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535: My Computer Supports Math

 

00:00:00   All right, we should start by pointing out we have done another members special. Because I'm an idiot

00:00:07   and I like getting my feelings hurt, I decided I would roll the dice and see what John and Marco

00:00:15   thought about John's of Bleecker Street, which is my beloved preferred pizza institution in Manhattan.

00:00:22   And so what we did was we spent a truly absurd amount of money to get Goldbelly to send us

00:00:30   two not particularly large pizzas per family and do that overnight from Manhattan to our respective

00:00:37   households. And then we cooked them up much like we did with the, I almost said frozen meals but

00:00:41   don't call them frozen meals, call them TV dinners. And so they all arrived at our desks at about the

00:00:45   same moment. We talked about it on air. I will not tell you if my feelings were hurt or not, but I

00:00:51   will tell you that it was an adventure to say the least. And so if you are not a member you can go to

00:00:57   ATP.fm/join. You can join for as little as one month, although we'd love for you to stick around.

00:01:03   If you join you get access to all the member stuff that's ever happened and we're up to like, I don't

00:01:07   know, six-ish episodes I think, something like that now. And so you get access to all that. You could

00:01:13   grab them all and then cancel your membership. We're not slimy, we let you do that. You'll hurt

00:01:18   our hearts and our feelings, but you can do that. That is allowed. And so, but I think once you check

00:01:24   out all the perks you will love it. So please check out ATP.fm/join. Marco, John, anything to add.

00:01:30   - If you could imagine what it would be like for Casey to try to convince two New Yorkers with

00:01:38   strong opinions on pizza to try his pizza, you can see why this was a good episode. I suggest,

00:01:47   if you've been on the fence before about membership for whatever reason, you aren't a member yet,

00:01:52   but you like when we argue about non-technical things. - There was plenty of that.

00:01:57   - Yeah, even just discuss non-technical things. These kind of member specials and this one in

00:02:02   particular, it's a good venue for that. - Indeed. Come for the pizza talk, stay for

00:02:07   the bagel talk. And also I would like to point out just one more time, I probably made this point on

00:02:12   the special, although I might have forgotten. My birth certificate says state of New York,

00:02:16   my friend. Only two thirds of your host, their birth certificate states state of New York,

00:02:22   and Marco is not one of them. I'm just gonna put that out there.

00:02:24   - Yeah, but which one of us lives here? Oh, that's fair.

00:02:26   - Yeah, that's fair. - Oh, that's right.

00:02:27   - Yeah, so we're all imposters one way or another.

00:02:29   - When's the last time you lived there? You lived in New York, Casey?

00:02:32   - I lived in New York, late 80s, I think. - Right, John?

00:02:37   - Yeah, something like that. - I go there every year at least.

00:02:40   I'm like, Casey, did your parents live in New York when you were born? Or did they just drive there

00:02:45   to give birth to you? - Is that a thing that people do?

00:02:49   - I'm not sure. I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to be offended. And to be honest, I started it by

00:02:53   throwing you under the bus earlier, but I'm not sure how offended I should be. No, they were

00:02:58   living, I believe they were living in Fort Montgomery at the time, which is nearish Newburg.

00:03:02   And I was born in Newburg, which is probably, I'm now probably giving away some sort of top secret

00:03:07   scam thing. - Yeah, you're not supposed to

00:03:08   tell people the answers to your security questions. - Yeah, so there you go, whoopsies.

00:03:11   But anyways, but no, they live in New York. - There's nothing in Newburg for any security

00:03:14   question to ask about. - I didn't know where any of those

00:03:16   places were, so I assume they're all upstate, so nevermind.

00:03:18   - Yeah, they're not upstate by most standards, but by both of your standards.

00:03:23   - Hold on, Newburg is definitely upstate. - Oh, come on, it's not that far.

00:03:27   - Marco lived in Brooklyn long enough to adopt the Long Island definition of upstate.

00:03:31   - It's like a two hour drive north. - No, it is. Is it really?

00:03:35   - Yes. - No way, a two hour drive from

00:03:38   Fire Island? - Everything is a two hour drive

00:03:40   when you go upstate. - Yeah, well, we established that

00:03:42   frickin' Manhattan is two hours from Fire Island. - That's what I'm saying, yeah, no.

00:03:45   - No, no, that doesn't, no, so like, how about this, John's a bleaker, let's just take that as

00:03:49   a landmark, let's see how far we are from Newburg, give me a second.

00:03:52   - Is this as the helicopter flies, or if you actually have to take roads?

00:03:55   - No, no, no, I'm doing this on Google Maps. It's under an hour and a half, 70 miles.

00:04:00   - Wait, hold on, at what time of day? - Right now, right now.

00:04:05   - At 8 p.m. - It's also 8 o'clock at night,

00:04:07   right, on a Monday. - Yeah, try it anytime while the sun's up.

00:04:10   - I don't know, man, so you consider like the lake that we used to go to, you consider that

00:04:15   like deeply upstate, I assume? - I wouldn't use the word deeply,

00:04:17   but it's unquestionably upstate. - I guess to me, I'm not trying to say

00:04:22   I'm right, I am not trying to say I'm right, but to me, I feel like anything within a couple

00:04:27   of hours of the city is barely upstate. - No, no, no, no.

00:04:31   - So where's the dividing line, Harlem? - Philadelphia is within a couple hours

00:04:35   of the city, I mean, this makes no sense. - No, okay, no, no, no, okay, okay, that's

00:04:39   fair. So where's the dividing line, is it 125th Street, for Christ's sakes?

00:04:41   - No. - I mean, it depends on the

00:04:44   definition, but you know, and different people have different definitions. The one definition

00:04:47   every New Yorker can agree upon is upstate begins north of them, you know, no one thinks they live

00:04:52   upstate. However, if you kind of, you know, plot like, you know, the bell curve of like, all right,

00:04:57   well, where does upstate really begin to most people's opinions? You know, it certainly begins

00:05:04   at least above like, you know, Westchester or Rockland Counties, and possibly even lower than

00:05:09   that, depending on who you ask. - So you would, this is gonna sound argumentative,

00:05:14   I really don't mean it that way, so you would say Westchester County is, you personally,

00:05:18   Marco, would say is or is not upstate? - I personally would say no, but it's like,

00:05:22   but it's not the city, like, I would never say it's the city. It's definitely not.

00:05:26   And it's not quite upstate, but it's like, it's certainly like a boundary, you know,

00:05:30   upstate, it's kind of like the way the atmosphere of the Earth transitions to space.

00:05:36   It's not like a clear line. - I think that's reasonable,

00:05:40   actually, that's where I'm fuzzy, because I don't get it.

00:05:42   - When I was a kid growing up on Long Island, if we visited Marco, where Marco's house is

00:05:46   in Westchester, I would say that Marco lives upstate.

00:05:51   - Literally everything is upstate, like, I don't take that for anything.

00:05:55   - I know, I'm just telling you what the, and I recognize that that's a very limited perspective,

00:06:00   like that classic New Yorker cover that shows the map of the United States with the New Yorker's

00:06:04   view of it, and it doesn't make sense. And today, I would probably say anything that's above West

00:06:09   chester, but I still feel in my bones the idea of, like, going to visit Marco would mean driving

00:06:15   upstate. - And certainly,

00:06:16   by the time you get, like, once you're more than 20 or 30 miles from the city, I think the argument

00:06:23   is, yeah, you're pretty much upstate. - So 20 or 30 miles, you said miles or minutes?

00:06:28   - It's just a ballpark, but I'm gonna say, yeah, like, something on the order of, like,

00:06:31   20 or 30 miles, I'd say you're upstate. - Well, so now that we got that argument

00:06:36   out of the way, I feel like we've accomplished something, so yeah, if you wanna hear more of that,

00:06:39   if you wanna hear more of that atp.fm/join, it was an adventure.

00:06:44   All right, let's do some follow-up. Apparently, this is the follow-up that will not die. I mean,

00:06:50   the follow-up that keeps continuing. Tell me about the latest developments with your

00:06:54   Kobo and your e-readers. - I think this is it. I know I say this--

00:06:58   - You said that the last two weeks! - I know, I did!

00:07:00   I think this is it. All right, so I mentioned last episode, I had switched from the Kobo Sage

00:07:05   to the slightly smaller Kobo Libra 2 device, and a couple of people pointed out that Libra 2

00:07:12   doesn't support Dropbox, which I didn't know at the time, I'd only used it for, like, a day,

00:07:18   and so I hadn't noticed, oh, this feature that I like, this Dropbox feature that the Sage has,

00:07:23   the Libra 2 doesn't actually have it, and I was a little disappointed by that, and I thought--

00:07:28   - Just a pause. - Right.

00:07:29   - Remind me, what was the draw for Dropbox integration? 'Cause that is not something I feel

00:07:34   like I have ever wanted on the Kindle, but I have a feeling you're using it for a purpose that I

00:07:40   either am not expecting or just not something that I do, so remind me, what's the purpose there?

00:07:45   - Well, the main purpose, and the reason it's on the Sage, the Sage supports a stylus where you can,

00:07:49   like, draw or take notes on pages, the main reason I think it's there is so you can, like,

00:07:54   export your notes that you make into something that's easily accessed elsewhere, but what I use

00:08:00   it for is, I have ebooks from various sources that, you know, like, sometimes if you buy,

00:08:06   like, not pirated, if you buy, like, an O'Reilly one or something like that, like, sometimes you'll

00:08:10   buy an EPUB file, or you'll buy something that is downloadable as an EPUB file without DRM,

00:08:16   like, you know, a lot of, like, you know, the, like, tech instructional stuff a lot of times

00:08:19   comes this way, I bought a couple of ebooks recently that came that way, and so you'll have

00:08:23   an EPUB file, like, all right, how do I read this easily? And you can, you know, drag it into Apple,

00:08:27   or Apple Books or whatever, or I can drop it in this Dropbox folder that I just have a Dropbox

00:08:32   folder now for the Kobo, and any EPUB files or PDFs, I can stick there, and then I can get them

00:08:37   on the Kobo and read them that way, so that's my main use. - So is there, is there no, and I'm

00:08:42   viewing everything through the lens of Kindle, 'cause it's the only thing I'm familiar with,

00:08:46   with the Kindle, you get, like, a bespoke email address, I think at, like, kindle.com or something

00:08:50   like that, and you can email a PDF or an EPUB or what have you to there, and then it will send you

00:08:55   an email back and be like, are you sure you wanna do this? - No, no, no, it doesn't, no, well,

00:08:58   you can, like, you can, you can, like, give it, like, permitted email address sources to say,

00:09:05   like, if I sent it from this, and that's how Instapaper's Kindle integration works,

00:09:08   a long time ago, I reverse engineered the Kindle Mobi format, the way they were doing,

00:09:15   like, newspaper and magazine periodical support, 'cause they would devise this, like, table of

00:09:20   content structure out of it, and so I reverse engineered that, figured out what they were doing,

00:09:24   and then did it with Instapaper, so that Instapaper would basically generate, and it still works this

00:09:28   way, it would generate a Kindle format periodical file and send it to that email address that you

00:09:35   would enter in the Instapaper control panel for, you know? Anyway, it's a little bit tricky with

00:09:39   Kindles because, at least back then, I don't know if this is still the case, I think it might be,

00:09:44   but back then, Kindles didn't support EPUB, they had their own custom format that was based on the

00:09:48   ancient Mobi or Moba Pocket format, and if you, and you could email documents to their service,

00:09:54   and it would actually convert them to Kindle format on Amazon's end, and then send them over

00:09:58   to Kindle. And Kobo, as far as I know, doesn't need to do that, it seems like the device just

00:10:04   natively opens EPUBs without any other effort involved. - But my point is, my point in

00:10:08   interrupting earlier was that there exists such a thing with Kobo as well, there's some email you

00:10:13   can send things to? - No, so the way Kobo normally, as far as I can tell, I looked for that, as far

00:10:18   as I can tell, to send stuff to it electronically, the only way to do it is this Dropbox integration

00:10:23   on the Sage, and apparently, the only other way to get stuff on it is to connect it to your

00:10:29   computer with a USB cable, and it shows up as a USB storage device, and you can drag files over

00:10:33   that way, which is fine, but not great, you know? So anyway, so I posted about this on Macedon,

00:10:38   and a few people, including Stefano Castantini, wrote in that there's actually a hack that,

00:10:45   I mean, and I use the term hack very loosely, it's very easy, there's this third-party hack app

00:10:51   called Nickel Menu for Kobos, and the way you hack this is you connect it to your computer as a

00:10:57   drive, and you just put this file on the drive, and when you eject it, the Kobo sees this file,

00:11:04   reboots, and so it must have some kind of checking for plugins kind of system, that's how it feels,

00:11:11   it feels like an OS plugin that's kind of unofficial, but the Kobo just loads it,

00:11:16   and then once you load this plugin, then you have an extra menu on the bottom of your Kobo,

00:11:21   and there's a few little incantations you can put in this config file, one of which will enable

00:11:25   Dropbox support on the Libre II, and there's also, the Libre II version is super easy,

00:11:31   there's apparently a couple other methods you can use for other older Kobos, anyway,

00:11:35   all this is to say, in five seconds, I had Dropbox support hacked onto my Libre II by

00:11:41   basically sticking this file on the USB drive version of it, and that was it, that's all I had

00:11:46   to do, so I'll put the links in the show notes, obviously, when you're installing random hacks

00:11:52   from the internet onto a device, it is worth considering, what is the security service area

00:11:58   that I'm exposing here, and so what I did for the Dropbox support was, I have a secondary

00:12:04   Dropbox account that only has access to one folder, and then I share it with my primary account,

00:12:10   so that way, 'cause I figure, if this third-party thing ends up being untrustworthy in the future,

00:12:15   or presently, or whatever, what do they have access to? Well, they have access to a handful

00:12:19   of ebooks, and that's it, a Dropbox account that has access to none of my other stuff,

00:12:25   so the service area, I decided was small, obviously, you can make your own decisions

00:12:29   on that, it's still a device on your network and stuff like that, so that's up to you, but

00:12:32   I decided this hack was worth it, and now I have Dropbox, and it's great, there's a couple other

00:12:37   things that it enables that I don't really need, so I'm just really using it for that.

00:12:41   - That's cool, so we'll have some links that Marco provided in the show notes. John, we have all

00:12:46   sorts of genuinely interesting news and feedback and whatnot with regard to multiple displays on

00:12:51   M1 and M2 Macs, we were talking about, I don't remember when in the episode we were talking about

00:12:56   it, we were talking about how the MacBook Air doesn't support more than one external display,

00:13:01   and we were trying to theorize whether or not that was Apple being jerks and doing that in software,

00:13:07   or is it really a hardware problem or something, so what is the verdict on this, John?

00:13:11   - In the context of the 15-inch MacBook Air, people were saying,

00:13:15   writing and saying, "15-inch MacBook Air is great, except in corporate environments,

00:13:19   people really want two displays, and if the M1 and M2 only support one." So,

00:13:24   Mathis Woolworth says, "The M1 and M2 chips only have two display controllers,

00:13:29   one for the built-in display and one that can run the external display. The display controllers are

00:13:32   not part of the GPU, they are separate bits on the SoC. On the Mac Mini, the internal display

00:13:37   controller signal is piped out to a chip that converts it to HDMI, so that's why the Mac Mini

00:13:41   has got an HDMI port on the back. The controller that drives the internal display seems not to be

00:13:45   able to output display port signals. It seems from die shots that Apple is using a lot of die area

00:13:50   for the display controllers." Richard Stevens continues that Hector Martin, who does, Asahi

00:13:56   Linux, how do you pronounce that? - Asashi? I think it's Hector Marcan, I believe.

00:14:02   - Oh yeah, I love this about Richard Stevens, says Hector Martin, but I think you're right. Anyway,

00:14:07   A-S-A-H-I Linux. It's the Linux that runs on your M1 and M2 Macs, right? And they've been figuring

00:14:16   out how to tap into all of the hardware features of M1 and M2 SoCs, including the GPUs and display

00:14:24   drivers and everything, so they know a lot about these internals. Anyway, Hector had a bunch of

00:14:28   tweets that were since deleted, but Richard found them in the Internet Archive. Here's what Hector

00:14:32   had to say. "Why does the M1/M2 only support one external display? Because Apple's display

00:14:38   controllers are so fancy pants that the M1 Macs has more silicon dedicated to display controllers

00:14:43   than CPU cores. They can't fit any more of these on the cheap chips. Compare the display area and

00:14:49   the die shot below to the power CPU cores, excluding the L2 cache. One display controller is larger than

00:14:56   two power CPU cores combined with enough spare leftover to cover the efficiency CPUs as well.

00:15:02   M1 Macs has four of them, plus the internal one, which is on top of the CPUs not annotated in the

00:15:07   die shot." So I actually additionally annotated the die shot that's in our little show notes here.

00:15:12   We'll try to put a link to the old Twitter thread and the show notes for you to look at.

00:15:16   You can see that the display controllers are pretty large, especially when, again,

00:15:20   when you compare them to the power CPU cores. Is that performance? Performance, power, whatever,

00:15:25   like the good ones, the fast ones, the big ones, right? The efficiency CPU cores are really small.

00:15:31   I'm not reading that from the text because in the text it's PCPU and eCPU as abbreviations.

00:15:35   It's kind of cheating because like, "Oh, just exclude the cache." Well, you can't really

00:15:39   exclude the cache because you're including what looks to be very regular memory region

00:15:44   in the display controls. But anyway, all this is to say is this is a hardware limitations

00:15:48   of the SOC and Apple decided to make it this way. And one reasonable theory about why they decided

00:15:56   to make this way is that the display controls are surprisingly large. When you're budgeting out how

00:16:00   much space and therefore how much power and how much cost you have to allocate to all different

00:16:05   functionality on an SOC, maybe for your low-end chip you decide, "Eh, two display controllers

00:16:11   should be enough." And so you burn almost as much area as half of the power CPU cores. I did it

00:16:19   again. Performance CPU cores as you did in the other. Now, it doesn't mean that Apple can't

00:16:25   change their mind about that. It could be that having the M1 and M2 both be like this, only

00:16:31   support two external displays with two display controllers, has garnered enough complaints that

00:16:36   the M3 may make a different choice. We'll see. So stay tuned for that. But anyway, on the M1 and M2,

00:16:41   the display support is not Apple artificially limiting you to something. It is a decision

00:16:46   Apple made when they designed the M1 and M2 SOC in terms of allocating space for drivers. But

00:16:52   that doesn't mean, as we've talked about in many past shows and we will now talk about again,

00:16:56   that you can't actually have two displays attached to your M1 and M2. How can that be?

00:17:01   So Edward Munn writes and says, "It is possible to get the M1/M2 MacBook Air to support multiple

00:17:05   external monitors by using a dock that supports DisplayLink with the correct drivers installed.

00:17:10   DisplayLink does have its drawbacks, however. You can only watch DRM content in a browser by

00:17:14   disabling hardware rendering. You cannot watch content within the TV app, and a message displays

00:17:18   when logging in saying that the screen is being monitored." Oh, besides that! Yeah. I don't know,

00:17:24   a lot of people are in this setup and I don't know if these are universal. I think you can use

00:17:29   DisplayLink stuff and not see some of these, but anyway, I don't speak for much experience.

00:17:34   So Edward continues, "Despite these drawbacks, it does allow for a one-cable solution for multiple

00:17:38   monitors and charging." And Edward says, "Lastly, I find it amusing that this M2 MacBook Air can

00:17:43   natively support a 4K HDR 144Hz monitor or even a 6K monitor, but requires workarounds to display

00:17:51   two tiny 1080p monitors." It just goes to show, it's not the resolution or the number of pixels,

00:17:56   it's the fact that, hey, are you a separate display that I have to deal with? Then I have

00:18:00   to have a display controller for you or I have to do something else. Steve McWee writes, "I have two

00:18:05   24-inch HP monitors running off a base model M1 Air using the Wavelength USB 3.0 to HDMI adapter."

00:18:12   And finally, Lior Chacade says, "Yes, DisplayLink is an external driver. Yes, it uses screen

00:18:18   recording to send data out as data packets over thunderbolts instead of using the Data Display

00:18:21   Control Protocol. Yes, docks that support it are less common and more expensive than

00:18:26   comparable alternatives, but at the end of the day, it does the job of connecting multiple

00:18:29   external displays to M1/M2 Macs." And the reason I think this is relevant is because,

00:18:33   in my experience in the corporate world, terrible docks like this that support multiple displays

00:18:39   were ubiquitous. They were everywhere. Even before ARM on Mac, everyone had one of these third-party

00:18:45   docking things that you would connect your laptop to that would let you have multiple displays,

00:18:49   whether it's for your Macs or for your Dell laptops or whatever it was. I don't know,

00:18:53   did they all use this DisplayLink tunneling video over USB or was it just a common product?

00:18:59   But either way, I think this is the corporate solution to, hey, I've got an M1 or M2 and I want

00:19:04   more than one monitor. It's like, well, deal with this. It's a little bit janky, it's a little bit

00:19:09   weird. I bet the video quality probably has some compromises as well. I don't know all the technical

00:19:13   details, but that's what you have to do. And it seems like for the 15-inch MacBook Air, I assume

00:19:20   those limitations will continue to be the case, but maybe for the M3, they'll do something better.

00:19:24   Indeed. All right. And then Ryan Maxwell wrote in, "Marco dismissed the idea pretty strongly

00:19:29   that Apple would intentionally cripple the MacBook Air to segment the product lines and try to upsell

00:19:33   users, which for the record, I agreed with. My first Mac was an iBook G4 and one of the main

00:19:37   differences between an iBook and a PowerBook G4 was that the PowerBook supported extending your

00:19:41   desktop to an external display. The iBook just supported mirroring. The problem was the iBook

00:19:45   G4 was totally capable of supporting extending. It was just a firmware lock. There was a very

00:19:50   popular utility that many of us used to unlock the feature. It worked great. I can imagine such hacks

00:19:54   are much harder these days. We'll put a couple of links to relevant information in the show notes.

00:19:57   Couple of people have this story. Some people thought it was iBook G3 or G4. This is back in

00:20:01   the days when the pro laptops were called PowerBooks. It's not that Apple has never done

00:20:05   this and they would never do it. It's just not common practice. I mean, giving this example from

00:20:10   the days of the iBook and the PowerBook shows how old it was, there's probably a couple more modern

00:20:14   examples, but in general, that's not how Apple segments. They segment by designing the M1 chip

00:20:19   to display controllers. It's baked into the hardware. It makes a chip smaller, cheaper,

00:20:24   lower power, so on and so forth. And Apple hopes that they have struck the right balance between

00:20:29   cost and power efficiency and features. Maybe they haven't with the M1 and M2. Maybe they'll

00:20:33   change their mind, but that's the point at which they're making the decision. It's not like they're

00:20:38   making a chip capable of driving seven displays and they say, "Oh, but seven displays on a MacBook

00:20:43   Air, they would never buy our pro products. Quick, we need to cripple it." They tend not to do that.

00:20:47   If they do do that, it's a pretty terrible mistake because that means when they were designing the

00:20:51   chip, they made the wrong choice. If that's part of their design, that we want to segment the line

00:20:57   and give people a reason to upgrade, they would bake that into the hardware because then they

00:21:00   would give you a smaller and cheaper chip, two things that Apple cares about, and yes, also more

00:21:05   power efficient, which customers care about. Sometimes Apple makes the wrong choice with

00:21:10   hardware, but the wrong choice for you might be the right choice for somebody else.

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00:23:05   With regard to Final Cut Pro and the iPad, Chris writes, "My one terabyte 13-inch M1 iPad Pro has

00:23:15   16 gigs of RAM and virtual memory, so the inability to round to projects is definitely not a hardware

00:23:20   issue." For what it's worth, not every M1 iPad Pro has 16 gigs of RAM. They can come with as

00:23:28   quote-unquote "little" as 8. And then I don't know what the virtual memory story is on iPad OS. I

00:23:33   know that that's a relatively new development but I can't recall the specifics. Jon, do you happen

00:23:38   to remember? Yeah, I just want to add that M1, the minimum amount of RAM I believe is 8 gigs. I don't

00:23:43   think Apple has ever sold it with less than 8 gigs. So if you've got an M1, you've got 8 gigs

00:23:48   and you may have more. The reason I put the virtual memory note in here is because I said it

00:23:52   on last week's show and we talked about it again. It's become the sort of colloquial way to talk

00:23:57   about this topic. But you know, this is a tech show and I'll hold on to this one as long as I can.

00:24:03   iPads have always had virtual memory forever. What they haven't had is they didn't use swap.

00:24:10   They wouldn't take things out of RAM and swap them to, you know, flash storage and back. Those are

00:24:15   two different things. Virtual memory just means that the addresses that your program is using

00:24:19   are not addresses in RAM. They are virtual addresses that are somewhere in a virtual

00:24:24   address space and every process gets its own gigantic virtual address space of a given size.

00:24:30   And it's like, well how can every single process on the computer have the same address space?

00:24:34   Aren't they stomping over each other memory? No, because those aren't the real addresses. Those are

00:24:37   virtual addresses and there's a thing, there's a bunch of hardware in there that translates from

00:24:42   virtual addresses to hardware addresses. And at that point the hardware and the operating system

00:24:46   make sure that two processes don't stomp on each other by using the same physical address. So

00:24:52   basically all systems that run Darwin, the core of what was Mac OS X, have and always have had

00:25:00   virtual memory. But iOS devices and iPad OS for the longest time did not have swap, which meant

00:25:05   that when RAM was getting close to being exhausted they would say, "Oh, don't worry about it. This

00:25:10   stuff that's in RAM, I'll write it to 'disk' in a big giant file. And if someone needs it again,

00:25:17   I'll go get it from there and to make room for it I'll take something that is in RAM and put it back

00:25:21   there." And anyway, doing that a lot is called swapping. That is called the swap file and iPad OS

00:25:27   did not have that for a long time but now does support it on certain hardware configurations.

00:25:32   I'm not familiar with details just like Casey. We talked about when it rolled out,

00:25:36   but I only imagine it will become more prevalent. But the point is it's not a limitation. The big

00:25:42   beefy iPads do support swap. I just wanted to be a little bit careful about saying they support

00:25:47   virtual memory because maybe I'll lose that battle. Maybe just eventually people will just, "Well,

00:25:51   when you say virtual memory you don't mean virtual memory."

00:25:52   Yeah, you've lost that battle.

00:25:54   I don't think so though because the problem is they've always had virtual memory and there's

00:25:58   no other word for virtual memory than virtual memory. They've always had it.

00:26:02   But I feel like virtual memory has been supported since the 386. I don't think it's the kind of

00:26:10   thing you have to say that modern computers support or don't support. Every computer supports

00:26:14   virtual. Most people's fridges probably support virtual memory at this point.

00:26:19   Yeah, sure. But there's no other name for it though.

00:26:22   It's like saying, "Yeah, my computer supports math." Yeah, most computers support math.

00:26:28   I know, but if you were trying to reuse that term, say, "My computer can do addition," it's like,

00:26:32   "Well, I don't mean addition. I mean it'll take memory and write it out to persistent storage."

00:26:37   I'm like, "Well, that's totally different. Why are you using that term?" Anyway, I would say it

00:26:42   doesn't have swap, doesn't use swap, virtual memory with swap. I don't even know how Apple

00:26:46   describes this kind of thing, but I just want people...

00:26:48   I believe they called it virtual memory swap when they had it on one of those little bubble

00:26:53   words on the slide.

00:26:54   Some technical person said, "You can't just call it virtual memory. You got to put the

00:26:57   word swap." Virtual memory swap, I think that three-word phrase, use that one. That one works.

00:27:01   But virtual memory, it's really confusing for me. People say, "Does your iPad support

00:27:05   virtual memory?" I'm like, "Yeah, it does."

00:27:07   And so does yours, and so do all of them ever.

00:27:10   Exactly.

00:27:11   And so does your watch.

00:27:12   Right, right.

00:27:13   And your fridge probably.

00:27:14   Yeah.

00:27:15   All right, so bringing you back to Final Cut Pro, I thought this feedback was excellent,

00:27:18   and I probably should have known this having had a brief window of time when I sort of

00:27:22   kind of knew Final Cut Pro, but because my usage was so rudimentary, I never really

00:27:27   put this together.

00:27:27   So Brendan writes, "As an occasional Final Cut Pro user for over a decade, I'm extremely

00:27:31   confident that the lack of round trip has nothing to do with performance whatsoever

00:27:34   and everything with the way Final Cut Pro 10 handles project files. It's extremely flexible

00:27:38   and allows assets, proxies, and cached renders to be segmented out on different volumes and

00:27:43   storage types. That is extremely useful in necessary and professional video editing

00:27:47   environments."

00:27:48   So I don't see a new project format coming along soon on the Mac side to replace that

00:27:54   if it needs to adhere to the current limitations of iPadOS.

00:27:57   So in other words, like one of the things, and maybe one of you can have a better explanation

00:28:01   here, but one of the things that we needed a lot more years ago was if you're working

00:28:06   with these like super high resolution video files, that's really computationally intensive

00:28:10   for the computer to do as you're scanning through them and so on and so forth.

00:28:14   So Final Cut Pro would make these quote unquote proxy files, which basically means it'll

00:28:18   down sample your 4K video to like 720p that it'll use for the purposes of doing the edits

00:28:24   and getting everything lined up. And then when you finally did the one true export,

00:28:30   it'll go back to the source material and render it in 4K or what have you. And that was proxy

00:28:34   media, or I forget what they call it, proxy something or other. And there's all sorts

00:28:38   of other things too. And Final Cut Pro will often generate this on its own behind the

00:28:44   scenes. And you can be explicit if you so choose and tell it, oh, I want the proxy media

00:28:49   to go here. You know, I want the regular stuff to go there and so on and so forth.

00:28:52   So, yeah, I think Brendan makes a good point that it is extremely flexible, which is wonderful,

00:28:56   particularly if you're working on like a two hour video or something like that. But

00:29:00   that might not be so wonderful if you're trying to work within the extreme limitations of iPadOS.

00:29:05   See, I don't buy this as a format difference, though, because that's true between Macs as

00:29:09   well. If you have a project file that references assets that are all over the place and you

00:29:13   give that to somebody else on a Mac and they're on their laptop across the country and they

00:29:17   try to open that project, it's not going to work. It's not going to be able to find all the media.

00:29:21   Like that's just the nature of the beast. I don't think there's anything particular in iPadOS that

00:29:25   prevents access to network storage or whatever. But, you know, again, Apple makes the operating

00:29:30   system so they could patch these things. I think if there was a new project format on the Mac,

00:29:35   it would of course continue to support that flexibility, probably. And then they could

00:29:39   also support it on iPadOS and it would behave exactly the same way as it does on a Mac,

00:29:43   where it says, "Oh, you open this project? I don't know where the hell any of this media is.

00:29:46   I tried to connect to the server, but it's not accessible on my network. I don't know where it

00:29:49   is. Sorry." Like that's the nature of complicated formats like this. So it is another thing to

00:29:56   consider that dealing with that on iPadOS may be slightly more difficult because of sandboxing and

00:30:01   the inability to mount network drives as far as we know. But, you know, Apple does make the OS and

00:30:08   they can make all that possible. So it's still a little bit of mystery. I would love to hear

00:30:11   a technical explanation from somebody at Apple of why the project format is different. I would

00:30:17   hope they wouldn't say, "Well, you know, the iPad is a little less — like sort of just a vague answer

00:30:23   doesn't tell us anything." Because they can't — I don't think Apple can say with a straight face,

00:30:26   is kind of the point of this follow-up. I don't think they can say with a straight face anymore

00:30:29   that it's a power limitation, especially for the people with like a 16-gig iPad Pro with an M1.

00:30:34   And they'd be like, "No, there's no excuse for in terms of horsepower or power." And swap,

00:30:40   right? Virtual memory swap, as Apple would say. That's got it all, right? So what's the problem?

00:30:48   I continue to hope, fingers crossed, that it is just an updated project format that will eventually

00:30:52   come to the Mac. And if and when it does, to Brendan's point, it will have to support all

00:30:55   the existing workflows, if they are an essential part of people's business, which I think they are.

00:31:01   Indeed. And then finally, I think it was like right in the beginning of the year — I forget

00:31:06   exactly when it was — but Dell announced their own kind of knockoff version of the Pro Display XDR.

00:31:13   You might remember this because it had a truly enormous webcam that stuck up above the top

00:31:21   forehead of the monitor. If memory serves, it had a little drop-down like connectivity port that

00:31:27   would come off the bottom of the monitor, which I actually think was kind of cool. But I'm not sure

00:31:31   that many share that opinion with me. But anyways, this is a 32-inch 6K monitor, the oh-so-eloquently

00:31:38   named the U3-224KB. Well, apparently pricing has been released, and it is $3,200, which normally

00:31:48   would make me do a spit-take, but remind me how much your ridiculously overpriced monitors were,

00:31:54   gentlemen. Well, are you including the stand? Yeah, don't forget, this comes with a stand. So

00:31:59   it's $3,200, comes with a height-adjustable stand, and this thing has, to remind everybody,

00:32:04   140 — up to 140 watts of power delivery, a 4K webcam, a huge array of ports, just a ton of

00:32:10   ports all over it. It has slightly higher resolution than the XDR. It's 6144x3456 instead of

00:32:17   the XDR, it's 6016x3384. Sorry about the way I read that number, just deal with it. There are also,

00:32:25   because this is Dell, we'll put a link to the product page, they make a whole line of these

00:32:29   monitors, and you can change tons of things about them. This monitor is available in the following

00:32:34   sizes in inches, 24, 27, 30, 32, 34, 38, 43, and 49 inches. Well, slow down though, but that doesn't

00:32:41   necessarily mean 6K in all the rest. Right, exactly, and it goes up to 8K as well. So those

00:32:47   smaller monitors are different resolutions, and the bigger monitors can be different, but I'm saying

00:32:50   this is the matrix of different features, so you can't get all the resolutions at all the sizes,

00:32:54   obviously, but there's a lot of choices here, like I said, including up to 8K, I think the 8K

00:32:59   version is like $4,000 or something. Now, this is not really an XDR quote-unquote replacement,

00:33:04   because I don't think any of the combinations of sizes and resolutions support HDR 1600 nits. I

00:33:13   don't know if they have mini-LED backlights, but hey, $3,200 for XDR resolution if you don't care

00:33:20   about HDR, and you don't mind looking at what is a very unattractive monitor in my opinion,

00:33:26   it's a good deal. That's what we were wondering about the whole time. We were talking about this

00:33:30   at CES, we were making fun of the looks, we were looking at all the ports, but like, well,

00:33:32   how much is this going to cost? And the question was, how much will it undercut the XDR by? And I

00:33:37   think $3,200 with adjustable stand is a good price. Like, that is a way better deal than the XDR.

00:33:43   Well, I will, I mean, so you know, you said you have a lot of options available here,

00:33:49   but none of those options make it super nice as an Apple replacement.

00:33:53   There is no option for beauty on this monitor.

00:33:56   Yes. But you know, so I think this is a very good deal relative to what else is in the market,

00:34:03   which as far as I know is just the XDR, like in this kind of resolution and size class.

00:34:07   I don't think there's anything else really. I could be wrong, but I'm not aware of any.

00:34:11   I mean, I'm sure there are other makers making monitors with the same panel,

00:34:14   but Dell is a reputable brand and you know what I mean.

00:34:17   So yeah, but, but I think so for this to be $3,200 and the XDR to be with the stand $6,000.

00:34:24   Yeah, this is a really good deal. I would at least though, I would caution people if it's been a

00:34:32   while since you've used an Apple computer with a third party monitor, the experience is not always

00:34:39   as seamless as you would hope it would, it should be. It's not like the olden days because the olden

00:34:44   days things were simpler. We didn't have things like HDR and all these like new DRM schemes for,

00:34:49   you know, movie protection and stuff like that. So, you know, on some level, like I am not tempted

00:34:55   by this. Obviously I already have the XDR, so that's a huge difference, but I'm not tempted

00:35:00   by this because my experiences with my ultra fine LG monitor have been pretty paper cutty in part

00:35:09   because the ultra fine is just such a mediocre monitor, but also in part because Apple does not

00:35:15   seem to take much effort at all in making the experience good for third party monitor users.

00:35:20   And oftentimes as Apple's computers move forward, as the hardware and software move forward,

00:35:28   oftentimes it seems like the number of paper cuts that you get by using a third party monitor

00:35:32   is increasing over time. So while you are able to save a good amount of money going with this option,

00:35:38   you are giving up a lot of niceness and you're setting up for possible paper cut issues that you

00:35:44   might not get with a first party monitor. And that's not to say that like Apple is, you know,

00:35:48   making the best monitors here. You know, it's just to say the reality of the situation is you're in

00:35:52   an integrated environment if you're using this with a Mac and you're going to miss out on some

00:35:56   of those integrations. And it might not be, there might be annoyances or limitations by going with

00:36:02   this that we don't really know about yet or that you might not be thinking of that are worth

00:36:05   considering when you're making a decision. I think a lot of the fault is going to lie with

00:36:10   the monitor maker. That's why I was suggesting maybe Dell over somebody else. Cause I think

00:36:13   there is like driver software that you might have to install on your Mac to get all the features of

00:36:17   this monitor to work. And that's kind of the responsibility of the third party monitor maker.

00:36:23   You would hope Apple would work together with them better. But that is, you know, it's like,

00:36:29   who's to blame here? Is it Apple because they don't care about making stuff work with third

00:36:32   party monitors or is it the third party monitor maker because they stopped caring about the

00:36:36   drivers for Mac OS after a few years? Cause they've already made their money in that monitor. They

00:36:39   don't care already bought it to give one. I don't, I don't know if this is an example that, you know,

00:36:45   puts Apple in a good light, but it is something that happened before Apple sold monitors besides

00:36:52   the XDR or even maybe before the XDR the M1 and M2, for example, even though they can only drive

00:36:58   one monitor, they can drive the LG 5k I believe. Right. Yeah. And so the LG, LG 5k is a third party

00:37:05   monitor. It was the only, you know, Apple retina resolution, third party monitor for a long time.

00:37:11   While we were asking for Apple to make one again, other than the XDR. Well, there was the,

00:37:15   there was the 4k for a while and then they changed it, which made it slightly less retina E, but

00:37:20   there, it was the LGs, the two LGs, the 4k and the 5k. Yeah. I guess the 4k 24 inch was the

00:37:25   closer to that, but anyway, the 5k was the big one, right? Until Apple, you know, Apple had the

00:37:29   XDR, but until Apple came with studio display and the LG 5k is weird and requires Apple to do some

00:37:35   stuff to support that, that Apple did. Like as far as I'm aware, you didn't have to install any

00:37:39   LG drivers, right? For the LG 5k. Correct. So, part of that you could say, okay, well,

00:37:45   that's not Apple doing it out of the goodness of their heart. It's because the LG 5k is basically

00:37:48   the same monitor that was in a 5k iMac and they'd already done the work for that. But the fact is

00:37:53   that the, you know, M1, when it first came out, could drive a third party monitor. And Apple had

00:37:59   to do some work to make that happen because for people that don't know, we talked about it when

00:38:02   the 5k iMac first came out, which was ages ago. The 5k, in fact, Apple bragged about it. That's

00:38:07   why we knew about it. The 5k iMac had its special, you know, Apple custom timing controller, cause

00:38:11   it's basically like two internal logical displays with like two parallel display stream things going

00:38:18   in there and then a controller that synchronizes them. That's how you get 5k resolution over one

00:38:22   cable internal to the 5k iMac. Well, that was, that was true at the time. It is a little bit

00:38:27   different now, but carry on. Yes. But I, but I think the, even the, the LG 5k today, if you

00:38:32   connect it to an M1 over a single cable, it's doing the display stream multiplexing. It's more

00:38:38   commonplace now, but Apple had to support that. My point is with the M1, they could have chose not to

00:38:42   support it cause none of their monitors do stuff like that, or maybe just the XDR or whatever. So

00:38:47   I don't know, again, I don't know if that is Apple making an effort to say, oh, well,

00:38:51   since we don't sell any monitors like this, we should make sure the LG 5k works cause it's the

00:38:55   only game in town or just saying, well, we already basically did that work for the 5k iMac. So we get

00:38:59   it for free. So we might as well do it, but, uh, it is a thing that happened. The Dell ones,

00:39:03   on the other hand, especially the 6k thing with the camera and all the ports, I imagine you're

00:39:07   going to be relying on, uh, Dell keeping its drivers and software up to date to have all

00:39:13   the features of that monitor working. How good is Dell at doing that? Probably better than some

00:39:18   random no name brand that you just found online. Right. But maybe not as good as you want it to be

00:39:24   to Marco's point, especially years down the line. Yeah. It's, it's still Dell at the end of the day

00:39:29   and, and Dell also, you know, they're not going to care nearly as much about how it works on a Mac

00:39:35   than they are how it works on their PCs that they sell. So, or other PCs. I thought I saw the word

00:39:39   Mac mentioned on the product page, so let me search for it again. I mean, you know, they'll

00:39:43   take our money, but you know, you better believe they're not going to like, you know, have amazing

00:39:47   driver support if they don't have to. I mean, I'm just happy to see the word mentioned. This monitor

00:39:50   is compatible with multiple operating systems, including windows and Mac OS, though are in a

00:39:55   circle. I guess one of the other ones, Linux. Uh, but anyway, uh, there, there are at least mentioning

00:40:00   it. So they, I think they understand who, who would want a monitor with this kind of pixel

00:40:05   density at this size. Uh, there is some possibility that it might be a Mac user.

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00:42:16   What do we have to talk about tonight? Well, first we can talk about whether I use this

00:42:23   phrase correctly. And I don't, I shouldn't be asking you to, maybe we can get some young people

00:42:26   in the chat to weigh in. What I wrote as the top topic here is a WWDC vibe check. My use of that

00:42:34   term is in the sense that we are seeing how we all kind of feel about WWDC being two weeks out from

00:42:42   it. Is that the correct use of the term vibe check? Do we have any, who are we kidding? There are no

00:42:46   young people in that room. I don't know why I'm thinking this. All that matters is like,

00:42:50   is our audience old enough to think that we are using it correctly? Whether or not we actually are.

00:42:57   Here's the thing. I know young people listening to the podcast, hello out there. We love that

00:43:01   you listen to it. Tell your friends to tell your nerdy friends, which is what I always say. Cause

00:43:04   if you tell your regular friends, they're going to listen and think it's super weird, but tell

00:43:07   your nerdy friends. Anyway, people who listen, people who listen live, like there's a very tiny

00:43:12   number of dedicated people who are in our chat room right now who listen to the live stream of

00:43:16   this as we record it. And we have to imagine because the number is so small, the, the, uh,

00:43:22   the percentage that might be young people, uh, there is probably very low. Yeah. That is probably

00:43:28   accurate, but I will say as an official old, I do believe you are using the term correctly. And,

00:43:34   and yes, again, I don't know how much stock I put in any of our, yep. Totally, totally. I mean,

00:43:40   I do, I do have teenagers, so I feel like I have a leg up on you too, at least, but I can just learn

00:43:44   through osmosis by hearing them say things, but well, who's, who's less likely to know about cool

00:43:50   slang, like a random, you know, 40, whatever year old or a 40, whatever year old with teenage

00:43:57   children. I almost think the people without the teenage children are more likely to get it right

00:44:02   because the teenagers will try harder to hide it from you when they're your kids. Oh my God. No,

00:44:06   no, you can't help. You'll see when you have a teenager, you can't help but hear them speak all

00:44:11   the time and them talk to their friends and they will say things to you using the same language.

00:44:16   They talk to their friends, whether they mean it or not. I mean, I mean, look, we, we get some of

00:44:21   that now, but like, it's funny, like, like, so going around, you know, my, my kid and his friends

00:44:27   going around that group is this, I don't know, I'm sure it came from a YouTuber, but some kind of

00:44:32   joke where they are like, you know, what's, you know, nine plus 10, like 27 or whatever, and

00:44:37   everyone laughs. It's like, okay. And I don't get it at all. And I'm like, okay, well, I'm already

00:44:42   at the point where, you know, the kids are doing stuff that I don't understand at all that, you

00:44:47   know, and, you know, every generation goes through this. And like, I'm thinking like, you know, when

00:44:52   we start saying things like vibe check, like, I'm already so disconnected from what the young kids

00:44:58   are saying and how what they think is funny and whatever references they're making from their

00:45:01   YouTube celebrities they follow. There is no way in hell that we're using this term correctly. Like,

00:45:06   we're just, we're too old. They're like, we should avoid any, anything that even seems like modern

00:45:11   slang. We should just stick with the the the phrases that are licensed for old people use.

00:45:16   Yeah. Someone in the chat room says that it's, well, the idea is that you're

00:45:22   checking to see how somebody's doing. It's more like checking in with them.

00:45:27   I don't know. I'll ask my kids after. Anyway, I've defined the term as we're using it here.

00:45:32   If we're using it wrong, at least, you know what I mean, because the goal is communication. Although

00:45:35   I will say what I remember on a recent episode, I heard Casey say something that I actually talked

00:45:40   to my daughter about that I'm wondering where Casey heard it. He probably heard it from pop,

00:45:44   the same place my daughter did with some kind of popular media or like a sitcom or, you know,

00:45:49   something that you did that you use the term you are, I don't know, one of my phrases that I would

00:45:57   use for it is so on and so forth, et cetera, sort of one of those where you're trying to say,

00:46:02   and other things like this, I'm not going to list them all. You know what I'm talking about, right?

00:46:06   And the phrase you use is whatever, whatever you say, whatever, twice, whatever obviously was from

00:46:10   our generation. We all know about whatever my generation anyway, whatever Gen X is totally a

00:46:14   thing, right? Whatever, whatever saying in that particular way, whatever, whatever, whatever.

00:46:18   I can't, you know, I've, I heard my daughter say it and I, I talked to her and I said,

00:46:22   is whatever, whatever, is that a you thing? Or is that a common like thing among people your age?

00:46:29   And, and she said, no, it's not a me thing. It's just a thing that people my age say. And so,

00:46:34   you know, took her word for it. And then I heard Casey say it a few times. Like,

00:46:36   did I? Yeah. Where did Casey pick up whatever, whatever. So it might be somewhere. I don't think

00:46:42   you picked up from your kids. Do either one of your kids say whatever, whatever when relaying

00:46:45   a story about something. So it's probably from like, you know, some television show or something

00:46:51   like that. And people keep getting down to yada yada and saying, yada yada, like Seinfeld that

00:46:57   made up that thing. Yada yada. Seinfeld did not make up yada yada. People Seinfeld popularized it

00:47:01   for the rest of the world. It's not the Metro New York area, but rest assured yada yada existed

00:47:06   long before Seinfeld. Well, this has been a language corner, but yeah. So let's talk about

00:47:13   how we feel about WWDC. However you want to phrase that. How we feel on, since I'm talking, I guess

00:47:18   I'll just start. I am excited. You know, I never, I never get any concrete information about anything

00:47:26   in any regard from any of the people I know inside Apple, but I can tell you that the, the, now I

00:47:33   don't want to say vibe, but I was going to say vibe. The, the impression I get from people. I

00:47:37   think we can use vibe. I think we all understand and know how to use vibe. I don't think that,

00:47:41   I think that's the thing that predates a lot of teenagers who are alive today. All right,

00:47:44   fair enough. The vibe from people inside Apple is that they are like vibrating. Like they are real

00:47:51   excited. At least that's, that's the impression I've gotten. I wish I could tell you that I'm

00:47:54   being coy and I know exactly what's happening and when it's happening, so on and so forth. I

00:47:59   genuinely know nothing, but our sources aren't that good. Yeah, exactly. Here's the thing that

00:48:04   you're the people you know, and like the vibe you're getting from people at Apple,

00:48:08   they probably don't know anything either, right? That's the thing that a lot of people who are new

00:48:13   to the world of Apple might not understand when we're watching some kind of presentation and

00:48:18   Apple's presenting something, the vast majority of the Apple employees are just as surprised as we

00:48:23   are because they compartmentalize everything. If you don't need to know about project XYZ,

00:48:28   you don't know about it. And so it's not like we're watching and they're like, well,

00:48:32   every Apple employer already knows this. No, every Apple employee does not know this. So

00:48:35   Apple employees are vibrating. There could be coming off the same thing that we are, which is

00:48:39   like, we feel like there's something big coming. And they literally don't know what it is because

00:48:43   they're not disclosed as they say on the headset or on the car or on the whatever the hell like

00:48:48   they don't, they just, they literally don't know. But because they are employees and work there,

00:48:53   you can kind of get a feel from, because maybe they know someone who does work on that team

00:48:56   or they know someone who knows someone and those people seem happy all the time or they seem

00:48:59   frantic all the time. Or yeah, they've been working nonstop for the last two months. Exactly. Like

00:49:04   that's the vibe that they're getting that we're not getting. And that is being transferred to us.

00:49:07   Yeah. My favorite example of this is, you know, after the Swift announcement in like 14 or

00:49:12   whenever it was, um, I was talking to a handful of internal Apple people and of the, I don't know,

00:49:19   five or 10 people I spoke to, I think maybe one or two of them was aware that the, that Apple was

00:49:24   working on a new language to release at some point. But I don't think a single one of them knew that

00:49:29   the Swift announcement was happening that day. So they're sitting there, you know, in the, in their

00:49:33   office or whatever, watching the keynote and saying, Oh, that's cool. You know, same time that

00:49:39   I'm looking over at John saying, Oh, that's cool. Like they all found out at the exact same moment

00:49:44   for something as big as Swift. So, I mean, not literally all of them, but you know what I'm

00:49:47   saying? So, uh, whatever, whatever, John, for the Swift, for the Swift example, specifically,

00:49:52   that's another example of how, how tricky it is to read the tea leaves at Apple. Um, way back in the,

00:49:59   the day, you know, I'd written a bunch of blog posts at Ars Technica, which have since been

00:50:03   moved to my own website, talking about Apple's needs for a new programming language. Uh, and in

00:50:08   response to those posts, lots of people from Apple either reached out to me, back channel, I talked

00:50:14   to them at WWDC, we would have discussions on the topic that I wrote about. Obviously, almost all of

00:50:20   them didn't know anything about what Apple would eventually do in this area. Some of them did.

00:50:24   Right. And we would have discussions about it. And in hindsight, I can see that a lot of those

00:50:29   discussions, you could tell which one of these people that I was talking about this four years

00:50:33   before Swift was announced, knew Swift existed or whatever, you know, or like two years, one year

00:50:38   leading up to it. That's the way that you can get a vibe from Apple people. The problem is though,

00:50:44   tons of stuff is happening inside Apple that never sees the light of day. And so you can have a

00:50:49   discussion with somebody that makes you, I totally think from all these discussions I've been having

00:50:53   with Apple people, they seem really excited about whatever, smell-o-vision, right? And I really

00:50:58   think Apple's working on a smell-based product and it just never sees the light of day. And you're

00:51:02   like, Oh, I guess I was wrong about that. And then you have to learn 15 years later that there was a

00:51:05   big smell-o-vision project and it got canned because of some internal political turf war,

00:51:10   or they decided they weren't going to do smell-o-vision. Or it was catching on fire.

00:51:13   Right. Exactly. So the vibe inside Apple reflects a feeling about what might be happening inside

00:51:22   Apple, but then there's the question, okay, but what of the things that happens inside Apple

00:51:26   comes out of Apple and in what form and when? Another example is the TV stuff. Apple's going

00:51:31   to make a television set. And like from what we understand from current rumors and people revealing

00:51:37   stuff, some of the technology that was originally made for the project where Apple was going to make

00:51:44   a television set, I keep saying television set, because I don't know how to explain this to young

00:51:47   people, but like a TV, a big screen that you look at that plays, anyway, ended up in the HomePod

00:51:54   of all places because they were working on audio for the HomePod. So the HomePod comes out of some

00:51:59   work that was done in the television. There was so much smoke around TV back in the day of just like,

00:52:04   Apple's going to make a television set, they're going to do it, it's going to be, and what we

00:52:06   ended up getting was the HomePod on the Apple TV and Apple never did make a television set. And

00:52:10   we'll see where the car stuff goes. So it's difficult to read, but sometimes like the vibe

00:52:17   you're getting, it's a legit vibe, even if Apple never ships any of that stuff in the form you

00:52:21   think they're going to. But in this case, I feel like the vibe about the headset is so strong and

00:52:27   so lightning focused and so detailed with the rumors that, you know, where there's smoke,

00:52:33   there's surely going to be fire eventually. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, again, I'm not playing coy. I

00:52:38   wish I knew when I was playing coy, but I'm not. But I don't know. I just feel like based on no

00:52:47   facts and just a gut feeling, I feel like there's going to be a lot this year, even if it isn't the

00:52:52   headset, I still feel like it's going to be a busy keynote. Obviously the drop of Final Cut Pro and

00:52:58   Logic Pro just last week, that could lead Len Creedence to the idea that it's going to be busy.

00:53:05   But I don't know. I just, I feel like there's going to be a lot here. And if there's no headset,

00:53:09   how can it be busy? Explain that to me. I don't know. I'm not sure. I really don't know. But I

00:53:14   mean, there's a couple of examples off the top of my head. It sounds like we're getting an all new

00:53:20   watchOS, or for some loose definition of all new, which we may or may not talk about this episode.

00:53:26   Yeah, we should be getting widget support on iPadOS. I'm trying to think of other things.

00:53:31   Presumably there'll be a lot of improvements to SwiftUI. I mean, this is a developer conference,

00:53:35   strictly speaking. So hopefully we'll see a lot of SwiftUI improvements. I'm not sure. I feel like

00:53:41   they could fill an hour to an hour and a half with just normal software stuff. I mean, hell,

00:53:47   Chris Vanazzo says in the chat, "No new features in macOS." That would need an hour and a half just

00:53:52   for applause, right? So that would be a crowd pleaser, but I don't know if it would count as a

00:53:56   big, you know, I kind of feel like headset is the obvious one that would make this big. And honestly,

00:54:02   if they have the headset, nothing else matters, essentially. Like not that they're not, of course,

00:54:06   they're going to have new versions of all their OS's and the new versions will have nice features,

00:54:09   but if they have the headset, that alone makes it this, an extremely, like these come rarely.

00:54:16   When does Apple introduce new platforms? Not that often. watchOS, tvOS, like they, you know,

00:54:21   sometimes they're big, sometimes they're small, but this is so hyped, so long rumored. It's as

00:54:25   if they were coming out with the car, right? All you need is that. If that exists in the keynote,

00:54:29   it is a big keynote. If that doesn't, it isn't released in this keynote. I think to make it a

00:54:35   big keynote, you need a lot of things that currently seem unlikely. I think you would

00:54:39   need the 15 inch MacBook era to be announced. You need all new versions of the OS's with more than,

00:54:44   with some significant features that people care about. And I think you'd have to probably throw

00:54:47   in the Mac pro. That's what it would take to match the headset. And it always comes back to the Mac

00:54:52   pro. Honestly, no one cares about the Mac pro, but, but me, but if you're trying to make a big

00:54:57   keynote, you need the things people do care about 15 inch MacBook air, all new versions of all the

00:55:01   operating systems that people love Swift with the new features, new version of X code. And then you

00:55:05   throw in the Mac pro as a, you know, fun kick. If you remember when the Mac pro was announced

00:55:09   at WWC, we were all there. I believe, um, the 2019 Mac pro that is. And I think that was like

00:55:16   the star of the show in terms of didn't they like leave that to the end, like, despite the fact that

00:55:20   nobody buys them or whatever, it is a, it is a glamour product for Apple to roll out because

00:55:26   it's big, it's powerful, it's shiny, it's expensive. It's good looking if you like holes.

00:55:30   And so I even, I know people think like, oh, nobody cares about the Mac pro. That doesn't

00:55:37   make a big keynote. It does. It would, it would add to the bigness of it, but you need all that

00:55:41   stuff that I described. And on the other side of the scale, just the headset by itself.

00:55:46   Yeah, that's fair, but I don't know. I, I I've been talking a long time, but suffice to say,

00:55:51   I get the feeling that whatever it is, it's going to be a big year, which is why I really hope that

00:55:57   the three of us get to be there. So Apple call us, we'd love to hear from you. Um, but no, I,

00:56:02   I think it's, I think it's going to be big and, and I don't, I think that would be excellent

00:56:07   because I don't feel like the last couple of years have been bad by any means, but I think just a

00:56:12   really firing on all cylinders kind of year would be pretty, pretty awesome. I'm excited. You know,

00:56:19   I'm, I'm a little bit nervous for, as a developer that like, I'm about to have my summer, you know,

00:56:25   ruined in the best way. You know, the same way it's like, you know, like, like the Jonathan

00:56:29   Colton song about, you know, you're, you're in everything the nicest way. Like when you have

00:56:32   a kid, it's like, oh, you ruin everything in the nicest way because you, you know,

00:56:35   you disrupt my life in a huge way. But you know, you're my kid and I love you. I it's,

00:56:40   forgive the horrendous summarizing of this, you know, art form. Um, I feel like this is,

00:56:46   this might be like that for developers in the sense that like, whatever plans we had for this year

00:56:51   are probably about to be derailed in a pretty big way by the headset. You know, it seems by all

00:56:57   accounts, it seems like the headset is being announced at this event. Uh, and there's going

00:57:03   to be a developer story to it because obviously why else would they announce it if that'd be quite

00:57:07   a move at a developer conference to be like, here's a brand new brand new platform, a sweet solution.

00:57:12   You can make web apps for it. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Um, so anyway, yeah, you can, you can program it

00:57:17   only with Siri. Oh gosh. I would quit the business. Anyway. Um, so I think our, our plans are, are

00:57:28   going to be disrupted if our plans weren't, you know, wait for the headset, it's going to be

00:57:31   disruptive. And I think it's going to be in a very exciting way. Um, I don't know what the headset

00:57:39   will be. I don't know what the headset chances are on the market, but you know, when I, when I use

00:57:45   the existing VR headset hardware that exists, you know, on the market today, the limited amount I

00:57:50   have used with it, although, you know, with the exception of the Oculus, whatever two that we have

00:57:55   upstairs, um, I'm super uninterested in it and it kind of gives me motion sickness a little bit.

00:58:02   I don't, it doesn't work optically well with my eyes for whatever reasons. It just, there's a lot

00:58:08   of like minor paper cuts or major paper cuts with it. And I don't find the games that interesting.

00:58:12   But Apple is full of really smart nerds. And many of them have apparently decided that what they

00:58:21   have is something special and worth shipping for Apple in a pretty high profile way. So

00:58:27   I'm, I'm optimistic. I'm tend to be optimistic that whatever they have is probably pretty good

00:58:34   because I trust them to make that call and they call it right most of the time.

00:58:39   So whatever they have, you know, we can look around the market and we can be super

00:58:44   unexcited about all the other VR headsets out there and also trust Apple to say, you know what,

00:58:51   if they're this excited about something like this and they're thinking and they're releasing it now,

00:58:55   there's probably something there. It's probably really good in at least some ways for at least

00:58:59   some uses and possibly more. So, you know, otherwise they wouldn't be releasing it.

00:59:04   You know, Apple holds back on a lot of stuff. So we, we can be fairly sure that what does get out

00:59:10   there, especially a new platform in a high profile release like this is bound to be,

00:59:14   they've done their homework. They've probably built something really cool. And it's probably

00:59:19   going to be really exciting when we see it. So that's why I'm, I'm very interested, not in the

00:59:24   VR or AR or XR space in general. I'm very interested in what the heck did Apple do here?

00:59:30   Because I trust them to, if they're, if they've gotten to this point, it's probably something

00:59:36   really exciting and really good. Now, how many other people will think so and will be willing

00:59:40   to spend $3,000 and, you know, deal with the whole, you know, butt mounted battery situation.

00:59:45   Who knows? We'll see when we get there. But again, I trust them to have gotten this right.

00:59:49   If they do that, I don't think that'll be a thing to deal with, by the way. I think that'll be a

00:59:52   feature that everyone will say, oh, of course they did it. I mean, we've all discussed all the

00:59:56   reasons. It's just that once the product comes out, all the reasons we've discussed suddenly

01:00:00   become like concrete and people say, I always thought it was a good idea because the headset

01:00:04   weighs less and you can swap batteries and so on and so forth. But right now everyone thinks it's

01:00:08   dumb. Right. And then the whole rest of the industry will change to butt batteries and

01:00:11   they'll be like, well, of course, this is the obvious design. We didn't copy Apple.

01:00:14   Exactly. Right. It was obvious we didn't copy Apple at all. I mean, Apple's not going to be

01:00:17   the first one to use a battery pack, an external battery pack, a bunch of other people. Not in

01:00:20   any way. I do feel like for this, for the headset, again, I get the vibe that it's coming this year.

01:00:26   If it's not, I think a lot of people will be disappointed. I think it's, you know, whatever,

01:00:30   like it would quote unquote justifiable. It's like, well, Apple never announced anything.

01:00:33   That was all on you. It was just rumors. But anyway, the good thing that I hope the headset

01:00:38   will do is provide cover for every other product. And I know this is not the way it works inside

01:00:45   Apple, but like it's plausible that there could be enough internal communication to let the other

01:00:54   products that are announced every day, every day, we see all the new versions of the new OS,

01:00:58   the new version of Swift updates and frameworks, the new version of Xcode,

01:01:01   gives them some cover to not feel like they have to press, press, press to get their exciting feature

01:01:08   out the door ASAP, even if it's buggy, because the headset is just going to block out the sun

01:01:12   at WWDC. Right. And so a lot of times at WWDC, I feel like I feel some groups are pressing. They're

01:01:18   like, we really need to wow them in the keynote and they show something and we are wowed, but then

01:01:23   we realize like, Oh, this is even, isn't even in the build, the beta build at WWDC. It'll be coming

01:01:30   in the later build. And when it does come, it's buggy and unfinished and it just ends up being

01:01:34   frustrating and disappointing. And it's like, you don't need to try that hard ship what you're

01:01:39   actually ready to ship. Like, I don't want to see anything in any of the other sort of platform

01:01:43   stuff that isn't in the WWDC beta, because I feel like the headset provides them cover to be more

01:01:50   relaxed with their, uh, you know, with, with their choice of what to include and what to save for a

01:01:57   future release in the ideal world. I would have liked, you know, Apple to have the forethought to

01:02:02   say, Hey, uh, you know, back in 2022, Hey, WWDC 2023, we're going to ship the headset.

01:02:09   So everybody else, when you're planning your new releases for the new versions of all the different

01:02:13   OSs, everybody takes a snow leopard, right? That didn't happen. Like that's that they don't have

01:02:18   that kind of coordination. They can't tell the future that far in advance. It's foolhardy to try

01:02:22   to make plans like that. I do think it would be wise for them to give each platform a snow leopard

01:02:27   once in a while, we've talked a lot about macOS not being annual if they could get the bugs out of

01:02:32   it, but it's just too big of a company to be that coordinated and making plans that far in advance

01:02:39   about software releases and releases and headset. Most of, you know, part of the reason you can't

01:02:44   make that plan is that all the other groups aren't even probably disclosed on the headset if they

01:02:47   don't have to be, uh, or subsets of them are because only some people who work on tvOS now

01:02:52   have to know about the headset, not all the people. And certainly the people who work on tvOS hardware

01:02:56   probably don't need to know about anyway, it's very compartmentalized to the detriment of Apple

01:03:01   internally. I feel like sometimes, and this is kind of one of those cases that we just assume

01:03:05   that despite the fact that if the headset does launch a WWDC, it will provide cover for lots of

01:03:11   other OSs. The only thing that helps them with is what I just described, which is okay. Now,

01:03:17   maybe they don't have to press, maybe the higher levels of the org chart can cannot press to have

01:03:22   the Xcode team, you know, push out some feature of Xcode that is buggy and going to cause the

01:03:27   app to crash all the time. They'll say, we'll just save that to next year. It's fine that you

01:03:31   don't have it. And they won't know that's because the headset is coming, but only like the people

01:03:35   seven levels off the org chart who are disclosed in the headset do know that. And they let those

01:03:39   things travel downhill. This, I know this sounds Byzantine and complicated, but honestly, this is

01:03:44   the way it works in big companies, especially ones like Apple that have everything compartmentalized.

01:03:48   This is whole, that's why reading the tea leaves is a thing. That's whole kind of game of telephone

01:03:53   of like what gets prioritized, what gets given money and why by people who at various points in

01:03:59   the chain don't know, have all the information available. They just know what the people above

01:04:02   them tell them and what the people below them send back and feedback, but they don't, nobody

01:04:06   has the whole picture until you get pretty high in the org chart. And it makes it very difficult to

01:04:10   act in a coherent manner. It's an, Apple has an amazing job of it to be clear as a company,

01:04:14   they speak with one voice, their, their marketing, their PR makes it seem like they are a coherent

01:04:20   mass, but internally it's lots of little kingdoms moving in all sorts of different directions,

01:04:24   pushed and pulled by forces they can't see and don't understand for the most part.

01:04:27   Yeah. We can put that slogan in there and they're recruiting material.

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01:05:48   for sponsoring our show. So in terms of like the overall, like what I expect from the other

01:05:57   platforms, you know, it's hard when in a new platform year, like what we have most likely

01:06:04   here with the headset launching, this is a year as John mentioned, like this doesn't happen often,

01:06:07   this is a year of a new platform. What tends to happen with Apple when a new platform is being

01:06:12   developed is a bunch of talent is pulled from other teams to work on that new thing. And

01:06:17   obviously that doesn't, it doesn't all just happen in one year. But what has probably happened here

01:06:22   is probably a bunch of people from other OSs and other projects in the company have probably been

01:06:28   spending a lot of time recently working on the headset. And so I would expect based on that for

01:06:34   not only this year, but also last year to have been somewhat slow. And I would say that's kind

01:06:38   of the case, you know, that being said, Apple's a bigger company now than they used to be. And they

01:06:42   are able to maintain things on multiple fronts better than they used to be. They're still not

01:06:46   great at it, but they're way better than they used to be. But anyway, so I would expect this to be a

01:06:51   somewhat slow year for the other platforms. But that being said, in terms of like what is actionable

01:06:59   for developers to do with the headset right now, I think, you know, we're gonna see version 1.0 of

01:07:07   this OS, we're gonna see version 1.0 of the SDK and version 1.0 of all the frameworks and the UI

01:07:13   and everything else. On some level, it's very exciting and very disruptive to our customers,

01:07:18   as I was saying earlier. But also, there might just not be that much for us to do yet on it.

01:07:24   You know, first of all, I don't know when they plan to actually ship this thing to us. But that's

01:07:30   gonna itself be a pretty big limitation. Like there's gonna be a lot of things where we want

01:07:35   to develop something for this, but we kind of can't until we have one. Or we can only do preliminary

01:07:40   work maybe in some kind of simulator or something until we get one. Or maybe, you know, maybe Apple

01:07:45   will use the new developer center that they built, they opened up last year, to like, you know,

01:07:50   invite developers out by invitation only, come out to the developer center in, you know, July and

01:07:56   August, and you can sign up for like, you know, a one day slot to use the hardware and test your app

01:08:02   on it. You know, they did that with the watch. So, you know, and they had like the whole dev kit

01:08:06   situation with the transition to Apple silicones, like they've done stuff kind of in this ballpark

01:08:11   before. So I'm guessing that kind of thing will happen, you know, whether it will be open to

01:08:16   many developers is a different question. You know, I'm sure some developers will get invited.

01:08:21   You know, I don't know if it will be like, anybody can sign up kind of thing. I think it'll be more

01:08:25   likely, you know, don't call us, we'll call you. That's much more likely just for scale. But anyway,

01:08:31   so I don't expect there to be a ton for developers to do on the headset yet this summer, because

01:08:38   presumably, we won't have them yet. We won't have access to them yet. And we probably will have a

01:08:44   very early SDK. So and so it's going to depend a lot on what you do. Like if you if you make an app

01:08:51   or or choose to make an app, that is really a great thing in AR VR, then you're going to have

01:08:59   maybe a busier time. If you make, say a podcast player, you know, it might not be that important,

01:09:05   like, it might just be all right, find a way to show a UI. But otherwise, everything else is the

01:09:10   same. And and if the stories are accurate about like, you know, them being able to run iPad apps

01:09:15   and little windows, it might not be that much work at all for developers to get their apps to at

01:09:20   least run on the thing. And then, you know, once we have physical access to them, then we can maybe

01:09:24   worry about, you know, making it good in the thing. Secondly, if we don't have physical access to them,

01:09:29   neither do our customers. And so again, it's like, there's only going to be so much we can really

01:09:35   do until this thing is out in the market, or at least widely available to developers. So that's

01:09:41   going to hold back some of that. So I would, I would also hope that there is some nice to haves

01:09:47   on the other platforms. This is what we're gonna get to in a second. And I think, based on the

01:09:52   rumors and everything so far, that seems fairly plausible. And also just based on you know, what

01:09:56   Apple has done, even when their teams have been busy doing other stuff, you know, on new platforms,

01:10:02   whatever, they do tend to have decent iOS releases. You know, Mac OS, oftentimes, you know, is last

01:10:09   priority and doesn't get much. And frankly, that's often a good thing. Because when, when they,

01:10:15   when they touch Mac OS, without a ton of effort behind it, they tend to break things and make them

01:10:19   worse. So, you know, that's, it's good for Mac OS to not have not have a lot of updates when they're

01:10:25   busy. So, but iOS, I think is, is likely to have some decent quality of life stuff there. That,

01:10:33   you know, even if there isn't some kind of massive, you know, SDK overhaul, some kind of massive new

01:10:39   language or framework or anything else, like, even in the absence of those really big updates,

01:10:44   there tends to be a bunch of nice small stuff with new iOS upgrades, both as customer facing

01:10:49   features and on the on the developer SDK and a lot of little like quality life improvements,

01:10:53   little new APIs, little, you know, single little modifiers for Swift UI, or, hey, here's a new view

01:10:58   container that makes things easier for you. You know, stuff like that, that tends to get there

01:11:02   and never release. So I'm expecting that for iOS. And then I think what we're about to get to is,

01:11:08   I'm actually very excited and interested to hear that there's pretty strong rumors that WatchOS

01:11:14   is getting substantial updates. Do we want to talk about that now?

01:11:18   So yeah, this is reported in Bloomberg, what was this last month, I believe in late April,

01:11:23   I believe it was a Mark Gurman piece that talked about how Apple is to upgrade its watch operating

01:11:29   system with a new focus on widgets. And so Mark writes, as part of WatchOS 10, Apple is planning

01:11:35   to bring back widgets and make them a central part of the interface. The new widget system on the

01:11:39   Apple watch will be a combination of the old WatchOS Glances system and the style of widgets

01:11:43   that were introduced in iOS 14 on the iPhone. The plan is to let users scroll through different

01:11:47   a series of different widgets for activity tracking, weather, stock, tickers, calendar

01:11:51   appointments, and more, rather than having them launch apps. The new interface will be reminiscent

01:11:55   of the Siri watch face, which was introduced in WatchOS 4, but it will be available as an

01:12:00   overlay for any watch face. It's also similar to widget stacks, a feature in iOS and iPadOS that

01:12:04   lets users pile many widgets into one and scroll through them. As part of the overhaul, Apple is

01:12:09   testing the idea of changing the functions of some of the watch's buttons. Currently,

01:12:12   press the digital crown, launches the home screen. For the next version of WatchOS,

01:12:15   Apple may have that open up widgets instead. And it is worth noting that apparently the Watch

01:12:21   App Store has fewer than a million monthly users in the whatever region they were going to through

01:12:26   some court proceedings. Apple disclosed versus 101 million on the iPhone, so literally 100 times more

01:12:33   people using the iOS App Store than the WatchOS App Store. I can't say I'm surprised. But yeah,

01:12:38   I mean, I think the idea of widgets on the watch is appealing. I don't know if I'm quite

01:12:46   as enthusiastic as you are, Marco, but I will say that even as someone who has only dabbled

01:12:54   in watch development, one of the things that makes watch development very tough, particularly

01:12:58   for things like complications, is that you have extraordinarily little time as a developer to run

01:13:04   code that will update information on a complication and other things like that. And so if widgets were

01:13:11   given more flexibility and more time to update themselves, such that they're getting updated

01:13:17   more than what feels like three times a day, I know that's not literally the case, but that's

01:13:21   what it feels like sometimes, that I would be more enthusiastic about. Like when I look down at my

01:13:26   Carrot weather widget, and it's not, excuse me, complication, and it's not Carrot's fault,

01:13:32   oftentimes it is clearly behind, especially on spring or fall days where the temperature can

01:13:39   vary pretty dramatically from morning to afternoon. A lot of times I'll look and my watch will say,

01:13:45   "Oh, it's like 40 degrees outside," but I can tell it's easily 20 degrees more than that.

01:13:50   And so I think what I'm most potentially interested in is if there is either a better API,

01:13:59   which presumably there would be, and I'm going to give you a chance here Marco in a second,

01:14:02   but a better API to make this work a little better or be easier to do on the developer side,

01:14:08   but more importantly, just to have a little bit more ability to make the watch feel alive rather

01:14:16   than something that occasionally wakes up and then goes immediately back to sleep again. Marco,

01:14:21   does any of that make sense? Yes. And I think you've identified a couple of the key parts of

01:14:28   both why I'm excited for this and also why some of the issues I've had with WatchOS in the past

01:14:34   and present. So Apple has a long history going back to, I believe the first major version of this

01:14:41   that we saw in modern day was dashboard for macOS. A long history of these views that you can get

01:14:49   where you have to go to the view or you look at a view of something and at that point, when you're

01:14:56   looking at it, the app is asked, "Hey, update this data." And in the meantime, maybe it shows a

01:15:00   placeholder or stale data and then the new data pops in like a second or two later. And from a

01:15:06   user point of view, that sucks. It's terrible when you look at something on your watch or in the old

01:15:12   dashboard interface on the Mac or different places like that, or the old today screen or the today

01:15:17   widgets on iOS, you would seek out this information, you would go to it, or you would look at it.

01:15:24   And then at that point, the system would ask the app, "Oh, hey, update this." And the reason why

01:15:30   it was built that way was that the systems for various reasons over time, there weren't the

01:15:36   system resources or they were chosen not to be spent this way to have those apps constantly

01:15:41   running in the background, being able to update their data whenever they wanted. In the case on

01:15:46   the watch, the watch has always been extremely power constrained. And that dictates everything

01:15:52   about it. It's a very small battery and a very small device. And they really can't make the

01:15:56   battery any bigger. It's already most of the device. So it's like, you got to deal with what

01:16:00   you got here. And that dictates everything. That dictates the slow processor the watch has relative

01:16:08   to the phone. Everything is about space and power and minimizing drain on that battery.

01:16:14   **Matt Stauffer** Speaking of that, there are rumors that they're going to actually change the

01:16:17   SOC, not just change the number, but actually change. And I don't see the rumors around three

01:16:23   nanometer really confusing because I know TSMC is ramping up on three nanometer, but the lead times

01:16:29   are such that I can't figure out when Apple will ship a product fab done TSMC's three nanometer

01:16:36   process. But I also can't imagine the watch SOC being substantially better without going to a new

01:16:43   process. I don't know what the current process is. Is it actually the same process size as the

01:16:48   good five nanometer that the phones are? Or is it?

01:16:52   **Matt Stauffer** It might still be seven. I mean, because the watch SOC, the CPU in the watch,

01:16:58   I don't know about the whole SOC, the CPU cores in the watch have not changed in three years.

01:17:03   **Matt Stauffer** I think the whole SOC has. I think people who looked at the die shots that

01:17:07   not much has changed for a long time.

01:17:10   **Matt Stauffer** Yeah. So it's using a three year old processor. And so that's not fun. Yeah,

01:17:14   I think the series six, seven and eight, they're all the same chip.

01:17:17   **Matt Stauffer** So the rumor is this might be a new chip. And I think if it uses a

01:17:22   smaller process size than the previous one, that could give Apple a little bit of headroom to

01:17:28   change some of the things you just described.

01:17:29   **Matt Stauffer** Yes, because that's the thing. Like with watch OS, since its beginning,

01:17:34   it was all about conserving, extremely aggressively conserving the resources on the watch,

01:17:40   because there's not much to go around. So that impacts the way apps have been built from the

01:17:45   beginning in various ways. But the gist of it is what Casey said, that your app, you don't always

01:17:53   run. Like if you're not being actively used on screen, with very few exceptions, you're not

01:17:58   running. And so if you rely on a third party app that has say a complication that you're looking

01:18:03   at, say, you know, carrot weather, you know, a good weather app, you know, you're looking at,

01:18:07   you know, whatever the complication is on the screen, like, that app is only being woken up

01:18:11   in the background every so often to, you know, fetch new data from the internet, update the data

01:18:16   in the app and, you know, update the complication, you know, data. And it tells the watch, hey,

01:18:23   over these next, you know, six hours, here's the hourly forecasted display from this time to this

01:18:28   time show this from this time to this time show this, etc. It gives us this timeline of updates.

01:18:32   And during that entire time, the watch may not and probably won't ever ask the app, hey, refresh,

01:18:39   give me give me give me new data here. So what you're looking at when you when you look at watch

01:18:45   complications, you are looking at a series a timeline of pre rendered data that is that the

01:18:52   app has provided during some like three second long window, it was allowed to run in the background

01:18:57   a few hours ago, possibly. And and there's a certain limit on how many times per day can do

01:19:01   that the app servers can send push notifications to request an update, but those aren't always

01:19:06   obeyed. It's more it's like, it's a request, not a guarantee, like, please give me some time,

01:19:10   I have some new stuff, I would like to show it. And the and the watch can say, okay, or the watch

01:19:16   can say, I don't know what you're talking about and just walk away. And so there's all these

01:19:21   limitations. And the widget system on the iPhone was built the same way. If you were making watch

01:19:28   complications, you know, a couple of years ago, then when widget came out, it was like, oh,

01:19:31   this is clock kit, just, you know, slightly different and with swifty, why, which made a

01:19:35   lot better. But that that that idea of when you swipe over when you view a widget on the iPhone,

01:19:42   that app is not running. And this is why again, like there's there's also some rumors with iOS 17

01:19:47   of possible interactive widgets. And I and this kind of flies in the face of this, because it's

01:19:52   kind of questioning like, well, what is what would that mean? And I think it would be very limited

01:19:56   if that if there's a thing but anyway, because, again, widgets on iOS work that same way. And

01:20:03   then actually, they later then brought that widget system back to the watch and replaced clock kit,

01:20:08   which was based on widget kit was based on the ideas of clock kit, but did it better with Swift

01:20:12   UI, then they redid the new complication system using widget kit because it was better. Anyway,

01:20:18   so they brought it back full circle anyway. So on iOS, you know, you have widgets, those apps aren't

01:20:24   running, it's the same thing where they are periodically asked for updates. And the app gives

01:20:30   the gives iOS a timeline to say, all right, show this from this time, this time, etc. And again,

01:20:35   same thing applies this, the that app servers can send a push notification requesting an update,

01:20:39   it may or may not be obeyed, there are there's there's limits, there's throttling, etc.

01:20:44   On iOS, there's, you know, one set of limits on the watch, it's way more aggressively throttled.

01:20:49   And there's way less opportunity for apps to update their complications on the watch.

01:20:54   So anything they do, first of all, it makes perfect sense to bring that system more to the watch.

01:21:00   Because it does what the watch needs. It gives a timeline of updates without having to have all

01:21:06   these apps running in the background drain the between the very, very tiny battery in the Apple

01:21:10   Watch. So it makes sense to have this be more built into the system. That being said, if there's

01:21:17   no other major advances, like more frequent background updates, more, you know, a more robust

01:21:24   system to request updates, higher limits on how much CPU time or memory those processes or

01:21:29   extensions can use when they're updating. Without other changes like that, it's going to be a fairly

01:21:36   limited system. And it's not going to enable a lot of what people would expect or want. So I hope

01:21:43   when they bring this over, assuming they have to, I mean, I'm sure it's too late now, whatever they

01:21:47   have decided to do, that's it. But I hope they have, when they have presumably brought this over,

01:21:52   I hope it has come with some increases in those limits or some, you know, less aggressive

01:21:58   throttling, some more frequent updates being permitted or something. And all of that, I think,

01:22:06   will be a great thing once they establish it. Because when you look at the way the watch works

01:22:10   now, apps on the watch still suck. They just suck less than they used to, way less. I mean,

01:22:16   they used to be horrendous with, you know, WatchKit 1. That was rough. But, you know,

01:22:22   they're still very limited. They're still way more limited than iOS apps. And it makes it very hard

01:22:30   as a developer to make a great watch app experience that will match what our users expect. As a result,

01:22:36   it's kind of unfair. You know, like, I don't use a third party weather widget on my, as a

01:22:42   complication on my watch. Because third party apps, even the best written ones, like Carrot,

01:22:48   Carrot's a great app. Even the best written weather apps on the Apple Watch cannot update

01:22:55   their complications as often or as reliably as Apple lets theirs update. So I use Apple weather

01:23:01   complications on my watch, even though they're less good, because they work better and more

01:23:06   consistently. And that's not to say anything against the developer of other apps. They can't

01:23:11   do anything about it. It's out of their hands. So, and I know this, like, because I have my own

01:23:16   custom little complications, don't do anything useful, but I just kind of use them for cosmetic,

01:23:21   you know, things on my own face. And I know that occasionally they just stop getting asked to

01:23:25   update. And I can't do anything about it. So the whole system is pretty, it's pretty limiting for

01:23:31   third party developers. So what I'm hoping, if they're moving this to the system from a developer

01:23:36   point of view, I hope those limits get get raised in a big way. And maybe they maybe they don't need

01:23:42   the new processor, maybe not. I hope not because I would like them to be available on all the

01:23:46   existing install base. But hey, we'll see what happens. And then as a user of watchOS,

01:23:51   the honeycomb screen has always been a huge failure. I anytime you have to go to that screen,

01:24:00   you've lost. And it's going to that screen. It's like trying to plug in a micro USB cable.

01:24:06   It's like, I know I'm going to be I'm going to spend way too long staring at these tiny icons

01:24:09   trying to find the app that I want. And whatever I tap on whatever I guess is this alarm or timer,

01:24:14   whatever I guess is going to be wrong the first time and maybe the second. And so it that's created

01:24:19   is terrible. You can change it to a list if you want by a long pressing. But the list is terrible

01:24:25   in different ways. It's first of all, it's just too long. There's all these different built in

01:24:29   features, many of which you can't turn off that you know, you need some way to access. So that

01:24:34   whole system could use a rethink. It's a hard problem. I get you know, they're trying to cram

01:24:40   40 apps onto a two inch screen like yeah, it's that's that's a tough problem. But

01:24:46   there is room for improvement in the way they've done it now. So if the rumor is correct, that they

01:24:52   are actually re implementing or rethinking large parts of how users interact with apps on the watch

01:24:58   at all. That's a very good thing too. And then finally, I would say the the rate of adoption of

01:25:07   third party apps among non nerd people on the watch is really low. And and I mean, this is just

01:25:15   anecdotal. But you know, look around people in your life who have Apple watches. We've talked

01:25:19   about that on the show before. How many of them even know that you can change the complications?

01:25:27   Ask around, look around, see how many people in your life use an Apple watch face that even has

01:25:31   complications. And then see how many of those are on the default. And it's a lot. It's most of them.

01:25:36   So the watch has a lot of functionality that is just that people just don't know about. And you

01:25:44   can't blame them because the way to access this functionality is often really hidden or convoluted.

01:25:50   Or on the phone. Yeah, or on the phone, which I mean, fortunately, they have been moving a lot of

01:25:54   that off. Like I recently I tried to edit like, what metrics were shown in different workout modes.

01:26:01   And that used to be phone only. And now it's watch only. Now you have to like hit the little

01:26:06   like dot menu on the workout and go in there and edit stuff there. It took me a while to figure out

01:26:11   like, first I was looking all over the phone app for it. Couldn't find it anywhere there. I'm like,

01:26:15   well, crap, did they just remove customization of workout faces. And then eventually I found it in

01:26:19   the in the watch app, but it took me a while. And I and that was like, I know this feature is probably

01:26:25   still here somewhere. And I know roughly where to look at it. And I'm a computer professional.

01:26:29   And it took me a long time to figure it out. So there's a lot of stuff like that on the watch.

01:26:34   There's a lot of functionality in the watch, much of which people would really enjoy if they knew

01:26:39   it was there or if they knew how to do it. And it's it has a massive discoverability problem.

01:26:44   And a lot of stuff is super clunky about it once you do figure it out. So there's a lot of room

01:26:48   for improvement there. I'm really excited that they're that they're tackling this because in

01:26:52   most for most of the last three to five years, it has seemed like the watch is not well staffed.

01:27:00   Like it seemed like when WBC comes comes and goes every year for the watch. It has seemed a lot like

01:27:06   man is do they have like more than four people working on this entire OS like because they you

01:27:12   know, they do good work, but it's just really bits and pieces come out every year like it's not it

01:27:17   not a lot comes out from the watch from watch OS every year. It's a very it's kind of like tvOS

01:27:21   like you get a couple of things here and there but it's a very very small set of new features

01:27:25   every year. And so it has seemed under invested in in the last you know, X years. This suggests

01:27:32   that they have actually put a lot of effort into it this year. So that's exciting to me as well.

01:27:36   I'm really looking forward to hopefully the watch having like major major updates in usability or

01:27:43   in app capabilities or app structure or whatever it is. I hope they actually deliver on that.

01:27:48   I hope it's really good. And I would also hope still maybe the more you put a widget like

01:27:55   architecture into the watch. I think the the easier that makes it for them to offer third

01:28:02   party watch faces as an option. Yeah. Now whether I know I know happen eventually whether yeah,

01:28:07   whether they are doing it, whether they will choose to do it, whether they will permit it.

01:28:12   These are all very different questions. But from a technical point of view using widget kit or a

01:28:19   widget kit like system with some pre-built parts makes a lot of sense for enabling for the structure

01:28:26   to enable third party watch faces because then you don't have to have a third party process running

01:28:31   constantly on the on the watch. You can again just wake it up periodically. You can you have you can

01:28:36   define certain pieces that you have to use like all right well you have to use this digital face

01:28:42   of this size and it has to be in this location or you can choose to use these specific analog

01:28:48   watch hands and they have to be in this location. You know whatever it is if they wanted to dictate

01:28:52   certain parts of it and certain requirements to say all watch faces must be able to do X, Y, Z or

01:28:57   must use pieces X, Y, Z in this way. They could do that really well with with with widget kit

01:29:03   technically speaking and practically speaking. So it seems like the the most apparent and obvious

01:29:08   way to enable third-party watch faces based on the tech stack we know of today is with widget kit.

01:29:13   So bringing widget kit to watchOS in a bigger way yeah that makes a lot of sense for maybe maybe

01:29:18   maybe enabling this either now or in the future. I hope it's now. If it isn't now and I know it

01:29:23   probably isn't I hope it's in the near future because I still want third-party watch faces

01:29:26   and this is just such a such a clear like you know I wouldn't necessarily call anything easy

01:29:31   but this is actually a straightforward and and dare I say obvious way to offer them you know

01:29:36   using this kind of architecture. So anyway I'm looking forward to this and and I hope

01:29:41   I hope this is an exciting year for watchOS. So imagine this it's WWDC we're you know we're

01:29:47   watching the video since it's a fantasy we're all sitting next to each other for the first time

01:29:51   since 2019. We're watching the video together and Kevin Lynch comes on the video and says

01:29:58   I only have one thing to tell you about the watch communication between the watch and the phone

01:30:03   is reliable now and then walks away. That's not gonna happen. Is that enough is it'll never happen

01:30:08   but Marco is that enough to make this a classic like just favorite WWDC of all time? Oh no because

01:30:15   I would first of all I don't think it's possible second of all I wouldn't I wouldn't believe them

01:30:19   and I think the the way the way to fix phone to watch communication is to get rid of it

01:30:24   like the way the way to fix it is to give me the same controls that I have on URL background

01:30:31   download sessions and URL communication which you most you have most of it already give me the same

01:30:36   background download abilities and APIs on the watch that I have on the phone let it let it

01:30:40   download like let background download start immediately and and let them run over wi-fi

01:30:46   and not over bluetooth to the phone. That's what like there's a there's a number of points in that

01:30:51   communication stack that are either unreliable or ungodly slow and again this is all in the name of

01:30:56   saving power like you can see why they did it but I think a lot of those decisions they might have

01:31:03   made sense seven years ago maybe they make less sense now or maybe they're not as necessary now

01:31:08   as they used to be and the those decisions really hold back apps and and so again I hope they like

01:31:16   just let my app initiate a background-able download that will run over wi-fi and start

01:31:23   immediately. That's it I can do it on iOS I can do it on all other Apple OS's. Well I don't I don't

01:31:31   think Mac OS supports background downloads anyway I can do it on most other Apple OS's. I can't do

01:31:37   it on on the watch and that really holds stuff back to the point where I had to make a breakout

01:31:43   game in my app so that you would keep the screen on like that the whole reason I had to make a

01:31:48   game in my watch app in my podcast app while you download a file is so that you have something to

01:31:53   do that will keep the screen on so I don't have to rely on the background downloads when you want to

01:31:57   download something right now before you go out for a run or something and you don't want it to be

01:32:01   cancelled for no reason or to never start for no reason so please Apple make that stuff better but

01:32:07   anyway I will complain a lot less about that if I have custom third-party watch faces. No that's

01:32:13   fair. So John pulling on this thread a moment what is your I don't care about anything else that

01:32:18   happened this was a great WWDC I assume new Mac Pro? I mean yeah well I'm not really expecting

01:32:25   that because of the rumors although I do have a brief aside about something that Marco talked

01:32:29   about how people don't know don't customize their complications on their watches they don't know

01:32:35   they can do it and the interface of doing it is clunky and it's lots of things on the watch are

01:32:39   non-discoverable and when you were describing that I thought this is another place where

01:32:45   it seems like Apple is I mean we don't know because we don't know what they're doing but

01:32:50   it seems like they're behind where everyone else is zooming forward with their large language

01:32:53   models one of the things that current large language models that are out there right now

01:32:57   are really good at doing is exactly this task which is a voice interface to describing what

01:33:03   you want your the complications in your phone screen to be like you can go to one of these

01:33:08   large language models right now and say make me a web page in the lower left corner put a picture

01:33:12   of a sun in the lower right corner put a counter that counts up every second and like you could

01:33:16   actually describe the functionality of the widgets and it will do it like how easy would it be for a

01:33:20   well-trained large language model to say I want the weather in the upper left the date in the

01:33:25   lower left and then continue a conversation said no I want the date to be the day of the week plus

01:33:31   the the month in the year or I don't want the year like those type of conversations you can have them

01:33:36   with large language models right now and the canvas that they're painting on is like anything

01:33:41   you can ask for more or less it'll try to do it with varying degrees the problem space of picking

01:33:47   which widgets you want to picking out from a fixed set of widgets to appear in a fixed set of location

01:33:52   with a fixed set of options large language models would eat that for breakfast the problems are one

01:33:57   apple seems not to be on that train with everyone else as far as we know because they haven't

01:34:02   announced anything in that area two their existing thing that you can talk to Siri sucks balls and we

01:34:06   know that and then you know three I don't think this is the type of thing that apple can uh you

01:34:13   know say oh well they're popular we're rolling out this year you know like it's again as hard

01:34:18   enough as we don't know what's going on but like it seems like apple is behind everyone else on

01:34:23   this so you can't expect them to surprise watch os 10 is out and it's got a large language model that

01:34:30   you can talk to and I guess this ties into what Marco was saying too is even if you could like

01:34:33   you don't run the large language model on the watch right so now it has to do network communication oh

01:34:38   no the sky is falling batteries being destroyed and I get that like like it's true of what Marco

01:34:43   was asking for I want my downloaders to start now and on wi-fi it'll kill people's watch batteries

01:34:46   but it's like but they want that to happen when they're down they you know it's the balance

01:34:50   between which would you rather have your podcast literally never downloads and it frustrates you

01:34:53   to no end or we burn part of your battery downloading your podcast like you have to pick one

01:34:57   you can't like there's no way to get the podcast on your watch without burning battery so either

01:35:01   you want it and you're willing to sacrifice the battery for it and you don't and the same deal

01:35:04   I think with talking to your watch and setting up with a large language model and setting up your

01:35:08   complications maybe as a one-time tutorial that you guide people through when they're setting up

01:35:13   their watch and they have a conversation with it and during the course of the conversation the

01:35:16   watch face forms in front of their eyes is a great way to a show people that's possible and b

01:35:23   let them know that they can do it in a way that doesn't involve them poking their fingers at the

01:35:26   screen trying to find the interface because I have the same frustration I'm not familiar with watch

01:35:29   os because I don't wear an apple watch and anytime I want to do anything in watch os I don't know

01:35:33   where it is I don't know how it works I can't figure out what things are supposed to be touching

01:35:36   or what even what the vocabulary of gestures is to do stuff large language models would destroy

01:35:42   this test they're so good at it it's such a narrow problem space and you can talk in a free form

01:35:46   manner and apple's speech to text actually works pretty well so once you get over that hurdle and

01:35:52   you can throw that text to a large language model running somewhere on an apple server that it can

01:35:56   communicate with that is a I think a really good use of current technology for you know talking to

01:36:04   things and the problem space of dealing with any kind of ui on a two-inch screen that's on your

01:36:11   wrist yeah and on the point of large language models by the way this is obviously you know a

01:36:18   huge question is like we're in the the this like you know boom time of this new generation of ai

01:36:25   capabilities what's apple gonna do with wtc with them and and I think unfortunately the answer is

01:36:31   probably nothing there is nothing because they like that's not what apple does like apple does

01:36:36   stuff you know more slowly than that in a lot of areas and I mean they they could if they were on

01:36:40   the ball on this and were were sort of ahead of the curve or even you know even with everyone else

01:36:45   they could have stuff to announce the wtc but that whole part of the org seems dysfunctional now again

01:36:50   because we don't know what's going on for all we know they've been working on large language

01:36:52   model stuff for seven years and they're about to roll it out and wow us but it certainly seems like

01:36:56   that's not the case no I think what's more likely is look apple apple knows that again these are

01:37:02   smart people they know that the eyes of the world are going to be upon them and expecting

01:37:08   ai announcements and so I think what they're going to most likely do is brand some things as ai

01:37:16   that are not actually using this new generation of of technique and it's just using you know the

01:37:21   the previous generation you know like you know what we used to call machine learning you know

01:37:24   these terms and I know these terms are you know oftentimes fake and shifting around over time but

01:37:30   they I think they might just you know show off stuff that is using that kind of technique

01:37:35   and say this is ai powered you know just because those are the buzzwords that people expect at the

01:37:39   day the rumors surrounding the like siri and the headset I seem to recall reading something

01:37:45   somewhere that was like a supposedly inside dirt on like that the headset team didn't really want

01:37:51   to use siri but like that's what's available to them they're kind of like wanted to go their own

01:37:55   direction because siri sucks so bad they're just like well we you know I don't know if they want

01:37:58   to use large language models maybe that predates that but like they know they have a problem here

01:38:03   because they the headset is similar like the interface to it is more limited than it is on

01:38:08   a phone ipad or mac so you have to figure out how do I manipulate things I don't know the whole

01:38:12   cameras looking at your fingertips and so on and so forth but it's a harder problem right it's

01:38:15   harder than just using a pointer or cursor you know or touching the screen with your fingers

01:38:18   you can't do that with a headset so let's use the voice assistant that our company already has

01:38:23   oh but that voice assistant is bad so well you don't want the headset to be bad people working

01:38:28   on the headset is that we want the headset to be good and we do need something that's going to

01:38:31   listen to us and so I kind of agree that they're like as they promote siri and the headset maybe

01:38:37   they'll have a new suffix siri ai seri I mean I don't know how they'll go that far but like

01:38:42   maybe they'll just say hey siri's in your headset too and everybody loves siri and look how amazing

01:38:47   it is you can talk to it and make little vr apps as the rumor was or whatever but like

01:38:51   yeah this is another one of the benefits of the headset the fact that it blots out the sun I

01:38:56   think it can blot out the fact that apple doesn't really have anything to show uh for it uh

01:39:01   regarding large language models wt which is fine they got a whole headset and a new platform isn't

01:39:06   that exciting I think they can get away with it this year next year when we come to wc next year

01:39:11   regardless of how the headset turns out maybe next year it's finally just shipping to people

01:39:14   or something next year apple needs to start having some kind of answers with large language models

01:39:19   because I think they've proven they're useful in enough context and like the reason I gave the you

01:39:24   know setting up the complications on your watch uh you know watch screen uh problem space that is

01:39:31   a limited domain where large language models can excel in in ways that siri absolutely has not

01:39:37   because you have to know how to talk to siri and in the special way that siri understands and even

01:39:41   when you know sometimes it does ridiculous things that that don't make any sense whereas large

01:39:46   language models don't work that way again if you've never tried one go go to one right now and

01:39:51   ask it to do something with a limited problem domain or even with a not particularly limited

01:39:55   one like I said asking it to make a web page for you or something it's really good about having a

01:40:00   conversation with you and understanding what it is you want as long as it's you're talking to it

01:40:04   about something that was able to train itself on it's out there in the world and apple can absolutely

01:40:09   find a large language model and train it on enough data to understand watch os complications yeah

01:40:16   one thing by the way like in in terms of like wwdc you know hopes and dreams here one thing I I would

01:40:23   love to see I I don't know if it'll be this year it'll more likely be next year but I would love to

01:40:30   see apple make available to developers through apis on the phone some large language model

01:40:38   capabilities that they have optimized like crazy to run on their hardware so for instance you know

01:40:42   the the stable diffusion algorithm for image generation apple actually I think I believe it

01:40:48   was that one apple actually contributed to the open source project or whatever to optimize it

01:40:53   for running on apple silicon max and or apple silicon in general and so and then that that

01:40:58   kind of enabled people to make iphone apps with it I would love them to do more of that that kind

01:41:03   of thing of like and and build it into the os so that we don't have to download like each app you

01:41:08   know a good example of this right now is if you want if you want to transcribe sound into speech

01:41:15   into text apple has actually shipped an api to do this for a number of years now it's called

01:41:21   something like sf speak synthesizer the pro or speech recognizer whatever there were a number

01:41:26   of problems with it number one because I've been trying to do features like this in overcast for

01:41:30   years you know one of the biggest clearest examples of where I could use this is like

01:41:34   when you do clip sharing and overcast to be able to show as part of the video clip the text you

01:41:41   know many apps like tick tock you know they do this they have this built in now this is a common

01:41:46   thing and I need to do it at some point and in the past this was limited by a number of factors number

01:41:51   one was in the past I don't know if this is still the case that api to use apple's built-in speech

01:41:58   to text api your app had to request and get access to the microphone even if you were feeding it audio

01:42:06   that was not from the microphone so I could not as a podcast app feed the pre-recorded audio that

01:42:13   I downloaded to my podcast app through their text-to-speech system or their speech-to-text system

01:42:18   until I prompted the user for microphone access and that alone was enough for me to say I'm not

01:42:22   using this feature because I'm not going to ask my users who are all you know educated nerds

01:42:28   for permission to access their microphone in a podcast app because there's no reason I would

01:42:33   need that except to be creepy and like spy on them with ads and stuff like okay so I don't even want

01:42:38   the appearance that I might be doing that I don't even want the ability to access their microphone I

01:42:42   don't want I don't I don't even want that to be possible in my app so that alone ruled it out but

01:42:48   also you know it was it was using older style you know models and and things to to do the speech-to-

01:42:55   text conversion and it wasn't very good in my testing like I made a couple of test prototypes

01:43:00   granting myself microphone access just to see like you know how good is this and it was bad and it

01:43:06   was it was too bad to ship so I didn't ship it well whatever however many months ago open ai

01:43:12   released their whisper model and whisper is really massively better it's not a small difference it is

01:43:19   way more accurate and there there is a project called whisper.cpp where some guy has done

01:43:25   amazing work in like transforming this this thing that you would otherwise need a whole bunch of

01:43:29   python to run into a very simple c++ wrapper that you could make ios and other apps with and it runs

01:43:36   fine on apple stuff and I tried that and I built a prototype with that and it was super easy to use

01:43:41   and and and the downside of using whisper oh there's two main downs number one if you use the

01:43:47   large models that have like larger vocabularies and more accuracy it's just too slow to run on

01:43:52   an iphone number two these models are huge to download like the the base model that provides

01:44:00   like okay accuracy decent speed is something I think it's something like 70 megs and then if you

01:44:07   want something more accurate it goes into like multiple gigs very quickly and this is just it's

01:44:13   untenable to run that in the way I would want to run that would be you know stuff like transcription

01:44:18   of what you're listening to you know there's lots of things I could do with that if it was fast and

01:44:22   and you know inexpensive computationally to run that but if I had to download like a two gig model

01:44:28   you know as part of the app to do those features or whatever that's that's not going to fly

01:44:33   and if it's going to be super slow it's not going to fly well they could build in some medium-sized

01:44:39   model into the os if they wanted to and they could use it themselves for their own speech to

01:44:43   text stuff and then make that available to developers they could also for instance optimize

01:44:47   that model you know the reason why the whisper dot cpp doesn't run very quickly on iphones one of the

01:44:53   reasons is because apple has not done their work to optimize that one the way they did with the

01:44:57   stable diffusion also they the the way these models usually work you if you're running in

01:45:03   the background you don't have access to the gpu or the neural engine as far as I know but you

01:45:09   definitely can't run you can't run ml models on the gpu if your app is in the background

01:45:13   you can only it it makes your app only use cpu based computation and that makes them way slower

01:45:19   to run in many cases and this is the case for whisper and whisper dot cpp only ever uses the

01:45:24   cpu it doesn't have any access to the hardware acceleration besides you know cpu raw stuff and so

01:45:30   this makes it slower than it than it could be so if apple actually wanted to offer a really great

01:45:35   dictation to speech api or just you know speech text api they could massively improve the the api

01:45:44   they've already offered for years by using this new kind of technique a new kind of model like this

01:45:48   optimize it let it run on the acceleration hardware ship it ship a base model with the os

01:45:54   and all of a sudden every app could have really easy access to speech to text that's the kind of

01:46:01   thing that i think is more likely for apple to offer with these new ai techniques sooner

01:46:07   than having them offer some kind of like full-blown customer facing you know quote ai powered feature

01:46:13   i think it's too soon for that and and that's that's kind of less appley to do that kind of

01:46:17   thing the customizing watch face is a great example of how apple would do it it's not like

01:46:21   you can have arbitrary conversations with the thing like they would be very narrowly constrained and i

01:46:26   know the large language models out there now are supposedly constrained but they're it's more like

01:46:30   everything except for these five or six things they try to keep them away from whereas this would be

01:46:34   you can discuss nothing except for watch faces and i feel like that is easier especially if they

01:46:39   train the model themselves right um which again costs money and you know regarding the the the

01:46:45   speech text thing and the size of them and everything there's a reason large language

01:46:48   models are called large language models they use tremendous amounts of storage and tremendous

01:46:53   amounts of memory and tremendous amounts of compute not just for the training which is itself

01:46:57   huge because obviously you're grinding through tons and tons of data but even just for the part

01:47:01   of it where it runs the the inference part of it where it does its thing even that takes a

01:47:06   substantial amount of of power and resources which is why i was saying the watch would have to be

01:47:10   communicating with the server obviously and then even just communicating with the server would be

01:47:14   taxing for the watch and drain the battery and so on but not to mention the servers yeah well i mean

01:47:20   the servers yeah but again to be that incredibly constrained to just be doing watch faces it's what

01:47:26   we talked about a while ago and the people have actually implemented uh large language models

01:47:30   sitting in front of essentially the functionality exposed by siri or like you know limit functionality

01:47:34   that's already on the watch the watch can already pick complications and configure them and put them

01:47:37   in places on the faces it's just a question of translating from speech to text and from text to

01:47:43   what is this text telling me to do and then oh actually i i the watch have apis for doing all

01:47:49   the things you're asking for it's a very constrained problem space which is miles from like what

01:47:53   microsoft did was like here's bing you can talk to it about stuff good luck yeah but like ultimately

01:47:59   i what i want to see from apple in the ai age really is make a lot of this cool tech available

01:48:08   on device for for on device use by apps that are not communicating with their own servers

01:48:14   that can just run everything locally and apple has you know with the exception of of having

01:48:20   what seems like organizational or cultural trouble with ai machine learning techniques and

01:48:28   people in general um that that's a that's a large issue they need to they need to figure out if they

01:48:33   haven't yet and so far it seems like they haven't but what they have resource wise is they have all

01:48:39   these supercomputers in everybody's pockets that have amazing hardware and software capabilities

01:48:44   and and they care a lot about privacy and things running on device whenever possible and everything

01:48:51   and that's that's a level of sophistication and an amount of resources that their competitors don't

01:48:57   have so i i hope apple leans into that and i think this is this is how they're going to ultimately

01:49:02   tackle you know quote ai leaning into on device stuff as much as possible and and and if they do

01:49:09   that themselves they will most likely do it in a way where there is an api for developers to

01:49:14   hook into or use those same capabilities in our apps that's what i'm hoping to see from apple in

01:49:20   this new age of these new styles of ai it is you know cool on device capabilities that run quickly

01:49:27   and locally that don't need you know us to as you know a developer of one app we don't need to go

01:49:33   train our own models we don't need to uh you know go run a huge server farm or have our own you know

01:49:39   open ai tokens that we have to use and figure out how the heck to pay for like i want to see what

01:49:45   what apple can deliver us on device that they will maintain they will train they will update it over

01:49:52   time they will make it faster over time and let us build on top of it and they have a very strong

01:49:58   history of doing that in other in other areas so i i think this is what they will ultimately do

01:50:03   whenever they get their act together on ai and and we don't know when that will be and it probably

01:50:08   won't be all at once i'm hoping to see little hints of it this year even that i think is

01:50:13   optimistic but we'll see and then maybe next year or the year after maybe we'll see big stuff

01:50:18   and that's that'll be exciting they're already doing all that it's just a question of what

01:50:22   letters they put on it they used to put the letters m and l right now and now we're saying

01:50:26   the letters a and i what we mean is exactly what apple has been doing which is they they do provide

01:50:31   you a bunch of models you can use like that text-to-speech one that you were saying you know

01:50:34   and they do improve it over years they do make it run fast in the heart but they've done all of that

01:50:38   but like yeah but but no but the stuff that you have now there's better stuff apple that uses not

01:50:43   the m and the l but it uses the a and the i and it's all this you know right we obviously there is

01:50:47   there are different techniques to doing this and the current technique that lots of other companies

01:50:51   are experimenting with is better than what apple is doing so what we want is apple do what you've

01:50:57   been doing with all the things you used to call ml keep doing that we love frameworks we love you

01:51:02   making it fast on your hardware it's just that there's a new thing that does everything you've

01:51:05   been trying to do but better not everything but certain things it does better so please give us

01:51:10   access to that in a way that makes us not have to worry about it and i do think that they will do

01:51:14   that and i just got done saying the larger models are too big you know they're just way too big to

01:51:18   even run at all and even like phones or even big mac sometimes that's why you have to communicate

01:51:22   over the network but that's today like those things change like part of what makes that

01:51:26   tractable is just a march of progress but part of it is also companies like apple deciding that it

01:51:31   is important for their socs to be good at doing this and that can really knock down these things

01:51:36   that's the reason the socs we have today are so good at doing the things they do so good at image

01:51:40   processing so good at you know doing the kinds of computations that has to be done on a phone on a

01:51:46   mac or whatever those special process processes for video encoding and decoding and you know the

01:51:52   the neural engine all that stuff was developed because apple said these these types of functions

01:51:58   are useful to do on a phone or on a mac or whatever and we want to do them in low power

01:52:02   or what i think that will come for large language models as well i don't think we're going to you

01:52:07   know models that currently run that require hundreds of gigs of ram to do inference are

01:52:10   going to run on your phone anytime soon but i think there will be a meeting in the middle of

01:52:14   like you were saying margo cut down versions of these things limited problem space and and to be

01:52:19   clear with the limited problem space you're like oh there's no way they can never limit a large

01:52:22   language model enough it'll always be scary i'm thinking of the scenario when you were talking

01:52:25   about configuring the complications it never answers back the only thing it does in response

01:52:31   to you talking to it is show you what it thinks you're asking for as you're screening your

01:52:35   complications and basically says you know is this okay you know press okay or say okay or like

01:52:41   it never talks back to you it just does what you and it there's no way for you to accidentally

01:52:47   have your watch insult you or something or there's very few ways perhaps watch insult you

01:52:51   by arranging complications i guess each of each complication was a letter it could spell out a

01:52:55   naughty word or something and someone figured out how to do it but like it's really limited problem

01:52:59   space we just but basically what we're just asking for is you know the promise of siri

01:53:03   well large language models are currently delivering on a lot of that promise i can have a conversation

01:53:09   in text with a large language model and get it to do useful things that reflect what i'm asking you

01:53:15   no it doesn't know anything about facts no it has no understanding of anything no i can't ask it

01:53:18   questions and trust its answers but i can ask it to arrange a bunch of complications on a watch

01:53:23   screen and the good thing about that is i'm the one who gets to say you did it correctly or you

01:53:27   didn't and if you didn't i could say no the upper left should be carrot weather and not apple's

01:53:32   weather widget and maybe and maybe it still fails to understand me or whatever but the result is

01:53:37   okay well fine i'll do that one manually or whatever but the point is like trying to do that

01:53:41   through siri now is laughable like you can't you know people people would never try to do that

01:53:46   they're they're lucky when they can talk to their watch to reply to a text or something and that's

01:53:49   only like nerds who have practiced that whole thing whereas large language models seem so much

01:53:54   more flexible about understanding the foibles of our language and and eventually doing what we want

01:53:58   and so i really do hope that again not this year probably but that eventually becomes one of the

01:54:03   things they start rolling out uh if not as a as a way to interface with tiny screens or headsets

01:54:11   then at least as something that we can expect our powerful max to be able to do right because i would

01:54:15   love to be able to say things to my mac to do drudgery without having to open up a web browser

01:54:20   go to one of these large language models type a bunch of stuff in and all that thanks to our

01:54:24   sponsors this week collide squarespace and trade coffee thanks to our members who support us

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01:54:35   we've ever done before that plus all the membership perks you'll see atp.fm slash join thank you

01:54:39   everybody we will talk to you next week now the show is over they didn't even mean to begin

01:54:50   because it was accidental oh it was accidental john didn't do any research marco and casey

01:54:59   wouldn't let him because it was accidental it was accidental and you can find the show notes at

01:55:08   atp.fm and if you're into twitter you can follow them at c a s e y l i s s so that's casey list m

01:55:21   a r c o a r m anti-marco armin s i r a c u s a syracuse it's accidental

01:55:41   all right so i wanted to talk to the two of you i wanted to kind of invoke the brain trust

01:55:50   perhaps call the diamond dogs together and see what you two thought about pricing for call sheet

01:55:56   we talked about this i i don't know when it was i think it was a little bit last week i think it

01:56:00   was a little bit uh a few weeks before that but i'm getting knock on wood getting really close to

01:56:06   sending this to the app store which means i really need to lock down my pricing schedule for like a

01:56:10   better word um well you need to lock down your initial pricing sure you can always change yes

01:56:18   that is true um and so i think what i've landed on as a general scheme and then we'll talk about the

01:56:25   different options therein um i think what i'm going to do is you get to use the main screen

01:56:33   which shows you like popular stuff in your country or really your language popular stuff in your

01:56:37   language new stuff in your language um you know so that would generally be you know new stuff in

01:56:41   english for me and popular things in english um and sort of kind of american-based when it's english

01:56:48   but not always it's complicated doesn't matter but anyways um you can do all that in that you can do

01:56:54   you can you can tap through that whenever you want and and there's no real limit there so

01:56:59   hypothetically if you can six degrees of kevin bacon yourself to the information you want

01:57:03   that'll take a while but you can you can do that for free always but to search i think i'm going to

01:57:11   have a daily limit of something to the order of five maybe ten searches at most that's so many

01:57:18   what do you do that's too many is it okay have one or two like okay well let's shelve that shelve

01:57:24   that for a second put it in the parking lot we'll come back to that because no that is something i

01:57:28   want to discuss i didn't realize that that was too many so i want to discuss that like hold on a

01:57:31   second so some number of searches per day and then after that it's tough nuggies you know subscribe

01:57:36   or get out of here wait until tomorrow and i feel like in general that is the right approach and and

01:57:45   and that's what i think i want to go with but if you disagree either of you we can talk about that

01:57:49   in a second then the second question becomes you know assuming we have this some amount of free

01:57:54   searches per day and then you have to subscribe all right well what does subscribing mean

01:57:58   and i think when we first talked about this we had concluded kind of as a threesome that somewhere to

01:58:04   the order of eight dollars a year seems like a reasonable price for this sort of thing and i

01:58:09   think i feel pretty good about that but there's two other options on the table that i think would

01:58:13   be additive not a replacement one of them is do i offer a monthly option and if so how expensive

01:58:23   is that and currently i'm leaning toward offering a monthly option for either a dollar or a dollar

01:58:29   fifty i'm not really sure what what feels right there now that would be kind of considerably more

01:58:35   than the yearly option so i want to know your thoughts when we get there when i stop talking

01:58:38   in just a second um but i think for sure i want a yearly option the question is do i do a monthly

01:58:44   option and if so how much and then the other question is do i do a something like a lifetime

01:58:50   unlock i think using the word lifetime is a is a dire mistake and i wouldn't phrase it that way but

01:58:56   maybe a one-time unlock if i go this route at all and i'm currently i think i'm against it because

01:59:02   i just think that it sets me up for failure and even if i'm leading leaving a little money on the

01:59:08   table i just it makes me nervous promising anything that far out like that that just

01:59:14   makes me feel a little uncomfortable so that's kind of where where things sit right now and

01:59:21   i am curious what your thoughts are now marco you jumped all over me justifiably you know i'm not

01:59:25   i'm not upset you jumped all over me a second ago we're both of you really about five free searches

01:59:30   per day so talk me down from five which what should the number be marco i'd say one or two

01:59:35   i mean that that's that's tricky though it is look again it's tricky but and and there's a question

01:59:41   of like what defines a search that's a big question if you search and you mistype it and get

01:59:47   no results does that count as a search yeah so the way it's currently implemented it's not in the test

01:59:51   plate yet but the way it's currently implemented in a branch that i have going right now is that

01:59:56   you can strictly speaking type however many searches as you want during the day but the

02:00:00   moment you click your time to click the moment you tap on a result then that counts as a search and

02:00:06   now you've lost one of your one of your searches yes that sounds good i would also you know the

02:00:10   branding of this i would say you know you've like you call it something like free searches so like

02:00:16   you've you've you have one free search left today and then when you hit the end you've used up you've

02:00:21   used all your free searches today you can buy buy the subscription and get unlimited searches you

02:00:25   know that kind of that's how i would phrase this you have free searches and then you have this

02:00:29   paywall that gets you more searches i'm speaking of free you're doing a free trial right well that

02:00:34   was my initial thought but now that i have this whole free search thing i don't i feel like it's

02:00:38   kind of redundant yeah i don't know that you necessarily need a free if you have this here's

02:00:42   what you need you need to have what you need to have uh the goal is someone needs to use the app

02:00:48   enough to like it and and that is the tricky part so the use it enough to like it like just a single

02:00:57   use instance like i was watching one tv show and we had a question on the couch about what was this

02:01:01   person in that one instance of use that has i feel like that one instance uses has to be successful

02:01:08   and enjoyable without any pay crap in their face and you're like okay but how many searches is that

02:01:14   and that's why i think that picking the searches is tricky 10 is too many right because no one's

02:01:18   going to burn through 10 a day 10 is enough for a single couch instance and maybe you'd use the app

02:01:22   once every few days um but one is too few because for a single couch instance like no one will ever

02:01:28   get the point to like the app because they'll be like i used it for two seconds and then it

02:01:32   threw a paywall in my face and i hate it that's why the free trial is good because the free trial

02:01:36   period is unlimited and that allows the free trial period to be this is the time when you get to like

02:01:41   the app because it's unlimited it's a free trial everything's open full access to everything but

02:01:46   that door closes and that allows it takes the pressure off your number of you know searches

02:01:51   per day to allow people to get to like the app they're supposed to get to like it during the

02:01:56   free trial and then the paywall sole purpose is to gently remind people that they can pay to get

02:02:02   that experience that they previously had if you don't do a free trial you have to somehow thread

02:02:07   the needle of like how much will let people use it enough so they'll like it but like because

02:02:12   because i think some people will never go above one search per couch incident or whatever you know

02:02:17   like they'll just they'll just use the app forever for free to say i you know i don't do this often

02:02:23   when i do do it i look it up and again what you just described i can do as many searches as i want

02:02:26   until i find the result that i want and then i tap on it and i get my answer i put the phone down

02:02:30   never look at it again they might not even know you have a paywall with your limit of one and

02:02:34   other people in a single couch incident go through 75 searches because they're like what was this

02:02:39   person what was that search for this person i think the person's name was a sticker and they're

02:02:42   tapping through results and they're doing all sorts of things and they will be incredibly

02:02:45   frustrated by a limit that's like one or two but if you have the free trial you can be like look

02:02:50   you had the you had your salad days you got to use the app you got to see all the features you got to

02:02:55   you know and then it's just a question of how long is the free trial it would kind of be nice if the

02:02:59   free trial only started like when they you know when they had their first big usage scenario um

02:03:06   but yeah a free trial would hypothetically start upon subscribing so you subscribe yeah you get

02:03:12   your one week or whatever and then then you're charged i don't know i i hear what you're saying

02:03:17   i don't disagree with it but i feel like especially if i were to crank the limit from five to like two

02:03:22   or three then i i i maybe i'm wrong but i feel like at that point you have gotten at least a vague

02:03:30   enough notion to know okay no no this is all right and if you want to try again tomorrow try it again

02:03:34   tomorrow i don't i don't love the idea of both a free trial and the search limit but but that is a

02:03:42   weak opinion held loosely see this this is getting very complicated like i i almost think like

02:03:47   john's right like you know you you want to give people a chance to like the app of course so

02:03:53   that's making me now revisit like what if instead of just instead of having anything per unit of

02:03:58   time per day per month what if it was a higher limit that was a single view so for instance

02:04:03   you get 10 free searches after that you got to pay that's it like because then you could make

02:04:07   the number higher and you can give people more chance to get to know the app you could display

02:04:13   it more easily in the ui it's very it's much clearer to people what the limit is some people

02:04:18   take a while to come around to pay for stuff though like some people need to be convinced

02:04:21   that there is actual utility they may like the app and they may say oh that i found that app useful

02:04:25   but they haven't come around to the idea that i like it enough to pay for it and that's where the

02:04:30   doling out a small amount that periodically is better than the big buck even if it's a big bucket

02:04:35   of 100 once they burn through that 100 and they like the app they may not be ready to pay still

02:04:40   but if they'll but if there's one doled out each day after that they'd be like you know what i do

02:04:45   keep coming back to this is the same reason so many people including me eventually paid for the

02:04:48   new york times because it's like they have a bunch of free ones and i don't think i want to pay for

02:04:52   the whole thing but you know what over the course of months weeks years you realize i'm more sick of

02:04:58   of running out of my free articles of the new yorker or whatever than i am sick of paying for

02:05:02   the new yorker and then eventually you do it and obviously the numbers here are way smaller than

02:05:06   the new yorker the new york time subscription or anything like that but it does take people's time

02:05:11   to come around if you slam that door closed you use your 150 free searches and that's it forever

02:05:15   and ever and ever they're you're giving up the opportunity for them to eventually come around

02:05:20   because they're just going to delete the app yeah i guess yeah because it's just it's tricky because

02:05:25   like you you don't you don't want to make this too complicated you want to keep it so that people

02:05:30   know that there's a limit they know when they're going to hit it and then when they hit it they're

02:05:36   they're not they don't say screw you and delete the app and you know so i i get what you're saying

02:05:42   john i mean i i just think once we get into you have x per day they recharge per day and then you

02:05:48   can start a free trial that asks that lasts x amount of time then then you're paying me eventually

02:05:53   after that and by the way you have an annual or monthly like that's a lot of complexity for this

02:05:58   pricing model for a very simple app i i mean a lot of the apps i see on the app store are exactly

02:06:03   like that like i know i i'm i've been subjected to prompts and screens described in this exact

02:06:09   scenario and as a customer i tend not to get hung up with understanding what it is that saying the

02:06:14   customer all i know is can i use the app when i want to and if i can't how much money would i

02:06:20   have to pay to make it happen and then the final thing is will i be able to use the app in the

02:06:25   future should i just delete it now i don't actually understand or know or try to parse

02:06:29   the text about what their scheme is and what the limits are and what the whatever all i know is

02:06:33   i can't do what i want now why is that and how can i make it go away and is this a permanent

02:06:37   situation and i feel like that's how most people interact with this like they don't have to actually

02:06:41   understand your business model well but that's even more reason to to me to say look it's either

02:06:47   you pay or you don't you know and this is what marco was saying a moment ago like if you don't

02:06:50   want to pay i'll i'll give you a little sip you can just make it a paid up front app like an old

02:06:54   person well yeah i mean but if you don't if you don't pay i'll give you a little sip of it each

02:06:59   each day and if you pay then that's that and then we're we're good here as long as you keep paying

02:07:03   you get as much as you want and and i i like marco was saying i don't disagree with you in principle

02:07:08   but i i i couldn't put my finger on what felt gross about it and i think it's what marco said

02:07:12   is that just feels too complicated like either you're paying me or you're not there's no in the

02:07:16   middle you know there's no free trial it's either you're paying me or you're not you really want to

02:07:20   use this app free trials are insanely popular for a reason though that's true all right and you can't

02:07:25   you can't overlook that they're everywhere they're everywhere i think they do really work and i know

02:07:31   it does complicate things it does especially for an app your apps your app is different in that it's

02:07:36   not like it is very situational you're probably not going to use this app while you're you know

02:07:41   commuting on the subway right it's it's when you're on the couch it's when you're watching

02:07:45   the show or when you're discussing a show like it's it's not a general purpose app so you don't

02:07:50   have that many opportunities for engagement and when you do have the engagement the value of your

02:07:55   app is it's there when people need it and if it's like oh they go to look it up and you're and your

02:07:59   app you know gives them the Heisman they're not going to come back it needs to like i said it

02:08:04   needs to prove value it needs to say i wanted an answer i got an answer and the app was pleasant to

02:08:10   use and this is the thing i find myself doing frequently so we'll see now here's the other

02:08:14   thing that i'm sure people listening are probably thinking and we've discussed as well the audience

02:08:19   for your app at least initially is not the same as the general public it's going to be able to

02:08:23   listen to your podcast and know about the app no one knows about this app except for people who

02:08:26   read your blog and listen to your podcast or are related to them because it's not out yet but that

02:08:31   is a ready-made customer base and that customer base has totally different values has a totally

02:08:36   different idea of the of the exchange going on here they might be buying it because they're a

02:08:40   fan of yours because they've heard us talk about it so much the general public is coming from a

02:08:46   totally different perspective so you know i feel like and i think it's reasonable to like this app

02:08:51   has nothing to do with atp it is a general purpose app that anybody who watches television and movies

02:08:55   can use the question is do you want to design this app to be optimal for the people who listen to atp

02:09:02   or to be optimal for the people who have no idea what atp is or who you are and those are two very

02:09:06   different designs unfortunately what makes you say that like what what's the difference because the

02:09:10   people who are listening to atp they have different desires out of the app their their impetus to buy

02:09:16   their their motivation to buy is so incredibly different for people who have no idea who you

02:09:21   are you know what i mean like it's just they're totally different but they're very they're limited

02:09:25   they're small in number and so like you could just say i'm just going to set them aside and i'm going

02:09:30   to build this app for the general public uh because you know practically speaking the people who just

02:09:35   want to be the app buy the app because they're curious about the app that casey made or because

02:09:39   they want to have more context for the next episode of atp they listen to that's not a market

02:09:43   that's going to sustain the development is that you know what i mean yeah everyone else is and

02:09:48   the everyone else you know the design for them often involves the gross stuff that you find

02:09:53   unappealing and complicated and i base that on all the apps that i download in the app store that

02:09:57   have those types of models that they're you know complicated and unappealing and gross feeling yeah

02:10:02   i mean i i i'm not sure i see a free trial is this make or break thing that you seem to because and

02:10:08   and maybe it's because i'm too myopic in the way i operate but like i i think a free trial is useful

02:10:15   if it's the sort of thing where that's the only way i can try the app but this kind of

02:10:21   homegrown alternate approach i think gives me kind of what a free trial like i i view them

02:10:26   i view them as equivalent even though they're not literally equivalent i view them as equivalent

02:10:31   spiritually equivalent where i either need a free trial to prove its worth or i need to you know

02:10:37   distribute little sips of the app to prove its worth and it seems it seems redundant to have

02:10:42   both to me but i don't know maybe maybe i've got this all right if you give them the sip like i

02:10:47   think the main thing when you give them the sip is to make sure it's clear to them this is not the end

02:10:52   that you should not delete this app because even though you i'm not letting you do this search now

02:10:56   at some point in the future that i'm going to tell you about tomorrow next week in an hour whatever

02:11:01   you will be able to use the app again and by the way if you don't want to see this nag screen here's

02:11:05   the subscription or whatever because that's what you're trying to stop is i've hit a paywall delete

02:11:10   this app that is you know because you never get that person back they're not going to redownload

02:11:13   it or whatever they have no you know and so that's that's what you're trying to avoid and free trial

02:11:18   let's the idea of the free trial is they get to try it with but they've all functionality and

02:11:23   hopefully fall in love with it and then when that door closes eventually they you know they say oh

02:11:28   i really did like this app or i did find myself using it a lot yeah i mean i again i hear you but

02:11:33   i i feel like that's the whole point of this i'm gonna say five searches a day maybe that number's

02:11:38   wrong but i feel like that's the whole point and so i i don't know i i it it feels currently like

02:11:45   it's like i said like it's redundant and i don't love it and and you know for what it's worth when

02:11:50   you tap on um when you tap on like a search i'm gonna send you to i'm just gonna put this in in

02:11:56   slack um i don't think we're gonna put an image in the show notes um but when you when you tap on the

02:12:02   like search area what what you're seeing that i'm putting in slack right now that's not in the

02:12:07   context of search it's just you know the the the one view in and of itself but this would be in

02:12:13   where the search results and stuff would be is like a kind of mini paywall that says hey you

02:12:18   got to keep going or wait you know another few hours in order to get you know whatever more

02:12:23   searches um and and that would show and then what what i haven't mentioned to you guys is the way i

02:12:29   currently have it is if you think about the area on the on the or if you think about the the the

02:12:35   main screen and how there's a little magnifying glass that slides in from off screen on the right

02:12:41   as you're drilling into things um when you're in free mode to the left of that magnifying glass i'm

02:12:48   trying to generate an image real quick so give me a second i'm stalling for time but uh to the

02:12:52   left of that magnifying glass there's a really obnoxious red banner at the bottom that says

02:12:58   you have one search left today i think marco made a good point earlier it should say one

02:13:02   free search left today yeah but anyways it's written right now you have one search left today

02:13:06   subscribe now to you know remove limits or whatever i i can wordsmith that however i want

02:13:11   but yeah but what i'm driving at is there's this big ass banner right at the bottom saying hey

02:13:17   this is your situation you've got you know whatever however many searches left and then

02:13:21   you're gonna have to subscribe in order to you know get more yeah i think you could i mean this

02:13:27   all makes sense and i think the ui you are conveying all the information you need you might

02:13:31   you could actually do a fun kind of i don't know if this is an underscore esque thing but it makes

02:13:34   me think of him uh kind of like where you know you have uh you know whatever you have uh one

02:13:39   free search remaining and then you use it and then someone goes to try to do another search and you're

02:13:43   going to show up the paywall on the paywall screen have a button that says can i just have one more

02:13:48   search and you press it and then your app says okay and it lets you do it i don't know again this

02:13:53   is a lot of complexity just the one just a one-time extra that i get i i come down with

02:13:58   marco i i don't want it this complicated that's not complicated that's fun that's surprising delight

02:14:02   what i'm basically saying is the thing that i do don't tell anybody but the thing i do with the

02:14:06   the atp sales that we have when we sell merchandise um i always tell the the uh the

02:14:11   listeners that the end date is one day before it actually is well because that helps you know

02:14:16   resolve things like what time zone does it end in like that's that's the real reason exactly i

02:14:21   don't avoid all those issues the reason people don't say oh i thought the sale was supposed to

02:14:25   end today but it's not i don't have to deal with time zones the end date is always one day later

02:14:29   and that the having the limit be one you know having one extra in reserve that you give people

02:14:35   one time it's not like you can always ask for one more forever and ever but just having the one time

02:14:40   extra that's another enticement to eventually buy because all this app was nice to me i was

02:14:45   thinking about buying can i just do this one last search oh yeah you can then the paywall is really

02:14:49   down and no you don't get to ask for one more forever and ever like a like a two-year-old right

02:14:53   that's the type of thing you can do to soften this to make it more to make it less likely they delete

02:14:58   the app immediately all right here's i've i've been thinking about it i played with the app i

02:15:02   saw your paywall screen in slack i i think this is where i'm landing you get five or ten free

02:15:10   searches single time use and then one per day after that well that's interesting then when they

02:15:18   hit that one you show your your screen i will workshop the hell out of the screen for you don't

02:15:23   ship it the way i know you i know as soon as i said searches every day what is the everyday

02:15:28   phrase there for us anyway yeah we'll work out the screen but it's yeah this is by no means the

02:15:34   final screen this is very yeah you get five or ten five or ten searches up front for free then one a

02:15:40   day free searches then you hit the screen subscribe to continue after that one a day and i like how

02:15:47   you said you know or wait x hours to get you know your next free search like that's great

02:15:51   and you're then you have your two options i'm killing you're kind of killing me even offering

02:15:57   two options monthly and yearly well okay we'll get there we'll get there yeah but yeah you offer your

02:16:02   subscription option parenthesis uh and that's it and there's no free trial you get your one per day

02:16:09   after you've used your five you know single use ones that's it you one per day that's it you hit

02:16:13   this and you go forward if you want that i think that gives people enough time to get to know the

02:16:18   app with it with their five or ten you know stock free ones that aren't timed and then it gives them

02:16:23   that little out to keep them in the door um on the way if they want to keep them after they keep

02:16:28   going after that um but it but you know i think any more than one per day and you will have the

02:16:35   the limit that like you know which i was saying earlier with like how many incidents per couch

02:16:39   event are we are we going to even be using this app every day so so i i think that's probably

02:16:44   your best balance i i think that if you went with that model i think the initial bucket should be

02:16:49   more generous just because that's the following i think a little bit more than 10 would be because

02:16:55   you really you want to give people more time to fall in love with the app and some people hit it

02:17:00   after 10 some people it will take them three months to go through 10 some people go through

02:17:03   10 and one couches in it so it i you know and it's because it is finite at one time it's not like you

02:17:09   have to worry about it recurring no one's going to live forever off of your free bucket of 20 instead

02:17:13   of 10 it's just giving people more time to use the app enough that they are convinced that it's the

02:17:19   type of thing they want to pay for or at least not delete so for the sake of discussion i'm not sure

02:17:24   this is the right answer but you get 20 searches for free then once that bucket is up be that in

02:17:31   an hour or in a year after that you get one freebie a day and if you if you use that one freebie

02:17:37   tough nuts either wait another day or pay me yeah i actually i kind of like that and i still think

02:17:42   you should have a free i still think you should have a free trial but whatever i i think i'm

02:17:47   team marco on that one i i disagree john also thinks we need to offer our t-shirts in 17

02:17:51   different options every time and i'm the one who's like can we just do like two or three people love

02:17:55   it people love it and it's even it even works with cotton bureau's new model nails we're not even

02:17:59   penalized for doing it all right all right well i'll think about the free trial although current

02:18:04   my current thinking is marco's right all right so i i actually really i didn't think about this

02:18:08   high well it's not really hybrid but i'm gonna call it the hybrid approach um i actually think

02:18:12   this this makes a lot of sense and i think it's reasonably easy to digest that's the thing i'm

02:18:16   worried about and that's that's what i keep coming back to with the free trial is i think it's adding

02:18:20   a layer of complexity that just isn't helpful and so um i like this because it seems pretty

02:18:25   straightforward you got your bucket once you use it you get one a day after that tough nuts

02:18:29   uh all right so i think it's just as complicated as all the schemes you were describing as

02:18:33   complicated but again i say that the people who are using this app do not need a mental model of

02:18:38   this system they just need to know how do they feel about what the app is putting in front of

02:18:41   their face and doesn't make them want to pay money like that's the level people are operating at when

02:18:45   they're poking at their phone they are not trying to suss out your monetization model and and how

02:18:50   you've structured things so i don't think that's a concern at all but if that was a concern the

02:18:54   thing you just described is just as complicated as everything else we've described i mean maybe

02:18:59   well and also like some people will suss it out some people will complain some people will be

02:19:04   you know will be you know bounced off and they won't go through with it because they'll think

02:19:07   it's too ridiculous those are only going to be the listeners of our podcast though the regular

02:19:11   people just do not know who they would complain to assume case it doesn't exist and is just a giant

02:19:16   application mill somewhere like they think apple made all the apps like that's not the people who

02:19:22   complain are so much more like i was gonna say sophisticated but so much more in tune with how

02:19:26   the world actually works than the the most of the people who are just poking at their phone screen

02:19:32   yeah fair enough but all this is to say like you know you're not going to please everyone no matter

02:19:35   what you do don't sell yourself short like don't rip yourself off trying to please everyone like

02:19:40   if some if you hear from people who are like well 20 free searches is really not enough for my needs

02:19:46   like you know it's fine like two then then they should they should pay you if they say that's why

02:19:51   i'm saying they say i used that up in one couch incident a you know they heard listen to the show

02:19:54   because they said couch incident and g it's like okay but like fine you are you are outside the

02:20:01   bell curve 20 for one couch incident is way higher than you know so i'm sorry but i'm not

02:20:08   you can't configure the app for the outliers that's what you're just trying to find them no and and if

02:20:11   anybody uses it that heavily they should be paying for it that that is exactly like that is the kind

02:20:15   of user that like okay then that makes sense you have you have heavier needs for this you should

02:20:20   be paying for it simple as that you know because this is not a free app this is a this is an app

02:20:25   that has limited free functionality that is really a subscription priced app and there's nothing wrong

02:20:30   with that and people will there will be people who will try to make you feel bad about that

02:20:34   but don't because that's life this is what modern software is you have you know you have to keep it

02:20:38   up it's yeah modern software is ongoing revenue in some form because you because people expect

02:20:44   ongoing updates i'll just use imdb one star all right good luck with that all right so so tell

02:20:51   me if i'm if i'm bananas to say that monthly should be an option i i like it i think it's

02:20:57   good i think it's a lower number on the screen i think marco was saying should yearly be an option

02:21:02   no no i well no i i mean i i i think if there's only going to be one it should be yearly but

02:21:09   i think i'm okay with two but what i think i think what you want so i mean look cynically speaking

02:21:14   not everyone who signs up for a year will use it for a year so you kind of want to push more

02:21:20   people towards the yearly if you want to maximize money um so there's there's that to consider

02:21:24   i would suggest if you're going to offer both monthly and yearly which i think i'm okay with

02:21:31   price them in such a way that people who do math will go for the yearly yeah and that that argues

02:21:36   for uh not making it 150 because that makes the math harder for people right like like you know

02:21:41   so if you made it you know a dollar a month eight dollars a year that's pretty good like in terms

02:21:46   of that will drive people people can do that math in their head real fast right there or or make it

02:21:51   two dollars a month and make it ten dollars a year you know something like that whatever whatever it

02:21:54   is like make it so that people can clearly tell oh i should really go for the year and because

02:22:00   that's really what you want if i care about that but i think the smaller number for monthly

02:22:04   is is a smoother on-ramp for people who say i don't know if i want this eight dollars worth

02:22:10   correct then after three months of paying monthly they'll be like oh this is dumb i should just pay

02:22:13   for annual maybe yeah but ultimately like you you want this screen you want most people who

02:22:20   choose to subscribe to go for the longer term one for lots of reason number one you'll make more

02:22:24   money from people who abandon it early number two those people will be reminded only once a year

02:22:30   instead of 12 times a year that they are subscribing to your app and every time someone's

02:22:33   reminded they're subscribing to your app by one of those emails from apple saying these are about to

02:22:37   renew that's a chance for them to cancel it so you you don't want to have to bother people with that

02:22:42   every single month if they're willing to pay for a year at whatever price that is so ideally you

02:22:46   want yearly customers more than monthly customers so that you know because you'll you'll both make

02:22:52   more from them you know in terms of the abandonment and then you'll the ones that don't abandon it

02:22:56   you'll keep them longer probably so yearly is probably better for you so yeah i would price it i

02:23:03   think if if your yearly price is going to be eight bucks i think a dollar a month is a good price for

02:23:08   the monthly if you're i i would maybe push yearly to be 10 bucks but that's it's not that big of a

02:23:14   difference i know that you're going to have trouble asking for 10 bucks because it's you

02:23:18   and you you keep thinking you keep talking yourself down and giving yourself you know pay cuts well

02:23:24   it's it's it's just i i mean i honestly if it were no it is up to me but if it were up to me and i

02:23:31   felt like you know i could get away with whatever i wanted then i think i i think ten dollars a year

02:23:36   is reasonable in like ten dollars a year and like one or maybe two dollars a month but yeah i think

02:23:41   that a regular person would look this and be like no that's way too much money and that's what gives

02:23:47   me pause those people are going to say that no matter what these prices are it could be 10 cents

02:23:52   a month they would say that yeah maybe i i don't know i i feel like i feel like keeping it under 10

02:23:58   is it feels like i can just i it can it can be an impulse buy it under ten dollars even on a yearly

02:24:06   basis which is bananas because if you go out to eat and get a soda it's like 250 and that literally

02:24:13   is pissed away in the span of six hours but i mean i do this on the on the consumer side i do the same

02:24:19   thing and i'll look at a 10 plus dollar an app or a dollar a year nap and i'll be like do i really

02:24:24   need this so i feel like the most i can get away with per year is nine dollars and when i see those

02:24:30   ten dollar apps you know what i do i usually go for the free trial and see if i like it oh

02:24:34   if you're going to go with eight or nine bucks then yeah i'd say i i would say it in order to

02:24:41   maximize the best ratio of monthly to yearly um i'd say a dollar a month eight dollars a year and

02:24:47   you don't think that a dollar fifty is because i mean the only the only reason to do more than

02:24:52   a dollar and less than two is just to eke out a little bit more from the monthly people which

02:24:56   maybe that's dumb anyway because i'd be strictly speaking i'm if they if they stay for a year which

02:25:01   is a big if then i'm making more with a dollar a month than i am eight dollars a year but i don't

02:25:05   know it it just it doesn't make sense to make it one one fifty or two dollars or something i mean

02:25:13   you could you could try look and this is the kind you can play with this over time you can actually

02:25:16   you can change prices all the time like people don't need to have a comprehensive history of

02:25:20   the pricing of your app in their head well i thought for subscriptions though got a little

02:25:23   dodgy because then you have to like get the permission or something like that you know

02:25:27   better than me mark i don't know if you can change you can actually increase the the subscription of

02:25:32   existence but i'm just thinking of like for going forward for new customers for setting aside what

02:25:36   existing customers do you just like retire one and start another subscription and like and just keep

02:25:41   it going but not have it be purchasable in the app so like like there's there's ways to do it like

02:25:44   yeah you just have multiple subscriptions at different price points like you can change like

02:25:48   recently you know the whole the disney plus mechanic they added you can increase the price

02:25:54   of an existing subscription and bring those users along but i believe they have to you have to give

02:25:59   them some amount of like the system gives them some kind of notice and i think they i don't think

02:26:04   they have to opt in but they have a chance to opt out so you know that's that kind of runs a risk of

02:26:08   loss there so you know ideally you don't need to change these prices but you can change these prices

02:26:14   yeah so but yeah i mean look i mean a dollar fifty a month is not bad i just think a dollar a month is

02:26:19   an easier it's a it's a more obvious sell it lets the screen look nicer like you you have more design

02:26:24   options in terms of your biggest markets like the us where it's going to be a nice even number you

02:26:28   can you cannot even show the decimal points like you know like so you have options there actually

02:26:34   no you can't because it's gonna it's gonna say do the new tiers have even like one dollar exactly or

02:26:40   is it still in 99 cents i thought so i thought they do i that's why i have it i got a double

02:26:45   check i think you're right yeah yeah because i that's why i have it currently is literally eight

02:26:50   dot zero zero and either one dot five oh or one dot oh oh you know um it's because i i was thinking

02:26:56   about it and and i was listening to um uh shoot uh thoroughly considered earlier today and they

02:27:02   were talking a lot about you know the 99 cent thing and i feel like you know having the round

02:27:08   number i feel like that just feels nicer yeah and and that's that's partly why i don't want to go

02:27:13   all the way to 10. i could be convinced to go nine but i don't think i want to go all the way to 10

02:27:17   because that just even 999 i mean that's effectively the same damn thing nine nine feels like 10 like i

02:27:23   think that's why i keep going back to eight as instead of like if you're going to be below 10

02:27:28   eight's a really good number yeah and that's kind of where i that well that that's kind of where i

02:27:33   am too so all right so i think we all then i'm asking not telling we all agree that about eight

02:27:37   dollars a year sounds about right and you marco you were pretty perturbed about the monthly idea

02:27:43   but have you come around on that or we still not loving it i think i i mean look i obviously i i

02:27:48   don't have a lot of data here i have my app that is yearly only but that's a little bit different

02:27:54   in the sense that my subscription is not gating access to core features of the app so it's a very

02:27:59   different mechanic um you know in your case this like you need to convert as many people as

02:28:05   possible because anybody you don't convert with this paywall as john said is likely to abandon

02:28:09   usage of the app completely you and then you make nothing from them you know in my in my case if

02:28:14   they don't like my my you know premium subscription they can just keep using the app for free and yeah

02:28:18   i make money from the ads from them so you know it's a very very different scenario in your

02:28:23   scenario i think it does probably make sense to to have monthly and yearly especially because the

02:28:28   monthly is a cheaper way in the door i don't think you need free trials uh but i could be wrong i

02:28:33   haven't i haven't used them in the app store so like as a as a developer so i'm not sure you know

02:28:38   how the conversion rate would be different it does introduce a level of conceptual complexity for the

02:28:43   customer uh it introduces complexity to the screen that being said i don't think it introduces

02:28:50   meaningful complexity to your implementation you know that's a flag you set on the in-app purchase

02:28:55   and then and you know you whatever validation you're doing server side or whatever like it

02:28:59   makes that a little more complicated to account for but for your purposes it almost doesn't matter if

02:29:03   somebody's in a trial or not like you're just trying to make money from them long term you

02:29:06   don't really care if you know this search came from a trial user versus this one came from a

02:29:11   paying user yeah it's not i i already have support for it in my kind of facade in front of storekit

02:29:17   too it's it's generally fairly straightforward unless you're trying to figure out how much time

02:29:21   is left in the trial and or how you know when the trial expired then it becomes a little bit

02:29:26   interesting but i think i could support the trial if i wanted to i just don't think i want to

02:29:31   um and because again i just feel like it's more complicated but yeah it is um but john where do

02:29:36   you come down on both monthly and yearly i think you should definitely have both the other thing

02:29:41   that's interesting about monthly which i thought i've i've been thinking about if i should message

02:29:49   this in app at all but certainly i'll talk about it on the show is that if you're a kc list

02:29:54   superfan you could do monthly and if you stick with it then you're giving me an extra you know

02:30:00   what three four dollars a year and now i don't think that that's necessarily going to be what

02:30:04   anyone would choose to do except like five of you who i whom i love dearly but um but it is it is

02:30:10   another way to kind of have an implicit tip jar without actually putting in a tip jar which i kind

02:30:16   of like yeah i mean there will be some amount of that for sure i don't know if it'll if it'll be

02:30:22   enough to make that have to dictate any choices you make about the pricing of the monthly um

02:30:26   it's that's probably not a massive factor in determining the price yep all right so it sounds

02:30:34   like the brain trust has concluded a batch of of non-renewable tokens up front or i shouldn't say

02:30:41   tokens of searches up front somewhere in the order of 20 ish i think i'd still go 10 frankly but go

02:30:48   ahead i don't i'd still go with free trial i mean there's no consensus here this is not decision

02:30:53   making by committee i have opinions marco has opinions but casey you get to decide you can do

02:30:58   whatever you want yeah yeah no i hear you if you're trying to get me and marco to come to

02:31:02   the consensus is not going to happen no no no not necessarily i i'm just trying to to for as much my

02:31:07   own benefit as the listeners i'm trying to get kind of the brass tacks where where did we all

02:31:12   where did we all individually land and and if there is something that vaguely smells like a

02:31:16   consensus what does that look like and it sounds to me like you know again something to the order

02:31:22   of 10 to 20 free searches and then one a day after that i i think it sounds like we all agree that

02:31:29   monthly and yearly is not such a terrible idea a little bit of disagreement as to whether it should

02:31:34   be a dollar a dollar fifty or two dollars do you think i could go all the way to two on monthly

02:31:39   you could try it i mean i i'm not sure i mean having having something begin with a one like

02:31:44   one dollar a month sounds like nothing to a lot of people like that that that is a really good

02:31:49   sounding and looking thing a dollar fifty is a little more complicated as john said it makes

02:31:54   the math a little bit less likely to end up with the yearly purchase but ultimately that's that

02:32:01   still looks really cheap two dollars is really cheap but it doesn't look as cheap as a dollar

02:32:06   fifty so you know i i think there is a lot of benefit like psychologically visually in getting

02:32:13   that that one one point something a month that that is i think very attractive and then yearly

02:32:20   eight maybe nine dollars i don't know i feel like the the the delta between 12 monthly installments

02:32:28   and one eight dollar installment you know i feel like that that's quite a lot of savings for the

02:32:34   yearly subscription right that's what you want you want people to be going to the yearly yeah i know

02:32:40   but i feel like what i want to do is make it like nine dollars a year but i still think that i agree

02:32:45   with what you're saying earlier i feel like there's some weird divide between eight and nine

02:32:50   that you would expect to see between nine and ten but i feel like it feels cheap in a in a

02:32:56   happy way whereas nine does not feel cheap in a happy way it feels like it's getting it doesn't

02:33:00   feel cheap at all really it feels like it's getting expensive and the thing what you have

02:33:03   to consider here is you know it's it's easy to look at these numbers and be like well geez i'm

02:33:09   setting this up so early and if i make this nine instead of eight i'm going to make x percent more

02:33:13   money yeah but if the conversion rate is affected even a little bit by these pricing differences

02:33:20   you can quickly erase that margin so if you know if if you convert a decent number more people

02:33:27   at eight than you would at nine you will make more money total at eight yeah and and it's and it

02:33:33   doesn't take that many more people to make up that kind of difference and the same thing is true of

02:33:38   the monthly level you know whatever it is like if you're setting it at you know a dollar fifty a

02:33:43   month versus two dollars a month i think you'll get way more people in at a dollar fifty than you

02:33:48   would at two and therefore i think i think you'd make up that difference in volume but you know

02:33:54   this is the kind of stuff that it's it's one thing to to have these kind of gut feelings this is how

02:33:58   we think it is it's really hard to know in advance and it's even harder to be able to make this kind

02:34:04   of decision without just testing it and then being willing to like you know change the pricing in the

02:34:11   cumbersome ways that we have to do that yeah one final thing we didn't talk about much but i'm

02:34:16   curious both of your opinions um maybe we'll start with john do i do some sort of one-time only you

02:34:22   know like standard style in-app purchase i'm going to call it a lifetime unlock during this

02:34:27   conversation but i would not refer to it that way like a i would refer to it as like a one-time

02:34:30   purchase or something do i do a lifetime unlock no no hey i agree that's where i've landed too

02:34:37   but tell me why i mean because that you can always roll it out later and you can roll it out to

02:34:42   people who have already paid you a bunch of money but just don't want to deal with it anymore but

02:34:46   really love the app and are willing to pay a lot and have had time to fall in love with it but

02:34:49   i don't see how anyone is going to see this app use it enough without doing one of the subscriptions

02:34:57   to decide they want to pay a price that's going to be worth your while for our one-time unlock

02:35:01   to keep it in your back pocket save it for three years from now from this app when this app is

02:35:05   wildly successful but all the power users are so pissed about paying subscriptions that you can

02:35:09   100 then we can talk about it again but now absolutely not so for many reasons the you know

02:35:16   whatever even if you didn't call it lifetime unlock that's how people will perceive it they

02:35:21   will perceive this as i buy this and now i quote own it and they're going to a expect that it will

02:35:29   work forever which b involves you updating it over time because when we build modern software

02:35:36   we're building it on quicksand it there is no such thing as software that stays working forever

02:35:40   without updates anymore especially ios software accessing a web service like this there's so many

02:35:46   moving factors here like that's so you know you're building on quicksand this is going to require

02:35:49   constant updates you know not like every day but you know at least every couple of years like

02:35:54   suppose you suppose you worked on this decided you know this app's kind of done and abandoned it

02:35:59   and people were and you wanted people to still be able to use it you would have to put it in

02:36:04   a certain amount of time every couple of years just to keep it working on the latest versions

02:36:08   of of ios and the latest devices so you know there there's going to be some degree of maintenance

02:36:13   over time so you need ongoing revenue from people it's simple as that you need some way to make

02:36:21   money from ongoing use of your app to fund ongoing updates of your app which is what everybody

02:36:26   expects you to have so you're not going revenue simple as that if you don't if you don't have ads

02:36:31   then it's that's it like that's those are two options that we know about or you know creepy

02:36:37   user data which you don't want to do and i don't blame you so so like that's it like you have to

02:36:41   make ongoing revenue from your app somehow to justify continuing to update it so the and and

02:36:47   lifetime any kind of lifetime or flat rate or however you would brand it it it gives users the

02:36:53   impression and the expectation that and the entitlement that they will feel that they deserve

02:37:00   access to this app for an indefinite period of the future because they paid to unlock it they paid to

02:37:04   own it but that's not the reality of the modern software environment they can't own it they can't

02:37:09   like have it forever without ongoing work from you so it's better to not even try to sell that

02:37:14   to people don't even sell them on the idea of that anymore because that doesn't exist for an ios app

02:37:19   yeah all right brain trust is spoken i appreciate it fellas

02:37:26   (beep)