0:00:00Okay, let's do this thing. Nothing like fixing a critical bug. Not 60 seconds before we go in the air.
0:00:07I saw that five seconds ago. I just saw that. That was great diagnostics from the both of you. I'm very impressed.
0:00:13Actually, I'm very annoyed right now because the headphones I'm using, the left driver started rattling today.
0:00:20It's only resonating with certain low frequencies. So like when Casey talks, I hear a little rattle in my left ear.
0:00:26But when I talk or when John talks, I usually don't. But when Casey gets nice and deep really close up then, I'm like, "Oh God!"
0:00:33Hey Marco, how's it going?
0:00:35So try to avoid your sexy radio voice next week.
0:00:38I'll just be sure to do it like this for the whole show. How's that sound?
0:00:42What could possibly go wrong? That'd be perfect.
0:00:44What could go wrong?
0:00:46I am incredibly pleasantly surprised with... maybe it's the quality of our audience.
0:00:56So last week, we began the show with a pretty big segment about Black Lives Matter and racism and police and privilege and all the issues that are going on right now.
0:01:09And have been going on for a while.
0:01:11I thought we were taking a risk.
0:01:14And we got hundreds of responses.
0:01:18I mean, we must have heard from 500 people.
0:01:20And of that number, I think three were even slightly argumentative.
0:01:26Like, I wouldn't even necessarily classify them as negative.
0:01:29Like, they were just slightly argumentative.
0:01:31And all the rest were universally positive.
0:01:34And so I think this both shows that our audience is awesome.
0:01:38But also this gives me hope for just the public in general.
0:01:42That I think it shouldn't be risky to say Black Lives Matter and to say that we have a racism problem in this country and to say that we have a police brutality problem.
0:01:52That shouldn't be a risky thing to say.
0:01:54But it is. And it has been.
0:01:56But I think now it's not.
0:01:58Now I think it has reached a critical mass of public realization and public acceptance.
0:02:05That like, "Oh yeah, this is actually a really big problem."
0:02:08And it's not risky to talk about it. It's not risky to say, "Oh yeah, we really have this problem."
0:02:14Like, no. It's a real thing.
0:02:16And that, in a weird way, gives me hope that we're making some progress on these issues.
0:02:22And I know we have a long way to go.
0:02:24And it's not going to be fast progress.
0:02:26But it's not risky to talk about this anymore.
0:02:30And that's a really good first step.
0:02:32Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
0:02:34I was braced for impact because whenever you put anything on the internet and you have more than ten people that look at it, you're going to get obnoxious feedback.
0:02:44It's part of the social contract of the internet.
0:02:48I mean, to give you some idea, saying Black Lives Matter so emphatically around all that discussion and privilege and everything last week,
0:02:55I thought, again, I thought this was going to generate some controversy among the audience.
0:03:00Things that have generated more controversy than this would be things like if we said, "The sky is blue."
0:03:06Or if we said, "Apple's doing pretty well these days."
0:03:09Anything we could possibly say generates way more argument and way more negativity than that did.
0:03:17And so, again, I think that's amazing.
0:03:20And I'm really pleased with that ratio of positivity that we got.
0:03:24Yeah, I'm very excited about it.
0:03:26And I wanted to just one quick moment thank the both of you guys, especially for speaking so eloquently about it,
0:03:33and for our listeners for taking the time to listen to it as well.
0:03:36And actually, our first bit of follow-up relates to that.
0:03:39John, can you tell me why we need to recount this other than that it's a good idea to revisit this periodically?
0:03:45I'm inlining for performance purposes.
0:03:47We had a whole bunch of links in the last episode about the resources so you could go to learn more and do more and stuff like that.
0:03:55And people were very nice in recommending things to add to the list.
0:04:00In particular, a lot of people were recommending books.
0:04:02What we had linked was a page that itself linked like 16 different books.
0:04:06So most of the recommendations for books that we got were actually books that were already on that page.
0:04:10So I just wanted to surface them.
0:04:12And so we're not going to have a million notes this week.
0:04:14I just wanted to pick out the three or four handful of books that were most recommended.
0:04:19They will be in line in the show notes this week and not buried one link away under a page.
0:04:23So check it out if reading is your thing and you want to learn more about these issues.
0:04:27I plan on reading at least one, maybe two of these.
0:04:31There's another book I'm going to read this summer.
0:04:33But I have a couple of these on my reading list now.
0:04:36If I have time, I hopefully will be able to add many, many more.
0:04:38And I'm really looking forward to that.
0:04:40John, you were making fun of me last week about doing some edits inside of a web form.
0:04:46And Martin Bre has some thoughts about that.
0:04:49Martin writes, "Regarding John's last remark about never editing in a text field on a web page,
0:04:54I've also been in the same camp and trying to spread the message.
0:04:56I did that no later than yesterday with my brother who's currently taking his exams
0:04:59which are occurring online due to the COVID-19 measures.
0:05:02In this particular case, that was disastrously bad advice.
0:05:05He quickly learned about the school's anti-cheat features.
0:05:08For some of the questions, they simply blocked pasting text.
0:05:11And on others, they apparently check the speed at which text is entered.
0:05:14And if that's too fast, it gets cleared.
0:05:16And I assume you also might get flagged as a potential cheater.
0:05:18I should have anticipated this, but I didn't, and it made my brother lose a bunch of time."
0:05:22See, I was right all along.
0:05:24See, I think this is one of the ways like schools, when I went through school,
0:05:29and again, disclaimer, I'm a terrible student, et cetera.
0:05:32But when I went through school, when I stumbled through school,
0:05:35we didn't have much technology in the school.
0:05:39Like, you know, I graduated from high school in 2000, from college in 2004.
0:05:43And that was like, I never even saw anybody use a laptop in a classroom.
0:05:49Wait, not in college?
0:05:51No.
0:05:52Really?
0:05:53That happened like right after I graduated.
0:05:55Like, it was when that whole wave came in.
0:05:57When I got to college, most people came with a desktop computer,
0:06:00a cheap PC desktop computer.
0:06:02Only a few, usually the rich kids, had laptops.
0:06:06And you'd occasionally see them with it like in the library,
0:06:09but you would never see anybody in the classroom using a laptop.
0:06:12And that seemed to start literally like right after I graduated.
0:06:15Like, I graduated in 2004, and it seemed like around 2005
0:06:19is when everybody had laptops in classrooms.
0:06:21But I never saw one.
0:06:23And, you know, I never took a test on a computer.
0:06:26I never, like, I wanted to.
0:06:28I would have loved that at the time.
0:06:30I was dying to use computers for anything.
0:06:32But, you know, we only had them for like the computer science class,
0:06:35and that's about it.
0:06:36And so I missed this entire wave of classroom technology
0:06:41that is now ubiquitous.
0:06:42I've never seen a smart board.
0:06:44I don't have a great idea of even what it is.
0:06:46Oh, they're so nice.
0:06:47You've missed out on so much.
0:06:49And we're the same age.
0:06:50In fact, actually that reminds me, happy birthday to you
0:06:52because your birthday is tomorrow.
0:06:54And so we are effectively the same age, you and I.
0:06:57And I didn't get to use a smart board until my second real job,
0:07:01but they were amazing at the time.
0:07:02Smart boards were, imagine like one of those mobile white boards
0:07:06that you would perhaps see in like school or whatever.
0:07:09But instead of being a traditional white board,
0:07:11if I remember right, it was a, maybe it was a white board.
0:07:14I don't remember. It's been so darn long.
0:07:15But anyways, it was something like a screen projected on the white board
0:07:18or the white board itself was a screen or something like that.
0:07:20So the point is, it was digitizing everything you were doing.
0:07:24So you could draw using this like fake marker,
0:07:27and then you could select what you've drawn and move it around.
0:07:30And as someone who loves doing like white board diagrams
0:07:34and things of that nature, it was really convenient
0:07:36because not only could you move the stuff around
0:07:38when you realized, oh, I gotta shimmy something
0:07:39in between these two boxes, but also you could just easily
0:07:42make a PDF and send it to your coworkers or whatever.
0:07:44Smart boards are super cool.
0:07:45I never had that opportunity in college,
0:07:47but they were great in the real world.
0:07:49Sorry, I totally interrupted, but happy birthday.
0:07:51- No, I mean, I interrupted you.
0:07:52That's my job on the show, I guess.
0:07:53(laughing)
0:07:55I've never even, like, I think in all of college,
0:07:58and like I think I had one professor
0:08:01who gave presentations as PowerPoints.
0:08:04Like I never had that either.
0:08:06Like it seemed like the old school way of doing school
0:08:10ended right as I left.
0:08:12(laughing)
0:08:13And now everyone's on PowerPoints using smart boards
0:08:16or things like that, using digital test taking on computers.
0:08:19That's all new to me.
0:08:20And so, you know, if you look at the quality
0:08:23of software on average, you know, up like kind of
0:08:26near the top you have like most consumer level stuff
0:08:29made by good companies like Apple who are pretty decent at it.
0:08:32That's like, you know, nice usable thoughtful software.
0:08:34And jeez, I mean, even Apple has their problems
0:08:36in that area a lot recently, but believe me,
0:08:38it's way better than a lot of things.
0:08:40Then, you know, a little step down from that,
0:08:42you have like the general world of PC hardware.
0:08:44Like, well, you know, sometimes it's okay,
0:08:47sometimes it's all right, you know,
0:08:48it's not to the best standards,
0:08:49but it's still like generally kind of usable.
0:08:52Then kind of like down a bit you have like
0:08:55specialty software for like certain industries,
0:08:58like my dentist software, and that's,
0:09:01it's getting a little bit hard to use,
0:09:03a little bit crappy, a little bit, you know, hostile.
0:09:05And then you take a huge step down
0:09:07and you have enterprise software.
0:09:10And that is a disaster.
0:09:12It's impossible to use, it's terrible,
0:09:14it's user hostile, it's terribly designed.
0:09:17And then even another giant step below that,
0:09:20you have what is usually education software.
0:09:22(laughs)
0:09:24Like the incentives and the factors and the,
0:09:28you know, the costs and benefits and everything
0:09:30are not set up at all for enterprise software
0:09:34and especially for education software,
0:09:36which is like enterprise software but with even less money.
0:09:39It's not set up at all for that to be usable
0:09:41or friendly or well designed or even remotely well maintained
0:09:45because schools have very special needs
0:09:48and usually no money.
0:09:50And so it's like, and it's, you know,
0:09:53similar enterprise software where like
0:09:54you're making a deal with a whole district
0:09:56or a whole government where you have to,
0:09:58you know, you're dealing with like huge committees
0:10:00and budgets and the public and politics
0:10:03and all sorts of other stuff.
0:10:05So I can't even imagine how hostile
0:10:09a lot of the software must be in education these days.
0:10:12I mean, we only see, we like scratch the surface
0:10:15with just like whatever we have to use
0:10:17because my kids in school as like, you know,
0:10:19the parent portals of various things,
0:10:20which are always terrible.
0:10:21And that's like the bare minimum.
0:10:23I can't even imagine what it's like
0:10:25to be a student in this stuff these days.
0:10:27- I remember, I've told pieces of this story
0:10:30on the show before, so forgive me,
0:10:31but when I was in college, I went to school
0:10:34with a home built, you know, tower monstrosity,
0:10:37which at the time was not unusual.
0:10:39- Me too.
0:10:40A full tower too, not even a mid tower.
0:10:42- Yep, yep, yep, yep.
0:10:43- 'Cause the full tower had more drive bays.
0:10:44- Yep, and I believe I had two CD,
0:10:47like I had a CD-ROM drive that was super fast for reads.
0:10:51Then I had a CD-RW drive that was not that fast for reads.
0:10:54But then what you could do is you could duplicate CDs
0:10:56without having to like cache it on the hard drive
0:10:59for a little while.
0:11:00You could do a straight rip from one to the other.
0:11:01- Well you could, but like, you know,
0:11:03that was a risk, 'cause you, like,
0:11:05the buffer under-arm protection on the writers
0:11:07was never that great.
0:11:08- No, that's true.
0:11:09- I mean, you gotta whip out your Nero burning ROM game
0:11:11and like, you know, rip it to an ISO first,
0:11:13and then use Nero, you know, to burn with like
0:11:16all the protection, try to copy all the games
0:11:18with all their stupid protection disks and everything.
0:11:20(laughs)
0:11:22- God, this is a walk right down memory lane.
0:11:24But anyways, but I think I had, what was,
0:11:26it wasn't a zip, was it a jazz drive that was like
0:11:29a zip drive, but higher capacity,
0:11:31is that what I'm thinking of?
0:11:32- Yeah, it was one gig instead of 100 megs.
0:11:34- Yep, I had one of those, which I loved at the time,
0:11:36even though I barely ever used it.
0:11:38But after a couple of years, like,
0:11:40I think it was my junior, maybe senior years,
0:11:44I got myself a ThinkPad, which was in no small part
0:11:48because Dad worked for IBM at the time.
0:11:49And I remember I thought I was hot stuff,
0:11:52and this is the part I've told on the show before,
0:11:53because this ThinkPad was one of the first
0:11:56that you could add a daughter card internal to the ThinkPad.
0:12:00It had like a little door that you could unscrew and open,
0:12:04and you could put a Cisco 802.11b wireless card
0:12:07within the computer.
0:12:09And so I had a wireless connection in the like
0:12:1210 buildings on campus that were set up for wireless.
0:12:15But I had a wireless connection without one of those
0:12:18PCMCIA dongles hanging out the outside,
0:12:20you remember that?
0:12:21Where you had that like antenna hanging out
0:12:23the outside of the machine.
0:12:25This is around the same era as if you were really cool,
0:12:28you would have one of those, not like slot loaded,
0:12:31but like one of those spring ejected ethernet or modem jacks,
0:12:35you know what I'm talking about?
0:12:36- Those things, I'm shocked those didn't immediately
0:12:39break on every use.
0:12:40- Agreed, completely agreed.
0:12:41- I believe it's called an X jack, if I remember correctly.
0:12:44- You might be right, I don't even remember.
0:12:46But anyways, I bring all this up because one of my,
0:12:49oh you are right, look at that,
0:12:50very deep good pull there, Marco, I'm impressed.
0:12:53- I read a lot of computer magazines,
0:12:54had a lot of ads for these things.
0:12:55(laughing)
0:12:57I never actually owned one.
0:12:59- One of my favorite memories of school,
0:13:02which is probably indicative of how poorly I did in school,
0:13:04was when we were in a class, it was myself
0:13:07and a couple of friends, and we all had laptops,
0:13:09and we were using waste.
0:13:11And nobody remembers this, but this is Justin Frankel,
0:13:15who did Winamp.
0:13:16When he was at AOL, he put together a peer-to-peer
0:13:19chat app that was all super encrypted at the time.
0:13:22Maybe it was easy to break, who knows.
0:13:23But at the time, it was super encrypted,
0:13:25and you could make a chat room,
0:13:26and then have person-to-person chats.
0:13:28And this is when AOL Instant Messenger was very much a thing,
0:13:31but we were like, no way, man, the school might find out
0:13:34that we're chatting during class if we use AOL,
0:13:37so we gotta use this super encrypted waste thing.
0:13:39And it was so stupid, but now it was a stupid kid,
0:13:42so what are you gonna do?
0:13:43But I remember doing that with a couple of friends
0:13:44during class, and it was extremely enjoyable
0:13:47having a back channel as we were supposed to be listening,
0:13:51even though we really weren't.
0:13:53- I love Justin Frankel, 'cause he was like,
0:13:55I made Winamp, AOL bought Winamp in the late '90s,
0:13:59early 2000s, because they wanted relevance,
0:14:02and they didn't know what to do,
0:14:03and they were old people, and they had more money than sense,
0:14:06and had no idea what they were doing,
0:14:07and MP3s seemed like a new thing that they could take hold of
0:14:10and maybe do something with, so they bought Winamp.
0:14:12And meanwhile, Justin Frankel, the developer,
0:14:14or at least one of the developers,
0:14:15was one of the most radical activist,
0:14:19anti-establishment developers of the era,
0:14:22and he just kept making and releasing things
0:14:24that just totally undermined AOL.
0:14:26I don't know what his deal was,
0:14:28how he didn't just get fired,
0:14:30I don't know, whatever the contract he had with them was,
0:14:33was amazing, because he was able to just release stuff
0:14:36that just constantly poked them so hard,
0:14:40and somehow got away with it.
0:14:42And he seemed to not care at all,
0:14:44which I just, I love so much.
0:14:46- Yeah, I completely agree.
0:14:47Whatever happened to him, like recently,
0:14:49what is he even up to?
0:14:50- I don't know, I hope you're not some horrible person.
0:14:52- Oh, who knows.
0:14:53Doesn't ATP's livestream eventually boil down to Shoutcast,
0:14:58or is that not correct at all?
0:14:59- Oh, yes, sort of, yeah.
0:15:00So we host this livestream on an open source app
0:15:04called Icecast, which is basically
0:15:06the successor to Shoutcast.
0:15:08Shoutcast was the streaming server protocol
0:15:11for MP3s, basically, that I'm pretty sure Justin Frankel,
0:15:16or at least the Winamp team initially developed, I think.
0:15:20And Icecast kind of evolved out of that,
0:15:23and I think it has replaced it,
0:15:24and it's better in a few ways,
0:15:25but the basic idea is the same.
0:15:27It's one of the many things that I love about MP3s,
0:15:29is that the broadcast protocol is amazingly low-tech.
0:15:33You just, I run an app on my computer, Audio Hijack,
0:15:36that streams the MP3 bytes that we're recording here
0:15:40to the server, and the server just repeats it back
0:15:42to anybody who listens.
0:15:44And the protocol is super simple.
0:15:45It's basic text to connect, and then it shoves binary at you.
0:15:50That's just the MP3, and MP3 decoders are super simple.
0:15:52They just look ahead until the C11 ones in a row
0:15:54and start decoding there, and it just works.
0:15:57It's amazing.
0:15:58It really, it's so, this is one of the reasons
0:16:00I love working with MP3s so much.
0:16:02In many ways, it's so low-tech that it makes it
0:16:05very easy and powerful to work with.
0:16:08- Oh, that's right.
0:16:09Somebody in the chat put a link to Kakos.
0:16:12I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right, but--
0:16:14- God, I hope not.
0:16:15(laughs)
0:16:16- Well, yeah.
0:16:17It's his current company, and I'd forgotten
0:16:19that my favorite software to make animated GIFs
0:16:22of screen recordings, what is it called now?
0:16:24I can't remember.
0:16:25Shoot.
0:16:26Oh, gosh, it's gonna drive me nuts.
0:16:28- Kleket, that's what I use.
0:16:29- Lycecap, there you go.
0:16:31It's like the simplest, ugliest, like clearly cross-platform
0:16:34but does the job well screen recording software.
0:16:37Well, anyways, that was done by Justin Frankel
0:16:40in Kakos, I don't know how you pronounce it,
0:16:44but anyways, it was done in some time after he left AOL.
0:16:48- This is what I was forgetting.
0:16:49I knew he made something that really put AOL on the side.
0:16:52He made the Nutella file sharing network.
0:16:54(laughs)
0:16:55That's what he, as he was working for AOL, I'm pretty sure,
0:16:58which was a major media conglomerate that owned
0:17:01a lot of like, you know, music and stuff.
0:17:03(laughs)
0:17:04- Oh, man.
0:17:05Yeah, so, oh man, he's the best.
0:17:08- Anyway, what were we talking about?
0:17:10I don't even know.
0:17:11Oh, writing into web forms.
0:17:12- The moral of the story is, yeah,
0:17:14don't write on web forms, kids, unless you're in school,
0:17:16in which case your software probably sucks.
0:17:18- Don't try to paste into web forms
0:17:20'cause they'll think you're cheating.
0:17:21Yeah, my son had to take an online, an AP test online
0:17:24and it had similar measures.
0:17:26That was the same test where there was that story
0:17:27where people were, at some point in the test,
0:17:29apparently students are instructed to do something
0:17:31on a piece of paper and then take a picture of it
0:17:33with their phone or something or upload a picture of it.
0:17:34I don't know.
0:17:35Anyway, that's what they were doing
0:17:36and a bunch of kids took pictures with their iPhone
0:17:38and then tried to upload it, but the iPhone was taking
0:17:41Heek pictures instead of JPEGs, so they tried to upload
0:17:44the Heek to the website.
0:17:45It crashed because it couldn't process them
0:17:47and then everyone was flipping out
0:17:49and it's under a time limit or whatever.
0:17:50My son avoided that by dumb luck
0:17:54because the way I had him doing the pictures
0:17:57'cause he doesn't know how to use computers,
0:17:58so I said, look, just take the picture on your phone
0:18:00and then just keep photos open in the background
0:18:02and just wait a couple seconds
0:18:03and you should see the photo you just took on your phone
0:18:06appear in your Photos app
0:18:07'cause he's got the PhotoStream thing going
0:18:09and then drag it out of the Photos app onto the desktop,
0:18:12which is the only place that he knows exists
0:18:14like most people, and when you drag it out of Photos
0:18:16onto the desktop, it turns it into a JPEG
0:18:18and so he was uploading JPEGs and not Heeks
0:18:20even though his phone was taking Heek pictures.
0:18:22Anyway, hopefully with all of the COVID stuff,
0:18:25everybody's online test stuff will get better
0:18:28and the thing trying to prevent you
0:18:30from pasting into the form,
0:18:31like some password fields do that too,
0:18:32which is horrendous
0:18:33because it defeats password managers many times,
0:18:36but I know what they're trying to do,
0:18:38but it's punishing people for essentially bad,
0:18:41for good habits because if you are under time pressure
0:18:44to write something substantial into a text field
0:18:47as part of a test, it does make sense
0:18:50to do it someplace else where you know it's secure
0:18:53and then only put it into the webpage when you're ready,
0:18:56but of course the software interprets that as,
0:18:58oh, you must be cheating
0:18:59because you're copying and pasting it,
0:19:00and I suppose if you just edit the node in the DOM
0:19:02and stick the text in, it probably won't know,
0:19:04but again, they might accuse you of cheating
0:19:07and it's all just very fraught,
0:19:08so I feel like this is a cultural issue,
0:19:11more than a technological one
0:19:12that eventually once kids become accustomed
0:19:14to taking these kinds of tests online,
0:19:16they'll learn all the things that you're supposed to do
0:19:18and not supposed to do,
0:19:19and I guess the backup mechanism is every once in a while
0:19:23copy and paste it out of the web text field
0:19:25into a text file so that if the web page does crash,
0:19:28you'll still have the text.
0:19:29Anyway, online tests stink.
0:19:31Boom.
0:19:33- So when I got angry last week about my Samba SMB woes,
0:19:39I was expecting to be the only one,
0:19:42and if you recall, this is when
0:19:43I haven't used my computer in a little while.
0:19:45I go to Reach, like my Synology, for example,
0:19:47and I see a message in Finder,
0:19:49"The operation can't be completed
0:19:50because the original item for," whatever,
0:19:52"can't be found,"
0:19:53and the only way I knew how to fix it
0:19:55was to do a kill-all Finder
0:19:58and then try the same thing again,
0:20:00and it would always work pretty much immediately.
0:20:03And I got a lot of varied feedback about this,
0:20:06including from John, actually, after the show,
0:20:09and one of the most, or the two most important things
0:20:12I think I can share confidently right now
0:20:14is that first of all, you can go to the Go menu in Finder
0:20:19and then connect to Server,
0:20:20which is also done by Command-K.
0:20:23Should I mess with John and say "K Command"
0:20:25just to really tick John off?
0:20:26Anyway, you can use Command-K to go to this menu,
0:20:29and then you can reconnect that way,
0:20:30and supposedly, I haven't actually had to try this,
0:20:32and I'll explain why in a moment,
0:20:33but supposedly that'll let you reconnect
0:20:35without having to kill Finder, which is excellent.
0:20:37And then John, amongst others, had suggested,
0:20:39"Well, how are you getting to the Synology?"
0:20:42And to answer that question, what I was doing
0:20:44is I was looking at locations in the sidebar of Finder,
0:20:47and I see DiskStation, which is the thing
0:20:50that Synology calls itself.
0:20:52I see that in the sidebar, and I would just click that
0:20:54and drill into the particular folder I wanted,
0:20:55and that was that.
0:20:57But, John, you had recommended
0:20:59one of several different ways to get there.
0:21:02The Synology has its own dynamic DNS system
0:21:05where you can get yourself an Internet-visible hostname,
0:21:08even if you're, you know, NAT-ed and so on and so forth,
0:21:10and I could choose that.
0:21:12But it also occurred to me that since I'm running the Piehole,
0:21:14I have set up -- and it's very easy.
0:21:16-It's still funny. -It's the best, isn't it?
0:21:19Since I have set up Piehole version 5,
0:21:22then one of the things that it allows you to do
0:21:24is very easily, using the web interface,
0:21:27set up DNS responses for your local network,
0:21:30really, but just basically custom DNS responses.
0:21:33So, for example, iMac Pro,
0:21:35I have effectively hardwired, if you will,
0:21:38to refer to my 192.168 address for my iMac Pro,
0:21:44which is statically assigned via the Eero.
0:21:46And so what I've done is,
0:21:48instead of connecting using the sidebar in the Finder,
0:21:51I've connected to SYN, S-Y-N, which is what I have.
0:21:54It's like a shortcut to the Synology's static IP address
0:21:57within my network.
0:21:59And so far, after nearly a week,
0:22:01I have not had a problem with doing that.
0:22:03So it appears that something, I guess, with Bonjour
0:22:06or something about using the locations thing in the sidebar
0:22:10is what's hosing this all up.
0:22:12And so if you have any other mechanism
0:22:14by getting to your device, you know, do it by IP address,
0:22:17do it by a fully qualified domain name,
0:22:19whatever the case may be, you might find
0:22:21that that will fix your problem like it did for me.
0:22:23Also, there's a very interesting Hacker News post,
0:22:26which is not something I say often about all this,
0:22:28which I'll link in the show notes,
0:22:30even though that didn't actually get me to my solution.
0:22:32It was more what Jon said to me, amongst others.
0:22:35But you might want to check it out,
0:22:37because apparently this is a long-standing bug
0:22:39and not actually a Catalina thing after all.
0:22:41-Yeah, the suggestion that a couple of people had
0:22:43was to do something related to IPv6.
0:22:45Now, I forget what it was.
0:22:47It was just telling you to, like, disable IPv6.
0:22:49-I don't remember.
0:22:50I didn't have to fiddle with it, though.
0:22:52-Yeah, the Hacker News thing
0:22:54that talks about DNS lookup and, like, the mDNS stuff,
0:22:57it's not like regular DNS
0:22:59in that it gets broadcast periodically,
0:23:01and there's a TTL on the value.
0:23:03But if the TTL expires, say,
0:23:05because your computer was asleep,
0:23:07apparently you can't go request it again.
0:23:09You just have to wait for the next broadcast,
0:23:11and during that time, your computer has no idea
0:23:13how to connect to it at all.
0:23:15So you have to do what I did
0:23:17and cut all of that zero-conf,
0:23:19Bonjour, Rendezvous stuff out of the loop
0:23:21and just use IP addresses
0:23:23or names that you statically map to IP addresses.
0:23:25So there you go. Problem solved.
0:23:27-I think so, actually.
0:23:29I was really surprised, because I didn't think
0:23:31I was going to get any useful feedback,
0:23:33not because our listeners aren't awesome,
0:23:35just because I thought it was some really weird, esoteric thing.
0:23:37Turns out, not so much.
0:23:39Speaking of feedback from me to me,
0:23:41or to me from me -- I don't know, anyway --
0:23:43I had also kind of off-the-cuff lamented
0:23:45about my TV turning itself off,
0:23:47and I wasn't 100% accurate
0:23:49on what I had said the problem was.
0:23:51And Hugo Jobling had pointed out to me via Twitter,
0:23:53and I'm glad that you did,
0:23:55that the issue isn't --
0:23:57I think I had said it was automations,
0:23:59and that wasn't strictly true.
0:24:01The issue is that it -- I think the TV was added
0:24:03to my goodnight scene.
0:24:05I believe I had called it an automation last week.
0:24:07But Hugo had pointed out that when he was talking
0:24:09about the goodnight scene,
0:24:11but Hugo had pointed out that when he was adding
0:24:13his OLED TV to his home,
0:24:17one of the screens that I guess I just plowed right through
0:24:19and didn't look at --
0:24:21and if so, that's on me --
0:24:23one of the screens he has is "Suggested Scenes,"
0:24:27and it says, "Select scenes to include this accessory in.
0:24:29You can customize these scenes later in the Home app."
0:24:31And sure enough, there's "Goodnight,"
0:24:33where it says "Turn Off."
0:24:35And I don't recall having seen this,
0:24:37but I bet you anything that I just plowed right through it,
0:24:39"Next, next, next, next, next, next, next, next, next, next,
0:24:41whatever, whatever, whatever,"
0:24:43and wasn't paying close attention, so it's all my fault.
0:24:45We'll put a link to a picture that Hugo had provided
0:24:47to give you a better view of what I'm talking about.
0:24:49But I thought that was useful feedback
0:24:51to clarify what I was talking about earlier.
0:24:53And actually, a couple of people reached out via Twitter
0:24:55and said, "Oh, yeah, that happened to me,
0:24:57and I never understood why, and now I do."
0:24:59So I'm glad I brought it up.
0:25:01Let's see, Daniel Jalkut is telling us about PowerBox.
0:25:03John, what's going on there?
0:25:05-My corrections from last week.
0:25:07PowerBox is the thing that, for security reasons,
0:25:09presents the Open and Save panel
0:25:11rather than your application doing it.
0:25:13A couple notes from Daniel.
0:25:16One is that PowerBox is now always used for Open and Save panels.
0:25:20Gus Mueller says it used to be
0:25:22that it was only used for Sandbox apps,
0:25:24but in Catalina or maybe Mojave,
0:25:26it was changed to be used for all apps.
0:25:28So that could actually explain some of the slowness
0:25:30because before, maybe, an app wasn't using PowerBox,
0:25:32but now it was.
0:25:34And the second is Daniel says that he thinks
0:25:36the app actually owns the window but not the content.
0:25:39So your app may actually control that window,
0:25:42but you only get a small region
0:25:44where you're allowed to draw into it,
0:25:46and through XPC, the PowerBox draws into the main content of it.
0:25:49And apps are allowed to add their own sort of accessory views.
0:25:52So it's like you own the window,
0:25:54and your app gets to draw in some small portion,
0:25:56but PowerBox draws in the other portion,
0:25:58and PowerBox is the thing that actually gives you access to the file
0:26:01and tells you what the result of the thing was.
0:26:03So it's very complicated, and it's not surprising
0:26:05that something like that could potentially go wrong
0:26:07or have some performance difficulties,
0:26:10again, related to security checks and other things
0:26:12that may be slow, especially the first time you try them.
0:26:15So security's complicated.
0:26:17It's a lot easier back in the day
0:26:19when everything was all in one giant memory space
0:26:21and you just put up an open, say, dialog box,
0:26:23and you could literally not do anything else on the computer
0:26:25until you just dismissed it.
0:26:27- All right, and then finally for follow-up,
0:26:29David Darcy writes and shows us some videos
0:26:32about something absolutely fascinating
0:26:35that I had no idea was a thing.
0:26:37If I understand this right, on an Android phone,
0:26:40there's an accessibility mode called live caption,
0:26:43and so David sent us a video of the Android phone
0:26:48playing our show and doing speech-to-text captioning
0:26:53live as he's playing it in his podcast app.
0:26:55At least that's how I understood it,
0:26:57and this looks really freaking cool.
0:26:59- Yeah, I thought it was cool.
0:27:01It's another type of Android thing.
0:27:03You see much more of this in Android.
0:27:05There's no reason that iOS can't do it,
0:27:07but in general, Apple has shied away
0:27:09from allowing parts of the UI,
0:27:11parts of the system that are not the app you're currently in
0:27:14from overlaying the app that you're in.
0:27:16Obviously, notifications can come down from the top,
0:27:18and there's other things that can appear,
0:27:20and the status bar can change color.
0:27:22There are obviously ways that the operating system
0:27:24can intrude into the space of an app,
0:27:26but not really to this degree.
0:27:28So this was, presumably, the operating system, Android,
0:27:30on top of the podcast player, showing the captions, right?
0:27:33And you might be mistaken for thinking like,
0:27:35"Oh, that's a feature of the podcast app,"
0:27:37but my understanding of watching this video is that it's not.
0:27:39It is a feature of the operating system,
0:27:41and any time audio is playing,
0:27:43you can have this translucent overlay
0:27:45with the things being transcribed in it,
0:27:47which is pretty cool if you've got
0:27:49a very fast on-device speech-to-text engine.
0:27:51That's a great use of it.
0:27:53Was this person-- did they also give the video
0:27:55showing the voice control of Android,
0:27:57or was that somebody else?
0:27:59I don't know about that tweet.
0:28:01It was like showing how to speak to your Android phone
0:28:04to make it do stuff, not like you speak to Siri,
0:28:08like, you know, "Hey, dingus," you know,
0:28:11"Open thing," and whatever,
0:28:13or "Remind me to do this with that," or whatever,
0:28:15but, like, using it as kind of a verbal pointer, right?
0:28:20So you could tell it to go to the home screen
0:28:22to open an application, and when it opened that app,
0:28:25like, all the controls on the screen
0:28:27have tiny little numbers in circles next to them,
0:28:29so you would tell it to, you know,
0:28:32hit button number one, number five,
0:28:34confirm, okay, like, it was kind of like speaking,
0:28:38you know, very much like the interface
0:28:40that the Mac has, right?
0:28:41Do you remember that demo where they showed, like,
0:28:43the screen was cut into regions
0:28:44and controls had numbers on them,
0:28:45and you could essentially navigate the screen with speech,
0:28:48only this was on a phone.
0:28:50I'm not sure what Apple's interface to that
0:28:52looks like these days, because this interface
0:28:55does require you to see the screen,
0:28:56so it's not for people who can't see the screen well.
0:28:59I mean, these numbers are very small,
0:29:01so you have to have good vision,
0:29:02but just not the ability to --
0:29:04or the motor control to use the touch interface.
0:29:07So, anyway, I think all this stuff
0:29:09is especially interesting,
0:29:11including in the context of RSI.
0:29:13I don't know if anyone is getting RSI from their phones,
0:29:15but I can assure you that that is actually a thing.
0:29:18Somewhere out there is somebody
0:29:19who's been swiping too much with their thumb,
0:29:21and it feels a little stiff,
0:29:22and they're trying not to think about it,
0:29:23and they should.
0:29:25We did want to take a moment to call out
0:29:29three different organizations that we think
0:29:31are probably worth your investment, interest, time, et cetera.
0:29:35And just if you happen to have any money
0:29:39that you can throw their way,
0:29:40I think the three of us all believe
0:29:42that these are worthwhile causes,
0:29:44and they're worth checking out.
0:29:46So we wanted to take just a brief moment
0:29:48and highlight three of them.
0:29:49First of all, the Equal Justice Initiative,
0:29:51which is committed to ending --
0:29:52and I'm pulling these mostly from their websites,
0:29:54but I've heard from various people
0:29:56that these are all pretty great.
0:29:57The Equal Justice Initiative is committed
0:29:59to ending mass incarceration
0:30:00and excessive punishment in the United States
0:30:02to challenging racial and economic injustice
0:30:04and to protecting basic human rights
0:30:06for the most vulnerable people in American society.
0:30:09Secondly, the Black Lives Matter organization
0:30:11is a global organization in the U.S., U.K., and Canada
0:30:14whose mission is to eradicate white supremacy
0:30:16and build local power to intervene in violence
0:30:18inflicted on black communities by the state and vigilantes.
0:30:21By combating and counteracting acts of violence,
0:30:23creating space for black imagination and innovation,
0:30:25and centering black joy, we are winning --
0:30:27well, not "we," but they are winning
0:30:29immediate improvements in our lives.
0:30:31But it'll be "we" if you donate, which is excellent.
0:30:33And then finally, Black Lives Code
0:30:35is one of the organizations that the, I believe,
0:30:38now-defunct AppCamp for Girls
0:30:40has decided to sponsor or at least elevate,
0:30:44and I know the AppCamp people, and they're all really great.
0:30:47So Black Girls Code is devoted to showing the world
0:30:50that black girls can code and do so much more.
0:30:52By reaching out to the community through workshops
0:30:54and after-school programs, Black Girls Code
0:30:56introduces computer coding lessons to young girls
0:30:58from underrepresented communities in programming languages
0:31:00such as Scratch or Ruby on Rails.
0:31:02If you happen to have a few extra bucks
0:31:04to throw any of the three organizations
0:31:07that we've just called out,
0:31:09I think that would be really excellent,
0:31:11and certainly the three of us would appreciate it.
0:31:13But we just wanted to call that out.
0:31:15And, yeah, I don't know what our agenda is
0:31:17for talking about these sort of social issues
0:31:19and stuff in the future,
0:31:21but expect that, as with last week,
0:31:24we'll talk about it here and there,
0:31:26and then we won't, and then we will, and then we won't,
0:31:28and we'll just do what we think is best.
0:31:30- Yeah, we had some sponsorship openings this week,
0:31:32and we figured, you know, what better thing to do with them
0:31:34than try to promote some of these great causes.
0:31:36- Exactly.
0:31:37(jazzy music)
0:31:40Marco, it's your birthday tomorrow.
0:31:42Are there any birthday presents you would like by chance?
0:31:45- Oh, I don't know.
0:31:47My wife's making me some delicious fruit tarts,
0:31:49and I'm gonna have some beer that I like,
0:31:50and I think that'll be a good day.
0:31:52- That sounds like a good day.
0:31:53- Additionally, if you wanna get me an extra birthday present
0:31:55after you've already given to the good causes
0:31:57that are way better than this,
0:31:58'cause they need it way more than we do,
0:32:01we are going to launch a membership program,
0:32:04as of right now.
0:32:05So if you go to ATP.fm/join,
0:32:07you can join as a member right now.
0:32:10We've been doing this show for seven years so far,
0:32:13something like that, a little over seven years.
0:32:16And we are not gonna stop anytime soon.
0:32:18We all love doing this show,
0:32:20and as long as all of you out there keep listening,
0:32:23we wanna keep making this show.
0:32:25And the format and style of this show
0:32:28were established really fast.
0:32:30Within the first few episodes,
0:32:31we pretty much established the format
0:32:32that we've really used, almost unchanged, for seven years.
0:32:37We have the cold open pre-show,
0:32:39we have the dial-up sound, follow-up, main topics,
0:32:42ask ATP if we have it that week,
0:32:43ending theme, and the after show.
0:32:45It's a very simple formula.
0:32:46We've been doing it for a very long time.
0:32:48- And yet you too still can't follow it, can you?
0:32:50(laughing)
0:32:52- Part of the formula is not following the formula.
0:32:56- It's okay, great.
0:32:58- And we also very early on established
0:33:00the business model of the show,
0:33:01and it hasn't changed really in the entire seven years.
0:33:03The show is free, it's available everywhere,
0:33:05it's not exclusive to anybody,
0:33:07and it's funded, as so many podcasts are, by sponsorships.
0:33:10We read and ad read three times per episode roughly.
0:33:14Each read is about two minutes long,
0:33:15so you get about six minutes of ads in our show
0:33:17that is usually almost two hours long.
0:33:19And I think that's one of the best content to ads ratios
0:33:22of anything I listen to that has ads.
0:33:24And this all has worked very well,
0:33:27and continues to work very well for seven years,
0:33:30and will continue well into the future, we hope.
0:33:32And unless the sponsorship changes a lot,
0:33:35and if people stop buying podcast ads,
0:33:38other than something dramatic like that,
0:33:41we have no intention of changing any of these basics
0:33:43for the foreseeable future.
0:33:45And if you all will forgive me for a moment
0:33:48of a total lack of modesty, I think we make a great show.
0:33:53We might make the best tech podcast in the world.
0:33:57You will never hear me say this any other time,
0:34:00'cause it's really hard for me to say this
0:34:02without freaking out about the lack of modesty here.
0:34:04But we take a lot of pride in what we do here.
0:34:06We put a lot of work into it,
0:34:08and I think we're good at it, and I'm damn proud of it.
0:34:11So let's get back to the money part for a minute.
0:34:14We already make good money from this show.
0:34:17None of us are hurting financially.
0:34:20The vast majority of that money, though,
0:34:22only comes from one source.
0:34:24It comes from those ads.
0:34:26And we did just finish a merchandise sale,
0:34:28which we do a couple times a year.
0:34:29Merchandise is kind of a fun side project.
0:34:31It doesn't make that much money to us,
0:34:33because it's so expensive to produce physical items
0:34:35and ship them around the world and everything.
0:34:37We make a few bucks off of each thing,
0:34:39but it's more for kind of fun stuff
0:34:41to give our fans something cool to wear if they want to,
0:34:43and make some side income from this show.
0:34:45But the vast majority of the money
0:34:47comes from those six minutes of ads
0:34:49that you hear in each episode.
0:34:51Our ads usually sell well,
0:34:54because we have a really good audience for selling ads.
0:34:57You all out there, we have a pretty good idea
0:34:59that you're probably mostly a bunch of nerds like us,
0:35:02and we can sell you things like hosting companies
0:35:06and domain recognition, and we can sell you
0:35:08companies and domain registration and things like that,
0:35:10and it's not that hard to sell ads to our audience, right?
0:35:13And that's why you hear so many of the same companies
0:35:15advertising over and over again,
0:35:16because our ads work well for them.
0:35:18And it's great for us.
0:35:19We like them too, because they're good companies
0:35:21selling good stuff, and we can get paid good money,
0:35:25but also sleep at night, knowing that we're not
0:35:27annoying people or ripping you off or making a bad show.
0:35:31But podcast ads are a bit tricky as a business model.
0:35:36They are mostly good, but over time,
0:35:39they do take an increasingly higher amount of work to sell
0:35:43and to get paid for.
0:35:45As a lot of that ad buying has shifted,
0:35:47it used to be that the companies who bought the ads
0:35:50would come directly to us and deal with us,
0:35:52and we would send them an invoice
0:35:53and they would pay it and whatever.
0:35:55Increasingly, many of the podcast advertisers
0:35:57that you hear on most shows are buying through ad agencies,
0:36:01and the ad agencies are also consolidating
0:36:03and getting bigger and getting acquired and everything.
0:36:05And so when you're dealing with ad agencies,
0:36:07it just adds more work to the process.
0:36:09It adds more cost all around.
0:36:11We can't always sell every slot.
0:36:13We can't always sell the ads at the prices that we want.
0:36:17We often don't get paid for months,
0:36:20and sometimes we don't get paid for a sponsor at all.
0:36:23Like if they go out of business, if they go bankrupt,
0:36:25or they just don't want to pay anybody any forever again.
0:36:27We do get stiffed on an occasional basis.
0:36:31And the ad market is also volatile.
0:36:34It's kind of like the real estate market.
0:36:36Real estate are like, oh, it's always going to go up.
0:36:38People always assume the ad market will do well
0:36:40because it usually does until it doesn't.
0:36:44And whenever there's a big economic disturbance
0:36:47like there was with the quarantine,
0:36:49everybody cuts back on their ad spending immediately,
0:36:52and it's really hard to sell additional ads.
0:36:55It's also really hard every January or February or August
0:36:58or the fifth week in a five-week month.
0:37:00Like that's just how podcast ads have ups and downs,
0:37:03and you're very much tied to the economy
0:37:05or like these random calendar things about budgeting.
0:37:09So in this quarantine period,
0:37:11we've had, this was terrible for podcast ad sales.
0:37:14Some shows were hit worse than others.
0:37:16We were hit pretty bad.
0:37:17That's why you've heard so many episodes recently
0:37:19that have had only like one or two sponsors,
0:37:21including this one,
0:37:22instead of the usual three sponsors that we have.
0:37:24Now, I don't want to paint a picture
0:37:26that we're like dying here.
0:37:27The rest of the summer is looking a lot better
0:37:29for the ad sales, and again, we make good money,
0:37:31and we'll be fine no matter what you do.
0:37:33But this was a wake-up call to us
0:37:36that we wanted some diversification.
0:37:38You know, we don't want this entire show
0:37:41that we love so much
0:37:42to be dependent on the whims of the ad market
0:37:44when we have this perfectly good audience,
0:37:46you all sitting out there right now,
0:37:48many of whom have told us
0:37:50that you'd be happy to support us directly
0:37:52if Flexion option became available.
0:37:53So we are now launching a membership program.
0:37:57We don't expect this to replace the ads anytime soon
0:38:00or probably ever.
0:38:02Honestly, I think we'd be shocked
0:38:03if we got more than a few percent of the audience
0:38:05to sign up for it.
0:38:06And we also don't want to take anything away
0:38:10from what this show has always been for everyone.
0:38:12So we don't want to take any existing part of the show
0:38:15and put it behind a paywall or anything like that.
0:38:17You know, and maybe in the future,
0:38:19if ad sales totally tank
0:38:20and we have to make a bigger push for membership,
0:38:23maybe we'll have to do stuff like that,
0:38:24but that probably won't happen.
0:38:26If you want to support us by becoming a member,
0:38:28we have one plan, which we'll talk to in a minute.
0:38:30It's eight bucks a month.
0:38:32For that, you get your own private RSS feed
0:38:35and you get a sponsor-free version of the show.
0:38:38And you can put that feed in whatever podcast app you want.
0:38:40We made a nice, slick integration,
0:38:42heavily inspired by Stretecorion Dithering.
0:38:44Thanks, guys.
0:38:45We made a nice, slick thing that you can just do it
0:38:49with a couple of clicks on most apps.
0:38:51I went back, the last four episodes
0:38:53have sponsor-free versions in those feeds,
0:38:55and then all future episodes ongoing
0:38:57will have sponsor-free versions.
0:38:59And for now, that's it.
0:39:01You have the ad-free version of the show,
0:39:02eight bucks a month.
0:39:04And I gotta say, I subscribe to a few Patreons
0:39:07for ad-free podcasts, and I love it.
0:39:10It's a completely unnecessary luxury.
0:39:13As I said, we have six minutes of ads a week,
0:39:15but it's a luxury.
0:39:17Like most luxuries, it's kind of nice
0:39:19if you can afford it and if you care about that kind of thing.
0:39:22We hope to add more stuff later,
0:39:24maybe some occasional member-exclusive bonus content
0:39:28that wouldn't fit or make sense
0:39:30to be a part of this regular show.
0:39:32And we'd also love to hear your ideas
0:39:34on what else you would like to see as member benefits.
0:39:36But for the most part, what we're selling is
0:39:38supporting us, and you get a sponsor-free feed of the show.
0:39:41Same show, just without sponsors.
0:39:43So if you wanna spend eight bucks a month for that,
0:39:46that's great.
0:39:47If you don't wanna spend eight bucks a month for that,
0:39:49that's totally fine, too.
0:39:51Simply by listening to our show
0:39:53and hearing the ads in the regular version,
0:39:55that supports us perfectly well.
0:39:57So we thank you for that, that's enough.
0:39:59If you wanna support us differently
0:40:01by becoming a member for eight bucks a month,
0:40:03we'd be very thankful for that.
0:40:05So there it is, thank you for that.
0:40:07We have a lot more we can talk about, actually,
0:40:09but the implementation of this,
0:40:11some of the decision-making and why,
0:40:13the stack and everything.
0:40:14- I think we should dig into that.
0:40:16- We can start by saying that
0:40:18I've already seen suggestions go by in the chat.
0:40:21As you might imagine,
0:40:23when we discussed this amongst the three of us,
0:40:25we had all sorts of ideas.
0:40:27We entertained almost everything.
0:40:28I'm not sure which ones we want to discuss
0:40:30that we entertain, there's a couple of them
0:40:32that you might be amused by,
0:40:34but we're starting intentionally very simple.
0:40:37And we don't know how this is gonna go.
0:40:39There's one price, there's one offering,
0:40:41it's an ad-free show, it's straightforward,
0:40:43it's easy to understand,
0:40:44we're not taking anything away from anybody,
0:40:46nothing is moving behind a paywall.
0:40:48If you don't pay, you get exactly the same show
0:40:50you've always gotten.
0:40:51But we've entertained all possibilities.
0:40:53And so I think it's important to recognize
0:40:55that we are intentionally starting simple,
0:40:57and we're just gonna learn from how it goes.
0:40:59If nobody signs up,
0:41:00then maybe we've made the wrong offering, right?
0:41:02And so we'll figure it out from here.
0:41:05But hopefully what we're providing
0:41:08is easy to understand, straightforward,
0:41:10and something that at least a few people
0:41:12will be interested in doing.
0:41:14- Yeah, I think we should also talk about
0:41:16a little bit of the machinations with regard to cost,
0:41:19because I think that even though I am very comfortable
0:41:24and proud even of where we've landed,
0:41:26a little sliver of me is disappointed
0:41:28that we didn't decide to go with
0:41:30what we were originally thinking.
0:41:32- It was really funny.
0:41:33- It was really funny,
0:41:34but I think it would have come across obnoxious,
0:41:36which is why we shelved it.
0:41:37But I think it's one of those things where
0:41:39it's a bad joke, but I can't help but telling it anyway.
0:41:42(laughing)
0:41:43- You're totally that dad who tells the bad joke anyway.
0:41:46- I am, I am.
0:41:47- I don't think it's a bad joke.
0:41:48I was heavily in favor of this plan.
0:41:50Go ahead, Casey, it was your idea.
0:41:51- No, I thought it was Marco's idea.
0:41:53- It might have actually been Tiff's idea.
0:41:56Tiff and I derived it one night.
0:41:58- Oh yeah, that's right, it was Tiff.
0:41:59Marco came and told us that Tiff suggested it.
0:42:01- That's right, yes, he does.
0:42:02But anyways, Marco and Tiff had come up with the idea
0:42:06of doing RAM plans.
0:42:08So you could do eight bucks a month,
0:42:1016 bucks a month, 32 bucks a month, or 64 bucks a month.
0:42:14Now, of course, what would you be getting
0:42:16for all of those higher tiered plans?
0:42:17The same exact crap you're getting for the eight month plan.
0:42:20(laughing)
0:42:21You get nothing.
0:42:22- And we like it 'cause it's a computery,
0:42:24like the pricing at powers of two and stuff like that.
0:42:27But practically speaking, a lot of things
0:42:29that are like Patreons work like that,
0:42:32where there are tiers and you get,
0:42:34if you pay more, you get some separate thing or whatever.
0:42:37And especially for an initial offering,
0:42:39even though the joke about the RAM things was good,
0:42:42it just seemed like maybe too confusing
0:42:45and just let's just start off simple
0:42:46and see how it goes.
0:42:47If there are people out there who are super angry
0:42:50that they're not able to give us more money per month,
0:42:52let us know and we'll consider higher tiers.
0:42:54(laughing)
0:42:55- I don't expect a lot of email on that.
0:42:57- Yeah, exactly, right.
0:42:58And my thing is like, you should have an other field
0:43:01where people can just type in the amount they wanna pay.
0:43:04'Cause who knows?
0:43:05I've always been waiting for that one reclusive billionaire
0:43:08who listens to the show, it's like, all right,
0:43:1010 grand a month, here you go.
0:43:11Anyway.
0:43:12- I love, K Ham in the chat says,
0:43:14come on, this is an Apple podcast, we know it's 8/32/64.
0:43:18(laughing)
0:43:19- Yeah, that's probably true.
0:43:21We're gonna skip over the size
0:43:22that everyone else would wanna do, yeah.
0:43:23And we have all sorts of ideas
0:43:24of other things that we could give,
0:43:25but in the beginning, we don't, you know,
0:43:28we don't wanna overwhelm, all right?
0:43:30So Marco mentioned member specific content.
0:43:33I always said like, eventually,
0:43:34some day, years down the line,
0:43:36we should eventually get me to play Destiny with those two,
0:43:39but I don't know if they're actually gonna wanna do that.
0:43:41And that's not a podcast either,
0:43:42so I don't even know how that would work.
0:43:43But that's like stretch goal, five years in the future,
0:43:46potentially, if this is still a thing that we're doing.
0:43:50But in the short term, most of the obvious ideas
0:43:54you can think of, we've also been entertaining
0:43:55and may actually arrive,
0:43:57but we don't know what those are going to be now,
0:43:59so this is what we've got to start with.
0:44:01- Yeah, and ultimately, like, you know,
0:44:04we know, if you go, you know,
0:44:07apples to apples comparison,
0:44:08and like, well, for eight bucks a month,
0:44:10I could get Disney+ or something,
0:44:11like, yeah, we know.
0:44:13But it's closer to like, if you look at, you know,
0:44:16like, Patreons, basically, are the real good comparison here.
0:44:20Like, many podcasts and stuff that we like have Patreons.
0:44:23They usually have tiers at five or $10 a month,
0:44:27and that's like what I usually pay.
0:44:29Like, the average of what I pay for the ones I support
0:44:31is usually $10 a month.
0:44:33And really, like, you know,
0:44:35when we were talking about the multiple tiers,
0:44:36we didn't really want to have some kind of like,
0:44:40doodads that we give you, or kind of vague promises,
0:44:44or like, DVD extras, you know, it's like,
0:44:47a lot of Patreons and Kickstarters and everything,
0:44:50they think they have to offer stuff to people
0:44:52to get them to pay for the higher tiers.
0:44:54But as a supporter, you often just,
0:44:56you just want to support them.
0:44:57You don't want their stuff, or you don't want,
0:44:59you're not ever gonna like, you know,
0:45:00get their like, free email greeting,
0:45:03or you know, whatever the thing is.
0:45:05And then, meanwhile, for the creators,
0:45:06those things are massively time consuming
0:45:08and burdensome and often costly to make.
0:45:11And so, I, as a frequent supporter of this kind of stuff,
0:45:15I don't want any of that stuff.
0:45:17Let me pay you the five or 10 bucks a month for your show
0:45:20and get the ad free feed if you have one.
0:45:21And that's great, that's all I want.
0:45:23Like, 'cause the whole point is,
0:45:24you're paying to support something,
0:45:26not to buy a low priced product, right?
0:45:29And so we wanted to avoid anything like that,
0:45:32because not only is it generally not worth it for creators
0:45:35and it wouldn't be worth it for us,
0:45:36but that's not why we want your money.
0:45:39Like, we don't want you to buy something expecting like,
0:45:43you know, massive bonus stuff or special access to us,
0:45:47or you know, stuff like that,
0:45:48that's kinda hard for creators to actually really give.
0:45:51We just, if you wanna pay us for an ad free feed
0:45:54and for extra support if you want to, that's great.
0:45:57If you don't want to, that's totally cool.
0:45:59Again, we understand, if you just listen to our show
0:46:01and hear the ads, you are already supporting us.
0:46:04You can even skip them sometimes,
0:46:05just don't tell anybody, it's fine.
0:46:07Everyone does it, I do it, it's fine.
0:46:09Like, you are already supporting us by doing that.
0:46:11So if you wanna support us more,
0:46:12come be a member, ATP.fm/join.
0:46:16- There's some interesting tech details of this.
0:46:18My favorite one, before we start talking about
0:46:20like the website and everything,
0:46:22hopefully everyone in the chat has already signed up
0:46:23so you already know what the website's like, but.
0:46:26- We already have 71 members.
0:46:27- Hooray!
0:46:28- The interesting, the most interesting tech bit here
0:46:32is to streamline the production of the ad free feed,
0:46:37Marco, lover of dynamic ad insertion,
0:46:40has made the reverse of that, which is static ad removal.
0:46:45(laughing)
0:46:46The forecast tool that he uses to chapterize the shows
0:46:49now has a feature where it can export the ad free version.
0:46:52I don't know exactly how this works, Marco,
0:46:53you wanna explain it?
0:46:54- Yeah, sure.
0:46:55So basically, this is one of the areas,
0:46:59sorry, this is gonna be a Marco heavy episode.
0:47:01If the haters out there, I'm sorry,
0:47:02you might as well stop now.
0:47:04This is one of the areas where like owning the entire stack
0:47:07of production tools and like,
0:47:09this is strategically very good for me.
0:47:11Back when I made forecast, I believe I said on the show,
0:47:16like one of the reasons why I wanted to just get it out there
0:47:21for free and not try to charge like, you know,
0:47:2330 or 50 bucks for it and make nobody buy it
0:47:25is because it had value to me as somebody
0:47:29in the podcasting space, as both a podcaster
0:47:32and the owner of Overcast, it had value to me
0:47:35to have some kind of control over a podcast production tool.
0:47:39'Cause then if I wanted to add features to podcast
0:47:42at the production side, I had a place to do that.
0:47:45And then I can do things like add corresponding features
0:47:47to Overcast, you know, give MP3s a certain ability,
0:47:50like the idea of, I have my floating chapters
0:47:52where the chapter spec has a provision
0:47:55where you can have a chapter that does not get listed
0:47:58in the list of chapters, but just appears
0:48:00at a certain time range.
0:48:02Nothing actually reads or writes those,
0:48:04but the provision was there in the spec,
0:48:06so I said, hey, I'll implement that.
0:48:08So I implemented it in forecast and in Overcast.
0:48:10So now if you have a chapter podcast
0:48:13and you want to display a chapter that merely shows up
0:48:16at a certain time range but is not listed
0:48:18in the table of contents, you can do that and it works.
0:48:21So you know, there is value to kind of owning
0:48:23the whole stack here.
0:48:24In this case, first we built a CMS.
0:48:28This is one of the big reasons why I built the CMS
0:48:30when we did it.
0:48:31- Oh, stop, stop right there.
0:48:32We did not build a CMS.
0:48:34I would love to take credit for this,
0:48:36but two of us complained and moaned about a handful
0:48:38of design decisions and one of us actually did all the work.
0:48:41- Complained?
0:48:42That's important user feedback.
0:48:44- Yes, I would say two of you were design consultants.
0:48:48- Fair enough, fair enough.
0:48:49- Anyway, so first I built a CMS.
0:48:53We were wanting to do it for a while.
0:48:55As we said, things like controlling the RSS feed
0:48:57and how everything works and everything,
0:48:59we wanted to build it exactly for our needs
0:49:02in part to support a membership program.
0:49:05The way I build things is for the long term
0:49:09and with as much under my control as possible.
0:49:12So this is things like minimizing external services
0:49:16is a big part of this.
0:49:18When a service is done,
0:49:20when a service is necessary,
0:49:23I like to choose conservative, stable, long term services,
0:49:28companies that have been there a long time,
0:49:30and I like to choose low level building blocks
0:49:34instead of high level all in one solutions.
0:49:38What I want to do is own as much of the customer interaction
0:49:42and the customer billing relationship as possible.
0:49:45For example, rather than going to Patreon or Memberful,
0:49:49we built a site on Linode and we host our files on Libsyn
0:49:54and I built the whole membership payment program on Stripe.
0:49:59Building a hosting platform or a podcast CDN
0:50:03and stats service or a payment processor,
0:50:06which is what those three companies are respectively,
0:50:08that's no small feat.
0:50:10It's not worth doing for almost anybody ever.
0:50:12So that made sense to Outsource.
0:50:14Those are major problems that are really hard to do.
0:50:18I'm not going to become my own credit card processor.
0:50:21But I also don't want to go to somebody like Patreon
0:50:26where they have this whole big platform
0:50:28and I would simply be like,
0:50:30we'd be like one tiny member of it
0:50:33and we would be at the whims of whatever they decide to do.
0:50:36Every company seems good for a while if they're good,
0:50:40but then you don't know what's going to happen
0:50:42in the future down the road.
0:50:43Why have a dependency if you don't need it?
0:50:46So we built the CMS as these low-level building blocks
0:50:50that you, the customer, either will never see
0:50:53or might only notice, you'll see a Stripe logo
0:50:56in the footer of the payment page or something,
0:50:59but that's it.
0:51:00These aren't hitting you over the head.
0:51:02You're not going to Patreon to sign up for us.
0:51:04You're going to our site
0:51:05and you're signing up directly on our site.
0:51:06And we control all that.
0:51:08We don't have to worry.
0:51:09If we're going to go to some new podcast subscription
0:51:12membership management service,
0:51:13what if they go out of business next year?
0:51:15We don't have to worry about that kind of stuff.
0:51:17Stripe is not going anywhere.
0:51:18Libsyn has been around for like 15, 20 years.
0:51:21They're not going anywhere either.
0:51:22Linode is not going anywhere.
0:51:23These are solid, long-term, low-level building blocks
0:51:26and that's the way I like to build things.
0:51:28So that's the CMS part.
0:51:30And there's lots of interesting stuff about the CMS,
0:51:32but we'll get to that some other time maybe.
0:51:34I don't know.
0:51:35So as John mentioned, here I'm signing myself up
0:51:40for every week producing two copies of the show,
0:51:43one with the ads and one without.
0:51:45What the entire rest of the podcast industry does now
0:51:48is called dynamic ad insertion.
0:51:50We've talked about it here and there before.
0:51:51This is one of the reasons why you can occasionally,
0:51:53if you're listening to one of the major shows
0:51:55from a major producer,
0:51:56you will often hear a recent ad in an old show
0:52:00or you will hear a local ad for some local car dealership
0:52:04or some event that's happening in your town,
0:52:06which sounds kind of creepy the first time you hear it.
0:52:09And the reason why is they're doing dynamic ad insertion
0:52:11where they have their MP3 files of the show
0:52:13and they mark certain timestamps to insert ads at.
0:52:16And on download, they look at your IP address,
0:52:19they either do a direct geolocation lookup
0:52:22and figure out roughly where you are
0:52:24or they do something even creepier
0:52:26where they look it up with one of those data broker services
0:52:28and find out exactly who you are
0:52:30and then they inject ads that are relevant to you
0:52:33directly into the show at your download.
0:52:36As I mentioned earlier,
0:52:37the MP3 file format is really like hackable.
0:52:40You can basically splice MP3s freely
0:52:43and as long as you do it remotely competently,
0:52:46you can be really sloppy, you can make a lot of mistakes,
0:52:49as long as you do it remotely competently,
0:52:51it'll work, it'll play.
0:52:52And so that's what a lot of big publishers do now.
0:52:55They dynamically insert ads and anyway,
0:52:59I actually do kind of the opposite now.
0:53:03As John said, I am statically deleting ads automatically
0:53:06where forecast, the tool that I use to encode
0:53:10the chapter markers and the MP3, which I write,
0:53:13already had the concept of sponsor chapters.
0:53:17I like recognizing sponsored chapters by the prefix
0:53:19and you can edit what the prefix is.
0:53:21By default, it's what we use on this show, sponsor colon.
0:53:24And so it recognizes those and it highlights them
0:53:26in the table view so you can easily see them
0:53:28and that way, I always check to make sure,
0:53:30like, are they actually, you know,
0:53:32do they have the right durations roughly
0:53:33and then I can make sure they all have links
0:53:35and everything.
0:53:36And so it already had this mechanism of recognizing sponsors.
0:53:38It also had a feature called export air checks
0:53:40where people who buy ads, a lot of times,
0:53:43they will want to hear a copy of whatever ad you read
0:53:47before they pay you.
0:53:49They're like, give us an air check,
0:53:50which is just a fancy industry term for the copy of the ad
0:53:53as you read it from the show.
0:53:54And so I have a feature in forecast.
0:53:56I never wanted to do this.
0:53:58So I have a feature in forecast that says
0:53:59export sponsor air checks.
0:54:01And any chapter that has the sponsor prefix that you've set,
0:54:06it will just export those as separate files
0:54:08that include only that plus or minus,
0:54:09or plus, like, you know, a couple seconds on either side,
0:54:11et cetera.
0:54:13So I already had MP3 splicing, sponsor recognition,
0:54:17chapter markers, and I'm already making the show with chapters.
0:54:21So I built in a feature into forecast
0:54:25to automate the creation of the sponsor-free versions
0:54:28by simply having a menu item that will export
0:54:31a copy of the same file without the sponsor chapters in it.
0:54:35And as you hear the show,
0:54:36the way the sponsor-free version sounds,
0:54:38it's exactly the same show.
0:54:39The way it sounds is when you hear...
0:54:42[ Music plays ]
0:54:43...and then you hear the sponsor here,
0:54:45and then you hear the sponsor close music.
0:54:47[ Music plays ]
0:54:50Basically, the way the ad-free version works
0:54:52is you only hear the ad close music,
0:54:55and then it goes to the next topic.
0:54:56So you don't hear the ad open or the ad.
0:54:58You hear just, you know, previous topic...
0:55:00[ Music plays ]
0:55:04...and then the next topic.
0:55:05To do this in forecast,
0:55:07I had to first figure out Mac OS app notarization
0:55:11because the last forecast update predates Catalina.
0:55:14I also then had to add support for dark mode
0:55:17because the last update also predated Mojave.
0:55:19It was in 2018.
0:55:20-Oh, wow. That's great.
0:55:21-But the main reason I had to update the forecast app
0:55:23besides adding this feature was I had to improve the precision
0:55:27of the chapter markers because it turned out that the way I was...
0:55:30What Forecast does to achieve its amazing speed
0:55:32and make your fans spin so fast
0:55:34is it splits up the file into however many cores you have.
0:55:39So on my iMac, I have 10 cores.
0:55:41It's 20 virtual hyper-threading cores.
0:55:42So it splits the files with 20 parts,
0:55:44encodes each of those parts separately in parallel,
0:55:47and then glues them all together at the end.
0:55:49It turned out the way I was gluing things together
0:55:51was actually adding one silent frame of audio,
0:55:55which is something like 11 milliseconds.
0:55:58It was adding a little bit of audio
0:56:00at every joint that was silent.
0:56:02And it split them on silences, so you wouldn't ever notice.
0:56:06It wouldn't split it in the middle of a word,
0:56:08so it wouldn't be inserting silence anywhere you would notice.
0:56:11But it was enough that the chapter markers
0:56:14would be very slightly off as they were layered in an episode
0:56:18if you were encoding with a high core count machine,
0:56:21because you would have all these segments that were joined,
0:56:23and so a chapter marker might be off by a half a second.
0:56:27And the problem is, when I'm placing these so precisely
0:56:30to make sure that the audio flows correctly
0:56:34when it performs the sponsor removal splice,
0:56:37and it doesn't have a weirdly long gap
0:56:39or it doesn't cut off half a word somewhere,
0:56:42a half a second of imprecision is too much.
0:56:45So first, and this is all to save me
0:56:48a small amount of work every week.
0:56:50(laughs)
0:56:52First, I had to improve the MP3 joining algorithm in forecast.
0:56:58When I first wrote it, like four or five years ago,
0:57:02I had less knowledge of the MP3 file format than I have now.
0:57:05So I was able to do that just by knowing,
0:57:07like, oh, that's right, it's this padding frame
0:57:09that the lame lib is adding, you know, whatever.
0:57:11So I knew enough to do it correctly this time.
0:57:14So first I had to, like, figure out the notarization,
0:57:17add dark mode, update lame, then improve
0:57:20the precision of chapter markers
0:57:22by rewriting the way I joined things.
0:57:24(laughs)
0:57:25- My goodness.
0:57:26- But all that, I was able to do it
0:57:28because I control my production tool.
0:57:31You know, like, it's a very powerful thing,
0:57:34like, to have that, and you know, it's like a slow build.
0:57:38Like, this is how I like to do things
0:57:39in my entire career, if possible.
0:57:41You put in a lot of work up front
0:57:43to do ridiculous things that save time over time.
0:57:46This is one of the great things about being a programmer.
0:57:48Like, you can, if you have some annoying task
0:57:52that you have to do every day or every week
0:57:54or even once a year, you can write a script
0:57:57and you can spend three hours writing a script
0:57:59that's gonna save you one minute a day,
0:58:01but that's satisfying, and eventually
0:58:03that might be worth it.
0:58:04(laughs)
0:58:05But now I have ad-free versions.
0:58:08As I said, I only did the last four episodes ad-free.
0:58:11I didn't go back, like, any further than that.
0:58:13Then there's also issues with overcast
0:58:15that were kind of led to this.
0:58:17I developed a ping API to kind of make
0:58:21the private feed update speed be as fast
0:58:25as the public feed, 'cause you know,
0:58:26what you wouldn't want is if you have a premium feed,
0:58:29where everybody has their own little feeds,
0:58:31you know, like a premium offering,
0:58:33you don't want the public show to go out
0:58:35and then, and have that be picked up
0:58:37by all the apps really fast, 'cause it's a popular feed,
0:58:40and then have to wait like two or three hours
0:58:42for all the member feeds to pick up the same episode.
0:58:44Like, that would be not good.
0:58:46You know, you don't want your members
0:58:47to have a worse experience than your non-members, right?
0:58:49You want it to be equal or better.
0:58:51So I developed an API in overcast,
0:58:53where every time we publish a new episode,
0:58:56and this is a public API, it's on the podcaster info page,
0:58:59the ping API, overcast now has an API
0:59:01where you can say, all right, the feeds
0:59:03that begin with this prefix just got updated,
0:59:05so go crawl them now, instead of waiting, you know,
0:59:07possibly up to an hour or whatever
0:59:09that you might otherwise crawl them.
0:59:11So again, like, we produce a show here,
0:59:14I control the production tool, I control our biggest client.
0:59:17It's a good place to be.
0:59:18I know not everybody can do this,
0:59:20but when you do this, when you have this kind of stuff,
0:59:22it's amazingly strategically valuable,
0:59:25and you can push things forward, you know,
0:59:27you can make new features or make things better for everybody
0:59:30just based on your own needs, 'cause you know
0:59:32what your needs are, 'cause you're also a podcaster.
0:59:34- It's important to remember, and Mark was talking about
0:59:36all these things about how he has his production tools
0:59:38and the app and the CMS and blah, blah, blah.
0:59:40This is still using all just open standards.
0:59:43MP3 is an open standard that Marco did not invent.
0:59:45Chapters are part of the standard that Marco did not invent.
0:59:48Anybody can make tools that understand these.
0:59:50Our private and public feeds are just plain old RSS feeds
0:59:53that any podcast client can play.
0:59:55Like, we're all within this open ecosystem.
0:59:57It's just that because it's open,
0:59:59anybody can make apps that deal with them,
1:00:01which means that Marco can make apps that deal with them,
1:00:03and so he has, and same thing with our website.
1:00:05It's, you know, using PHP. It's on the web.
1:00:07It's on the website using open standards.
1:00:09It's just nice to be able to control
1:00:12as much of that as possible and as feasible.
1:00:15Related to that, since we control it,
1:00:18we wanted to make it a good, simple experience.
1:00:20Hopefully the people in the chat room who are our superfans
1:00:22have figured out the website
1:00:24and have not stumbled over anything,
1:00:26but we spent a surprising amount of time trying to figure out
1:00:28how to make it, make the experience obvious
1:00:30and simple enough.
1:00:32It's just like one or two screens.
1:00:34Like, it's not complicated. You just go there,
1:00:36and it's very simple, and that's what we wanted it to be.
1:00:38But one of the simplifications that I had my heart set
1:00:40on the beginning that it turns out we couldn't do
1:00:42was sign in with Apple.
1:00:44The thing that we talked about on the show,
1:00:46I'm a big fan of this service.
1:00:48It's like, oh, if you already trust Apple
1:00:50and if you're listening to this podcast,
1:00:52maybe you do already, you can, instead of signing in
1:00:54with an e-mail address or something,
1:00:56you can do sign in with Apple, and we wouldn't even know
1:00:58what your e-mail address was if you didn't want us to.
1:01:00You'd just be completely anonymous
1:01:02as far as we're concerned. You wouldn't have to maintain
1:01:04separate login credentials. It would just be like
1:01:06your Apple ID that you already have, and that would be
1:01:08an option for people who wanted to use
1:01:10sign in with Apple. Unfortunately,
1:01:12sign in with Apple
1:01:14strongly suggests that you have
1:01:16an application associated with
1:01:18like an iOS application or whatever,
1:01:20and you can kind of make like a dummy
1:01:22application just to satisfy
1:01:24its desires, but
1:01:26we don't have an app. We have a website.
1:01:28There is no like ATP app, right?
1:01:30We didn't want to make one,
1:01:32so unfortunately, the reason we don't have
1:01:34sign in with Apple is right now, it's not really
1:01:36designed to be just a way
1:01:38for people to log into a website that has no
1:01:40associated app whatsoever.
1:01:42We do support Apple Pay through Stripe,
1:01:44so the payment process is really
1:01:46easy if you have Apple Pay and you want to use that
1:01:48and you don't want to have to enter credit card number. You can
1:01:50be done in like less than 30 seconds,
1:01:52but for now, no sign in with
1:01:54Apple. I mean, yeah, like as John said, if we could
1:01:56just get away with not having your e-mail address
1:01:58at all, that would be wonderful. You know
1:02:00I would jump at that. You know, I mean, and believe me,
1:02:02I thought of various ways I could try to get
1:02:04away with not having an e-mail address
1:02:06for anybody, but the problem is
1:02:08like when you're taking people's money
1:02:10directly, you need to have
1:02:12some way of accounting for them so that like
1:02:14you can, so if they have a problem,
1:02:16they can e-mail you
1:02:18and say, "Hey, I have a problem. Here's my e-mail
1:02:20address. Can you look up my account?" You know, otherwise
1:02:22it just makes stuff a lot harder if
1:02:24you don't have that, and our payment processor,
1:02:26Stripe, collects the e-mail address
1:02:28anyway, so like we already
1:02:30are in possession of it anyway
1:02:32through, you know, indirectly. Like we have access
1:02:34to it. It's in our data from Stripe,
1:02:36so at that point, it's like, "Well,
1:02:38we already, we're already exposed
1:02:40to it." You know, and like, if
1:02:42you think about it, like personal information
1:02:44as like almost like a virus,
1:02:46like, you know, it's like, well, if it passes
1:02:48near your hands, like it's on
1:02:50you, so you have to take the precautions
1:02:52to protect it, and you know, you have to have
1:02:54a privacy policy about it and everything. It's like
1:02:56once you have to do all that stuff anyway,
1:02:58you might as well also provide a decent login experience
1:03:00and be able to fix people's
1:03:02issues when they e-mail you. One
1:03:04of the problems that we had when
1:03:06we were thinking about, "Should we add
1:03:08Sign-In with Apple?" before we realized that, you know, you kind of, that you
1:03:10really are encouraged, that it really
1:03:12needs an app, and you know,
1:03:14when Apple strongly encourages something, it basically
1:03:16is a rule, not a suggestion.
1:03:18But,
1:03:20but, you know, and if it isn't a rule now,
1:03:22it will become one later, so you might as well treat it like a rule
1:03:24now. But, one of the
1:03:26problems with Sign-In with Apple is like,
1:03:28if you have Sign-In with Apple,
1:03:30many people will use it
1:03:32the first time they sign up, or they will not use it
1:03:34the first time they sign up, and then when they
1:03:36come back to your site a few months later and want to log in,
1:03:38they will try
1:03:40the other thing. If they, you know, they used it the first time,
1:03:42they will try not using it the second time, because they'll forget
1:03:44whether they used it the first time or not,
1:03:46and then they will either
1:03:48not have, not see their account, and
1:03:50e-mail you saying, "My account's missing,"
1:03:52or they will miss, they will
1:03:54inadvertently create a new
1:03:56blank account, and then they'll write to you saying,
1:03:58"All my stuff's gone in my account."
1:04:00So, you create all sorts of, like, customer
1:04:02friction and customer support problems
1:04:04whenever you have multiple ways to log in
1:04:06to your service or app. So, ideally,
1:04:08if you could make it just one way,
1:04:10you totally eliminate,
1:04:12"How did I sign up for this?" You know,
1:04:14and you still have issues of people with multiple e-mail
1:04:16addresses deciding which one they want to use,
1:04:18but at least you reduce the,
1:04:20you know, you reduce the number of problems and problem sources
1:04:22you have by one big one, by just
1:04:24saying, like, "Okay, you don't have to worry about
1:04:26whether you log into our site with Twitter
1:04:28or Facebook or Apple ID or anything. You just
1:04:30log into our site with an e-mail address,
1:04:32period." So, there it is.
1:04:34I don't even have a password. I use one of my
1:04:36passwordless login systems.
1:04:38And, well, so
1:04:40we put a lot of work into the subscribe
1:04:42flow. Again, special thanks to the
1:04:44Chatecury and Dithering
1:04:46podcasts, Ben Thompson and John Gruber.
1:04:48The system that Ben Thompson has devised
1:04:50over there for quick
1:04:52subscribing with, like, the cool QR code and everything,
1:04:54we ripped it off completely 100%,
1:04:56with permission, but totally ripped it
1:04:58off, totally shamelessly, so
1:05:00thanks to them for
1:05:02innovating
1:05:04so that the rest of us can
1:05:06reap the benefits.
1:05:08One final nicety that Marco added,
1:05:10and you can correct me if I'm wrong about
1:05:12understanding this, but if you sign up as a member
1:05:14and you get your special member feed and you add it
1:05:16to your podcast player of choice using our
1:05:18cool little page that lets you do
1:05:20that, and then
1:05:22you unsubscribe, you stop being a
1:05:24member, you don't
1:05:26have to change your feed. Is that
1:05:28correct, Marco? That feed will continue to work
1:05:30for you, and then if you sign,
1:05:32it will just become the non-member feed,
1:05:34right? So, suddenly, you know, you won't have to, like,
1:05:36delete the feed from your podcast player, then resubscribe
1:05:38to the public feed, and then delete the public feed.
1:05:40You can just keep that feed there forever,
1:05:42and the content of it will change
1:05:44based on whether you are currently an active member
1:05:46or not. Yeah, and it'll tell you, like, it'll
1:05:48prefix the title with "Subscription Expired,"
1:05:50so, like, it'll be very clear that it
1:05:52is an expired member subscription, but the content
1:05:54will still be coming in, and there will be a link in each
1:05:56post for you to renew if you want to.
1:05:58Your member feed, as long as you don't delete your
1:06:00account, your member feed will continue
1:06:02to work just fine
1:06:04as a copy of the public feed.
1:06:06And then as soon as you want to resubscribe in the future,
1:06:08member stuff all shows up again. Yeah, and
1:06:10you can, of course, delete the feed and resubscribe to the public one, too,
1:06:12just saying this is a nice city, so you don't
1:06:14end up with this weird dead feed that doesn't
1:06:16work anymore. One thing that may
1:06:18not be clear, or at least wasn't clear to me about
1:06:20your membership that you're paying for,
1:06:22it's not calendar month, so if you
1:06:24become a member now, you're not, like, missing out
1:06:26on, like, the first couple of shows in June.
1:06:28It's based on your
1:06:30sign-up date, right? Yeah, it's
1:06:32simply, you know, time range from now.
1:06:34You're buying, you know, a month from
1:06:36now, and so, and it renews
1:06:38next month. And you can see it's, like,
1:06:40man, Stripe is so good
1:06:42these days. I mean, so I've built,
1:06:44I've used Stripe a couple times over the years.
1:06:46It's always been great.
1:06:48It's always been, like, great company,
1:06:50super amazing API,
1:06:52extremely easy to use, like,
1:06:54breath of fresh air compared to the old days of PayPal.
1:06:56But, now,
1:06:58it's even better. Like, if you can
1:07:00believe, like, if you are building anything with
1:07:02payments, I strongly encourage
1:07:04you to use Stripe,
1:07:06because it's so good.
1:07:08Stripe, not a sponsor of this episode. Yeah.
1:07:10You'd be amazed how
1:07:12much functionality we
1:07:14got from them for
1:07:16almost no effort at all. Like,
1:07:18the Stripe integration took me two days
1:07:20for the entire payment
1:07:22system. That is,
1:07:24subscribing, including Apple Pay,
1:07:26including support for
1:07:28the cards that use 3D Secure that need, like,
1:07:30you know, send you a text message to verify the
1:07:32charge before it actually goes through. Like, all that stuff
1:07:34is supported. And a whole billing portal, where
1:07:36you can go in and, like, change your credit card number
1:07:38if it's about to expire. It'll email you a week
1:07:40ahead of time of expiration and stuff like that.
1:07:42You can see your billing history.
1:07:44All that, and it
1:07:46took me two days to build the entire
1:07:48integration. Again, Stripe has always been good,
1:07:50but it's even better now.
1:07:52So, if you're building something that
1:07:54requires credit cards, if you're thinking about it,
1:07:56you'd be shocked how easy it is. So, yeah.
1:07:58Thank you to Stripe for being awesome.
1:08:00There were a lot of design decisions and things
1:08:02that went into this, and I don't think we need to belabor it anymore
1:08:04right now, but we might visit it in the future,
1:08:06or as we make other choices, we might
1:08:08revisit those in the future. But, I
1:08:10do want to thank Marco one more time for putting
1:08:12in the overwhelming amount of work on doing this.
1:08:14And if you want to get Marco a birthday present,
1:08:16you can donate to the three
1:08:18organizations we've already talked about,
1:08:20and/or you can join the
1:08:22ATP membership program.
1:08:24And. And would be better.
1:08:26Let's do "and." I'd rather, if you're gonna only give
1:08:28$8 a month to somebody, don't give it to me. Give it to
1:08:30one of them.
1:08:32We are sponsored this week by Notion.
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1:10:06[Music]
1:10:08[Music]
1:10:10All right, we have one big topic we need to talk
1:10:12about, which is going to make me friggin' miserable.
1:10:14Bloomberg says that the ARM
1:10:16transition is happening in, what,
1:10:18a week and a half, two weeks, something like that?
1:10:20It's happening at WWDC, or at least it will be announced
1:10:22anyway at WWDC.
1:10:24And this would only be
1:10:26depressing if you had a brand new laptop
1:10:28arriving tomorrow, which I definitely
1:10:30don't. Definitely not.
1:10:32I'm kind of amazed at how much mileage
1:10:34that Bloomberg has gotten,
1:10:36slash, Germin have gotten out of essentially the same
1:10:38story. Like, I think we've had
1:10:40basically the same story as a topic
1:10:42on this podcast. Not just
1:10:44ARM MAX, but I'm saying this
1:10:46specific story with these facts
1:10:48in this publication
1:10:50on this show, like, three times, right?
1:10:52So kudos for, you know, getting the page
1:10:54views. I don't think there's much new information, except
1:10:56they're becoming more and more insistent that no,
1:10:58really, WWDC,
1:11:00which is in a couple of weeks as we record this,
1:11:02this is going to be the coming out
1:11:04party for ARM on
1:11:06the Mac. They don't,
1:11:08you know, with the typical hedging, they always say, "As
1:11:10early as," yeah, well, it could happen as early
1:11:12as any point in the future. That's kind of,
1:11:14you know, anyway. So
1:11:16they're hedging, and they're like, "Oh, there's not going to be
1:11:18hardware available," but of course you have to announce
1:11:20the transition before you have the hardware for most cases,
1:11:22because if you just released ARM MAX, nothing
1:11:24would run on them, and, you know,
1:11:26all this leads us to discuss
1:11:28all the same questions. Now, the fact that they, why
1:11:30are we talking about it for a third time, then? If it's like
1:11:32there's not really any new facts, and it's just, you know,
1:11:34being more insistent on the dates that they've said many
1:11:36months ago, I think as they
1:11:38become more insistent, and as the date comes closer,
1:11:40I start to believe more,
1:11:42because it's like, well, they're still insisting,
1:11:44and it's getting closer to the day. We all know, kind of, like,
1:11:46you know, the leaks get more
1:11:48solid the closer you get to the date of when they're
1:11:50supposed to happen, and
1:11:52practically speaking, if
1:11:54the long-term rumors of, like, ARM MAX in
1:11:562021 are true,
1:11:58you kind of have to tell people about it
1:12:00before you try to sell them a bunch of
1:12:02hardware that doesn't run any apps, right? So
1:12:04WWDC is the time
1:12:06you would tell them, and you
1:12:08probably don't want to wait until WWDC
1:12:102021 if you're planning on having any
1:12:12selling consumers max in 2021.
1:12:14That's too late, so
1:12:16unless, like so many other things
1:12:18in this world that have been, you know, delayed
1:12:20by coronavirus, if that, if coronavirus
1:12:22hasn't thrown a giant monkey wrench into their
1:12:24plans, I'm starting to
1:12:26believe that this upcoming WWDC
1:12:28is going to be the,
1:12:30you know, the move away from
1:12:32x86, move away from Intel. I don't even know
1:12:34how to phrase it. We keep saying ARM MAX, but
1:12:36as we've discussed in many past shows, oh, could be anything,
1:12:38could be any kind of Apple processor, could be RISC-V,
1:12:40could be AMD, could be,
1:12:42anyway, ARM MAX, we're pretty sure
1:12:44that's what's coming, that's what Bloomberg says.
1:12:46And WWDC could be the date.
1:12:48Yeah, I'm
1:12:50very much looking forward to this. I mean, we've been talking
1:12:52about it for years now as the thing that
1:12:54we assumed was probably going to happen
1:12:56someday, and it has
1:12:58kind of felt over the last year or so
1:13:00like, it seems like it's getting close.
1:13:02If it finally is happening,
1:13:04I'm so excited. And even though,
1:13:06you know, again, we've talked about this
1:13:08so many times, there will
1:13:10be losses along the way, but I think
1:13:12we've already hit most of them.
1:13:14It's not a coincidence
1:13:16that Mac OS in the last couple of years
1:13:18has dropped support outright
1:13:20or deprecated major
1:13:22functionality that is
1:13:24considered like old or legacy that you
1:13:26think might be hard to support in an ARM transition.
1:13:28So things like 32-bit support,
1:13:30OpenGL, you know, like
1:13:32major things that have
1:13:34cost us a lot of apps, especially 32-bit has
1:13:36caused a lot of apps to be killed, basically.
1:13:38You know, a lot of the old
1:13:40APIs that were 32-bit only, you know,
1:13:42those aren't coming over. Why do
1:13:44you think Apple's been doing all this house cleaning on Mac OS?
1:13:46It's not just
1:13:48for fun. It's
1:13:50clearly in preparation for this transition.
1:13:52So it does seem,
1:13:54it seemed for a while that it's imminent. That seems
1:13:56more likely than ever now, and especially
1:13:58when backed up with this pretty firm
1:14:00report. I'm very excited
1:14:02to see this. I cannot wait.
1:14:04I do think we are probably going to lose
1:14:06Bootcamp,
1:14:08any kind of x86 emulation
1:14:10I think is out the window,
1:14:12and a lot of PC hardware
1:14:14compatibility is probably going to be lost as well.
1:14:16But I think that
1:14:18will be worth it in the end.
1:14:20I'm trying to remember what was the presentation
1:14:22where
1:14:24was it the most recent
1:14:26WWDC? There was some recent Apple presentation.
1:14:28I remember talking on
1:14:30the show about how
1:14:32the whole presentation was like
1:14:34a giant sub-tweet.
1:14:36I remember saying that the presentation
1:14:38was basically screaming, "We are making our
1:14:40Macs!"
1:14:42That's exactly what I said in the
1:14:44past episode of ATB. I can't remember the episode number.
1:14:46But the presentation was,
1:14:48"Here at Apple, we have a bunch of new
1:14:50products, and this one has an
1:14:52A-whatever processor in it.
1:14:54And let me tell you how great those A-whatever processors
1:14:56are. And it's got this, and it's got that." And they just
1:14:58went into how great they are at making these system-mounted
1:15:00chips. It was obviously an iOS device or whatever.
1:15:02They were so into it, and they were
1:15:04just telling you about all this cool stuff.
1:15:06And either just before or just
1:15:08after that, they had talked about a Mac product,
1:15:10and it said almost nothing about the CPUs.
1:15:12Because A) we knew that
1:15:14they were not remarkable, and B)
1:15:16everything that they were saying
1:15:18about the A-series, you knew if you knew the
1:15:20tech stuff, it was like, "Not true
1:15:22of the Intel CPU and the other
1:15:24thing." It's not super power efficient.
1:15:26It's not made on a new process size.
1:15:28It doesn't have a neural engine. It's GPU isn't
1:15:30way better. It doesn't have more cores.
1:15:32It has none of that stuff.
1:15:34And of course, Apple's not going to say this in the presentation. It costs
1:15:36Apple hundreds of dollars to Intel,
1:15:38whereas this one costs them less
1:15:40than $100 or whatever.
1:15:42The whole presentation,
1:15:44the subtext was
1:15:46"Apple makes great CPUs.
1:15:48Our CPUs are great in ways that
1:15:50Intel CPUs are not." But they didn't say that.
1:15:52That wasn't the time for that presentation.
1:15:54When I saw that presentation, I'm like, "Oh, it's
1:15:56on now. It's clear that they are
1:15:58just... There's no turning
1:16:00back now. This is the tech
1:16:02strategy. Everybody knows it, and their
1:16:04presentations have been leading
1:16:06up to it." So when they do come on stage and
1:16:08present this, this is
1:16:10the thing I'm thinking about as we come closer to
1:16:12WWC. How do they position this?
1:16:14We talked about this when we were talking about it years ago. It's like, "Oh, do they
1:16:16just use ARM for the low-end laptops?
1:16:18Do they keep the big ones
1:16:20x86? Do they try to make a 64-core
1:16:22processor for a new ARM-based
1:16:24Mac Pro?" This is back when we didn't even know
1:16:26they were going to make a Mac Pro.
1:16:28How do they deal with the software situation?
1:16:32How do they present this?
1:16:34Now that we get closer to the date,
1:16:36the default strategy that everyone
1:16:38believes becomes
1:16:40much more...
1:16:42There's much more support for it. That presentation
1:16:44they gave was not a presentation
1:16:46preparing the way for
1:16:48Apple to say, "We're pursuing a dual CPU
1:16:50strategy where we're going to have
1:16:52forever Intel CPUs and
1:16:54ARM Macs at the same time."
1:16:56That presentation was all about
1:16:58how Apple makes amazing CPUs,
1:17:00nobody makes better ones, isn't Apple awesome?
1:17:02Don't you wish these were in all of your devices?
1:17:04I think, right now,
1:17:06a couple weeks out from WWC, if they do this,
1:17:08the positioning is the same as it was
1:17:10for Intel and the same as it was for Power OC, which is
1:17:12basically these new
1:17:14A-whatever, these new
1:17:16Apple-made CPUs are
1:17:18better in all the ways that we care about
1:17:20than the CPUs we currently use. They're faster,
1:17:22they use less power, they have more features.
1:17:24They're not going to say this, but they're cheaper.
1:17:26And the pitch is
1:17:28and eventually, all Macs
1:17:30will use this, because it's better.
1:17:32Just like they said with Power PC, and just like
1:17:34they said with Intel. In fact, with Intel, if
1:17:36people were around for that transition,
1:17:38the specific pitch they made, which may sound weird
1:17:40in today's world of smartphones and iPads, but the
1:17:42specific pitch they made was that Power PC
1:17:44was just too power-hungry,
1:17:46ha ha. They couldn't
1:17:48put a G5 into a laptop, they weren't
1:17:50power-efficient, and Intel's roadmap had
1:17:52CPUs that had much better
1:17:54performance per watt. It wasn't
1:17:56just like, "Oh, Intel CPUs are faster." They were
1:17:58at that point, they definitely were faster, but the
1:18:00pitch was, "These are
1:18:02faster and use less power, so
1:18:04we can put them in our laptops." And, you know,
1:18:06like, Apple's thing is like, "There are
1:18:08ideas for computers that we have that we
1:18:10can't make with available Power PC
1:18:12CPUs, and the roadmap
1:18:14doesn't have anything to help us, like, say, a laptop."
1:18:16If your laptop is still
1:18:18G4, but your big desktops
1:18:20are G5, and the G5 is faster and better than
1:18:22the G4, and there's no prospect of
1:18:24getting a G5 into a laptop, that's a pretty dire
1:18:26situation. Obviously, it's not that
1:18:28dire now, but all this is to say is the
1:18:30pitch was, "This
1:18:32is the future of the Mac, and yes,
1:18:34there'll be a transition, and it will take a while, and here's
1:18:36how we're going to handle the transition, and don't feel bad about
1:18:38the Macs that you already have." Like, all the stuff
1:18:40that people are worried about, like, "Oh, you're going to announce
1:18:42an Intel transition, but then you're going to be selling people
1:18:44Power PC Macs? What if someone bought a Power PC
1:18:46Mac the day before that presentation?"
1:18:48That happened. That's a thing that happened.
1:18:50We all survived it. It's a bumpy transition.
1:18:52Your Intel Mac will
1:18:54be fine for probably the lifetime of that
1:18:56computer, because these transitions take time.
1:18:58But, in the end, I feel like
1:19:00this has to be positioned as
1:19:02the future of the Mac is whatever
1:19:04this thing is that Apple wants to move to, whatever
1:19:06they call these things. If they're A-series, M-series,
1:19:08you know, whatever they are,
1:19:10that's going to be for every Mac.
1:19:12It may take them longer.
1:19:14Maybe it's two or three years until they get
1:19:16a Apple-made CPU
1:19:18that is appropriate to replace
1:19:20the one in the Mac Pro or something.
1:19:22But I think that
1:19:24has to be the pitch is, "We make great
1:19:26CPUs. We're bringing them to the Mac."
1:19:28Even if they say, "Our
1:19:30first line of Macs will just be the laptops,"
1:19:32I will be shocked if they make
1:19:34any commitment to, like,
1:19:36in perpetuity continue to make Intel-based
1:19:38Macs, because that's just
1:19:40not the way Apple does things, and honestly,
1:19:42it doesn't really make any sense, because I think
1:19:44this is the one thing we've discussed
1:19:46in the program over and over again.
1:19:48I think Apple
1:19:50has proven the capability
1:19:52to make an appropriate
1:19:54CPU for every Mac that they sell,
1:19:56including the Mac Pro. They haven't
1:19:58actually done that yet, as far as
1:20:00we know. Maybe there's something in a secret lab or something.
1:20:02But I think they've proven they're able
1:20:04to, because
1:20:06the only difference in terms of
1:20:08the chips that are like in an
1:20:10iPad and in the Mac Pro is
1:20:12basically the number of cores. The individual cores
1:20:14are now competitive.
1:20:16Everything else is just a matter of money and time.
1:20:18Bus widths,
1:20:20memory support,
1:20:22I/O, PCI Express
1:20:24lanes, these are all solvable problems.
1:20:26Even the minor batteries that existed before
1:20:28that I used to insist could be solved by money.
1:20:30Those have come down without the application
1:20:32of huge amounts of money. Thunderbolt is now
1:20:34an open standard, and you can be certified as
1:20:36Thunderbolt-compatible, even if you're not made by Intel.
1:20:38And
1:20:40Marko mentioned the 32-64 bit
1:20:42stuff has resolved itself.
1:20:44Everything is all set up. Everything is all
1:20:46lined up for Apple to do this. It's easier
1:20:48now than it has ever been in the past.
1:20:50And I feel like the positioning simply
1:20:52has to be, "This is the future of the Mac."
1:20:54I'm so
1:20:56excited
1:20:58and disappointed about WWDC
1:21:00this year, because
1:21:02it was
1:21:04a unique pleasure being around
1:21:06you when Swift was announced
1:21:08and when, you know,
1:21:10it wasn't the Mac Pro announced
1:21:12when we were in the keynote
1:21:14audience?
1:21:16Sure was. You weren't next to me for Swift, but Mac Pro you were.
1:21:18Both Mac Pros.
1:21:20Well, there you go, exactly.
1:21:22Anyways, the point is, being in the room
1:21:24for that, like, obviously,
1:21:26the reality distortion field
1:21:28is different and has been since, what,
1:21:302011, but
1:21:32it's still amazing to be in the room when this
1:21:34is happening. And
1:21:36if this really is going to be announced
1:21:38in a couple of weeks, I'm going to be real
1:21:40sad not to be there. Obviously, I may not have
1:21:42been there anyway, because I might not have gotten a ticket, but
1:21:44it would have been really
1:21:46cool to have been able to see it in person.
1:21:48And I'm really curious
1:21:50how they're going to handle
1:21:52the cheering and the hooping and the hollering
1:21:54over something that
1:21:56arguably really
1:21:58should be cheered. And
1:22:00we should be hooping and hollering over.
1:22:02I'm curious to see
1:22:04how they handle that if they're just
1:22:06doing recorded videos.
1:22:08I'm also curious to see what
1:22:10I think about this computer that's arriving
1:22:12tomorrow, which I actually am super stoked for.
1:22:14I was thinking of you, and I said, "What if I just
1:22:16bought a Mac with the
1:22:18previous CPU?" Like, it'll be fine.
1:22:20I saw you fretting about that. What about yourself?
1:22:22I mean, before
1:22:24I ordered my Mac Pro, I had
1:22:26insisted many times, "I understand
1:22:28that Apple may have had to be switched
1:22:30to ARM, and I'm going to buy the last
1:22:32great Intel thing." And honestly, it's not even that great
1:22:34in terms of single-core performance. The iPads are
1:22:36probably faster, right? I'm
1:22:38resigned to it/fine with it.
1:22:40People are asking, "How do you feel about that?" I'm excited
1:22:42for ARM Macs. I'm not depressed
1:22:44about my Mac Pro. I love my Mac Pro. It's great.
1:22:46And I'll be fine with it.
1:22:48Maybe it won't last me ten years.
1:22:50Maybe I'll replace it with another...
1:22:52I bought multiple cheese graders before.
1:22:54I can buy multiple mega graders
1:22:56again, maybe, someday.
1:22:58But anyway,
1:23:00I'll survive. It'll be perfectly fine.
1:23:02I'm excited for ARM Macs,
1:23:04even if it's just laptops, which I don't even like in the beginning.
1:23:06Because having lived through
1:23:08two CPU transitions before,
1:23:10every one of them has been exciting.
1:23:12PowerPC was super exciting
1:23:14for... I mean, PowerPC itself was exciting
1:23:16for lots of reasons. There was lots of political reasons and
1:23:18other things that we can get into in Old Man
1:23:20Mode and in different shows, maybe. But
1:23:22the main thing was that
1:23:24it was faster. It was so much
1:23:26faster than the old...
1:23:28ridiculously faster, demonstrably faster.
1:23:30And who's not excited by that?
1:23:32And even this is even back in the '90s
1:23:34or whatever, when computers were getting faster all the time anyway.
1:23:36Even in that environment, the switch
1:23:38to PowerPC showed a lot of speed.
1:23:40Even in an operating system that was still
1:23:42largely emulated because huge
1:23:44slots of Mac OS were still 68K code
1:23:46for the longest time. Then the Intel transition,
1:23:48again, Apple was in a bad
1:23:50place. They couldn't put a G5 in a laptop.
1:23:52The Intel Macs were right out of the gate. You used them,
1:23:54and you're like, "Oh." I remember
1:23:56compiling Perl on an Intel Mac.
1:23:58I'm like, "Holy cow."
1:24:00This compiles so much
1:24:02faster than it does on my dual
1:24:04G5 Power Mac.
1:24:06The next day, it was like,
1:24:08"Oh, you have a dual
1:24:10G5 Power Mac? Try this
1:24:12middle-of-the-road, wimpy Intel Mac."
1:24:14I'm like, "Well, this giant
1:24:16cheese grater surely will compile." No, the Intel
1:24:18one was so much faster.
1:24:20I hope we have that same excitement.
1:24:22Maybe it's not raw speed. Maybe it's just like,
1:24:24"Oh, the battery on the laptops
1:24:26last iPad length. They're like 10 hours long,
1:24:28and before I was only getting four hours."
1:24:30I don't know, but I'm hoping
1:24:32that these Macs
1:24:34will be compelling. For anyone
1:24:36who has never gone through one of these architecture
1:24:38transitions, they're scary
1:24:40and they could be bumpy, but my main memory
1:24:42of the previous two transitions is excitement.
1:24:44As a tech nerd,
1:24:46it's an exciting time to be
1:24:48involved in the Mac. You would think it would be a
1:24:50scary time, and it would be like, "Oh, I'm just going to leave the Mac and come back
1:24:52when things settle down." But to me,
1:24:54it's always been exciting.
1:24:56I think they're probably going to start out with the
1:24:58MacBook Air. It's the
1:25:00best-selling Mac by all accounts,
1:25:02and it is very
1:25:04mainstream and very good, but the one
1:25:06problem it has is it's kind of slow.
1:25:08I've also heard that the
1:25:10thermal system
1:25:12is not super awesome,
1:25:14that it's not
1:25:16a very graceful or high-capacity
1:25:18thermal system.
1:25:20So if you can
1:25:22take that computer, keep what everyone
1:25:24loves about it, and
1:25:26give it significantly better performance
1:25:28and probably better battery life, that's a
1:25:30great update. That's all it needs
1:25:32to be. And many of the
1:25:34buyers of the MacBook Air don't
1:25:36need a lot of the higher-end, pro
1:25:38use cases where
1:25:40the transition might be a little bit bumpier.
1:25:42This is why I think that
1:25:44I've seen the idea floated
1:25:46that possibly
1:25:48the high-end
1:25:50products would stay Intel for
1:25:52maybe a little while longer or
1:25:54a significantly longer time, and that
1:25:56maybe ARM is potentially only
1:25:58in the laptops for a while, or
1:26:00maybe laptops and the Mac
1:26:02Mini or something like that.
1:26:04Maybe ARM doesn't come to
1:26:06the MacBook Pro or
1:26:08the iMac Pro or the Mac Pro
1:26:10quite yet.
1:26:12Maybe it waits another couple years before that.
1:26:14In the meantime, you have ARM
1:26:16where it really has
1:26:18where it matters most,
1:26:20which would be a smaller, battery
1:26:22powered thing like the MacBook Air.
1:26:24And that would be fine.
1:26:26That would also give people who
1:26:28rely on high-end
1:26:30apps, high-end hardware,
1:26:32kind of more
1:26:34specialized stuff like virtualization
1:26:36that not everybody really needs to do, but some people
1:26:38really need to do it.
1:26:40It would give all that time to transition.
1:26:42And for those people
1:26:44to either find a different platform
1:26:46or for tool makers
1:26:48to fill that in, to make
1:26:50X86 virtualization, or rather emulation
1:26:52I guess it would be, on
1:26:54ARM Macs, stuff like that. There's
1:26:56so many paths they could take here.
1:26:58What's really interesting, what
1:27:00I can't wait to see is
1:27:02what some of these decisions end up being,
1:27:04what they decide about things like
1:27:06bootcamp or emulation, things like that.
1:27:08And then I want to see the first ARM Mac.
1:27:10I'm so curious.
1:27:12If it is something like the MacBook Air, or even
1:27:14a return of a 12 inch MacBook, but ultimately
1:27:16I think it would probably just be the MacBook Air,
1:27:18that would be an amazing computer.
1:27:20I would probably buy one. It would be
1:27:22so good. I can't wait.
1:27:24I really can't wait. The thing that scares
1:27:26me a little bit about
1:27:28the potential for the laptops getting
1:27:30these processors first, which I think makes the most
1:27:32sense from what we know today,
1:27:34I'm worried, and this is actually
1:27:36applicable as well to something we haven't mentioned,
1:27:38which is a potential iMac refresh,
1:27:40I'm worried that
1:27:42maybe the processors will be new
1:27:44and, well obviously they will be, and
1:27:46maybe some other
1:27:48things around that will be new.
1:27:50Let's just say a version 2
1:27:52of the Magic Keyboard, or whatever it is they're calling
1:27:54the keyboards these days. All that is
1:27:56fine and dandy, but I'm really worried that there's going to be
1:27:58some new hotness looking
1:28:00aesthetic quality to it.
1:28:02And I don't know what that would be, to be honest,
1:28:04except on the iMacs, where obviously
1:28:06smaller bezels and so on.
1:28:08I'm scared that I'm going to get this laptop tomorrow,
1:28:10which I am genuinely very excited about.
1:28:12I'm really, really stoked to have something
1:28:14that will perform a lot better than my adorable, even
1:28:16though I love it, it's not fast.
1:28:18And I'm really excited for it, and I think, John,
1:28:20you're right when you said earlier that
1:28:22it's going to last. The entire lifetime
1:28:24of that laptop I don't think has been cut short by
1:28:26a potential ARM release.
1:28:28What scares me, and it doesn't even
1:28:30scare me if this potential
1:28:32ARM laptop has twice
1:28:34the battery life of my forthcoming 13"
1:28:36MacBook Pro. I don't operate away
1:28:38from a charger that often,
1:28:40so I'm not worried about that either.
1:28:42But if it looks cool,
1:28:44which is so
1:28:46stupid, I'll be the first to tell you it's so
1:28:48dumb, but if it looks super cool,
1:28:50can you imagine if they brought
1:28:52back, maybe not the polycarbonate, but
1:28:54the black MacBook? Do you remember how
1:28:56friggin' cool those things looked?
1:28:58Something along those lines.
1:29:00They looked great in 2006
1:29:02when they came out. I don't think they looked,
1:29:04I think that was a time period.
1:29:06They're not going to bring back
1:29:08plastic. I don't see that happening.
1:29:10I don't think you have to worry about it looking that cool, though, honestly.
1:29:12Not to slam Apple's
1:29:14current laptop design, but
1:29:16for two reasons. One,
1:29:18most of Apple's devices
1:29:20have had their skins pulled in
1:29:22to such a degree
1:29:24that there's nothing left
1:29:26to trim, and all you've
1:29:28got is surface finishes of color, so I suppose
1:29:30they could make a black one, but they probably won't. And the second reason
1:29:32is, during both of the
1:29:34previous transitions,
1:29:36Apple's MO, whether intentionally
1:29:38or just because of momentum,
1:29:40has been to sell you
1:29:42computers that look just like
1:29:44their predecessors, but their insides have a different
1:29:46CPU. And it makes
1:29:48sense from a design point. It's like, well, what if
1:29:50your CPU transition doesn't exactly coincide with
1:29:52a complete redesign of all your computers? You can't really do
1:29:54that. So, let's just
1:29:56take this case that previously came
1:29:58with the PowerPC and put an Intel chip in it.
1:30:00And the second part of that that could be
1:30:02intentional is, we want people to understand that this
1:30:04is just a Mac. They're not weird, they're not
1:30:06different. This computer you bought last week
1:30:08and this computer you bought this week, they look exactly
1:30:10the same. One has an Intel CPU,
1:30:12one has a PowerPC CPU.
1:30:14That could also be an intentional strategy.
1:30:16But I think the other one
1:30:18is more compelling. Practically speaking,
1:30:20Apple is not capable
1:30:22of physically redesigning
1:30:24its entire line of computers,
1:30:26or even a specific one.
1:30:28They've just refreshed
1:30:30most of their computers, which I think
1:30:32leads into this other rumor. This is related to
1:30:34WWC, the rumor about the iMac being
1:30:36replaced with a new design. And what they mean
1:30:38by new design here is, like you were saying, Casey,
1:30:40the case, essentially.
1:30:42The current iMac design has been around for
1:30:44many years. Everyone thinks, oh, you could get one
1:30:46with a smaller chin, smaller
1:30:48bezels. Maybe it could look like the
1:30:50Pro Display XDR. People have all sorts of ideas.
1:30:52But the bottom line is,
1:30:54the iMac is probably due for a
1:30:56physical redesign.
1:30:58This rumor is
1:31:00not that this would be like the ARM iMac,
1:31:02because there's no rumor that
1:31:04the iMacs are coming this year. All the rumors say
1:31:06the iMacs would be coming next year at the earliest.
1:31:08But you have to tell developers about it ahead of time.
1:31:10This is a developer conference, so people expect them
1:31:12to be announced to give developers
1:31:14time to rebuild their apps, yada yada.
1:31:16But the iMac rumor is,
1:31:18oh, and they'll introduce a new iMac.
1:31:20What this would mean, and this may also
1:31:22blow people's minds who haven't been through the previous two
1:31:24transitions, is they would announce an ARM
1:31:26transition, and in the same presentation
1:31:28say, look at this amazing new Intel-based
1:31:30iMac. Yeah.
1:31:32Because they're not going to stop selling Macs
1:31:34once they announce the transition.
1:31:36When they announce the Intel transition,
1:31:38it's not like, no more Macs will be sold
1:31:40until the first Intel-based Mac
1:31:42is released. And same thing with PowerPC
1:31:44and 16. That's just not the way the world works.
1:31:46So, it is not
1:31:48inconceivable that they could introduce
1:31:50a new iMac, probably due to the first part
1:31:52of the presentation. Say, here's a great new iMac,
1:31:54here are its specs, here's its price,
1:31:56doesn't it look cool, ooh, and ahh.
1:31:58And then later say, and now, an important
1:32:00transition for the Mac. We've done this twice before,
1:32:02and put in the slot, you know, like, you know how this is going to go, right?
1:32:04And I don't think
1:32:06people will be like, well, wait a second, you just introduced
1:32:08an Intel Mac. It's like, yeah, and we're going to be selling them
1:32:10in our stores for the next year, and people are going
1:32:12to buy them, and they're going to use them, and they're going to work
1:32:14because they're Macs. It's all
1:32:16fine, right? But that
1:32:18being the case, it's not like
1:32:20they're saying, okay, well, the first ARM-based Mac,
1:32:22whatever it may be, has to look
1:32:24radically different to give Casey FOMO.
1:32:26Like, I don't think that's going to happen, right?
1:32:28I think they're just going to look,
1:32:30whatever Mac it is, especially
1:32:32if it's like the MacBook Air that was just physically
1:32:34redesigned, it's going to look like that.
1:32:36Like, that's it. I mean, the best they could do
1:32:38is maybe give it a new color is available,
1:32:40or something like that, but their colors haven't
1:32:42been that daring lately either, so
1:32:44I do not expect the ARM transition
1:32:46to coincide with amazing style change. That
1:32:48being said, I welcome
1:32:50an amazing, daring style change to
1:32:52any of Apple's Macintosh lines,
1:32:54the laptops, desktops,
1:32:56anything. Not that I don't
1:32:58like the current style. I do. I really like how
1:33:00my Mac Pro looks. I think they're all
1:33:02attractive computers, and they're fine, but I'm always
1:33:04willing to have things mixed up. I'm
1:33:06frequently jealous of, you know, the
1:33:08surface finishes that the
1:33:10phones get from year to year, different
1:33:12colors, you know, shiny, matte,
1:33:14the glass covering,
1:33:16the pastel things, the product red ones,
1:33:18the whatever, that jet black one.
1:33:20Like, there's an adventurous spirit
1:33:22in the phone line that is not present in
1:33:24the Mac line, and I certainly welcome
1:33:26that, but I'm just not expecting it.
1:33:28By the way, semi-real-time follow-up,
1:33:30I am pretty sure, and I
1:33:32think it was my name is T in the chat
1:33:34that pointed this out,
1:33:36it was the Brooklyn Academy of Music
1:33:38event that Marco and I were actually present for
1:33:40physically, that they were going
1:33:42on and on about how amazing the processor is, and the
1:33:44then-brand-new iPad Pro,
1:33:46and then they started talking about
1:33:48the then-brand-new MacBook Air,
1:33:50and yeah, it's great because of all these
1:33:52things, and there's a processor in it. It also has a processor
1:33:54in it. Exactly.
1:33:56And so, I'm pretty sure Marco and I
1:33:58were there for that. It was brutal.
1:34:00Yeah. One final bit
1:34:02on the RMAX. A lot
1:34:04of people have been speculating about the
1:34:06hardware that developers
1:34:08would use to work on their apps, so I kept
1:34:10saying, like, you have to tell a developer so they can
1:34:12rebuild their apps, but you're not going to sell
1:34:14Macs based on the new
1:34:16processor until the next year, so what the heck are the
1:34:18developers going to test on? Well,
1:34:20when they did the Intel transition, they had this
1:34:22thing called the, what, the Developer
1:34:24Transition Kit or something, where they would
1:34:26sell you a Mac that was
1:34:28basically an existing cheese grater
1:34:30Mac, you know, a Power Mac, but
1:34:32inside, I believe it was a Pentium 4?
1:34:34Correct. It was like a PC motherboard
1:34:36with a Pentium 4, and
1:34:38they weren't selling it to you. You were
1:34:40essentially renting it, but you had to
1:34:42give it back to Apple at the end, and
1:34:44anyway, developers could get this. They gave Apple
1:34:46whatever it was, $1,000 or something, and you
1:34:48got a cheese grater with a Pentium 4 in it,
1:34:50and you would use that to
1:34:52port your app. It was an
1:34:54Intel-based Mac. It ran Mac OS X,
1:34:56and you would open up Xcode and bring your
1:34:58source code into it and try to get it to build and
1:35:00test it and everything like that, and then
1:35:02after the period was up,
1:35:04you sent that back to Apple, and then what did they do?
1:35:06They gave you, they said, they gave you
1:35:08the actual production Intel iMac
1:35:10as an option
1:35:12or something you could choose to either get your money back
1:35:14or they would send you an Intel iMac. I forgot,
1:35:16but the point is, Apple has various
1:35:18ways to get hardware
1:35:20to developers so they can do their
1:35:22development, but the hardware they give to developers
1:35:24isn't like a secretly ready
1:35:26ahead of time Mac on the new architecture.
1:35:28It's like this weird mongrel beast.
1:35:30It's like dev kits for consoles, right? They don't,
1:35:32they're not production systems. These
1:35:34are not consumer systems. Apple never
1:35:36shipped a Mac with a Pentium 4 in it, except
1:35:38for these developer transition kits. They were all
1:35:40like the core, you know, the core architecture
1:35:42or whatever, but the Pentium 4
1:35:44ones were good enough for people to do their porting work
1:35:46because it's the same instruction set or whatever, so
1:35:48everyone's thinking,
1:35:50what are they going to do this time? What kind
1:35:52of thing are they going to give
1:35:54developers so they can
1:35:56actually build their
1:35:58Mac app on ARM or whatever
1:36:00these, you know, what are these CPUs are going to be?
1:36:02And since the rumor is
1:36:04that these are going to be ARM Macs, everyone says, well, they don't have to worry
1:36:06about that because developers probably already have
1:36:08tons of ARM-based devices in their house, like they've got an
1:36:10iPad or something, so why not
1:36:12let them run
1:36:14Mac OS on their iPad or something
1:36:16because it's already ARM
1:36:18hardware and it's probably similar enough to the
1:36:20ARM Mac hardware that's going to come out because the rumors
1:36:22are that the ARM Mac hardware
1:36:24is based on the A14 chip that's going to be the next-gen
1:36:26iPhone and all that other stuff, right? So it's not like Apple
1:36:28is making an entirely, the rumor is that Apple is not
1:36:30making an entirely different architecture. It's
1:36:32all derived from the same iPhone chip that they're
1:36:34making a million of anyway.
1:36:36Let everybody run Mac OS
1:36:38on their iPads or maybe even on their iPhones
1:36:40or have it run on your iPhone
1:36:42and have it project to an external display and all sorts
1:36:44of theories like this.
1:36:46They are technically
1:36:48plausible, but
1:36:50they don't strike me as
1:36:52likely simply because the straightforward
1:36:54solution of just giving people a Mac
1:36:56with an ARM chip in it, even
1:36:58if it's some weird slap-together
1:37:00thing that you have to ask for back at the end,
1:37:02Apple's done it before and it
1:37:04worked perfectly fine. Like, if they
1:37:06have a better solution, if they have,
1:37:08you know, if they've already done the work to make
1:37:10iPads do this because that's how they've been developing
1:37:12internally, sure, maybe they could do it, but I feel like
1:37:14Apple's going to do the thing
1:37:16that is the most straightforward for them. And without
1:37:18knowing for a fact that Apple has been
1:37:20developing Mac OS and running
1:37:22it on the iPad internally,
1:37:24I have to think that they're going to
1:37:26give people, give developers access to
1:37:28something that looks and behaves like a Mac,
1:37:30but it's got an ARM chip inside it, and
1:37:32they'll probably want it back.
1:37:34See, you're probably right about most
1:37:36of that. One major difference
1:37:38though that we have to consider is that
1:37:40the number of Apple developers
1:37:42is so much bigger now
1:37:44than it was back then. And even if
1:37:46you rule out all the iOS-only developers,
1:37:48which is probably most of them,
1:37:50even just the number of Mac developers
1:37:52is way bigger now than it was in
1:37:542005, 2006. So
1:37:56it wouldn't surprise me if the idea
1:37:58of give people something that they
1:38:00have to then give back at the end is just
1:38:02too large of a scale to do this
1:38:04time.
1:38:06It would just be so, first of all
1:38:08it would probably be incredibly wasteful
1:38:10of all the electronics that you'd be manufacturing
1:38:12and then having to recycle at the end of that.
1:38:14They can let them keep it too.
1:38:16It would be useless for you
1:38:18because it would probably be unsupported by the next
1:38:20actual release version of Mac OS, but you could have them
1:38:22keep it too. But I see what you're saying about the scale.
1:38:24Speaking of scale, didn't they do
1:38:26something similar with Apple TV
1:38:28development? Obviously, again, a smaller
1:38:30user base, right? Yeah, I got one.
1:38:32But it was, you just
1:38:34paid a dollar because they had to charge
1:38:36you something for some kind of accounting reason.
1:38:38So you signed up as
1:38:40you filed a request
1:38:42to get one of these. And if they
1:38:44granted it, and it was through the developer
1:38:46account system, and if they granted your
1:38:48request, you were
1:38:50allowed to buy an Apple TV for one dollar.
1:38:52And I forget
1:38:54whether that was actually before they were
1:38:56available. I don't think it was. I think
1:38:58anyone else could buy them as well, but you just got yours
1:39:00maybe like a week ahead of time or something.
1:39:02It was obviously
1:39:04certainly cheaper, and that was
1:39:06the main issue there.
1:39:08With something like this,
1:39:10it's very possible that
1:39:12they can't really
1:39:14release a whole Mac to the public
1:39:16with
1:39:18very little software available for it.
1:39:20Although the funny thing is, if you look at
1:39:22how much software people run on their Macs that is not
1:39:24made by Apple, I mean, yeah,
1:39:26most of us run stuff that is not
1:39:28made by Apple, but I bet Apple could sell
1:39:30a MacBook Air tomorrow
1:39:32that only ran their software for the
1:39:34first few months that it was out, and it
1:39:36wouldn't sell zero copies.
1:39:38Microsoft ran that experiment. Microsoft did Windows
1:39:40on Arm that had very little support
1:39:42from third-party applications, and
1:39:44it didn't sell that well, but I mean, it was a
1:39:46product that they sold. Yeah, they released it.
1:39:48So I think what's possibly
1:39:50a more likely outcome here is
1:39:52maybe Apple
1:39:54sells a laptop, but only
1:39:56like, they actually sell. This is the first
1:39:58Arm Mac. Here it is.
1:40:00It's a MacBook Air or something, or maybe a
1:40:0213-inch MacBook Pro. It's something like that
1:40:04with, you know, it's
1:40:06like what you said, it's like, whatever the
1:40:08current, you know, case
1:40:10and design, it'll look exactly like
1:40:12what we sell now, because we're not going to put any additional work
1:40:14into this kind of beta product,
1:40:16and it'll just have Arm guts inside
1:40:18of it, and it'll be compatible with almost nothing,
1:40:20but you can use it for development, and maybe they sell
1:40:22it only through the developer portal. Like, maybe
1:40:24you have to log into your developer account to buy it,
1:40:26and then, you know,
1:40:28you sell it to developers, and you,
1:40:30maybe you even call it a
1:40:32beta product, you know, and that way
1:40:34you try to keep it out of the hands of
1:40:36the general public as much as possible,
1:40:38or at least like
1:40:40discourage people in some way from using
1:40:42it. Maybe it can only run software that
1:40:44you sign with your
1:40:46developer ID, and nothing else, like, you know,
1:40:48somehow you make it so that
1:40:50most regular people are not going to want to get their hands
1:40:52on one, but then,
1:40:54you know, otherwise it's a regular product that
1:40:56developers can buy. Something like that, maybe.
1:40:58Well, the way they would make it discourages, they would say
1:41:00like, look, this is not going to be supported
1:41:02by the next version of Mac OS, like, we're not,
1:41:04this is not a supported machine, it's just
1:41:06for you porting your software, from
1:41:08that point on, like, pretend no one
1:41:10gave back those Pentium 4s. Those
1:41:12would have not been supported by later versions
1:41:14of the operating system, unless Apple explicitly
1:41:16did it, like, someone in the chat room was saying that it used
1:41:18BIOS instead of EFI, I forget
1:41:20if that was the case, but that was a weird machine,
1:41:22right? And so, as long as you're upfront
1:41:24about what you're getting into here,
1:41:26and tell people, like, this is not,
1:41:28don't buy this expecting to use this as your Mac,
1:41:30that's not going to happen, this is for your,
1:41:32you know, it's a developer transition kit, it's a dev
1:41:34platform, and like I said with game consoles, it's
1:41:36ample precedent, every
1:41:38console game that's available at launch was developed
1:41:40on a dev kit, on
1:41:42provisional, weird, mongrel hardware
1:41:44that everybody, you know,
1:41:46like the whole world of console development,
1:41:48this is how it works, you get
1:41:50a dev kit, the dev kit
1:41:52often is very, very
1:41:54different from the console that's released to people,
1:41:56you know, in hardware and software, especially
1:41:58if you're going to be there on launch,
1:42:00and, you know, those dev kits,
1:42:02historically, they've actually been very
1:42:04expensive, but they ship them to
1:42:06developers all over the world, and, you know,
1:42:08I don't know if there are more Mac developers
1:42:10than there are console developers, I have to imagine there's more
1:42:12console developers when you add, you know, Sony,
1:42:14Microsoft, and Nintendo all together,
1:42:16there's got to be more of them, and it's a proven
1:42:18system, and then, again
1:42:20in the console world, they charge you thousands
1:42:22of dollars for these dev kits, which are
1:42:24useless to you, essentially, especially if you have
1:42:26one of the early ones before, you know, the
1:42:28console actually launches, because they may
1:42:30be, you know, have major differences
1:42:32to the actual production hardware,
1:42:34but that's how
1:42:36the sausage was made, so, and again, you can't
1:42:38buy, you can't just go into, you know,
1:42:40Target and buy a PS5
1:42:42dev kit, certainly now you can, you can't
1:42:44buy a PS4 dev kit, you have to go through Sony,
1:42:46and you have to be a developer, and, you know, so
1:42:48I feel like there are established systems to this.
1:42:50The developer transition kit was weird
1:42:52because it was a rental and they wanted you to return it,
1:42:54but then, in some ways, it's kind of an appley move
1:42:56where they don't want these things
1:42:58out there in the world, you know what I mean?
1:43:00And that's the firmest
1:43:02way to explain to people, this
1:43:04will not be your Mac for the next five years, like
1:43:06we're not going to support it, just pretend it
1:43:08didn't exist, it is a developer transition
1:43:10kit, it's a kit, it's not a
1:43:12Mac, it's just a kit.
1:43:14The reason I think people come back to the iPad
1:43:16thing is, like I said, I think the only reason
1:43:18they will do that is
1:43:20if they've already been doing that internally, if the way
1:43:22they've developed this is internally,
1:43:24rather than making a dev kit, they're like
1:43:26well, we've already got iPad hardware, so why don't we
1:43:28just use that as a dev kit inside Apple?
1:43:30If they've already done all that work,
1:43:32then yeah, they'll just do that for external
1:43:34people as well, but I
1:43:36question whether they would do that work internally, because
1:43:38internally is exactly where they make these weird
1:43:40transition kit things, so
1:43:42I'll be very surprised if the iPad
1:43:44is the transition kit, but if it is,
1:43:46that's got to be something they've been
1:43:48doing internally for, you know,
1:43:50for a long time, and they're just
1:43:52saying, we're going to leverage that work,
1:43:54why would we repeat that work
1:43:56with something that looks more like a Mac?
1:43:58Certainly the iPads are fast enough, and we've
1:44:00already got this cool keyboard thing, and we're all
1:44:02set to go, it's already a weird
1:44:04not so floppy laptop,
1:44:06so let's just go with that, but
1:44:08we'll see. Gruber had a big post
1:44:10about how un-Apple-like it seems,
1:44:12and how it would be weird to have a touch screen with an OS
1:44:14that isn't touch-based, and
1:44:16when I read that Gruber post,
1:44:18often on
1:44:20Daring Fireball there's a post that I will read,
1:44:22and nod my head, and I'm like, I agree with every single
1:44:24part of this, but when I get to
1:44:26the end of it, I start to have flashbacks
1:44:28of the earlier Daring Fireball post from years ago
1:44:30where I agree with every single part of it, but it
1:44:32turned out, like, all of it is sound, logical
1:44:34reasoning, but it turned out to be wrong for
1:44:36like, because like, Apple gonna Apple,
1:44:38sometimes they just do something different,
1:44:40it's like, boy, I agree with that post,
1:44:42everything made perfect sense, and it does,
1:44:44but it's like, yeah, we just decide
1:44:46to do something different, it's like, oh well,
1:44:48that's the difficulty of predicting
1:44:50an Apple, it's just an organization full of people, and
1:44:52sometimes decisions happen one way or another
1:44:54based on things you don't know about, or just sometimes
1:44:56whim, like, it's like when you do,
1:44:58you're trying to make a decision, do the big pros and cons
1:45:00column, it can be misleading,
1:45:02and you're like, look, I've got all these pros
1:45:04and very few cons, but like, the
1:45:06second con down is may cause death,
1:45:08and you look at the list, and it's like,
1:45:10if you did a blog post
1:45:12that just showed the pros, you'd be like,
1:45:14wow, this is a slam dunk, look at all these
1:45:16pros, they all make sense, they're all logical,
1:45:18but if you don't dwell on this one con that's like
1:45:20may cause death, eh,
1:45:22you know, so anyway, I'm not saying the iPad
1:45:24developer transition kit may cause
1:45:26death, but, you know, it really depends on how much
1:45:28you feel, how you feel about
1:45:30that keyboard, and, you know,
1:45:32touching the screen for you on your Mac.
1:45:36received a text message
1:45:38from someone inside your house, John,
1:45:40and it said something along the lines of
1:45:42I have never been more tempted to touch
1:45:44John's screen than I am right now.
1:45:46It
1:45:48made me so happy.
1:45:50And I believe I told this individual
1:45:52that they should not,
1:45:54and even though you were bad cop that
1:45:56week, I still didn't think that they should.
1:45:58That's how you know I love you, John.
1:46:00No, no one should touch my screen.
1:46:02Why would anyone do that?
1:46:04I don't know. I have no idea. I can't
1:46:06think of a thousand different reasons, John.
1:46:08Was that on, I forget, was that on this show or on Rekt
1:46:10ifs where I talked about it on my screen? It must have been the last episode on this show, right?
1:46:12It was this show, you mentioned that it's never been touched.
1:46:14Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
1:46:16Why break the streak? I can fix that.
1:46:18No, you can't, you're way over there.
1:46:20Social distancing is saving my screen.
1:46:22Oh my god.
1:46:24Thanks to our sponsor this week,
1:46:26Notion, and please give to the charities we link to in the show notes.
1:46:28And finally, thank you to our new members.
1:46:30That's really great if you signed up, and we really appreciate it.
1:46:32So thank you very much, and we will talk to you next week.
1:46:34Now the show is over,
1:46:36they didn't even mean to begin,
1:46:38'cause it was accidental.
1:46:40Oh, it was accidental.
1:46:42John didn't do any research,
1:46:44Marco and Casey wouldn't let him,
1:46:46'cause it was accidental.
1:46:48Oh, it was accidental.
1:46:50And you can't do any research,
1:46:52Marco and Casey wouldn't let him,
1:46:54'cause it was accidental.
1:46:56Oh, it was accidental.
1:46:58And you can't do any research,
1:47:00Marco and Casey wouldn't let him,
1:47:02'cause it was accidental.
1:47:04And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
1:47:08And if you're into Twitter,
1:47:10you can follow them at
1:47:13C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
1:47:17So that's Casey List M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M
1:47:21N-T Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C
1:47:26U-S-A-C-Racusa
1:47:29It's accidental.
1:47:32They didn't mean to.
1:47:35Accidental.
1:47:37Tech podcast, so long.
1:47:42Now we're in the after show and I can tell the most obnoxious/funny/still obnoxious idea
1:47:49I had for the pricing tiers, you know, so Tiff came up with the 8/16/32 thing
1:47:54and we were like, "Oh, we didn't want to do that, let's just start simple, blah blah blah."
1:47:57Wait a second. What if we have a thing where the more members we get,
1:48:03the higher pricing tiers you unlock, right?
1:48:07So to be clear, it's not like when Pinboard launched,
1:48:11it's like every member that subscribed added like a cent or a tenth of a cent or something to the price
1:48:17for the next member. So it's not that. You're saying you could still sign up,
1:48:22but you would have the ability to pay more money as everything went up.
1:48:27It's not even that. The people would sign up and the original would just have the one pricing tier
1:48:31and they'd all sign up at that one pricing tier, but then after you get a hundred members,
1:48:35you unlock the second pricing tier. Now those people who already signed up,
1:48:38they got their pricing tier and it's still there, but they've unlocked the ability for future people
1:48:43to pay more if they want.
1:48:46It's totally nonsensical.
1:48:48The more members you get, the higher pricing tiers get unlocked.
1:48:52It doesn't mean anyone ever has to pay them, they just get unlocked.
1:48:55I see a lot of stuff like this in video games. You're like, "Unlock harder difficulties?"
1:48:58It's like, "Why am I unlocking a harder difficulty? I have just enough trouble getting through this."
1:49:02"Congratulations! You've unlocked nightmare mode. I want to unlock nightmare mode.
1:49:06It took me a week to get through the hard mode."
1:49:09Again, Tiff enjoys that. But anyway, I thought it was funny,
1:49:12the idea of the more people sign up, the more you unlock,
1:49:15I think it would be a curiosity to say, "Will anyone?"
1:49:18If you unlock the $128 a month mode, it's like, "Will anyone sign up for that?"
1:49:22And then each week we could say, "So far, no takers in the $128 a month."
1:49:26"But if we get more members, we'll unlock $256."
1:49:30One of the biggest reasons why we decided not to have multiple pricing tiers
1:49:37is eight bucks a month, we recognize that's slightly premium
1:49:42for what we're offering, for what other podcasts and YouTube channels charge for their Patreons.
1:49:47We're right at or slightly above the basic level.
1:49:51I feel like $5 and $10 a month are very common price points for these kinds of things.
1:49:55So $8 is right there in the middle.
1:49:57I think I would have a hard time sleeping at night if somebody was paying us $64 a month for this.
1:50:05I wouldn't have any trouble at all. I was the proponent of the open text field.
1:50:09Just type a number. Type a number you want to pay us per month and we will accept that.
1:50:13No one's going to actually do that, so this is just funny things to think about.
1:50:17But then again, we thought that idea of putting wheels on a shirt for $4 actually was funny too.
1:50:21And that was the most popular shirt, because people are weird.
1:50:24That's true.
1:50:25Anyway, we're starting simple, but we have a lot of ideas.
1:50:29Real-time follow-up with regard to shirts, by the way.
1:50:31If I recall correctly, Alex Cox sent me a text message at exactly 8.01 Eastern time saying, "Is the shirt still available?"
1:50:42Which I thought was extremely well played.
1:50:44I was very grumbly, but I thought it was very well done.
1:50:48But I definitely did get a surprising amount of tweets that did not strike me as trolling.
1:50:54People saying, "Oh gosh, I did forget. I knew I was going to forget, and I forgot."
1:50:59So all you people who are responsible and actually buy when we ask you to, I appreciate that.
1:51:05Because you will be surprised how many people say, "Oh, oh no. Oh, it was me this month."
1:51:11Or this season, I guess I should say. "It was me. It was me this time."
1:51:14It was almost me this time.
1:51:16I always go down to the wire.
1:51:18It has been me. Like I've said, in the past, I've forgotten to buy our own shirts.
1:51:22My kids wear them. And sometimes you're like, "Oh, I'll get around to it."
1:51:26What did I miss? I think I missed the... Remember we did the multicolor shirts where it was all different colors?
1:51:31I forgot to order those.
1:51:33Yeah. I ordered all my stuff for this within eight hours of it ending.
1:51:38I think I was the first of us because we all use the same account so we can get it at cost.
1:51:44And I think I was the first one of the three of us to do it.
1:51:46And I was, I thought, eight hours out.
1:51:48So maybe I was more than eight hours, but I certainly didn't think I was...
1:51:52I didn't have a lot of extra time.
1:51:54I definitely procrastinated.
1:51:56Normally I order one of everything at the beginning of any sale because what you don't want is for somebody to get to the site and see that there's been zero sales.
1:52:04That just looks bad.
1:52:06I always want to put in any of our orders first before we announce it to the public so that way they get there and say, "Oh, look, people are buying this. It's happening."
1:52:15Because you don't want there to be a big zero there.
1:52:17That's why we all signed up for ATB member accounts before you came to the site.
1:52:21Yep, I signed up for the first one before I told anybody, "Hey, here's the link."
1:52:25I signed up for the second one and then I deleted it.
1:52:27Yep.
1:52:29Hey, you got a test if account deletion works.
1:52:31Yeah, well, you could just like...
1:52:33Now that we've deleted those numbers, you can just assign two to the audio increment column that probably has like seven in it for my thing now.
1:52:40There is no auto increment column in this. This is a random ID.
1:52:43Such a weirdo.
1:52:45What?
1:52:47There's the UUID people and there's the auto increment people and I am an auto increment person. Sorry.
1:52:52To be fair, this is not a UUID. It's a random integer. There's a difference.
1:52:56Why are you doing... That's making me even more upset.
1:52:59Well, everyone, it's your job to have so many members sign up that it shows Marko why it's a bad idea to use a random integer as a unique key in a table.
1:53:07Why?
1:53:09It's a really big integer.
1:53:11Yeah, that's what everybody says.
1:53:13There's a reason UUIDs exist.
1:53:15It's a really big integer. It'll be fine.
1:53:17Everybody, now we need to have what, like two and a half billion sign ups and then we will show Marko the error of his ways.
1:53:25It's not 32 bit.
1:53:2764 bit, sure. Okay, well, anyway, there's a reason UUIDs exist. Doesn't MySQL have native support for UUID columns?
1:53:32Probably.
1:53:34Well, you're just making it... Yeah, okay. All right.
1:53:36There's a lot of support for native storage of slightly complex value types, but you're generally better off not using that support because it's weird.
1:53:45When they say native, though, it's probably all strings under the covers anyway, knowing MySQL.
1:53:49Yeah, right.
1:53:51It's not actually native, packed binary support for UUIDs like real databases have. It's always just like, oh, well, there's some code that will generate a thing, but we store it as a string in a var char col.
1:54:00I just went to our member admin page. We don't have anything on there yet, huh?
1:54:04Nothing.
1:54:05I want to see account, man. You got to give me account.
1:54:07I can tell you. We have 117 members so far.
1:54:10Hey, that's excellent. I'm really pleased by that.
1:54:12How many people are on the stream? Like 400?
1:54:15Oh, that's brutal.
1:54:17I just want to know. I feel like the people who listen live are absolute biggest fans because some of them are up in the middle of the night or in early morning in weird times because of time zones.
1:54:27So if you're listening to the live stream and listen to all this BS and everything, you are very likely to be a super fan who would at least consider becoming a member.
1:54:35So this is like the best case scenario for signups.
1:54:39I mean, in all fairness, we have a like 25% conversion rate among this group.
1:54:43All right. That's what I'm saying. That's the best case. Yeah.
1:54:46Obviously, 25% of listeners will not sign up.
1:54:49That would be amazing. I don't think I've ever seen any kind of optional payment for anything that was above like 10%.
1:54:57Yeah, you won't break double digits for sure. I'm not sure we're going to break 1%.
1:55:02This is another thing we've discussed endlessly. Optimism versus pessimism. How many people are going to want to sign up for the membership? So we'll see.
1:55:08Yeah. Casey basically thinks no one's going to sign up. I think everyone's going to sign up. And Jon's kind of in the middle.
1:55:14That's an exaggeration.
1:55:16I was the most pessimistic for a long time until we started talking to other people who had membership programs and learned what their conversions are.
1:55:24And I'm like, "All right. Well, I feel like we could probably do about as well as them."
1:55:28So I was super pessimistic in the beginning, but I've been coming around. So you're right. I am kind of in the middle now.
1:55:35Yeah. I would love to get 5%. That's kind of my target of like, "I think we can probably do it."
1:55:41I don't think it's going to be super easy to get 5%, but I don't think it's out of reach.
1:55:45I think that's kind of my goal.
1:55:48Marco, ever the optimist.
1:55:50But that would be a pretty good goal. But if you look at Hello Internet, other nearby shows, and their proportion of...
1:55:58But it's different because everyone offers different stuff. Some people offer nothing, and it's just pay to support us.
1:56:04Can we tell the live streamers the thing that I didn't mention in the show that I desperately wanted to, but you didn't want to?
1:56:09Oh, the Ask ATP priority thing? That was a terrible idea.
1:56:12No, the CB thing.
1:56:14Oh, yeah, yeah.
1:56:16Yes, I can mention it?
1:56:18Yeah, yeah, go for it.
1:56:19I think that's fair.
1:56:20So someone mentioned in the chat before, discounts on merch. I think that we're absolutely going to do that.
1:56:25We don't have a merch sale now, so it's irrelevant, which is part of why we didn't want to talk about it.
1:56:29But if you're listening to the live stream right now and you're wondering, "Hey, are they going to have merch discount codes for members?"
1:56:35Yeah, we are planning to do that.
1:56:37Yeah, we already worked it out with the Cotton Bureau and everything, but the problem was that we didn't want to launch a membership immediately after our merch sale ended and say, "Next time you sell merch, you can get a little discount."
1:56:52I mean, I wanted to do that because I think people understand the arrow of time and can say, "Yeah, I understand. You didn't launch the membership until after the sale was over."
1:56:59This is not ideal timing, okay? Coronavirus kind of forced our hand a little bit on this.
1:57:05We'd been talking about it for a while, so things could kind of rush. But anyway, if you're wondering if I sign up for a membership, is there a possibility of discounts on merch in the future? The answer is yes.
1:57:13Yeah, and we know the timing on this is weird. Right now is not a great time to be launching a whole new thing.
1:57:21I was like, "Hey, everyone give us extra money!" Not the greatest time.
1:57:25But we're in it for the long haul here. There's no time like the present, so we understand that it's weird.
1:57:33Everything's a bit weird now.
1:57:35And we didn't want to take any time out of our WWDC show to do it then.
1:57:40Yeah, definitely not.
1:57:41So we wanted to have it in place by then because we know we're going to be very busy with all the WWDC content for probably weeks afterwards.
1:57:49So yeah, it's a whole thing. There were a lot of considerations that went into this timing, even though it seems like it sucks.
1:57:55Basically, it sucks less than other timing would have sucked. That would be nearby.
1:58:00I would like to state for the record that I am not above... I'll call them stretch goals for lack of a better terminology,
1:58:08but if Jon really does want to play Destiny with Marco and me and do it in some way that we can have people watch it on Twitch or something like that,
1:58:17I don't know what the number is, but if enough people become members, okay, fine, sure. You want to make me suffer? Fine.
1:58:23I'm volunteering both of you for this. The only reason we're not doing it right now is because I don't know how.
1:58:28That's the only reason we're not doing it right now. And Tiff probably knows how.
1:58:32We'll do that as soon as we can make Cooking with Jon. I wanted to make a cooking show with Jon, not me cooking, just filming Jon cooking.
1:58:41That's harder than what I... But I'm just explaining you just need to show screen sharing. Now it's just a thing with cameras in a kitchen.
1:58:48I know. But still, imagine how good Cooking with Jon would be.
1:58:52No, I disagree. If you're going to do it, then it needs to be Jon tries to teach Casey how to cook.
1:58:58Oh, yeah. Well, that's the whole Destiny angle is I'm trying to teach you how to play Destiny. That's the funny part.
1:59:04Jon teaches Casey to cook over Zoom.
1:59:07Right? Do you remember when we were all at Jon's house and I shredded or grated a cheese unsatisfactorily?
1:59:13Oh, yes.
1:59:14And he gave me like 10 minutes of crap about it.
1:59:16Like someone who had never been in a kitchen before.
1:59:18That's about accurate. And so can you imagine, like I will commit that I don't know what the number is, but I am ready, willing, well, maybe not able, but I'm ready and willing to figure out how to make this all possible so that if we get enough members...
1:59:34No, the best thing would be to do what Queer Eye does, where like Jon teaches Casey something about cooking and then Casey has to do it and Jon has to watch, but he can't say anything.
1:59:45That's brutal.
1:59:49Anyway, you're distracting from my Destiny idea, which I think is much more feasible.
1:59:53And Tiff knows how to do all this game screaming stuff. And maybe when the PS5 is out, like we'll set something up and we can figure it out.
1:59:59But that's like in the distant future when we get our act together, we have all sorts of wacky ideas for things that don't make sense to do, except for if there's this group of people who are like paying to be members.
2:00:10And that would be like, you know, member specific. Again, like for the chat room people, if you have ideas, even though we've discussed like probably all of them, send them in because it's like you're essentially voting by like, not that this is democracy, but like if a million people say they want this or don't want that, that will influence what we may or may not do in the future.
2:00:28So if you have ideas about member specific stuff that you want, feel free. The only thing that's really off the table is removing things from the show for the free people.
2:00:36Because as we said, we don't want to do that. So like, you know, oh, I think you should make the after show, put it behind a paywall. No, that we're not doing that.
2:00:44Yeah, we thought of that. But we said, let's do it. Right. So, you know, that's not that. Again, if 90% of our listeners become members, you know, we'll put the whole show behind a paywall, but that's not gonna happen. So don't worry about it.
2:00:57Yeah. Some of you are asking for the unedited live stream, similar to what the incomparable does with their bootleg feeds. That is something we've talked about.
2:01:06We've actually talked about that more than arguably anything else.
2:01:10I really don't want to do it because I think it sucks. But if I don't know.
2:01:15Yeah, you can imagine listeners in the live stream, you know why Marco doesn't want to do it because it's gonna sound crappy and it's not gonna be edited and like, you know, everyone who listens to the live stream knows what the live stream is like. I was in favor of it because it's a thing we're doing for free anyway.
2:01:29And we would still do it for free. By the way, we would still stream it for free. Like everyone who's listening now, you'd still be able to listen for free and do whatever you want. But this would be like, what if you're not awake at that time and you still want to hear the garbage live stream?
2:01:41There would be a feed with the garbage live stream in it for members. But maybe nobody wants that. I don't know. Like anyway, we started simple. We're thinking of things. We'll figure it out as we go along. But if that's something that you want, write in and tell us. Baby steps.
2:01:57We still gotta figure all this stuff out and get it churning along and see how many support requests we're gonna get from people who can't figure out the website or whatever.
2:02:08[beeping]