they did, one thing from 68K to PowerPC and a similar thing from PowerPC to Intel, doesn't mean that they have to do the exact same playbook for this transition.
01:09:53 ◼ ► That was a long time ago, the 68K one even longer ago. Apple is free to make moves like that that it thinks is bringing it towards its new unified future where everything runs SwiftUI and everything runs on ARM-based CPUs that they built themselves and the iPad and the Mac move closer to each other.
01:10:10 ◼ ► There is this future that we seem to be moving towards, and this architecture change, if it actually happens, is a point where Apple can make all sorts of changes. And the thing is, even though most of the stuff I've laid out here is like, "Oh, they're probably not going to do that stuff," right?
01:10:26 ◼ ► There's something from this bucket of "probably not going to do" that's going to be in there. Like, maybe a good thing that we think they're not going to do, like, "Oh, last week, Mark was saying they're probably not going to do boot camp." Maybe it turns out they do do boot camp, and it's good news.
01:10:40 ◼ ► There's something that really we didn't think they were going to do, at least out of the gate, but they did it, yay. But it could also be a, "Oh, by the way, the default security restrictions don't let anybody install any Mac outside the Mac App Store," which developers would hate, and they'd have to tell everybody how to disable, you know, go to System Preferences and click the lock icon and enter your min password and click a thing that lets you run applications that don't come to the Mac App Store.
01:11:02 ◼ ► But if they're going to do that, now is the time to do it, because, especially if you, you know, these are branded differently or whatever. Anyway, those are, I tried to be brief, I'm sorry, but those are my thoughts on a new breed of Macs. If there's going to be a new breed of Macs, the spectrum from all the way from "they're not even called Macs anymore" to "they're exactly like we said last show, but with one thing that is either a bit of good news or bad news," that's in my mind now, as we are, you know, less than a week out from WWDC.
01:11:29 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, that's definitely possible. Oh, and before I forget, some quick follow-up, I just wanted to try to avoid a week of email from people telling us this. "Casey, all your FFmpeg and everything stuff will be fine, because it's already compiled for ARM because it runs on Raspberry Pis."
01:11:45 ◼ ► As well as, there is some ARM use in the server world as well. I know it's not like super mainstream, but it's also not super obscure at this point, so a lot of that stuff has been compiled for ARM already, just for the server world, but definitely also for Raspberry Pis and stuff like that.
01:11:59 ◼ ► So, yes, while Jon said it's not, you know, you can't take those exact same make files and run them on Mac OS without modification, I'm sure most of the hard work has already been done, and so many of those packages should be able to be updated, like in Homebrew, without too much effort, I would imagine.
01:12:14 ◼ ► So anyway, that part I don't think you should worry about. The part you should worry about is closed source software. You know, all these open source packages, like somebody can do the work if it hasn't already been done, and make it compile and make it work, but if you have some closed source app that you're relying on that is not currently maintained, that's where you're going to have the problem.
01:12:33 ◼ ► If there is a compatibility layer for running x86 code on the new ARM Mac, which honestly I think that's a big if, I wouldn't actually expect one, because I think it will be too slow and too crappy, so if there is a compatibility layer, I would expect it to only be around for a couple of years.
01:12:50 ◼ ► You know, it's not going to be in the OS forever, the same way Rosetta wasn't in the OS forever. But John, I think your potential idea for what if they make other big changes to the Mac line, I don't expect any new product name things necessarily, like, because I mean, what would they call it? Knowing today's Apple, they would just call it the Apple Book. They have no other good names.
01:13:13 ◼ ► Even if they ditch Mac? Like what would they call it? Yeah, the Apple Book, the Apple Pro, iApple, I don't, you know, they can't make new names for Macs anymore.
01:13:23 ◼ ► No, the Mac name has way too much value to ditch it. I was just pinning that as an end of a spectrum. Yeah, but I wouldn't expect a new name, because I think having, giving the ARM products a unique name or suffix or prefix or anything, I think that would only make sense if they were intended to only ever be part of the product line, rather than replacing the entire product line.
01:13:47 ◼ ► And I doubt, I really doubt that's the case. I think the plan is for ARM to go across the entire product line over a few years, most likely.
01:13:56 ◼ ► So I wouldn't expect that to really be like a, I don't expect this to be a temporary or partial product line conversion, and for that reason, I don't think the naming would actually change meaningfully.
01:14:07 ◼ ► The thing to keep in mind though, and this is weird for historical reasons, but they did this with the PowerPC transition. They called them Power Macs. They gave them all a prefix.
01:14:17 ◼ ► Now it's weird because they were already Power Books, but they were 68K, so I know it doesn't quite track exactly, but they literally said, they said, and now the new Power Mac, because they had PowerPC, and they just called them Power Macs forever and ever, until eventually, I think the Intel's when they finally dropped it.
01:14:34 ◼ ► But yeah, so it's not inconceivable that that could happen. Power is obviously a cooler name than anything we can think of off the top of our head related to ARM.
01:14:43 ◼ ► They're sure as hell not going to call them ARM Macs or Apple Macs or A Macs or Mac Arms or Mac Airs or like, you know, I'm so afraid to even speculate about Apple naming things, but the name prefix thing is not without precedent.
01:14:58 ◼ ► I don't predict it. It is obviously a less likely scenario. I'm much more interested in like, oh, now's the time we've changed the security settings on you and make it more difficult for you to install stuff from command line tools. I'm more worried about that.
01:15:09 ◼ ► And that's, first of all, that's a valid concern because, you know, Apple, they do have a pattern of locking down the Macs slowly, more and more over time, making things a pain in the butt, slowly, more and more over time in the name of security. And certainly, I do think the ARM transition will totally remove and drop any software API that is currently deprecated.
01:15:35 ◼ ► So things like OpenGL, I don't think OpenGL will run on ARM ever. I think that's just gone. So any software that uses it, it's been deprecated for a couple of years now, I think. I seriously doubt that'll make it over. It's like, and again, Boot Camp, I think, is gone.
01:15:50 ◼ ► I think anything related to x86, I would predict is not supported at all. So we are going to have some losses there. But as for like, you know, bitter pills to swallow with the rest of the OS, any kind of new restrictions on our software abilities or hardware peripherals, I don't think it's going to be, I don't think there's going to be any like, you know, massive changes to what most people ever need to do, including developers, you know, because the reality is that they saw a lot of it.
01:16:19 ◼ ► The reality is that they saw a lot of Macs to developers. So I don't think they would ever have things like making it so you can't compile your own version of FFmpeg or anything like it might continue to be an increased pain in the butt, but they're already on that track anyway.
01:16:32 ◼ ► Like, I don't think it would be anything more of a pain in the butt than what we already have to deal with with Catalina and its various BS. So I think they want to make this transition as kind of transparent and smooth as possible, because what they don't want is to ruin the Mac.
01:16:49 ◼ ► You know, like they're trying to make the Mac better, presumably. I think they've shown a pretty good track record of that over the last couple of years now, after a very dark time, but they've gotten through that, I think. We're now in the light again, for the most part, except for Casey's text bar.
01:17:04 ◼ ► But otherwise, we're getting there. And so I trust them that they're trying to keep it good. And so I don't think they're going to use this opportunity to really break or super unreasonably lock down a significant amount of new stuff.
01:17:22 ◼ ► I think it'll be Mac OS 10.16 for the next one. Whichever is the first version that supports ARM, it'll just be like any other Mac OS release, where things are a little bit more ratcheted down in certain ways. You're not going to get unsigned kernel extensions. You might not get any kernel extensions, who knows?
01:17:42 ◼ ► But I don't think you're going to be dealing with stuff that is going to be a big pain in the butt or highly restrictive to what almost anybody needs to do with their Mac. Especially if you get rid of legacy hardware support needs, which is a lot of reasons why you might need kernel extensions, for instance.
01:18:00 ◼ ► If you just say, all right, these new Macs only support USB peripherals that support standard whatever, if you have certain restrictions like that in place with new hardware, which would be pretty reasonable for new stuff, I don't expect there to be big additional restrictions.
01:18:15 ◼ ► I think they want this transition to just be like, here's the Macs you've already had, you know what this is, you know what to expect, it's a Mac, it runs Mac apps, asterisk, that have been recompiled for ARM, and then that's it, and no other meaningful restrictions.
01:18:31 ◼ ► Kernel extensions are going away even if we don't transition to ARM. That's been a multi-year thing. And this is just an example of the transition being a place to just accelerate even existing plans. Like, oh, actually kernel extensions aren't going to go away in Intel until 10.17, but on ARM they go away in 10.16 just because how about we just never have them there?
01:18:51 ◼ ► Then problem solved, because nobody's kernel extensions are written for ARM now, so we just say no, they're gone. They'll probably be gone from x86 at the same time. Anyway, I want to do two quick hits here before we move on to the next thing.
01:19:02 ◼ ► You mentioned Intel emulation. What are our predictions? Marco already said he does not expect ARM, Mac OS to have any form of x86 emulation so you can run old apps without recompiling them. Casey, your opinion, your guess, your prediction?
01:19:18 ◼ ► Yeah, I would want there to be something like Rosetta or Rosetta 2, if you will. I think that would do a lot to alleviate a lot of the pain of moving to a place where software doesn't really exist if it wasn't built by Apple.
01:19:32 ◼ ► But I don't know how possible that'll be based on the hardware. You know, if this hardware is really as screaming fast as we hope, then maybe it would be doable, maybe it would be fine.
01:19:42 ◼ ► I also think, though, that Apple is not afraid to use the stick rather than the carrot, and so it wouldn't surprise me if Apple perceived it as well.
01:19:52 ◼ ► If we have Rosetta 2, that'll let the developers that have x86 software not have a fire under their bottoms to compile for ARM.
01:20:03 ◼ ► And we really want them compiling for ARM, so screw it, let's just not offer it at all. And if they really need this software, they'll virtualize with VMware or what's the parallels, or whatever the case may be, and do a Mac OS, you know, an x86 Mac OS installation on top of that.
01:20:18 ◼ ► And that'll be good enough for them. So I'm gonna say I want it to be there, but I don't think it'll be there, especially since Apple seems to be on their high horse about how mighty and powerful they are these days, which we're about to talk about.
01:20:32 ◼ ► You know, keep in mind, anything like we were talking earlier about, when John was talking about options for a dev kit and there being a software-only one, and you very quickly corrected yourself and you said simulator to emulator.
01:20:46 ◼ ► 'Cause the simulators for iOS apps are able to be really fast 'cause you're running native code. The whole point of this transition would be it would have to emulate ARM, like on the Intel, and same thing in reverse now. To run Intel software on ARM, you can't just do full speed simulation or what hypervisors do with virtual machines and stuff, where you are able to run full native speed and native code.
01:21:13 ◼ ► You can't do that when you have a different architecture. You have to emulate the whole thing. And emulation is really slow. And there are, you know, like Rosetta was a pretty advanced emulator. I'm sure maybe there's also similarly advancing techniques that we've developed since then that have made emulation a little bit better than it used to be.
01:21:31 ◼ ► But it's still a really slow process. So, like, running software in Rosetta was something that you could do it, and some stuff was, you know, you wouldn't notice the speed difference, but a lot of stuff you would. And so I don't see that being a great solution for most people for most apps. And that's why I don't think Apple's gonna ship it at all.
01:21:52 ◼ ► So one thing from history that was going around on Twitter, people were discussing this, like the, I don't know for a name of it was, but the thing that emulated 68K on PowerPC very quickly, I don't know if it was on the first set of PowerMax, but maybe on the second or third set of PowerMax, could emulate 68K faster than any 68K Mac ever actually ran it. Like it was the emulator was faster than the hardware.
01:22:15 ◼ ► Now, it helps that the PowerPC was much faster than 68K, and it also helps that that was in the period in the 90s or whatever when, you know, chips were getting so much faster every year.
01:22:24 ◼ ► And, you know, we just talked about Rosetta. But, you know, what I'm getting at is that both times Apple has done this, their emulators have been really good.
01:22:33 ◼ ► Obviously, yeah, emulation is slower, but, you know, both times, again, both times did it in the past, Moore's law was much more in effect than it is today, so they took advantage of that and it gave them the backward compatibility story, a pretty good backward compatibility story.
01:22:47 ◼ ► In fact, with the 68K to PowerPC, a backward compatibility story that Apple itself needed because they didn't get their whole operating system onto PowerPC for like years after the transition, just because there was so much legacy stuff there.
01:22:59 ◼ ► They did such a good job with those. And I understand all the reasons that you both think they're not going to have one. They all make sense to me.
01:23:05 ◼ ► But just something my gut is telling me because Apple has done it twice before and they were so good at it, that there's enough institutional, perhaps wrongheaded institutional momentum behind it, that it would be part of the transition strategy.
01:23:19 ◼ ► And I'm going to predict, I probably wouldn't put money on it, but I'm going to be the odd one out here and predict that there actually is a way to run x86 software on these ARM things using emulation. And yes, it will be slower.
01:23:29 ◼ ► And yes, it won't be as good as either of the two transitions. But I just kind of just feel like it's in Apple's DNA to do this. And my fingers are crossed. Like Casey said, I want it to be true. And I think I just want it so much that I'm willing to predict it.
01:23:41 ◼ ► The final thing we can't take as long on this, but this will be quicker. Names for MAGOS 1016. There's a story that we'll put in the show notes where someone's going through things that Apple has trademarked, trying to pull the names out of it. Catalina came out of these trademarks.
01:23:53 ◼ ► The remaining ones that are still trademarked are Mammoth, Monterey, or Skyline. And of course, it could be something entirely new. Of Mammoth, Monterey, Skyline, and other of your choice, what would you predict is 1016 name?
01:24:06 ◼ ► If the ARM transition is happening, it has to be Mammoth, right? Because the marketing just plays itself.
01:24:15 ◼ ► No, no, no. Because it's a Mammoth change. Like look at this Mammoth change and it's Mac OS Mammoth.
01:24:36 ◼ ► You can pick other. A name of your choice. It's probably a city in California. Or maybe they'll just break the naming scheme and call it something totally different.
01:24:56 ◼ ► Okay. So I think the one that sounds the coolest is Monterey. Therefore, that's not the one they're going to pick. I think the one they're going to pick is Mammoth. It's the weirdest.
01:25:06 ◼ ► I think, I don't know enough to pick an other. I think Monterey is the most likely, but I'm rooting for Skyline.
01:25:15 ◼ ► I think Skyline would be a better one for sure. I just think that if I'm Apple, I would choose Mammoth.
01:25:29 ◼ ► No, definitely not. We had them in Columbus, and I'm pretty sure, I don't think it really leaves Ohio, though. It traveled from Cincinnati to Columbus, halfway across the state, and that's about it.
01:25:40 ◼ ► So, quickie, because I can't resist now and we're never going to end this show, this is going to be a 12 hour show. Do Universal Binaries come back, and are they still called Universal Binaries?
01:25:49 ◼ ► I would imagine so. It would probably work the same way. The fat binary system, I believe, supports any number of architectures, so this would just be another one that would be in there, potentially.
01:26:01 ◼ ► Not from the Mac App Store, because that will do what the Mac App Store does, which is strip down to just the code that your particular machine needs. But for individual developers, yeah, they'd be able to make them fat.
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01:28:32 ◼ ► I also hate Inbox, but here we are. I only have so many things I can be outraged about, and so I haven't really followed this very closely.
01:28:43 ◼ ► And I'm falling down on my job as chief summarizer and chief, but my understanding is, and interrupt me when you're ready, that they released this new email app, a pay email app.
01:28:54 ◼ ► And the first run experience on the iPhone is basically putting your username and password, and if you don't have one, you need to figure out by magic or a divining rod where you need to go in the rest of the world to get yourself a username and password.
01:29:09 ◼ ► And I guess the initial app, 1.0.0, came out, and then when they tried to get 1.0.1 out, then Apple said, "No, you can't do this because in-app purchase, in-app purchase, in-app purchase."
01:29:22 ◼ ► And then there's been a big brouhaha ever since, mostly because David Hanemeyer-Hanson is a very well-known developer and CEO or CTO or whatever on the internet, and is from Basecamp, and what is it, 37 Signals? Is that right? Was that the old name?
01:29:38 ◼ ► It was formerly 37 Signals. They made a product called Basecamp, and it became the main thing they did, and then I think eventually it became the only thing they did, and so they renamed the company to Basecamp.
01:29:47 ◼ ► Right, right, right. So that's kind of the extraordinarily too brief summary. I have feelings about this, but I don't know if they're fair because I haven't looked into this enough. Which one of you would like to take me through the deeper blow-by-blow summary of what's actually happening?
01:30:01 ◼ ► I think we need to go blow-by-blow, but I think this is interesting for a couple of reasons. It's interesting because of the timing. We've talked on this show over many, many years about, "Oh, App Store rejections. This was rejected. It seems like it shouldn't have been. This is not a new story. This is the shape of the same story."
01:30:21 ◼ ► It's like, "Oh, Apple tweaked the rules or changed them or interpreted them differently, and it's affecting this developer, and it seems unfair, and the developer, depending on who they are, complains about it." That's the same old story.
01:30:32 ◼ ► But the timing is interesting for two reasons. One, it's happening right before WWDC. Here we are the week before WWDC. Not great timing for one of these things to blow up, as Casey mentioned, because David Hannah Marhanson is very loud on Twitter and is already famous, and there's a lot of stories being written about it.
01:30:49 ◼ ► Apple doesn't love that. You know Apple hates this. Apple does not want this to be a story anywhere, regardless of the actual specifics of the issue. Apple hates it when there are stories like this. That's why the thing you say, "Don't run to the press." They have to hate this.
01:31:05 ◼ ► Second is that Apple is in the process of various legal battles and potentially even in the United States, antitrust rulings against them in the EU and potential legislation in the United States going through Congress.
01:31:21 ◼ ► It's not a good time for this issue to come up on that front either, because Apple's lawyers are busy writing lawyerly-type press releases, disagreeing with decisions in the EU. I'm not tracking the individual legal cases here, but it's antitrust.
01:31:37 ◼ ► It's like, do these tech companies have too much power over the market? And it seems like there's growing momentum in the various legislative bodies across this planet to see if there's something that can be done to check not just Apple, but all the big tech companies, for all the reasons you would imagine.
01:31:53 ◼ ► Privacy concerns, market power, competition, anti-competitive behavior. Apple has been down this road before with Amazon and the eBook thing, and they lost that one. This is just generally bad timing for Apple, and maybe good timing for everybody else.
01:32:11 ◼ ► This specific instance here, if I was to talk about this, I feel like I could talk about it with someone at Apple without reference to antitrust, to individual developers, to fairness and rule-changing and power and monopolies and everything.
01:32:35 ◼ ► The argument that I would make and I have always made and will continue to make on this specific issue is that it's better for everyone, including Apple, if Apple just gets out of its own way and lets people make better applications.
01:32:48 ◼ ► We had the same conversation when the Kindle app was out there. The Kindle app is a better app if you can buy books on it. It just is, right?
01:32:56 ◼ ► And Apple doing everything in its power to make that not happen, "Oh, you can't even mention that you can go buy the things on Amazon.com." This is all old news. I'm sure these rules have changed since then.
01:33:08 ◼ ► That whole thing of "Make it so the app doesn't say anything about where you can sign up for Netflix." People would just have to know that because it wouldn't be better in the app if you could sign up for Netflix right there in the app. And Apple would say, "You can do that. Just give us 30%." It's like Apple. We know that's not going to happen.
01:33:27 ◼ ► Netflix does not want to give you 30% of their income or 30% of the signups that are through the app. They used to do that and they don't anymore. There's a lot of money that went away. Same thing with Amazon. Amazon literally can't give you 30% of every e-book sale because there's not that much money to ring from that stone.
01:33:43 ◼ ► David Hennemeyer Hanson and Basecamp sure as hell don't want to give you 30% of all the "Hey.com" subscription. No one wants to do that. By making these rules and thinking if we make these rules, we will have enough power to force this to happen. History has shown it just doesn't happen.
01:33:59 ◼ ► No one's going to give you that money. And so all it does is it makes the apps worse in the app store. Apps that are inexplicably worse where you can't do things that the developers want you to be able to do it, the users want to do them, but it's just not happening.
01:34:14 ◼ ► This is not a situation where interest and incentives are correctly aligned to make better and better apps. Everything is aligned to be oppositional and to result in us getting worse apps. Us getting worse apps in the end reflects poorly back on Apple.
01:34:30 ◼ ► I'm sure they've heard this argument a million times. This is the whole debate. Is it better to try to go for that 30%? Of course they have arguments about it. Oh, control. We don't want to send you to a scammy website to use other people's payment methods and yada, yada, yada.
01:34:44 ◼ ► The goal that Apple is shooting for, a world where they have all the control and also get all the money and also have apps that have all the features the customers expect is never going to happen. The app store has been around long enough to know that's not going to happen.
01:35:01 ◼ ► Companies will not give you or literally can't and stay in business give you that 30%. So given that's the case, stop trying to make that happen. Apple is not going to ever get it all. Best case scenario, we get this tense cold war where our apps are inexplicably stupider than they need to be.
01:35:20 ◼ ► Developers are cranky and Apple's platform has apps that are worse. On Google's platform, the competing platform, the dominant mobile platform, apps have fewer restrictions in this particular regard and the apps are better for them. That's not good for Apple.
01:35:35 ◼ ► And so, every time one of these things comes up, I just hope that whoever is arguing the side that I just articulated, which surely has been argued inside Apple for years, I hope they get a little bit closer to winning. So the more damaging and annoying this particular blowup is about
01:35:52 ◼ ► Hey.com, an email service being subjected to rules that other email apps weren't but that are eventually rolling out across every like it's, you know, it's a story we've seen before and it's a sad story and it's stupid and the restrictions don't make any sense to consumers and restrictions are very annoying slash company killing to the developers involved.
01:36:10 ◼ ► And we get worse apps like I hope I you know, I'm excited that the DHH on Twitter is super loud because he can afford to be super loud and he's using his fame to good effect and it happening through right in front of WWC with the antitrust stuff going on.
01:36:26 ◼ ► I hope that all comes to head and let's Apple before it's too late, give up on its impossible dream of having of making developers both give it 30% of the money and also make better applications for consumers.
01:36:42 ◼ ► That's my feeling on this issue that like, I, you know, I don't, I don't want to root for, for like a PR blowup. But sometimes that's just the only way things change. And I really hope this time it doesn't just like blow up and then fizzle again.
01:36:57 ◼ ► And on that on the on Apple side of this, the thing that I've gone for them is that if they have a wwc and if you just are maximum, they're all super amazing. That will change the conversation. And for a while people forget about Hey.com.
01:37:09 ◼ ► And that'll kind of be a shame. And honestly, I don't want Apple's wwc to be overshadowed with stupid apps or stuff. I just want Apple to do quote unquote the right thing. Meaning the thing that I think that they've been resisting doing in favor of the strategy that's producing worse outcomes.
01:37:25 ◼ ► Yeah, this, this kind of stuff just makes me mad because Apple has, you know, it's a big company. There's a lot of sides to it. There's a lot of personalities in it. And we see multiple sides of it at different times.
01:37:40 ◼ ► One of the dark sides of Apple is that they can be incredibly power hungry and shockingly stingy. You know, we say that certain things are a good value certain things like every wwc when they open up some API that we thought they'd never open up like wow, that's that's great.
01:37:59 ◼ ► We really surprised, you know, that really surprises there by opening up, you know, this API that seemed that it would be locked down forever or whatever. But then there's this dark side where they do some things and they stand by certain things that are just embarrassingly stingy for a company that produces premium products and prides itself in quality.
01:38:20 ◼ ► And almost unconscionably stingy for a company that has so much money as they have. It's like, it's a bad look to be super rich and super cheap about stuff. One of the biggest areas of this is the stupid in app purchase rule.
01:38:39 ◼ ► So this is the same rule, as you mentioned, that that prevents Amazon from offering in app purchase. So now there's an asterisk on that. Now Amazon kind of sometimes can offer in app purchase, because Apple needs Amazon more than Amazon needs Apple in certain ways.
01:38:55 ◼ ► And so they negotiated and made a special deal. Netflix famously like you know, they had an app purchase for a while, they removed it that caused friction that hasn't been resolved yet. But Netflix is allowed to do something that now hey.com can't do, which is the compromise that Amazon had and in many ways in many places still has, which is okay.
01:39:16 ◼ ► We don't want to use your in app purchase system because 30% is a lot. I often think, all the money I've ever made from Apple, all the apps, everything like Instapaper, the magazine, Overcast, all the money I make from Apple.
01:39:31 ◼ ► They keep like almost half as much again more than that. I have made Apple a lot of money over all these years.
01:39:40 ◼ ► And Netflix is made like when Netflix canned their in app thing, like they had numbers like it was like hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe it was even billions like Netflix gave Apple the 30% cut for a really long time. And arguably they benefited from that.
01:39:54 ◼ ► Well, and it was really 15% behind the scenes for like, they had a special deal for a while.
01:40:13 ◼ ► And as you said, that hasn't been resolved like the Amazon thing. And of course, as we've mentioned many times in the past, not everyone is Amazon and Netflix, so good luck negotiating a special deal for yourself.
01:40:24 ◼ ► Right. And so the way it's been to date until fairly recently is if you didn't want to use or couldn't use Apple's in app purchase system, you could have an app where it gives you a login form, but it never mentions like where do you create this account?
01:40:42 ◼ ► And the rules have actually gotten more strict over time. It used to be that like you could link out to Safari. They clamped down pretty fast on that after a couple of years, I think that then it was like, oh, you can't even do that.
01:40:52 ◼ ► But you can at least mention like go to our website to sign up. And in recent years, you can't even do that. In recent years, you can't even mention a website that you could go to create an account.
01:41:02 ◼ ► You can't link to a support page that if you click a few links in the in app browser after you get there, you can get to a purchase page. They have gotten remarkably strict about like, okay, if there's any way to get from your app to a purchase page, even if it's like 17 levels deep after they've already jumped out of your app into a web view, that still counts and they prohibit that.
01:41:28 ◼ ► Well, apparently, in the last few months, this has gotten even more restrictive to now certain types of apps and how they're defining this seems vague. The statement they gave to some news outlet basically said like consumer versus business is the distinction, but that's stupid as I think John Gruber wrote.
01:41:50 ◼ ► Like there is no difference between consumer. Like that's not an enforceable distinction and it's just clear BS from Apple. They gerrymandered it. Like they basically drew the outline so it exactly so it included like Netflix and Amazon.
01:42:02 ◼ ► It was like there's a bunch of other stuff like oh, reader apps or apps for content. Like if you try to read the language, it's like, are you trying to say Netflix and Amazon's Kindle store? Like it doesn't, you know, consumer business doesn't make any sense.
01:42:15 ◼ ► And then the previous language also doesn't make any sense about like, well, if you're a reader app, I guess. So email is not a reader app, but Netflix is like what do you know if you're if you're viewing content that had been licensed elsewhere, like it's all this language is basically written to specifically include just the things they want to include without naming them by name.
01:42:34 ◼ ► But yeah, like the rules changed apparently several months ago to say that even if you follow all the rules that Margaret outlined, also if your app isn't one of these apps that we want to be like this, you can't do it.
01:42:45 ◼ ► Right. So no matter what, and they've decided that Hey is one of these apps that basically gerrymandering is such a good analogy here because like it's ostensibly supposed to be this like codified system with like fair rules. But in reality, it's not at all fair. It's all political and it's all to to achieve this this basically this sinister goal.
01:43:05 ◼ ► This is pure blatant shameless greed. This is Apple being a huge dick. And look, I'm a huge Apple fan. We all are. We happily celebrate when they do great things. And for the next few weeks, we're probably going to be celebrating the great things that they're about to announce to us.
01:43:23 ◼ ► But this situation with this rule and the way they've treated this rule over time is Apple being a huge dick all the time. And it seems like their incredible dickitude is increasing over time with in particular about this rule.
01:43:38 ◼ ► All I can speculate is they must make a ridiculous amount of money from particularly this rule because as you mentioned, like this rule, this one thing about totally prohibiting any other outside payment system in many, many types of apps from being at all mentioned or even now at all existing in certain types of apps.
01:44:04 ◼ ► Even when it's totally reasonable to have a separation like that, like in this case, I think it's totally reasonable. This one rule and the way they operate this one rule is responsible for such a massive amount of not only negative sentiment, but of antitrust action and antitrust probes and any competitiveness actions by governments.
01:44:24 ◼ ► Like they are totally warranted. I mean, the response Apple posted and what was it yesterday to the European Commission probe thing, whatever that was, the response they posted and the big, the big puff piece they posted about all the money that they eat, that they enable in the economy from the app store.
01:44:43 ◼ ► That was such a massive pile of bullshit from so many different angles. It's a terrible look for Apple. It makes them look like dicks leading into what they hope to be a, you know, rah rah, look at us. Everyone's great. We love you developers conference in a week. They, they lead with that pile of crap.
01:45:06 ◼ ► That read like a lawyer wrote it didn't read like a lawyer wrote it and not a PR person because you know, you know when there's like a legal case in the courts, whatever it's about and like whatever the outcome is like there's a verdict or something in their statements from the lawyers.
01:45:18 ◼ ► Lawyers always say like the most lopsided one sided like do not acknowledge the other side has any good points whatsoever, whether they're on the winning side or the losing sides, but especially if they're on the losing side, it's like we disagree with this judge because they were saying we disagree with this judgment and we think Apple is the best company in the world and developers love it and everybody's great and like
01:45:35 ◼ ► it is not like a PR thing that tries to be like balanced and have the desired effect. It's a it's like a lawyer wrote it and said there is no other side, but our side Apple is right and that is all there is to it. And that's why if you read it as a regular developer, like are you kidding me, Apple hardworking.
01:45:50 ◼ ► What is that like determined developers? It's a level playing field. It's like none of these words are true. Like yeah, it's like every word of this is wrong. Yeah, it was very bad, but but it read exactly like you would see a lawyer ever say after a legal case.
01:46:02 ◼ ► So I feel like that's not that it's excusable, but it didn't surprise me and like when there is a legal case and you come out on the losing side, your lawyer puts out a statement like that and the fact that we read it as developers like you're not supposed to look at that's for like politicians and lawyers.
01:46:15 ◼ ► So yeah, it's just it's a terrible look like do they not know or do they not care how bad this like it's it's so just blatantly disrespectful of our of our intellect. Honestly, it's the kind of thing you'd expect our president to put out if he was slightly more articulate.
01:46:33 ◼ ► Oh, let's not go too far. He doesn't understand these words. Yeah, it's true, but it's so like stingy and double talky and just distorting it. It's it's almost like trying to gaslight the public into thinking that we're not being screwed as much as we are by Apple's rule here.
01:46:49 ◼ ► And it's just it's just it's awful and for a company that prides themselves on the principles they claim to pride themselves on to then also be acting like this is just this this crazy double talk that is not a good look at all.
01:47:03 ◼ ► Their strategy for doing these changes. It's not a new strategy, but like their strategy like reveals like what what makes it clear what they understand about it. So the strategy whenever they have a rule change like this like oh well, we've decided now that actually these certain kind of apps are allowed to let you sign up elsewhere and these other ones aren't right whatever but whatever the decision is like the strategy they use seems to make sense if you're like, oh, they're trying to be gentle to developers, right? Like they what they do is they make a change in this policy and maybe they update the wording or whatever, but they don't immediately like they don't have a strategy.
01:47:32 ◼ ► But they don't immediately like ban every app right they wait for you to have to update your app, right? So that spreads out sort of the outrage right because they make the new ruling and like if they just suddenly banned every app that like we've decided actually email apps can't do this and they ban like every email app that does this and we'll put a link in the show notes to to the HHS's Twitter thread where he says look at these five email apps. They all do exactly the same thing as us. How come they're not banned right? That's not a thing that Apple does. They don't say okay, we change the ruling.
01:48:00 ◼ ► All these email apps are banned we're pulling them from the store. What they do is wait for one of those email apps to do an update and then they say yeah about that actually there are new rules. You're no longer in compliance with blah blah blah and then you got to go back and forth and deal with trying to get a human and you know, but they do that on a case-by-case basis with each individual thing sort of demand paged outrage right like as and as each one of those person tries to update that spreads out the story.
01:48:27 ◼ ► So there's not a critical mass of things and it's not and you're like what isn't that better isn't that kinder than pulling all the email apps from the store. Wouldn't that be an incredibly hostile thing? Like you're not even getting any notice you're pulling all the apps like it's just terrible.
01:48:40 ◼ ► It's better to spread out like that but by spreading it out like that it reveals what Apple clearly knows which is this is an incredibly unpopular potentially damaging rule change.
01:48:50 ◼ ► They don't Apple does not have the courage of its convictions to say we think this rule is in the best interest of everybody users Apple and developers.
01:48:58 ◼ ► They know it's not in the best interest of developers and I think they also should know by now. It's not in the best interest of users given how we know developers will react to it.
01:49:07 ◼ ► And so they try to do it slowly and sneakily and just kind of like oh when you try to update will remind you and they probably think they're being kinder and gentler by doing that and in some respects they are but I think I think it reveals what they know to be true.
01:49:21 ◼ ► That this is not this is such an incredibly unpopular and potentially damaging change. They can't they literally can't afford PR wise to do it how they would do a good rule change say the rule change was hey guess not we're not taking 30% anymore we're taking 25.
01:49:34 ◼ ► You think they would demand page that out no they would announce it and it would apply to everyone instantly because it's good news when you got bad news don't really say anything and spread it out and that's that's just like it comes off as sneaky and shady even though I think they're motivated.
01:49:47 ◼ ► They think they're motivated internally by trying to be kind with that and I see that angle like there is an aspect of that but I just if you find yourself having to do that maybe rethink the rule change you're making.
01:49:57 ◼ ► You know the app store has always had this problem of the rules as written are pretty vague in a lot of ways they leave a lot to like case by case interpretation and they've always been enforced pretty inconsistently.
01:50:11 ◼ ► I've heard stories about them like specifically wanting to make examples out of developers that's one of the reasons why people like James Thompson who have like you know public apps like he makes pcalc and like he's been screwed over in weird ways so many times by app review.
01:50:26 ◼ ► I've heard that that was actually intentional to like make an example out of popular developers so that they spread the word so Apple doesn't have to.
01:50:34 ◼ ► You know so I used to think that like whenever they would have one of these slight changes or you know negative changes to the way a rule is being enforced and they would pick on some developer.
01:50:46 ◼ ► I used to think it was just random or that maybe maybe it was down to like you know app review is just a bunch of humans maybe some of them interpret things differently at different times and they just have to you know you know get their get their enforcement consistent and they were just going to get to it.
01:51:00 ◼ ► I no longer think that I think it's very clear that when they when they have these like behind the scenes enforcement changes that usually by the way and in this case also are not updated in the like published rules like there had there was not a published rule update a few months ago that made this rule start being enforced differently but it was.
01:51:25 ◼ ► I no longer think that it would that it's just because they like want to be gentle about it or don't want to tell us.
01:51:32 ◼ ► I think it's a tactic. It's a tactic to really help like extort money out of people because if you publish the rules the way they are in all honesty in direct clear terms like this.
01:51:44 ◼ ► Then somebody like base camp releasing a new app would already know before they developed the app over months or years they would already know we can't do this without supporting an app purchase and that might affect whether they choose to make it how they choose to price it etc.
01:52:04 ◼ ► I think the actual the rule change that forbids this type of thing actually did happen many months ago the problem is that that base camp logically was not just reading the letter of the rules but saying how does the app store actually work and in practice the way the app store actually works is there are existing email apps that do this.
01:52:21 ◼ ► So regardless of whether or not the rule is I think the rule change back and whatever it was like if you read it closely say are we a reader app are we a business app like that you know whatever like those words have been in there but then you look at the actual store and say well.
01:52:36 ◼ ► It's basically comes down to interpretation it's like well I think these rules would forbid our app but there's lots of it's open to a lot of interpretation so let me look at what's actually happening on the store which is what all developers do like to do their due diligence.
01:52:51 ◼ ► Because Apple never fully document their rules but what I'm saying is I don't think Apple needs to change the text to comply with this rule because the text that is in there fits with the gerrymander that they're doing it's just but the thing is because they slow roll it because because they don't automatically enforce it once if you look around and say well what's actually happening on the app store what you may see is it seems like this is allowed I see a bunch of other competitors doing the exact same thing I bet we're good we'll just watch and make sure they don't change the rules and you watch and they don't actually change the text but little do you know that the text
01:53:20 ◼ ► changed three months ago and apples in the process of slowly rolling out their interpretation of those rules you think you know the interpretation because you see this app on the app store ready but really that developers going to find out the next time they try to release a point release that they're mistaken about the interpretation of those rules and like that that slow roll out is it's so terrible because there's just no way like the tools we have are we can look at the text but then we might have a different interpretation and we can look what's happening the app store but then what's happening app store is a you know
01:53:50 ◼ ► a trailing indicator of what's actually going on because of the way apple rolls out these type of policy changes and like I said I can imagine them thinking they're trying to be kind with the slow roll out but it makes it just impossible to figure out what's going on and just you know it just kind of shady
01:54:05 ◼ ► no at this point I have thrown all possibility of their doing this trying to be kind I think it used to be that they they were trying to be like a little bit weaselly about avoiding bad PR because you know whenever you change the rules publicly if it's going to be in the direction of making things more restrictive like this it will generate bad PR so I think they try to just do it quietly and hope no one notices which is you know absurd really because everyone will we will notice
01:54:32 ◼ ► I think it backfired them now because if this change if this if they started slow rolling out this change in March it just so happened to have come to the head right now like if they had done the change all at once they would have taken the bad PR in March but by doing the slow roll out where you don't really have control over how slow rolls out because you don't know when people are going to try to update their apps right and getting unlucky to essentially like that hey.com was launching right before WWDC in their high profile app and they have enough money and nerve to say the F you to apple right and by the way
01:55:02 ◼ ► DHH has already testified in front of Congress in the US about tech antitrust issues so is the perfect storm of bad timing and the DOJ is talking to him again right so this is a perfect storm of bad timing but like this is one potential consequence of a slow roll out of a rule change and boy like obviously you know apple can't plan for these things and coronavirus I'm sure put a monkey wrench into all this but it's like not this live by the sword die by the sword like if this is going to be your strategy this eventuality of like you know someone in
01:55:32 ◼ ► side apple might be mad like how do we let this happen the week before WWDC it's like you only have yourself to blame like this you were in control of this whole process you decided to do it this way and this is the consequence.
01:55:43 ◼ ► No and again I don't think this is even being weasel anymore like it used to be being weasily let's try to avoid bad press by just not publishing anything and just hope it goes away right like when a kid like gets in trouble and they bury their head in their hands like they just like oh if I can't see it then I won't get in trouble like the problem will just go away like I think it used to I think it started out that way but now I think with this rule in particular the way they're enforcing this and the way they have been enforcing this.
01:56:11 ◼ ► I think it's a tactic because you are able to build your entire business build the entire app spend God knows how much time and money building out a service and an app and everything get it into the store maybe even get version 1.0 out there and then when you try to submit your bug update.
01:56:27 ◼ ► Bam you got to update you got to issue this right now or you got you know you got to add add our payment system right now it's like they I think it is now a tactic to be punitive and to be kind of kind of extortioning to be to really get people when they are most desperate and because I look they're trying to launch a service right here like you know hey.com they're trying to launch a service and instead of being able to launch it now now they have a serious problem with the interface that is on probably the most popular device.
01:56:56 ◼ ► That would be used to access that service and they can't like apples holding it hostage until they pay up until they agree to their extortion scheme.
01:57:05 ◼ ► There is no charitable way to look at this you've chosen the least charitable way that they intentionally that 1.0 through to get their app launched and then took them on point I'm not willing to go that far and think that was intentional strategy.
01:57:19 ◼ ► That's not quite that's not quite what I'm saying what I'm saying is that their their strategy of not publishing these rules.
01:57:30 ◼ ► Yeah not having conversations ahead of time not publishing the rules their entire what Apple always has told developers when it came to like questions about whether app review would approve something.
01:57:41 ◼ ► It's like submit it and save. The answer has always been just build the whole thing and submit it and we'll let you know later right which is not that's not really anything.
01:57:50 ◼ ► So I honestly think that the way they've been doing things where they let people build entire services build entire apps spend lots of you know spend years possibly millions of dollars maybe like building out services.
01:58:04 ◼ ► And then only to have app review slam the hammer down after they've already done everything and it could be because their entire economics model rested on the like vague interpretation of this rule that now Apple decided to change their mind on.
01:58:19 ◼ ► You have to believe that the result of that much of the time is developers saying fine I guess we'll support your 30% now because we have to it works.
01:58:30 ◼ ► So the strategy of being weaselly about this and you know being vague and changing shifting their enforcement over time is profitable for them.
01:58:40 ◼ ► I have to imagine this all goes back to one of the big you know root challenges Apple faces is revenue growth.
01:58:47 ◼ ► Their product lines have been you know slowing down dramatically and the economic conditions of the world are definitely not going to help them out this year.
01:58:54 ◼ ► And so they've been driving for services revenue and it's been working they've been making lots of service revenue but services revenue is often consumer hostile or developer hostile or both.
01:59:04 ◼ ► They have a significant financial motivation to ratchet up the extraction of money from existing customers and existing developers.
01:59:11 ◼ ► So these rules are never going to go the other direction they're never going to like people always think everybody you see they think like Apple's maybe this year Apple will lower the cut.
01:59:18 ◼ ► They're never lowering the cut. We're just lucky they don't keep raising the cut. Instead they do search ads.
01:59:25 ◼ ► They did lower the cut they lowered it for they did that as a subscription thing after the first year it lowers they lowered if your name is Amazon or Netflix like it has happened.
01:59:33 ◼ ► Asterisks a lot of asterisks everywhere and not in like a you know mass way here. This is one of the like when you have a significant push for ever increasing aggressive growth on services revenue.
01:59:48 ◼ ► The result is going to be increased friction and tension between you and your customers and your developers because one of the most common and easy ways to get additional services revenue is to just tighten the bolts and extract more for the same thing.
02:00:07 ◼ ► Or make things more strict or get more stingy with important stuff make people want to pay more money to get around there that you have to pay to get around it or in this case that you have to lose more of your revenue to Apple.
02:00:18 ◼ ► That's just going to keep happening. There are some services revenue streams that it's beneficial you know you look at like okay well if they offer some kind of service that people actually want and they offer a reasonable price like you know we talk about Apple arcade it seems pretty pretty okay.
02:00:31 ◼ ► So you know Apple arcade five bucks a month sure we'll pay that and you don't feel ripped off by paying for Apple arcade like you pay it if you want to no one's forcing you and it's fine.
02:00:40 ◼ ► So there are ways to get good services revenue but there's also ways that you just kind of put a tax on a system that's already in place or you use your power over people or your lock in or your monopoly power to extract rent from everybody in ways that like it's you're not really providing the value that you're extracting.
02:01:00 ◼ ► You're just extracting it because of the position you're in and Apple is doing a lot of that latter one as well and I see that only increasing over time and that's why like I you know when I see crap like this happening in the App Store to developers.
02:01:15 ◼ ► First of all I know there is no way that a guy complaining on Twitter even a very popular guy or a bunch of podcast talking about how Apple's being a dick here is actually going to change anything they're clearly making way too much money from this and they're not about to cut into their services revenue, especially not this year.
02:01:36 ◼ ► So the only way this is going to change is if governments force them to and Apple's walking a really fine line with this rule because this one rule as I said earlier has clearly inspired so many government probes and will continue to do so for any functioning government.
02:01:51 ◼ ► Ours should be doing it too. I don't know if we are. At least the EU has some kind of functioning consumer protection stuff so they're doing it at least but this one rule about allowing alternative payment systems and how are not allowing alternative payment systems in the app.
02:02:06 ◼ ► If that one rule was relieved a little bit the entire Spotify complaint would evaporate basically. Like so much of the antitrust issue with Apple and the App Store would go away with just this one rule being relaxed.
02:02:22 ◼ ► It wouldn't even have to be fully relaxed. It could go back to like you can link out to Safari for your own payment method and then go back to your app. Like which would be a huge relaxation of the rule. That alone would probably remove any teeth to any of these complaints, any of these antitrust filings and everything.
02:02:39 ◼ ► That would kill it but they won't even do that. So obviously they're making a ton of money from this and it's only going to get worse over time.
02:02:47 ◼ ► Well, they're also backed into a bit of a corner. Like I shouldn't be making excuses for Apple because I echo what you're saying Marco that this seems in extremely poor taste and just mean, just downright mean.
02:03:00 ◼ ► But from Apple's perspective, if they've shown all of the services revenue, it's not like they're going to throw it away. I mean imagine Wall Street and the damage that they would take from Wall Street if all of a sudden they were like,
02:03:14 ◼ ► "Well, we just thought we'd be nice today and we'd reduce our cut and we'd allow people to get around our IAPs and you know that's cost us a billion dollars or whatever the number may be because at Apple's scale it might be that much."
02:03:27 ◼ ► And so I just to your point a second ago like why would they ever relax these rules? I think as much as I want to believe that Apple is a company that wants to do right by its customers and do right by its developers,
02:03:39 ◼ ► ultimately I should have stopped with Apple as a company, period. And companies are made to make money. And Apple, like you said Marco, is making a shed load of money on all of this and they can't stop making a shed load of money because that's what their investors are expecting.
02:03:57 ◼ ► And that's who Tim works for. Tim works for the investors. I don't know. I come back to something that I feel like I always heard from Gruber and maybe it wasn't him but that's why I always heard it, which was that, and I might even butcher it, but Apple cares about Apple first, its users second, and developers third.
02:04:17 ◼ ► And this is one of those cases where we haven't gotten past step one, that Apple cares about Apple, and there's little room in Apple's heart for anyone but Apple. And that's really unfortunate because, as you guys had said way early on, these decisions that Apple have made,
02:04:35 ◼ ► to my eyes, inarguably make these apps worse. They absolutely do, and this was covered earlier but I can't emphasize it enough. They make the apps worse. But they make money and that's more important to Apple, which to some degree is kind of why they're there.
02:04:51 ◼ ► But it bums me out, and I guess when I get angry, is that I like to delude myself into thinking that Apple is a company made up of good people, which is true, trying to do right by everyone. And that's not really as true as I want it to be. They're trying to do right by Apple.
02:05:06 ◼ ► And if they do right by other people too, then sweet, that's a good bonus. But ultimately they're trying to do right by Apple. And I can't necessarily fault them for it, but it just kind of bums me out that this company that I want to celebrate for being just and right and progressive
02:05:20 ◼ ► ultimately, at the end of the day, is still just a company and it's still just a money making machine.
02:05:26 ◼ ► Yeah, and that's where the services revenue is so corrosive to that. If you consider just what they were for the most part before, just make good products and sell them to you. It's much easier to align what is good for Apple with what is good with their customers and what is good with their developers. If you're just making great products and putting them out there, and people want to buy them, and then people want to run software on them, that's great for everybody. And that's what they did for a long time. And that's what they still mostly try to do today.
02:05:55 ◼ ► But then when you also try to push into services, you introduce these potentially very corrosive incentives that actively fight against your customers and your developers, but benefit Apple a lot. And it takes a certain degree of, probably like self control, really, to avoid those corrosive influences and to not go down that route as you pursue services revenue.
02:06:22 ◼ ► And Apple has messed that up in a few ways. I think iCloud storage being so stingy is one of those ways, the free tier of that. This kind of stuff is just going to keep happening because now, if you look at the company financially, they need services revenue more than anything. It is the only area of the company that is significantly growing right now.
02:06:44 ◼ ► And if you look at what the product lines have in store and the world economy being kind of in the crapper right now, they're going to be relying on services revenue for growth for a long time, probably. Because everything else they sell is pretty mature.
02:06:58 ◼ ► Maybe someday they'll release some kind of AR goggles that will take over the world in some way, but so far that's not here and that might not happen. So services revenue is going to be the main driver of growth financially for a while. And they're going to keep ratcheting things down, or up.
02:07:19 ◼ ► That metaphor is very strange. But they're going to keep ratcheting things to a more painful direction to get that extra money out of services revenue. And sometimes it's going to be things that we want that we're happy to pay for, and sometimes it's not.
02:07:32 ◼ ► For a company that spent most of its existence not even having to make that kind of trade-off, that most of its existence it could just make good products and keep making more good products and keep making their products better, and that generated their success. So they never really had to develop the muscle for self-control against the corrosive influences of some of these services revenue streams.
02:07:56 ◼ ► So they're really bad at it. I don't know if they will find that balance, or if the money is too good for them and it's going to corrupt what makes them so great.
02:08:05 ◼ ► Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode, and Fully. And thank you to our members for supporting us as well. You can go to ATP.fm/join to see for yourself. And we will talk to you next week.
02:08:40 ◼ ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm. And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's Casey, Liz, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M.
02:08:58 ◼ ► A-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A. It's accidental. They didn't mean too accidental. Tech podcast so long.
02:09:19 ◼ ► I actually don't necessarily have any need to do an extensive WWDC predictions thing. But I would like to state on record, which is now going to cause the universe for it to be wrong because I'm feeling very smug about this prediction.
02:09:36 ◼ ► But I just have this gut feeling that there's going to be some pretty interesting developments on iPad and I think specifically around the home screen. I can't tell you why. It's just a gut feeling. It's not that I'm trying to hide anything. I can't tell you why.
02:09:52 ◼ ► But I think that there's going to be, I'm not sure there's going to be multitasking changes that we all really want, but I think something about the iPad home screen is going to be significantly different this year.
02:10:07 ◼ ► I hope that it is a refinement year for the most part. I know we probably won't get that and we just finished talking about ARM Macs and that's, an architecture transition is not a small deal. But in a way, it helps to do that transition if the OS is fairly stable otherwise.
02:10:27 ◼ ► Hopefully, at least on the Mac side, I really am hoping for a stability focused year. Every time I see any major new Mac feature, it concerns me now.
02:10:39 ◼ ► Because I'm like, first of all, that means they didn't fix the whole bunch of bugs they could have been fixing at the same time. And then second of all, the Mac features are so often really buggy and half-assed for the first few years that they're out, possibly forever that they're out.
02:10:52 ◼ ► Please stop touching the Mac in most ways and just refine what's already there because it needs it.
02:10:58 ◼ ► And then yeah, for the other platforms, again, I'm hoping for a refinement year as well because iOS 13 kind of sucked for a while.
02:11:06 ◼ ► The only platform I really hope to see major progress and changes on is WatchOS because it needs it the most still.
02:11:15 ◼ ► WatchOS is still so primitive and limited in what apps are allowed to do. SwiftUI helped a lot, but there's still a lot more to go.
02:11:33 ◼ ► I think we'll get Catalyst versions of the messages. Speaking of not touching the Mac, I really hope they do replace the Messages app with one that has feature parity, even if it's a "worse" app because the current non-Catalyst message app is no great shakes on the Mac.
02:11:47 ◼ ► If you want a real stability, this is something I think we haven't talked about on the show and I haven't heard talked about anywhere really, but if you're like, "Okay, I want this year to be a stability year where we just do refinement and stuff," you know the best way to do that? Don't do an ARM transition this year.
02:12:02 ◼ ► Just delay it another year. Have this be a refinement year like you just said, like, "Oh, no major new features." Maybe you get new Catalyst apps on the Mac, but in general, everything is all stability release and also no ARM transition.
02:12:15 ◼ ► And we would all be sad because we've been talking about ARM transition and all the rumors. I think we'd all be disappointed because we're all getting psyched up for it.
02:12:21 ◼ ► But that would sure be a more stable year than, "Oh, by the way, architecture transition." So I'm not rooting for that, but we have to put it out there as a possibility again, especially with coronavirus.
02:12:32 ◼ ► And it could be for uninteresting reasons having to do with manufacturing that really isn't Apple's "fault" or they just got cold feet and pushed it out another year. Things like this happen.
02:12:42 ◼ ► So if you're listening to this show before WWDC, I want you to at least have some preparation in your mind like, "Maybe it won't be ARM this year." And then you'll be pleasantly surprised when it is and you'll get to enjoy it all the more.
02:12:59 ◼ ► An ARM transition happening this year would actually let most developers treat it like a stability year for the app side and maybe even most developers in Apple too because most developers are not writing architecture-specific code anymore.
02:13:15 ◼ ► Those days are long behind us for most apps. For most developers, an ARM transition actually would not require very much work at all.
02:13:22 ◼ ► It would be a lot of work for some developers, anybody obviously writing assembly code and anybody relying on all the frameworks that we were talking about earlier that are probably going to be deprecated like OpenGL, or probably going to be removed like OpenGL.
02:13:33 ◼ ► But for most developers of most apps, there's not going to be much to do. And so that actually might kind of enable a stability year on a lot of different fronts.
02:13:46 ◼ ► There's also your dependencies. I know you don't use a lot of dependencies in your code, but that's not the case for other applications.
02:13:52 ◼ ► And so you have to also wait for all your dependencies to be both ported and validated on ARM.
02:13:57 ◼ ► And it's quite a long chain for a long application. It's not even entirely under your control how easy it is to port your app.
02:14:05 ◼ ► I don't think it'll be a big deal. Again, we've gone through it twice. Developers will get it done. But the bigger the app, the more potential there is for it to be quite a lot of work just to get the thing working and performing well.
02:14:18 ◼ ► That's the other aspect. Just because it compiles and runs and doesn't appear to be any bugs has the performance.
02:14:23 ◼ ► Presumably these new CPUs will have very different performance characteristics. Some for the better.
02:14:29 ◼ ► So it's much faster than it was before. I didn't have to do anything. But sometimes, depending on how Apple optimizes the libraries or how the libraries you're using are optimized, or maybe if you're a big company, you wrote a bunch of stuff yourself that was tailored for, not with assembly code, but tailored for what you know to be the strengths and weaknesses of x86's vector instructions or whatever.
02:14:48 ◼ ► It could be very different on the ARM stuff. Or it could be that the ARM CPUs, to get the best performance, you really have to use this new API that uses the built-in neural engine or something because it doesn't have the generic hardware to do what you want.
02:15:00 ◼ ► Anyway, this stuff is always more complicated. Hopefully, the pitch for small developers is you'll be able to port your app in a day. It'll be up and running. It shouldn't be a big deal.
02:15:11 ◼ ► Companies like Microsoft and Adobe, changing anything in that giant house of cards is always going to be quite a headache. Luckily, they have a lot of money and people, so I'm sure it'll work out.
02:15:30 ◼ ► Fine. If you had a risky pick that you would like to pick for WWDC, it's for nothing but bragging rights, what would you pick?
02:15:47 ◼ ► I haven't really been keeping up with the rumors because I've been believing the ARM transition ones and I'm like, "That's more than enough."
02:15:56 ◼ ► Beyond that, I'm with Marco. I'm mostly hoping that there's not anything that I'm not thinking of. I would be so overjoyed if bugs got fixed with existing features.
02:16:10 ◼ ► The only thing that I haven't heard rumored at all that I would be excited about that I think is worth doing is improvements to Time Machine to take advantage of APFS.
02:16:18 ◼ ► That's it. I think that will happen eventually no matter what, but it would be cool if they made further improvements this year just because.
02:16:27 ◼ ► But everything else, I just want to fix all the bugs and make everything better and faster and more stable and have a cool ARM transition.
02:16:34 ◼ ► All the iOS and iPad stuff, that'll be cool too, but it doesn't really affect my life that much.
02:16:41 ◼ ► So yeah, that's all I got. I got x86 emulation on ARM and Time Machine improvements for APFS.
02:16:49 ◼ ► I hope that if they do any kind of significant Mac features, which again, I hope they don't as well.
02:16:58 ◼ ► I think if they put a lot of effort into changing the Mac beyond the ARM transition, that might be a failure to read the room.
02:17:07 ◼ ► What most Mac developers want is stability. The Mac has been suffering in that area for a while.
02:17:15 ◼ ► But one thing I would hope for with the Mac is if they do touch it at all, if they insist on touching it.
02:17:50 ◼ ► If this thing is ever going to be good, we should see some progress towards the direction.
02:17:56 ◼ ► I was complaining earlier, when the Touch Bar first came out, it was pretty mediocre, and then nothing ever has changed about it.
02:18:06 ◼ ► If you're going to have this thing that came out really crappy or only mediocre, let's see some movement in the direction of being good.
02:18:30 ◼ ► It's wonderful as a 1.0, but it would be a lot more useful if a lot of limitations were lifted, and a lot of bugs were fixed, and performance issues were solved, and everything like that.
02:18:46 ◼ ► Not only as I wish for every year, but as they do every couple of years on watchOS, they actually do it.
02:18:57 ◼ ► It's always shocking to me how weird of a platform it still is for apps, how limited it still is, how buggy it still is, even with Apple's own built-in apps.
02:19:15 ◼ ► Do they know there's tons of bugs with one ear having its volume set to zero all the time for some reason until you adjust the volume and it goes back up?
02:19:30 ◼ ► The watchOS stuff, I'm always going to have a massive wish list because it's always going to need a lot of work, so I'm hoping for some big improvements there.
02:19:39 ◼ ► But everything else, please just do stability releases. The watch doesn't need it because it's already so unstable, there's no expectation.
02:19:45 ◼ ► Is everyone in favor of Catalyst messages? Because I totally am. Even if it's just as bad as current Catalyst apps, I just want feature parity. It annoys me so much that there's things I can only do on my iPad and iPhone through messages.
02:19:57 ◼ ► Like, do all the screen effects and all, and be able to see them, and add little... It doesn't have feature parity. It's just not as good, it's not as capable as the iOS version.
02:20:10 ◼ ► And I know if we make a Catalyst it'll be worse in a bunch of ways than the Mac app, but Catalyst will mean, in theory, I'm assuming, that it would actually have feature parity.
02:20:19 ◼ ► And so that way it could go in lockstep with the iOS version, so if they add some feature to messages it will come in both of them at the same time instead of having this lag or whatever.
02:20:27 ◼ ► And honestly messages could be a better app overall, right? So I share Marco's hope that Catalyst apps get better. I think they will because it was the first year for Catalyst.
02:20:36 ◼ ► It was bad, we all know it's bad, the apps are bad, right? But, you know, year two, if Apple's going to continue to have this be a thing, I'm sure it will improve.
02:20:44 ◼ ► And I'm hoping that the apps that they bring... What's the other app that desperately needs to be ported? I forget.
02:20:58 ◼ ► No, it's not. Anyway, this type of situation, the whole thing that Catalyst is made for, that there's something on iOS that wouldn't be on the Mac at all except if there's a way to get it there with you reusing the UI.
02:21:10 ◼ ► That's why, that's one of the reasons that Catalyst exists. Apple itself needs to start doing that.
02:21:16 ◼ ► I did it before with voice memos and a whole bunch of other stuff that's like, "Okay, yeah, right, you're right that those wouldn't be on the Mac if you couldn't just reuse the code for iOS, but honestly, yeah, they're more like a proof of concept."
02:21:27 ◼ ► Messages is getting into serious apps that you care more about. Hopefully they never do it with mail. Boy, that would be a nightmare.
02:21:40 ◼ ► Speaking of messages, slight tangent, something I really, really, really want, and it doesn't seem to me like it's impossible, but I really want to have support for the tap backs, the thumbs up, thumbs down, ha ha, exclamations, etc.
02:22:02 ◼ ► I want to have support for those in mixed format group messages when they're text messages. So Erin's entire family is on Android phones and we have a couple of group texts with members of her family.
02:22:15 ◼ ► And it is not unusual for the iPhone users, which is basically Erin and me and our future sister-in-law, to thumbs up a comment or thumbs down a comment or ha ha a comment or whatever the case may be.
02:22:27 ◼ ► And because it's a group, I guess it's not strictly speaking an SMS, I guess it's a group MMS message, what comes out is "liked, I'll be there soon."
02:22:37 ◼ ► You know, like the words "liked, I'll be there soon" instead of the message that reads "I'll be there soon" having a thumbs up on it. And it seems to me...
02:22:45 ◼ ► It says "Casey liked, I'll be there soon." "Casey laughed at, I'll be there soon." Right? Isn't that what it says?
02:22:50 ◼ ► I don't think it... It doesn't attribute it as Casey said, I don't think. And I'm not going to try to look it up now. But one way or another, it's clear that it took the verbatim message and put the word "liked" and then quotations around it.
02:23:05 ◼ ► And so you feel like... I feel like this is a solvable problem with computers today, that we could look back at prior messages and see if anything matches verbatim.
02:23:13 ◼ ► And see... Maybe we should just throw a tap back on there if you're an iOS or MacOS person. I really wish that worked. That would be very, very nice, because it's very, very annoying.
02:23:24 ◼ ► But this is the thing, like, for all of the incredible things Apple does in general, and as much as we poop all over them, you know, Apple software developers seem to be a pretty smart, pretty talented group.
02:23:36 ◼ ► But I think one of... To my eyes, one of Apple's bigger problems from a software development point of view is how unbelievably myopic they are.
02:23:46 ◼ ► You know, the quintessential example of this was how great Apple Maps has always been in the Bay Area, but has been utter garbage, or was utter garbage for the longest time everywhere else.
02:23:55 ◼ ► And hey, guess what? If everyone is working in the Bay Area that works on Apple Maps, it's going to be great there, and it's going to be garbage everywhere else.
02:24:04 ◼ ► And so one thing I hope that comes from this god-awful pandemic is if Apple were to, you know, somehow actually start to acknowledge that there are other parts of the country that exist, and hey, people might want to live there, then maybe things like that will get better.
02:24:19 ◼ ► And so this relates to my messages complaint, because I would bet that most of these Apple engineers just don't really exchange text messages with Android people that often.
02:24:28 ◼ ► I mean, why else would this not be a fixed problem already? And it's just... That sort of thing just really chaps my hindquarters.
02:24:35 ◼ ► When it's something that's a real bugbear to me with Apple software, but because it's like just barely off the happy path, I suspect that nobody at Apple has ever seen it.
02:24:47 ◼ ► I think tons of Apple people have mixed conversations with people that don't have iPhones. I mean, it's the same reason you do. Like, they may work for Apple, but it doesn't automatically mean their entire family works for Apple. I understand their constraint. Like, your idea of like, "Oh, if you see a verbatim message with the word 'liked' in front of it..." But that obviously doesn't work. What if someone legitimately types a message like that, and like, "Where did my message go?" Oh, it turned into a thumb because you happen to...
02:25:07 ◼ ► There's also the problem... Like, you're limited by the SMS network, right? It has very limited bandwidth. You don't want to put inline stuff in there that comes out as garbage on non- iPhones. So, I understand the problem, and obviously Apple's solution is that everyone should have iPhones.