PodSearch

ATP

536: I Reboot With Reason

 

00:00:00   We're getting close, we're getting close to WBC, I'm so excited. I'm getting excited. I'm getting excited.

00:00:05   Like, I've come full circle now with the headset. I've followed the complete Apple hype cycle.

00:00:11   First I was like, "They're doing what? What? That seems weird. Why are they doing that?"

00:00:18   Then I'm like, "What? This can't possibly be very good. Everything else on the market sucks. Why?

00:00:23   How is Apple going to make something good?" And then I'm like, "Well, if they're going to release

00:00:27   something, it's probably going to be pretty good." And then I start hearing reports and rumors,

00:00:32   it's actually really good. And now I'm like, "Oh my God, it's going to be here. It's going to be

00:00:36   really good. Oh my God." It's happening. This is just the cycle. I go through all their new

00:00:41   rumored launches and I think it's possible to be really good, but I still don't know quite what

00:00:47   that looks like. And I'm excited again. Kind of what I said last week, I'm excited because

00:00:54   I trust that if they are this excited about it, it's probably for good reason.

00:00:59   And I still don't think I want to actually use this, but we'll see. And then in the mean,

00:01:07   I'm excited to see what it is and to see how it's going to change our lives forever or not.

00:01:13   Is it going to be the iPhone or is it going to be the Apple TV? I don't know. We'll find out.

00:01:20   Or the HomePod. Oh God, I hope not the HomePod. Yeah, I don't know. I think I am also going

00:01:28   through the standard Apple/Casey regarding Apple cycle. Right now, I'm just kind of confused by it

00:01:37   because I don't feel like it's filling a hole I have in my life. But typically when I say that,

00:01:42   I end up buying whatever the thing is and realizing I had a perfectly shaped hole

00:01:47   for exactly that device in my life. I just didn't realize it at the time. So I'm optimistic though.

00:01:52   I have understood VR to be extremely cool. I've only very briefly tried like Oculus stuff,

00:01:59   extremely briefly. So I haven't had enough time with it to really understand what makes it so

00:02:04   special. But everyone I know who's tried it says it's amazing. And certainly the rumblings that

00:02:10   we're hearing, well, fair enough. But the rumblings that we're hearing is that the Apple stuff is

00:02:14   amazing. So yeah, I'm excited to see it. And I'm curious what the story will be around it. But

00:02:21   it'll be neat to see. I wonder, you know, you'd said earlier Marco that Apple's excited about it.

00:02:28   We heard, I think through Germin, I'm not going to be able to find a link for the show notes,

00:02:31   but I thought Germin had posted something last week or two that said like a lot of the Apple

00:02:36   executives are kind of pumping the brakes on this internally, which is interesting to me. That

00:02:41   doesn't necessarily mean it's not great. It doesn't necessarily mean it's garbage. We'll see what

00:02:46   happens. But I think on the macro level, I think you're right that Apple broadly does seem to be

00:02:52   excited about it. And it's certainly interesting. Like even if it's a disaster, I think it'll be

00:02:57   interesting. And like selfishly, it'll give us plenty of stuff to talk about, be it a disaster

00:03:01   or a winner. You know, I think there's going to be a lot to discuss and I'm super duper looking

00:03:06   forward to that. I'm excited about the boring WWDC stuff. Like, you know, setting aside the headset,

00:03:12   but it's probably not going to be for me, but it's exciting to talk about. But like, you know,

00:03:17   they have new versions of all the OSs, new versions of frameworks, new version of Xcode,

00:03:22   all that stuff that they always do. All the Swift stuff that I already know because Swift

00:03:26   is developed in public, like just all that good stuff. It's the sort of the refresh all your

00:03:31   things, period. And that's even in quote unquote boring years. That's exciting. It's exciting to me

00:03:37   as a user. It provides the dim hope of whatever things that I'm dealing with in my apps or in my

00:03:45   usage of these platforms might be fixed because, hey, it's the major next new version. So, you

00:03:50   know, as we sit here going through 13.1, 13.2, 13.3 of Mac OS and like things aren't fixed or

00:03:55   in changes, you're just like, well, it's too late in the cycle. You got to wait for 14. And so

00:03:59   hope springs eternal. It's like, well, the new version of Mac OS, that's when

00:04:02   whatever thing annoys me is going to fix. Maybe my weird windowing thing will be fixed

00:04:06   accidentally in there. Like, who knows? And then all the new frameworks, all the new APIs,

00:04:11   and maybe I'll see something that'll be exciting. I'll be excited to add some feature to one of my

00:04:15   applications because of a new API they added or something like that. And, you know, user facing

00:04:19   features, stability, performance improvements, all that good stuff on all their platforms.

00:04:25   That happens every WWDC. That alone is enough for me personally to be excited about it. And it's not

00:04:30   enough for like WWDC to be a smash hit in the major media. For that you need a headset. But I like the

00:04:35   boring stuff. I'm excited to watch some WWDC sessions where they tell me about new APIs and

00:04:40   an obscure framework that no one else cares about. Let's start with some follow up. The Dell 6K

00:04:47   monitor that was a phantom and then got a price just a week or two ago, I think a week, it was

00:04:52   last week we were talking about it. Suddenly it's already in people's hands. And so Alex Stevenson

00:04:57   Price took the fall for all of us. And he bought the, what was it, $3200 something like that,

00:05:03   Dell 6K monitor. And because Alex is a gentleman, it works at Plex if memory serves. So double bonus

00:05:10   points there. Anyways, Alex has tweeted, tooted a thread with regard to what it's like to use this

00:05:18   thing with a Mac. And so I'm going to read most of that thread. There's not too much here. Alex writes,

00:05:23   everything works out of the box with one Thunderbolt cable in zero software or drivers

00:05:27   installed, which is awesome. That means I don't have to install any Dell software or rely on them

00:05:31   keeping it updated. You can't control brightness or speaker volume with the system keys out of the

00:05:36   box. But I found that there's a popular open source app for third party monitors called

00:05:39   monitor control. And we'll put a link in the show notes. That makes it just work and uses the system

00:05:44   GUI and it makes it completely transparent. I don't know if that was two things, you know,

00:05:49   match up there. You don't have to install any drivers and everything works. Well, almost

00:05:54   everything, but no, but that's good to hear that basically like it works as a monitor and this

00:05:58   stuff on it seems to work. Like it just acts like a Thunderbolt hub, I guess, or however it's doing

00:06:02   its job. So, and then monitor control thing, I don't think is a driver. I think it's just an app

00:06:06   or whatever. So this is a pretty good story. Yep. Alex continues, I freaking love all the ports,

00:06:11   ethernet, USB-As, USB-Cs. It's so flexible. I can just plug in everything I had connected to my old

00:06:17   Intel iMac without needing a Thunderbolt hub or something else. And the pop-out front ports are

00:06:21   useful and totally hidden when you don't need them. I also like having an HDMI input for versatility.

00:06:26   It means I can easily plug in something like a console or an Apple TV for testing and it can do

00:06:30   picture-in-picture with the HDMI, which is neat. And then Ben Smith chimed in and wrote, I haven't

00:06:37   used this 6K monster yet, but about a year ago Dell released Dell Display Manager or DDM and for Mac,

00:06:44   which gives pretty complex software control of their displays. It worked well in my two 27 inch

00:06:48   4Ks. It feels like a sign Dell is committed to supporting the Mac. DDM was Windows only for

00:06:53   eons before this. So we'll put a link to the Dell Display Manager as well. The picture-in-picture

00:06:58   HDMI sounds cool. Like that is super cool. That's the type of sort of, you know, hardware feature,

00:07:04   you know, the Mac has, does not have any idea that it's there, that it's existing. It's just

00:07:07   something that the monitor does for you. And for particular scenarios, like maybe someone who works,

00:07:13   you know, for Plex, that might be super handy as opposed to trying to do some software solution

00:07:17   and funneling it through a window that macOS is aware of. Super cool. All right. So we have some

00:07:21   Final Cut Pro follow-up. People have used it. I have not, but people have used it, including

00:07:27   Jason Snell over at Six Colors. And we'll put a link to his hands-on, which includes a couple of

00:07:32   videos. One, I didn't watch the 30-minute one. I didn't have the time, but there's a shorter one

00:07:37   that he has a screen capture of him doing some editing for the little upgrade social

00:07:42   media videos that they do. So Jason writes, "Unlike Final Cut, Logic offers round-trip support for

00:07:47   Logic projects." Sorry, I should have mentioned we're also talking about Logic here. "Round-trip

00:07:50   support for Logic projects between iPad and Mac. That's great, but be warned, your Mac project must

00:07:55   have saved as a package, if, or have been saved as a package or whatever. If it's not, you'll need to

00:08:00   use the save as command to make a project version." I'm assuming, Marco, you can translate this,

00:08:05   because I have no idea what any of this means. Anyway. "And must use the musical grid, not the

00:08:09   standard time format. That's a very strong hint to anyone who is not a musician that this is not the

00:08:14   tool for you." Marco, can you translate that into dumb-dumb for me, please? All right. So the first

00:08:18   part is package format versus whatever format. All of these, Logic and Final Cut, the file formats

00:08:26   that they save in are actually, as far as I know, in both cases, by default, are Mac OS packages,

00:08:32   which are basically directories, inside of which could be any number of files. That's kind of their

00:08:37   native format. And that works fine in most cases. It does cause some problems with, like, syncing

00:08:44   platforms sometimes, because it's kind of treated as a whole bunch of files inside of a special

00:08:47   directory. But anyway, that's just at the point. And that's, I don't know what they're doing there

00:08:50   with iOS and how that works there. The second part of it, though, about the changing the measures to

00:08:57   time, basically. So Logic is a music composition program. That is primarily what it is designed to

00:09:04   do. And so by default, Logic projects do not work in timestamps. They work in beats and measures,

00:09:11   because it's for music. When you are using Logic to edit podcasts, that super gets in the way,

00:09:17   because it'll try to snap any edit you make to the beat grid of whatever you told it the BPM of your

00:09:24   project song was. And so when you try to use Logic to edit podcasts, which again, it's really not

00:09:32   made to do, but it happens to be a really good podcast editor if you convince it to do it,

00:09:36   you can change the time scale that it's using from beats and measures to just a timestamp,

00:09:43   which is what you want when you're editing podcasts. And then you can drag stuff wherever

00:09:46   you want. And you're seeing things represented as time instead of beats. And that's what you want.

00:09:50   It seems like the iPad OS version of Logic Pro does not support that time-based measurement

00:09:59   at all. It is only beats and measures and stuff. So maybe they'll add that down the road,

00:10:05   but it's not there now. And among some other little issues here and there,

00:10:09   that basically makes it very clear that this is really not for podcasts on the iPad.

00:10:14   That being said, as Jason Snell has pointed out, you have Ferrite on the iPad, which is a really

00:10:19   good app that edits podcasts in a Logic style, but it's made specifically for podcast editing on the

00:10:25   iPad. And that fills that role very well. It doesn't help you if you're a Logic person on

00:10:30   the Mac and you want to round trip stuff, that's not very good. But again, as I said last week,

00:10:35   when these were introduced, I don't think round tripping between the Mac and the iPad is going to

00:10:42   be a very common need for a lot of people using these programs. I have a feeling you're going to

00:10:47   use it either on the iPad or the Mac. And I don't think a lot of people are going to be trying to

00:10:52   edit the same projects on both platforms back and forth for lots of reasons, mostly practical and

00:10:59   technical. But also, I think if you're the kind of person who likes to and has the ability to

00:11:05   edit this kind of stuff on a Mac, you're probably going to want to use the Mac pretty much every

00:11:09   time. Whereas the iPad versions are going to largely appeal to people who either don't have

00:11:15   a Mac at all, or have a Mac but don't have the multi hundred dollar Mac versions of the software.

00:11:20   So I don't I think we're putting too much of a focus on the round tripping aspect here. But

00:11:26   that being said, you know, that the limitation of Logic on the iPad to not use time based measurement

00:11:34   is, is that's pretty fatal for podcast editing. So, you know, maybe but they'll probably get to

00:11:39   it in the future. Since they said it was round like logic is supposed to be the one that is

00:11:43   round trip all setting aside plugins, which we talked about last episode. This is not a plugin

00:11:49   issue. This is like, oh, it's round tripable. But there's this thing that we totally didn't mention,

00:11:53   and you only see it if you're doing podcasts, which again, is not what this program is designed

00:11:57   for. But it is kind of weird that there's these caveats. I feel like a big selling point for both

00:12:02   of these apps could have been this is not a toy version of insert app name here. It's the full

00:12:07   fledged thing. And you can do everything you can do on the Mac version. And that is absolutely not

00:12:11   true for these applications, at least in version 1.0. So they couldn't make that point. And they

00:12:16   didn't. But they did kind of say that logic Pro was round tripable. And as Dan Marm points out,

00:12:21   he couldn't even figure out how to switch like a podcast to be measure based, even though it

00:12:25   would surely be annoying, as you just said, Marco, like snapping to points that have no meaning in

00:12:29   your podcast, like just to get it over there, you know, just to have it to use probably just going

00:12:34   to try it out to review it or whatever. But yeah, we'll have to wait for future versions, see where

00:12:39   this goes. Like the fact that podcasters, some podcasters use this for as their audio editor,

00:12:46   makes it seem like kind of I mean, same thing with GarageBand. GarageBand used to have a podcast

00:12:50   template, I believe. And then they ditched that a while back. I think it's this is not the intended

00:12:57   use case of the programs. But certainly for GarageBand, it was at one time a supported use

00:13:03   case and logic, you could use it for podcasts and it wasn't awful. It seems kind of weird that Apple

00:13:09   doesn't even consider that case important enough to support like non measure and beat based

00:13:16   timelines, which like which they already supported in the max version. So it's,

00:13:20   I don't know if this is a signal, this is just prioritization of 1.0 features or whatever. But

00:13:25   I do feel kind of like, yeah, it's not a big deal. But again, logic is for musicians, like you saw

00:13:29   the whole intro videos, all musicians, that's fine. But it kind of feels like Apple should

00:13:34   like somehow make it even worse for podcasters. So we wouldn't even try to give more to make more

00:13:39   of a market for like ferrite and other apps like that, because a lot of those apps have trouble.

00:13:44   Like ferrite is kind of amazing as you know, a passion project from a small dev team. Is it

00:13:48   only one developer? I don't even know. I think it is like that's amazing. But like, think of

00:13:53   on the on the Mac, the sort of Renaissance, I think of graphics applications, you know,

00:13:59   for a longest time, it was like Photoshop and Illustrator, and then maybe like freehand back

00:14:02   in the day. But they became old and creaky and new entrants came in, whether it's you know,

00:14:07   the the whole affinity suite or pixelmator or photo mater, or the renamed pixelmator photo thing.

00:14:14   Like there's there's a lot of stuff going on on the Mac for in a market that seemed to be closed

00:14:19   off. Apple has never really participated in this market. But with Apple having logic out there,

00:14:23   and it kind of being useful for podcasts, but not really, I don't know, it seemed like to be

00:14:29   an uncomfortable, weird place. I think Mark will be our canary in the coal mine here kind of like

00:14:34   he was for like switching to Swift. Right? Just when does Marco finally give up on logic pro

00:14:38   and try using something else slash try writing his own editor? Yeah, I don't. I don't know.

00:14:44   I think at that point, I would probably like I know, ferrite has kind of flirted with the idea

00:14:49   of a Mac app here and there. I think that's coming. Yeah, I don't follow it enough. But yeah,

00:14:53   I'm pretty sure that is coming in. And I think if logic were to become extremely hostile to

00:14:59   podcast production, even more so than it is now. I think ferrite would just step in and replace it

00:15:03   for for the, you know, people like like me and Jason Snell, who actually edit this way,

00:15:08   or like Adobe Audition or like, there are other editors out there. I'm just saying,

00:15:11   it feels weird. Look, I have Audition. I don't edit podcasts with Audition. It's so what the

00:15:17   way Jason and now I edit podcasts, I kind of ripped off his whole style. It involves having

00:15:23   all having the tracks split up into little blocks of non silent speaking. So, you know, right now,

00:15:31   as the two of you are not speaking, there is nothing on your tracks. And then, you know,

00:15:35   right now I'm speaking and there's there's a block of audio when when as soon as I stopped speaking,

00:15:39   and one of you jumps in and tells me how wrong I am, the there will be a second block now,

00:15:45   right now Casey just left, that will be its own block on his track. Now I can just really quickly

00:15:49   I can drag that left or right and move it forward or back in time or I can just click it and hit

00:15:54   delete. And it is perfectly easy and fast to do that kind of edit. And so that's the kind of edit

00:15:59   I'm doing is moving around the blocks deleting them if you know if somebody like coughs, I can

00:16:03   just click it hit delete that that that block is gone. If Casey left too, too slowly, and I want to

00:16:09   make my joke sound funnier. I'll screw it up half a second. It takes him a little bit longer to get

00:16:13   it. You can shrink up that delay. Yeah, this is a very complicated way of saying that you run strip

00:16:19   silence on everybody's tracks beforehand. Like, in case some people are wondering, the tracks come

00:16:23   as a big long continuous strip of audio. And then you do strip silence and it will strip out with

00:16:27   some tolerance all the parts where in the track where somebody's not talking. Right. And by the

00:16:31   way, and that feature doesn't exist in Logic for iPad. But like, but that style of editing,

00:16:37   I have found is much easier and faster and more efficient to do in Logic than it is to do in

00:16:44   Audition or any other program I've seen so far. Audacity is another popular one, I think. Yeah,

00:16:49   look, Audacity is it's free. It's this nice open source audio program. That's great.

00:16:54   I wish Audition could do it because I'm already paying for a ridiculous Adobe Creative Suite

00:17:00   thing so I can get access mostly just to Audition. And I love Audition for lots of Audition is like

00:17:05   my audio toolbox like I do a lot of other stuff in it, but I just don't like the way it edits. And so

00:17:09   anyway, that style of editing Logic fits that style really well and it fits my brain and fits

00:17:15   my workflow and everything, even though it fights me at every single turn if I like slightly veer

00:17:20   off if I hit the wrong button, or like if I'm typing in a chapter title as a marker. And if I

00:17:26   left if I left the podcast playing while I'm typing in a chapter title, occasionally, something will

00:17:32   grab the keyboard focus back to the track as it's playing. And the word I'm typing, which will

00:17:38   contain a bunch of like regular letters not holding command or anything. Regular letters in Logic do

00:17:43   all sorts of stuff like you can just hit you know, a and that does something that you know, brings

00:17:47   up automation like so if you're typing a word with you know, a few regular letters in it, and the

00:17:51   focus gets out of that text field and goes back to the main window, which happens through some kind

00:17:56   of weird bug or behavior constantly. As you finish typing the word the window goes crazy with

00:18:01   everything you just accidentally invoked. And you're like, Oh, my God, what happened? How do I

00:18:06   get back? What do I how do I undo this? And a lot of times the answer is I have no idea how to undo

00:18:09   this, I just close it and reload my last save. So I save pretty frequently. So anyway, Logic fights

00:18:15   you a lot. But it is really good when it is like when you when you got it, when you're in when you

00:18:22   like when you're in it, when you're when you got it, and you're just getting through it. It's

00:18:26   really good for that style of editing. And I haven't found anything better than that. So I use

00:18:29   it for that. But you know, the reason why ferrite was able to come in as what I believe a single

00:18:35   person developer was able to do is because people who use podcast who use logic at podcasts like me

00:18:41   are using a fraction of the functionality logic offers because we're not doing music production.

00:18:46   If you actually focus on that, that little subset of abilities, you can make a really great editor

00:18:53   as a small team. You know, one of my ideas for a very long time has been, hey, if this podcast app

00:18:58   business thing doesn't work out, maybe I should go make an editor. I would love to make an editor.

00:19:02   But I've always thought like, I don't have time or the market's too small. Well, fortunately,

00:19:07   ferrite already now exists. And so I probably don't need to. So that's great. So anyway,

00:19:11   if logic ever blows up for podcast use any further, I think we all just switch to ferrite.

00:19:16   Benjamin Mayo writes, quote, keep Final Cut Pro open until the export is complete, quote,

00:19:21   this point alone would put me off using it seriously. Who wants to sit there with a

00:19:25   foreground process bar, progress bar, excuse me, for minutes at a time, it feels like a

00:19:29   data restriction that iPad OS v next could remove in light of VRAM, etc. So in other words,

00:19:36   apparently, the official Apple instruction is you need to keep the app foregrounded as long as

00:19:41   export is happening, which makes sense given the restrictions within iOS and iPad OS. But

00:19:46   it's kind of janky. They should have put a breakout game in there. Yes. This is a great example of

00:19:50   like, what is it like to write pro apps for the iPad, the iPad, again, M2 iPad, you can get over

00:19:55   like 16 gigs of RAM and an M2 SoC, the same thing that's in the M2 MacBook Air, and it's just like,

00:20:01   there's, it's incredibly powerful. But of course, we if you want this export to complete,

00:20:08   keep the app open. Like that's, you know, and who if you're Apple writing a pro app, hey, Apple,

00:20:15   you're empowered to make this better. Well, but hold on, I feel like if it would be gross if they

00:20:21   cheated and allowed themselves to background like I know I'm saying by adding the OS level features

00:20:25   to be able to say you could do something in the background and you won't be killed, like,

00:20:30   especially on iPads that have swap as we discussed in past shows like there's what separates them

00:20:35   from Mac with a single user logged in their weird Mac with a single user logged in running a

00:20:39   slightly different OS with slightly different GUI toolkits that is way less resource constrained

00:20:45   than the Mac is because the Mac has all sorts of random stuff running out of multiple users logged

00:20:49   in at the same time, who knows what's taking up memory all over the place. The iPad is so locked

00:20:53   down so minimize every app on the iPad has been brought up and existed in an environment of like

00:20:59   start resource starvation, they're not allowed to do certain things in the background, they're not

00:21:03   allowed to hog the CPU is like so constrained. It's the quietest neighborhood of this sort of

00:21:08   hardware class and Apple's product line. And yet, if you want to export a video from Final Cut,

00:21:14   the only choice is just keep this app and you know, make sure it stays running, just keep staring at

00:21:18   it. It's like going back in time to when you couldn't switch to another application because

00:21:21   the previous one you're using would just disappear. They need to fix this like the hardware is so

00:21:27   powerful. And now they have powerful programs like Final Cut on them. That kind of dialog box is kind

00:21:32   of and you know, the Final Cut Pro team is not empowered to make that change. The iPad OS team

00:21:37   is empowered to make that change. A new set of API's or different set of restrictions for certain

00:21:42   applications in certain situations, yada yada yada. I have to imagine, like I said, the if you

00:21:49   were to, you know, hop on to an iPad and a terminal or you know, look at the equivalent of activity

00:21:53   monitor. It's such a quiet neighborhood on there. Everybody is welcome behaved and quiet because

00:21:57   they know if they act up the OS is going to kill them. Not so on the Mac and a Mac with the

00:22:03   equivalent power. You don't have any of these restrictions. You can launch Final Cut export,

00:22:08   go do something else, play a game while it's exporting. I mean, obviously, it'll slow down

00:22:11   your export or whatever, but you don't have to worry that, you know, the Mac OS is going to kill

00:22:15   Final Cut in the background because you open the game. Yeah, it really is unfortunate. And you know,

00:22:21   it's, I know that it snuck up on Apple that the hardware is more advanced than the software

00:22:27   because none of us have ever mentioned this before. I'm sure they've never thought about it

00:22:30   before, but what are you going to do? They didn't know four years ago that they were going to make

00:22:34   an M1 based iPad. So right, right. Chris Hawking writes that you can go from Final Cut Pro in the

00:22:40   Mac to Final Cut Pro on the iPad. John, tell me about how this is all held together. So this is

00:22:43   what it gets back to what Marco was referring to, you know, the bundle structure of quote unquote

00:22:49   documents and Mac OS. They're often directories with file name extensions on the directory name,

00:22:54   and there's a bunch of stuff inside them. So apparently Final Cut Pro on the Mac uses

00:22:57   dot FCP bundle files and on the iPad it's dot FCP Proj short for project. And the dot FCP Proj

00:23:06   bundle inside that buried in a certain directory structure is the dot FCP bundle directory. So the

00:23:12   trick is you make the thing to make an FCP Proj and then you bring that over to the Mac. And then

00:23:18   on the Mac, you edit the dot FCP bundle that's inside there, because if you right click in the

00:23:22   finder, you can do show package contents and like dig the thing out. So you let the Mac version of

00:23:26   Final Cut edit the FCP bundle that's buried inside the bundle for the iPad version, and then you

00:23:31   bring it back. And, you know, it's a little bit janky and a bunch of stuff won't work. And you

00:23:36   can even you can even go the other direction. You can make this this file structure on your Mac

00:23:41   to sort of encase your Mac Final Cut project thing, as long as you make this metadata file

00:23:47   with the right data and all of that stuff, which is very tricky or whatever. But what it looks like

00:23:51   to me is that the iPad, quote unquote, file format for Final Cut Pro is just the Mac one wrapped in

00:24:00   more crap. And that that gives me you know, again, makes me optimistic that the Mac version will

00:24:05   eventually support this because it seems like just a superset of the Mac format that the Mac

00:24:10   file for file is inside this directory with other stuff. So I don't see how it couldn't support

00:24:15   everything. So I hopeful in a year or two as they revise these things, they'll sync up in a more

00:24:20   sane way and maybe be able to go back and forth. And then Steve Schraut and Smith has, I guess,

00:24:26   done a little bit of spelunking and has some notes. Steve writes Final Cut Pro looks to be using the

00:24:31   Swift UI app lifecycle. It uses a Swift UI app that is in the class app, you know, app and app

00:24:37   delegate adapter. Logic uses a traditional UI application main, if not merely an architectural

00:24:43   choice. It might suggest that Final Cut Pro app code base is a lot younger, which could explain

00:24:47   why it's less fully featured than Logic. I think that means that Final Cut Pro officially counts

00:24:52   as a Swift UI app using UIKit and not just a UIKit app using Swift UI. And finally, Steve writes,

00:24:58   "Baffling, the first run screen or welcome video that you see for 10 seconds on Final Cut Pro

00:25:04   is a whopping 180 megabytes of the 750 megabyte install size." That is, that's a bold choice.

00:25:12   Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Once you get the apps to be that size, maybe it's not that big

00:25:17   of a deal, but it's kind of weird. Like, why do you need a welcome video at all? What year is this?

00:25:22   Have you gone back? Remember the welcome videos on Mac OS X? Those were cool and everything,

00:25:25   but even those weren't this big. They weren't this big proportionally to the size of Mac OS X,

00:25:31   my memory is. And anyway, you weren't, you know, downloading those from the app store, I suppose,

00:25:36   coming on plastic disks. Right. Then tangentially related, Ben Shireman pointed out to me something

00:25:42   that I've been waiting for in Final Cut Pro on the Mac. So oftentimes, well, I shouldn't say often,

00:25:48   occasionally myself and Erin will be at like a school function or something like that. And I will

00:25:54   often have my big camera with a zoom lens, sometimes using that for video, because it'll

00:25:59   record 4K video, and then she'll have her iPhone and she'll be recording video. And one of the

00:26:04   perks of having gotten used to Final Cut Pro and doing KC on cars is that I can, I know how to do

00:26:10   like multi-cam recordings and things like that within Final Cut Pro. However, my camera records

00:26:16   SDR and iPhones record HDR. And in order to get both of them in the same project and not have it

00:26:23   look completely weird and oftentimes way dimmer than it should, you had to do like a ton of work.

00:26:30   And I forget exactly how you do it, but it's a real pain in the pine quarters. And in 10.6.6,

00:26:36   Final Cut Pro 10.6.6, which just came out, I think in the last week or so,

00:26:40   one of the headline features on the little welcome screen is automatic color management,

00:26:44   easily edit HDR and SDR clips in the same project with intelligent tone mapping of video to match

00:26:49   your color space. And it is so easy, in fact, that in the preferences for Final Cut Pro,

00:26:55   at the bottom of the general tab, there's HDR colon check, automatic color conform. That's all

00:27:00   you have to do. And then magic happens, which is super cool. So now when we are at school functions,

00:27:05   recording our kids, doing kid things and trying to merge these together into one video,

00:27:11   it won't look completely dark and underexposed, hypothetically anyway.

00:27:14   So what does this actually do? Practically speaking, you've got the HDR ones that have

00:27:18   super bright stuff and then you have the SDR ones that don't. Does it take away the HDR from

00:27:22   the HDR ones? Does it crank up the brightness on the SDR ones?

00:27:25   Yeah, I understand what you're asking and I don't recall the answer. Ben linked to,

00:27:30   and we'll put it in the show notes, a YouTube video where they talk about this. And I can't

00:27:34   remember if they're pulling up SDR or bringing down HDR. That's probably a technically inaccurate way

00:27:39   of describing it, but you get the gist. I don't remember off the top of my head which way it's

00:27:43   going, but I presume it's got to be one or the other, right?

00:27:46   Well, I mean, televisions do the same thing. Tone mapping isn't a term used in television settings

00:27:51   as well. The televisions have to do it because, as we've discussed in the past when talking about

00:27:54   TVs, you can master video content for television shows and movies up to a maximum brightness level

00:28:01   of like thousands and thousands of nits and there's no television that you can buy that can

00:28:06   achieve those values. So you always have to map from, "Oh, the signal says this should be 4,000

00:28:10   nits. Well, your TV maxes out at 1,600 nits, so we're going to have to take these brightness

00:28:16   values and map them using tone mapping down to fit on your TV screen." And there's tone mapping

00:28:23   on like a per frame basis, on a per scene. This tone mapping information that can come with the

00:28:28   content, video game consoles can provide tone mapping information to the television set based

00:28:33   on what they know of the content that they're generating. Lots of different ways you can do this.

00:28:37   Also, SDR is supposed to max out at some incredibly low value, like the actual official

00:28:42   television standard, I think is like, I don't know, someone's going to write and tell me I

00:28:47   get it wrong, it's like 300, 350 nits. It's way less bright than you would think. Most television

00:28:52   sets when showing "SDR" will show it brighter than the spec. They will show it at 500 or 600,

00:29:00   just because brighter looks better. So already, most of the time you see regular SDR in a

00:29:05   television set, and on a monitor for that matter, because the monitors go up to like 500 nits or

00:29:10   whatever, like the XDR I think is 500 or 600 nits for non-HDR content, you're already tone mapping

00:29:16   up to make it a little bit brighter, even though it's not technically correct. So it could be that

00:29:20   they actually do kind of meet somewhere in the middle, because I think if you tone map to SDR

00:29:24   up to HDR levels, it would look weird, but you don't want to kill all the HDR stuff. This topic

00:29:30   is way more complicated than my understanding of it, obviously, I'm just telling you the basics

00:29:33   of what televisions do with picture, but the whole world of color spaces and look-up tables and color

00:29:40   correction and tone mapping is probably way more complicated when you're in an app like Final Cut.

00:29:43   I kind of wish it did a bit like iMovie does, which is like, if you don't know what you're

00:29:47   doing, just throw the video in a big pile and it'll handle it. Well, I think that's what this is doing

00:29:51   now, it just wasn't doing that before. Yeah, it's got a checkbox that says "automatic color conform",

00:29:56   which mostly does it for you, as long as that checkbox is checked by default. But even iMovie

00:30:00   has some weird stuff, like in the tiny bit of video editing I do for my Destiny videos,

00:30:05   I had to Google to figure out, like I couldn't figure out why it wasn't, you know, my PlayStation

00:30:08   5 recorded at 60 frames per second and my PlayStation 4 recorded at 30, so I'm like,

00:30:13   "Great, now I can make 60 FPS videos!" And I could not figure out why, no matter what I did in iMovie,

00:30:18   it was always 30 frames per second, and the secret is, the first clip that you put in, iMovie decides

00:30:24   maybe it's documented somewhere and I probably could have guessed it or figured it out, but I

00:30:28   had to Google to make sure, like, sometimes it would work and sometimes it wouldn't, and I

00:30:32   couldn't figure it out, it's like, just make sure the first clip is 60, and then from that point on,

00:30:36   as you chuck clips in, the whole movie will be 60, even, you know, the 30s won't screw it up or

00:30:40   whatever. So, do what I mean, or, you know, Magic will do everything for me, can also be confusing,

00:30:46   but maybe not as confusing as the giant mess of controls that is Final Cut Pro.

00:30:51   We are brought to you this week by Lickability, a premier app studio. They've been designing,

00:30:59   building, and shipping amazing apps for nearly 15 years. Lickability is a talented team of experts

00:31:05   who have scaled products to millions of users. They've helped create five star apps for companies

00:31:11   like Tumblr, special place in my heart there, also the Atlantic, the New York Times, Clubhouse,

00:31:16   Mastodon, Epic Games, Stripe, and many more, and their work has earned multiple awards and features

00:31:23   from Apple and Google, and I, frankly, I personally know some of the people in Lickability, and they

00:31:28   are really great top-notch developers. They have developers experience with Swift and iOS, Kotlin

00:31:35   and Android, cross-platform technologies like React Native and Flutter, pretty much whatever

00:31:39   you need to make a great app, Lickability has the talent to do it. They partner with companies of all

00:31:45   sizes, from solo entrepreneurs to startups to Fortune 500s. Maybe you're looking for someone

00:31:50   to create an app from scratch or solve a problem in your existing code base, or maybe just speed up

00:31:54   your existing software engineering team. No matter what it is, Lickability has done it all. So if you

00:31:59   want a great app, you want to work with Lickability. Get the conversation started at lickability.com/atp.

00:32:07   That's lickability.com/atp. Lickability makes amazing apps crafted with care. Thank you so much

00:32:15   to Lickability for sponsoring our show. Hey Marco, you stupid. Okay. What's 9 plus 10? Oh

00:32:28   god, this stupid. When you talked about this last show, Marco, I had no idea what you were talking

00:32:36   about. Same. But when I saw, because you got the number slightly wrong, but when I saw the correct

00:32:41   numbers, I vaguely recall seeing that somewhere. Oh, see, I don't think I'd ever seen this. It was

00:32:45   mean but funny. Yeah, so a handful of people wrote in with the Know Your Meme page,

00:32:51   or entry if you will, for 9 plus 10 equals 21. Marco refused to play along with me. I'm very sad,

00:32:58   but I'm sure using the magic of logic, he will clean that up to make both of us sound smart.

00:33:02   There's only so much I can do. It's mostly made for editing music. That's true. But anyway,

00:33:11   the point is, this is far from music. Yeah. If you're interested in the history between 9 plus

00:33:17   10 equals 21, it's a very short, I believe it was Vine originally. It's all of like 10 seconds and

00:33:23   maybe Marco will drop it in. Who knows? I did not think it was funny. I just thought it was mean

00:33:28   like to the kid. I don't. Yeah, see, that's me as well. No, I don't like this meme either. It's

00:33:34   vaguely upsetting to me. First of all, memes of little kids is not great because they don't,

00:33:38   no little kid should be in a meme and then it's like, it's mean spirited on top of that.

00:33:42   You're not a fan, but you know. Agreed. Like, yeah, I'm like, you know, I like memes where it's,

00:33:49   you know, like, like pretty much everywhere it's going to be hot. Like nice, simple, you know,

00:33:53   dumb, but, but like not punching down. I don't think at least. Yeah. A dog startled by a stuffed

00:34:00   animal, that kind of thing. Yeah. However, I am glad that I at least am now aware of what all of

00:34:06   the children here are, are talking about. Oh goodness. And then in the defense of John of

00:34:12   Bleecker Street, there was a comment on Reddit. The ex-lurker writes, I went here during my last

00:34:18   trip to New York on Casey's recommendation. It was incredible. The white pizza was probably the best

00:34:22   I've ever had. And apparently that was no secret. There was a lineup down the street, even at 8 PM.

00:34:27   Quick side note, I find an 8 PM dinner to be hilariously late, but I don't think that's really

00:34:31   true in Manhattan, but nevertheless, uh, the ex-lurker continues as a party of two. We got

00:34:35   patio seats within a few minutes. Thanks to the wonderful service and staff. I'd say they made the

00:34:39   experience just as much as the food itself. I also got a, uh, I got two to that, which is,

00:34:44   hmm, uh, and, uh, and some, I couldn't put my, my hand on it. I, I, I couldn't, I, it was weird to

00:34:52   sing Mastodon on ivory and on the website of memory serves, but definitely on ivory. I could

00:34:57   go back about a week in my mentions and then it jumped to like two months ago. I don't know what

00:35:02   the deal was, but it's fine. It's Federation. We're fine. Yeah. It's all fine. Uh, I apologize.

00:35:07   I can't cite the, uh, toots, uh, and I, and I don't know who tooted, but, uh, whoever's sponsored

00:35:12   Delta, right? Hey, but the point is, uh, somebody wrote to me and said, I went to John's years ago

00:35:18   with my wife and we are still talking about it to this day. So, uh, maybe not gold belly, maybe a

00:35:23   little exceedingly expensive, maybe it doesn't travel the best, but if you happen to be in

00:35:27   Manhattan, check it out. What's the follow-up to smelt the Delta? Is it a supply denied? It supplied

00:35:32   it. No, no, whoever, whoever smells it, Delta, whoever made the rhyme committed the crime is the

00:35:36   one I'm used to. I think whoever denied it supplied it. It's a slant rhyme, but you know,

00:35:42   there may be some regional variations here. Yeah. I think that, I think there's more,

00:35:45   there's, there's probably a Wikipedia page that lists them all. I guarantee there are more.

00:35:49   Okay. So we were talking earlier about how Marco likes edit podcasts and he likes to make it easy

00:35:59   to just clip out an entire thing that somebody said, um, Marco, I'm gonna make it easy on you.

00:36:05   You're just, you're going to have to cut the next five minutes of me saying what the f***,

00:36:10   Apple. What the f***? Why are you angry Casey? Let me save you from yourself. Why are you angry?

00:36:15   Because I don't need to be told how to report bugs effectively. I need them to respond to bugs

00:36:22   effectively. Oh yeah, this was bad. No, no, but they're not, they're not mutually exclusive. So

00:36:27   this, what he's talking about is Apple posted this document that, uh, it contains a bunch of

00:36:31   information about how to report bugs effectively. It's making Casey angry for reasons that are

00:36:37   explicable if you understand human nature and or no Casey, but, or have you ever filed an effective

00:36:43   bug? But, but, but, but looking at the documentation, uh, like of how to file bugs

00:36:49   effectively, I think it's well-written documentation. That's mostly good advice.

00:36:54   Now it is frustrating when there is another problem with the bug reporting system that

00:37:00   we've talked about many times on here, but like, but this part of like, Hey, if you,

00:37:04   for people who want to report a bug, here's our sort of best practices. These will help people

00:37:10   get their bugs fixed better because the more information you can supply, the better you can

00:37:15   supply it or whatever, if you were round trips, like this is all good. Even if it's not the part

00:37:21   of the system that we think needs the most work, it is a good thing. Apple should have this. This

00:37:26   documentation should exist. And the things that says, I mean, I just mostly just skimmed it,

00:37:30   but the things it says are sensible and straightforward and well-written.

00:37:35   So I'm not going to fault Apple for making this documentation. If anything, if you want to complain

00:37:40   about something, Casey, you can say, why didn't this documentation already exist? Cause it seems

00:37:43   like a basic essential thing that a big company like Apple should have. And who knows, maybe they

00:37:47   had an old version of it. And this is, this is the new version. It's just frustrating because

00:37:51   we think the problem is not on our end. It's not that we're not good at reporting bugs, Apple,

00:37:57   you're not good at responding to our bugs, but I think they are two separate things. So I pretty

00:38:03   much applaud the creation of this documentation. It doesn't really do much to help with the other

00:38:09   side of the equation is once we've given you a beautiful bug report that follows all your best

00:38:14   practices, what happens after that? And that's why we're still mad about, but I don't think you

00:38:18   should transfer the anger over that process to this documentation because this documentation

00:38:24   should exist and should be good. And it does exist. And I think it is.

00:38:27   I understand everything you just said. I hear you and all of that right in the ear, right in the

00:38:35   ear, because this is so obnoxious. Are you kidding me with this? Like, yes, John, I do understand.

00:38:41   And I genuinely, I do agree with what you're saying. I honestly do, but this is so tone-deaf

00:38:46   and so obnoxious. I mean, I put it in the show notes when I worked. So in the mornings,

00:38:52   Wednesday mornings, I work on the show notes and I try to get most of it squared away then.

00:38:55   So I don't get distracted while we record. And what I put in the show notes is beatings will

00:38:59   continue until morale improves, because that's basically what they're saying here. Like,

00:39:03   no, no, no, we are flawless, perfect people that have no issues on our side, but all you fricking

00:39:09   idiots over there, let me help teach you how to make my job easier. Like, come on. Like, yes,

00:39:15   John, I agree with you. I get what you're saying. You are right. I'm not as much as I joke.

00:39:20   And even, or even organizationally, the people who are empowered to write this documentation

00:39:24   probably have no power over when and if bugs are responded to, you know what I mean? Like,

00:39:28   the documentation team is not the same team that like triages feedbacks, you know what I mean?

00:39:33   Totally. But it's just so tone-deaf. Like, even though everything you said is true,

00:39:38   and as much as I'm giving you a hard time, like it is true, and I do agree with you. And this is

00:39:43   actually useful documentation. It's not too long. It's not too wordy. It's pretty good. And it's

00:39:47   aesthetically nice to look at. It has a pretty easy URL. I forget what it is off the top of my head,

00:39:51   but it's not a bad URL. But it seems like so unfair and so obnoxious that, first of all,

00:40:01   of all the things Apple's documenting, this is what you're choosing to document? How about you

00:40:05   document any of the 8,000 f***ing APIs that just say-

00:40:08   They have, the other art documentation does appear. What was the, recently they redid a bunch

00:40:12   of documentation and did a really good job on it. Like, that does happen.

00:40:15   And they're getting better. They are getting better. I should give them credit in the sense

00:40:18   that they are getting better. I don't know if they're getting better, but all I'm saying is

00:40:21   they are doing other documentation. This is not the only documentation that they've done recently.

00:40:25   They have done a bunch of other documentation. No, it's not. But it's just, read the room,

00:40:29   people. Read the room. Like, there's so much more you could have done here.

00:40:33   Cut me off, Marco, because I'm going to keep going.

00:40:35   Apple has a profound inability to read the room so often. And this is one of those times. And look,

00:40:44   I think both sides of this are true. I am sure Apple gets thousands and thousands of bug reports

00:40:52   that are totally non-actionable because they're badly written, because they're incomplete,

00:40:58   because they don't have required information. There are definitely people in Apple who have

00:41:03   a problem in their hands of these bug reports that are coming in, many of them are not good enough

00:41:09   that we can actually act upon them or give a useful response. And therefore we should tell

00:41:14   people, hey, maybe try to do it this way. So that is totally valid. But when good people file good

00:41:22   reports, they are so often either ignored or dismissed in a hurry without respect to the

00:41:29   person who wrote them or the time they took that it's a slap in the face to those of us who have

00:41:35   ever done that because it seems like they are failing to read the room. Yes, they get tons and

00:41:40   tons of bug reports that need improvement. Also, when you file correct bug reports,

00:41:46   you constantly are reminded by Apple, either via inaction. And in most cases, you can file an

00:41:55   amazing bug report, give your sys diagnose, give your sample project that demonstrates the issue

00:42:00   every single time, give all the information you need. And as far as you can tell, no one has ever

00:42:07   even looked at it. No one has ever even run your sample project. No one ever responds, it stays

00:42:12   open forever. The vast majority of the bugs I file stay open forever with no commentary or response

00:42:17   ever coming back my way. Now, I am fully aware, Apple people, before you set me on fire, I am

00:42:22   fully aware that there can be internal discussion on the bug that I will never see. And for various

00:42:29   reasons involving, you know, security concerns, but mostly just Apple's culture, for various reasons,

00:42:34   the barriers are set up in place such that I will as the bug filer typically not see anything that's

00:42:40   being discussed behind the scenes about my bug. The problem is the processes that you have in

00:42:46   place, dear Apple bug people have two massive problems. Number one, your secrecy dial is set

00:42:53   too conservatively and rather than ever tell us that even you're looking into it, we see status

00:43:00   open, response none forever. That's problem number one. So we can't tell if you're looking at our

00:43:08   bugs. And frankly, it seems most of the time that you're not. Problem number two, I'm sure,

00:43:15   dear Apple person, that your team deals well with bugs. Your team takes them in and, you know,

00:43:22   they go through whatever the screener process is and when they get to your team, I am sure your

00:43:27   team runs those sample projects and actually reads the bugs and actually tries to act on them

00:43:34   and doesn't just have an autoresponder that says every time there's a new beta, please verify this

00:43:40   is still the case in the beta. And if you don't do it within like, you know, two days, it automatically

00:43:44   closes the bug. I'm sure your team doesn't do that. Unfortunately, many other teams do. And so,

00:43:53   that's the experience we get the vast majority of the time is either we get no response or we get a

00:44:00   response that suggests that the person who is making this response, if it's even a person and

00:44:05   not just a script, their goal is to close as many bugs as quickly as possible while doing as little

00:44:11   work as possible. And so they're trying, it's almost like, look, I have a child. That child

00:44:16   sometimes does not want to do something, say, you know, eat a new food or, you know, do homework,

00:44:22   you know, whatever the case, you know, something kids don't want to do. Kids that don't want to

00:44:25   do something will often try to find some little tiny technicality that they think will cancel

00:44:33   their ability to have to do the big thing they don't want to do, even if it's not really relevant

00:44:39   or even if it barely is relevant, it can be easily fixed. So, for instance, this piece of, you know,

00:44:45   broccoli, tux, this lentil over here, therefore, this invalidates my need to eat any of the rest

00:44:49   of the things on the plate. I'm going back to video games, like that kind of logic.

00:44:52   And of course, that's not valid. And this is why, like, you know, contracts that are written by

00:44:58   lawyers tend to have clauses that basically say something along the lines of like, if some part

00:45:02   of this contract is invalid or unenforceable, it doesn't make the rest of it invalid. Apple

00:45:07   bug reporting does not seem to have such a clause. And Apple bug reporting, it seems to be,

00:45:12   if we can find any reason to close this bug report, we are going to do that immediately and with

00:45:19   prejudice if we've looked at it. Now, if we haven't looked at it, as I said, most of my bug reports

00:45:23   just stay open forever. But if you do look at it, it seems like the most common response I get

00:45:29   is those kind of autoresponders, like, please verify this is still the case in the newest beta

00:45:33   of whatever, whatever. And then if I happen to be doing something else that week, and I happen to

00:45:40   miss the usually unspecified deadline of like, hey, I you know, I don't actually run the Mac OS

00:45:46   beta. So I don't actually know like if this is still happening on Mac OS or whatever. If I

00:45:51   happen to miss that few day period, they tend that they seem to give you my bug is just closed. That's

00:45:56   it. It seems like they are constantly rushing through large batches of bug reports to close

00:46:04   them. That's different from to fix the bugs. See, that's the problem here. Whatever the incentives

00:46:12   are, and the processes in Apple around bug reporting and bug filtering and bug processing or

00:46:19   whatever, the process seems to encourage mass closure and invalidation over actually reading

00:46:28   them and fixing the problem because oftentimes, the very, very, very few times I've actually

00:46:33   gotten like a real response to a bug. It's sometimes frequently rather seems that the person

00:46:42   does not want to fix anything. They really just want to find a reason why they can ignore my bug

00:46:48   report, or why the thing I'm asking for, which seems very reasonable to me like, hey, this API

00:46:53   should behave the way it seems like it should by its name. Oftentimes, the response is basically

00:47:00   you're holding it wrong, or we don't think it should behave that way because that would be

00:47:04   difficult. Or like, you know, they are like, oh, you don't use this API, go use this old deprecated

00:47:10   one instead. Well, that's that's not really a response that I can really use because it's

00:47:15   deprecated. Like there's so so often that's that's been the kind of responses I get. Usually nothing.

00:47:21   But when I do get responses, it's either been seemingly automated, or somewhat dismissive. And

00:47:28   trying to look for an excuse to not do work, and to close the bug as quickly as possible. And I can

00:47:34   totally see how a large engineering organization can create a system that has this dysfunction.

00:47:41   Because of course, you optimize for the metrics that you have to work with. So it is somebody's

00:47:45   job to go through bug reports. They develop an incentive, whether implied or not, that they

00:47:51   should go through as many as possible and try to close as many as possible. It is an engineering

00:47:56   team's job that when bugs get assigned to them, they should probably look at them and verify them.

00:48:01   And if they're real bugs to schedule it from some kind of priority to get fixed, and then actually

00:48:05   fix them. However, it sure is a lot easier, especially when you're under crunch time, which is

00:48:11   all the time, it seems a lot easier. If you can just find some reason why you don't have to fix

00:48:16   them, then we can just close that report and move on with the things we actually need to do to solve

00:48:20   this crunch time where the feature we actually thought was cool, or whatever feature our boss is

00:48:24   telling us has to be done by the end of the week. So it's not that our bug reports are all badly

00:48:29   written. I'm sure many of them are. And it's not that Apple never responds well to bug reports,

00:48:35   because they occasionally do. But it's that giant fat middle where the well written, well supported

00:48:42   bug reports are so often, as far as we can tell, either ignored or dismissed for reasons that seem

00:48:48   like crappy engineering management to us. There's some text that Casey pulled out of the thing here

00:48:54   that is actually vaguely relevant to that. It says, "Please note, as an issue is being worked on,

00:48:59   we can't provide status updates until a fix is available in a beta software update for everyone,

00:49:06   or a different resolution has been identified after completing the investigation of the issue."

00:49:09   So they're basically saying, "We can't tell you anything about it. Don't ask us when it's done."

00:49:14   That's what it's saying, but that's not the reality.

00:49:17   And the thing that it says it can't be until we think we have fixed it, we put that fix in a beta

00:49:25   release, and that beta release is released to everybody who is on the beta program. And only

00:49:29   at that point can they provide an update to the feedback, which seems extremely, extremely bad.

00:49:35   We've all noted that happening. The only thing you hear from them most of the time is, "Check if this

00:49:41   is fixed in the beta." And Marco always thinks that means that someone's going through and just

00:49:45   closing all the bugs and asking if they're fixed. But it could also be that this process that they've

00:49:48   just described in this document is happening, which is, well, they were working on it,

00:49:52   and they did implement a fix, and they did put that fix in the beta. And now the only thing

00:49:56   they're allowed to do is push whatever button that causes a boot to kick over a fishbowl that

00:50:01   pours water onto a cat that runs over a wire. It eventually causes someone to hit a text expander

00:50:08   macro that says, "Check if this is fixed in B287657432," which you just have to know is,

00:50:15   you know, Mac OS Ventura 13.4.1, because they won't say that. They'll just give you a build

00:50:20   number as if you have them all memorized and as if you're running Mac OS betas all the time.

00:50:24   This is useful because it is official Apple process documentation of a bad process.

00:50:33   And the bad process is we can't provide status updates. I mean, maybe you could say that means

00:50:38   we can't tell you how it's going, but it also kind of reads as what we experienced is you just won't

00:50:43   hear anything. And what you would like to happen is a back and forth with a human being who is

00:50:47   working on this problem clarifying, "You sure X, Y, Z? And did you think about blah, blah, blah?

00:50:52   And so you said you did that, but in your sample project, we did this, but does it work when you

00:50:55   do that? And what are you actually trying to do? And why do you need this feature? And why do you

00:50:58   think it should work that way?" Back and forth, back and forth. You know how bugs work in

00:51:02   functioning software projects, right? And that process can be the special public facing,

00:51:08   totally separate from the internal discussion, blah, blah, blah thing because of Apple's weird

00:51:13   secrecy thing. But if Apple wants to have the weird secrecy thing and the division between

00:51:16   radar and feedback and all that, fine, that's on them. But it doesn't mean, "Okay, but now we can

00:51:21   never communicate with you." No, now you have to have two separate areas of communication,

00:51:26   the private one that's for all the Apple people and the public one with, you know,

00:51:30   the person who reported and experiences the bug because it's important to communicate with them.

00:51:34   It's important to, you know, like talk about the bug maybe before you even try to fix it,

00:51:40   because maybe like you're thinking about a way that you think it should be fixed or you think

00:51:44   it might be fixed by this other change or whatever, but that's the time to communicate with the

00:51:48   reporter. And I have seen that happen occasionally where they will communicate and say, "Well,

00:51:52   why is it that you want to do this?" or whatever. But this document makes it seem like actually that

00:51:56   should never happen. You just report a beautifully formatted bug report and then you hear nothing

00:52:00   until we say, "Test this in the latest beta." And that's not a good process because skipping that

00:52:05   whole middle portion where you discuss the bug may mean that you like maybe again, maybe the bug

00:52:12   wasn't written clearly enough. Maybe you wrote it with some context that is that was in your brain,

00:52:16   but it's not in their brain. And maybe even though you had a sample project, they think they

00:52:19   understood how you wanted it to work, but you weren't entirely clear how you wanted it to work

00:52:22   in the sample project. So they quote unquote fixed it according to what they thought the bug was

00:52:27   saying. That can happen even in really well-written bug reports with really well-created sample

00:52:32   projects that are very clear. Sometimes, you know, software is complicated and sometimes it's just a

00:52:36   misunderstanding. That's why you have to have communication, ideally, before you dive in and

00:52:42   say, "I know how I'm going to fix this typey, typey, typey." Like before you do that, make sure

00:52:47   you understand the bug and the only way you can do that is talk to the person who's reporting it or

00:52:51   the multiple people who are reporting it. Are these people all reporting the same bug? Maybe this

00:52:55   person thinks the API should behave this way, this person thinks it should behave that way, and then

00:52:59   internally you think it should behave a different way. It's just exhausting and how much more

00:53:05   difficult it makes everybody's lives. Obviously, it makes our lives difficult because we're

00:53:07   frustrated because the bugs aren't fixed, but I think it makes lives more difficult for the

00:53:10   people writing the software as well because they are cut off from us just as we are cut off from

00:53:16   them. They can't reply to us. Apparently, they're not empowered to do that. They can reply on the

00:53:20   internal thread and they can all discuss it, but it's like they're all discussing a bug that you

00:53:24   reported, but you're not allowed to be in the room. I wonder if they talked to each other. I was like,

00:53:28   "Man, if only the person who reported this bug could tell us what they meant instead of us arguing

00:53:32   back and forth about it. I think they meant this and I think they meant that, but why do they think

00:53:35   they want this? Do they have discussion threads internally where they're debating what the founding

00:53:40   fathers thought or something when George Washington is standing just outside a glass window saying,

00:53:44   "I'm out here, but you can't hear him because it's soundproof glass. I'm out here. Just ask me. I'm

00:53:48   right here." Never mind that doesn't freaking matter what the founding fathers thought because

00:53:51   that's stupid. Anyway, that's the analogy I came up with. I'm sorry. We're here. You're there.

00:53:57   We should communicate and if it has to be in some weird regimented secrecy preserving way,

00:54:04   so be it, but that just means you need more staff and more people to do that type of thing. "Oh,

00:54:08   that's too cumbersome for you?" Well, then get rid of that and just trust your engineers to be able to

00:54:12   hold their tongues when discussing things. I don't know. Whatever the solution is, this isn't it,

00:54:17   but this documentation like this is good because if you ever encounter an Apple person and discuss

00:54:25   this, it's difficult to pin this down because we don't know what's really going on and they always

00:54:30   think they know what's really going on, but they really don't because as we've talked about in the

00:54:33   past, people within Apple don't have a full view of Apple either. They have a bigger view than we

00:54:37   do on the outside for sure, but they can only see their portion of the company, their portion of the

00:54:44   project or whatever, and we can only see the tiny portion of the bugs that we throw over the wall,

00:54:48   but something like this where some group is empowered to write documentation that describes

00:54:54   some part of the bug process for the whole company. This document is not just for one

00:54:59   framework for SwiftUI. This is not API platform anything specific. This is whole company.

00:55:07   So whoever wrote this, the responsibility was describe what good feedback is supposed to be

00:55:11   like for developers, and in that documentation they said we can't provide status update until

00:55:15   it fixes available in a beta software update. So now you've got sort of like hard evidence proof,

00:55:20   it says well, and the official Apple documentation on the process that they follow, this is what it

00:55:24   says, and we think this is bad, and it's harder for them to say, oh that's not how it works in

00:55:28   my group. I'm like, look, I'm just going to buy what Apple's own documentation said. It's easier

00:55:33   to argue against this because otherwise we're just saying, well, I tried a thing and here was my

00:55:36   personal experience, and it's like, ah, it's just an anecdote. On average, it would do a really good

00:55:40   job. Or in my group it's good. And by the way, on the whole, like, oh, within my group we do good

00:55:44   on feedback. The problem is, obviously, we don't get to pick as developers which bugs we encounter.

00:55:51   Like we don't get to say, I want to make sure I encounter bugs in the group that's really

00:55:54   responsive. We don't get to pick. Maybe I'm not even using that framework. Maybe that framework

00:55:58   doesn't have any bugs. Maybe I don't encounter any. Well, it has bugs. It doesn't have any bugs

00:56:01   that I encounter, right? When you're a developer, you can't choose which API will do something

00:56:09   unexpected based on how responsive you think the group is inside Apple. And again, when you're

00:56:14   inside Apple, all you can do is be responsive in your group. You can't, as a rank and file developer,

00:56:19   somehow fix this feedback system internally. But somewhere in Apple's org chart, there are people

00:56:25   who do have the power and responsibility to oversee this process. And if I met one of those

00:56:31   people, I would have a little note card with this thing on it and say, see this highlighted passage

00:56:34   here? This doesn't work for me for the following reasons. And if they say, oh, that highlighted

00:56:38   passage is not actually how it works, I'll say, well, maybe you should find the person who wrote

00:56:42   this documentation that's supposed to apply to the whole company because apparently it's not true.

00:56:45   Something is wrong here. Either this documentation is incorrect or you are incorrect about the policy

00:56:51   that your company follows. Or the third thing is you can say, this is how it works and we think

00:56:55   this is the best way it works. And then we'll just kind of, you know, we are a great impasse there,

00:57:00   because if they really think this is the best way it should work, I think they should talk to more

00:57:04   developers. That's what Marco keeps saying when he does read the room. He's basically like,

00:57:09   you know, have you talked to enough developers to understand how we feel about the process? Is it

00:57:15   working for us as developers? So separate from is it working for you, Apple, as a company and as,

00:57:20   you know, the individual engineers, I think if you read the quote unquote room at WWC,

00:57:26   if you had as many developers as possible in the room at the same time and you actually talked to

00:57:30   them about how the feedback process is working, I think what you would get is a net negative sentiment.

00:57:36   Yeah, absolutely. And again, the thing is they're choosing this, you know, what is it?

00:57:43   We can't provide status updates. You choose not to, but you could. That is something you are

00:57:52   capable of doing. And the other thing that drives me nuts is I know a lot of people at Apple that

00:57:56   have been third party developers and they justifiably for a moment anyway, really,

00:58:02   truly understood what it was like to be on the outside, but then they get inside and they see

00:58:07   how the sausage is made and suddenly excuses are made for this. I don't care. I am not on the

00:58:13   inside. I understand. And I think it was Marco going on about this earlier and he's, he's exactly

00:58:17   right. I understand that they get an unfathomable amount of feedback more than I could possibly

00:58:24   imagine. And I understand that that is a very big burden, but I don't care. Yeah, that's not

00:58:32   on, that's not on us. That's on them. That's not my problem. It's like, geez, it's so hard to make

00:58:38   all this money all the time selling all these iPhones. Like, yeah, I'm sure there are challenges

00:58:41   there. That's not our problem. Right, exactly. And part of being a platform vendor is vending

00:58:48   the platform, including making a platform, not a pile of shit. And if you want us to help you not

00:58:53   make it a pile of garbage, then you, we need to be able to do that. And it's just so obnoxious for

00:59:00   them to say, Oh, excuse me. We would like it if you did your free labor in a way that was better

00:59:06   for us, please. And thank you. We're not paying you for this time. I think the last time we spoke

00:59:10   about this just a few weeks ago, a couple months ago, you know, I feel like I should bill Apple

00:59:13   at whatever the going rate for an iOS contractor is, which years ago was like $150 an hour. I have

00:59:18   no idea what it is now, but I should build them for the time I write filling out actually decent

00:59:24   feedbacks. And then that's not how anything ever works. I know you're frustrated, but that makes

00:59:30   no sense. No, but like, I think it's frustrating that like, you know, even if you read this

00:59:36   document and even if you give it the most charitable interpretation of like, okay, sure.

00:59:40   If Apple insists that they can't tell me what's going on with my bug until a beta version has

00:59:45   been released that might fix it, that's totally understandable. It's not. And they can change

00:59:51   that on any time to a large degree if they choose not to. But let's set that aside for now.

00:59:56   Even that process does not happen consistently. I have so many bugs that go back years that actually

01:00:06   were eventually fixed that actually did eventually the problem I was reporting did get fixed status

01:00:13   open, no response. So it's so yes, some bugs make it into the system and, and do get those,

01:00:22   like, please verify if it's fixed in this version of whatever they, some bugs do get that. Most of

01:00:28   them still don't, most of them still just stay open forever. So yes, part of the process works that

01:00:36   way, but there are still substantially broken parts of the process that make it so that our view from

01:00:45   the outside is so often that filing bugs is a waste of our time. And it's not because we're trying to

01:00:51   be lazy and it's not because we're trying to be negative and it's not because we're attacking your

01:00:56   work personally, dear Apple engineer hearing me say this right now, we'll get to that in a second.

01:01:00   It's that the process has shown us actions speak louder than words and Apple's actions as a whole

01:01:09   towards the developers in this area have been largely failing us, largely dismissing us,

01:01:14   and largely telling us that we are wasting our time. Now I know you, you individual Apple

01:01:21   engineer listening to this, you probably are very angry hearing this. Now some of you will be like,

01:01:26   yeah, you know, that's yeah, they're right. I, you know, I wish we could fix it or I'm trying to fix

01:01:30   it or whatever, but many of you Apple engineers listening to this right now are going to be angry

01:01:35   at us. Now I've been feeling for a while, actually, we have a larger cultural problem. You know, us

01:01:42   podcasters and the commentary and the public versus you, the individual Apple engineer,

01:01:50   you get mad at us a lot because you feel like we're attacking your work. And I want to be very,

01:01:55   very clear. First of all, you don't work independently of the company. You, when we

01:02:02   attack something that you work on, we are attacking the output of the company. And that is maybe

01:02:09   partially your responsibility, but on the whole, that's not on you. And we're not attacking you

01:02:15   because your work is being shown through the context of a giant multinational corporation

01:02:21   that we don't have, you know, good access into. We're not, we're not talking to you. You're not

01:02:26   talking to us. There's all this context around this. I want to be very clear that I don't want

01:02:32   to attack individual engineers. You're working within a system and that system occasionally

01:02:38   fails you. And it occasionally fails me. Our job on the outside is to comment on the work as a whole,

01:02:44   as we see it, as it gets out of the company in the context of the company. You, dear engineer,

01:02:52   or bug screener at Apple who's here in the show, this isn't your problem. This is the problem of

01:02:57   the system that is much larger than you within the company that you work for and the processes

01:03:03   and incentives and realities of that system. So you, dear engineer, please don't be mad at us.

01:03:09   We're not attacking you directly. Rather, we're trying to empower you. When we criticize the work

01:03:16   of Apple or something about Apple, we are trying to empower the individual people inside the company

01:03:24   to be able to do their best work and get their best work out to us. And we're doing that by

01:03:30   making a stink in public so the higher ups might feel some kind of heat on this issue and that

01:03:36   might help them decide, hey, this is worth looking into or changing some policy or making some

01:03:43   decision differently or allocating resources differently. That's what we're doing here on

01:03:48   the outside. So again, I want you individual Apple engineers, not just on this topic, but on lots of

01:03:52   topics, we hear about this here and there. We hear some really hurt feelings. And I understand

01:03:58   it hurts when people tell me my software sucks. I get it. And I really want to be clear here that

01:04:03   we're talking about the company's processes and the company in general. The way to use us is to

01:04:09   let our arguments speak in ways that you can't. Maybe you, for the good of your job,

01:04:15   maybe you shouldn't be raising these concerns internally. I get that. There's a reason why

01:04:21   I don't work in big companies. I wouldn't last very long. But chances are we can say things that

01:04:28   you can't. We can reach people that you can't. So use us. Use these arguments to help make your

01:04:34   department or your division or your project better and help convince the higher ups with all of our

01:04:41   rage and especially Casey's rage, of which there is much. Use this to make things better for everyone

01:04:49   rather than taking it as a personal attack. Because I swear we don't mean it as a personal attack on

01:04:54   any individual people or department there. Anytime we criticize anything about Apple,

01:04:58   it's not meant to be like, "Oh my God, that was my project and you're directly insulting me."

01:05:02   No. We are trying to make things better that are the output of a giant company.

01:05:06   And sometimes the best way to do that is for podcasters on the outside to make a big stink.

01:05:10   **Matt Stauffer** That's why you should wear your Mac Pro Believe shirts too.

01:05:13   Oh, here it is. There it is.

01:05:15   **Matt Stauffer** One day a week maybe, or on special occasions or at certain times,

01:05:19   especially if you work anywhere near the pro Mac hardware division. Just put that into your wardrobe

01:05:24   rotation. I'm just saying. **Tristan O'Brien** Do you know, because you presumably have shipment

01:05:28   information forthcoming for the Ternus shirt, right? You haven't seen if that's shipped,

01:05:32   have you? **Matt Stauffer** I'm assuming that. I just got my son's Mac Pro Believe shirt came

01:05:37   today. I know a bunch of people who've gotten them. I didn't actually look at the shipping.

01:05:40   I sent it to Apple Park. Is it ever going to actually make it to him? Who knows?

01:05:45   **Tristan O'Brien** Oh, of course not. Of course not.

01:05:46   **Matt Stauffer** I was actually going to WWDC. I might deliver it in person, but you know.

01:05:50   **Tristan O'Brien** It's kind of a large building. Do you think it's kind of like,

01:05:55   are they going to place it in the middle of the ring? Just like, here Apple Park, boop.

01:06:01   **Matt Stauffer** I'm assuming executives have people screening their mail. So like people don't

01:06:06   send them anthrax and stuff. So I'm assuming some, when they see like a big name like,

01:06:10   oh mail to Tim Cook. If you have a picture on the leadership page, I'm assuming someone is going

01:06:14   through the mail. And so it's like sending something to just like the president of the White

01:06:18   House. It'll get to him. I mean, in a functioning mail organization, not that we care at all about

01:06:25   this, but hey, if you know how the mail process works inside Apple, feel free to send us some

01:06:30   anonymous people. Like when people send you mail, can you just send it to Tim Cook Apple Park? I'm

01:06:34   almost certain if you sent an actual piece of snail mail to Tim Cook at Apple Park, the main

01:06:38   Apple Park address, it would make its way into the giant hopper that contains Tim Cook stuff. Would

01:06:43   Tim Cook ever look at it? I don't know, but it's not like they'd be like, Tim Cook, I don't know

01:06:47   who this is. The goat in the garbage, it doesn't have an office number on it. We can't deliver this,

01:06:51   return to sender. No, they're going to figure it out. And so I figured John Turness is similar.

01:06:55   But no, I would like to, I think we need to move on because it just makes me ragey. I don't know

01:07:01   if you noticed, but I do want to echo what Marco said. Like this is, I think, maybe I'm using the

01:07:08   word wrong, but I think it's a political problem. You know, and I think both Marco and John have

01:07:12   pointed out that clearly Apple is not incentivized to fix this in a way that's compatible with third

01:07:17   parties. And that doesn't mean it's any one individual contributor's fault. While I take

01:07:23   a lot of fault, or I have a lot of complaints with this whole thing, I don't mean to complain

01:07:31   about any one individual person. And I know because I've exchanged emails with people on

01:07:36   the inside that are desperately trying to change this and make it better. But unfortunately,

01:07:40   rank and file can't really turn a ship this big. And arguably, even the Federiges of the world,

01:07:46   it's hard for them to turn a ship this big. So I get it. It's hard. I also get that I don't get

01:07:53   how hard it is. But golly, it's just so infuriating from the outside. It just hurts.

01:07:59   It hurts because without third party developers, this platform is not what it is. I mean, yes,

01:08:05   it is an amazing platform. iOS, iPadOS, MacOS are amazing platforms. But without third party

01:08:11   software, they ain't that great. And so I feel like, you know, it's just we keep turning another

01:08:17   cheek. And at one point, I would love to not have to do that. We are brought to you this week by

01:08:24   Rocket Money. These days, so many products and services and apps are subscription priced. But

01:08:32   do you know how much your subscriptions really cost? How much it all adds up to? Most Americans,

01:08:37   if you ask them, they think they're spending about 80 bucks a month on subscription products

01:08:41   and services. But the actual total is closer to $200. People really underestimate this.

01:08:47   If you don't know exactly how much you're spending each month, you need Rocket Money. Rocket Money is

01:08:53   a personal finance app that finds and if you want, cancels your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your

01:08:59   spending and helps you lower your bills all in one place. Over 80% of people have subscriptions they

01:09:06   forgot about. Chances are you're one of them. Like maybe that STARZ app just to watch one show or

01:09:11   that free game trial that you never actually used. Rocket Money will quickly and easily find your

01:09:16   subscriptions for you. And for any you don't want to pay for anymore, just hit cancel and Rocket

01:09:21   Money will cancel it for you. It's that easy. They also help you manage all your finances in one

01:09:26   place and they can automatically categorize your expenses so you can easily track your budget in

01:09:31   real time and also if you want get alerted if anything looks off or different. Over 3 million

01:09:37   people have used Rocket Money saving the average person up to $720 a year. This is the kind of app

01:09:44   that easily pays for itself. Stop throwing money away. Cancel unwanted subscriptions and manage

01:09:50   your expenses the easy way by going to rocketmoney.com/atp. That's rocketmoney.com/atp.

01:09:58   One more time rocketmoney.com/atp. Thank you so much to Rocket Money for sponsoring our show.

01:10:05   Jon, turn my frown upside down even though I really don't care about video games very much.

01:10:12   Tell me about the new developments and make me care. Ah, so, video games. This was an announcement

01:10:20   that probably came as a surprise to people who aren't obsessively following the company Bungie

01:10:24   but I am obsessively following the company Bungie because they're the makers of Destiny,

01:10:28   that game I play all the time, except for now when I'm playing Tears of the Kingdom.

01:10:31   They have announced a new game. The new game is Marathon, which is a name that may be vaguely

01:10:39   familiar to you if you are an old school Mac gamer. I guess I have to start by explaining...

01:10:46   That was the game? The Mac game that was available?

01:10:50   I have a whole book full of games. What was it, classic? You know that big book about

01:10:56   shareware Mac stuff? Anyway, there's a lot of them. Surprising number, but it's a very small

01:11:00   community. So, Marathon. Why was Marathon important? Way back in the day, the thing

01:11:05   that Marco just did that happened all the time. PC users would be like, "Oh, Macs don't have any

01:11:08   games," or whatever. That wasn't actually true. There was a lot of really cool games on Macs.

01:11:13   It was a very small and weird community, but the thing that was true was, "Hey, you know that big

01:11:18   new game that you heard of?" Almost all the time, that big new game that everyone is talking about

01:11:22   would not be available on the Mac. There were exceptions, and Marathon was one of them, and so

01:11:25   was Myst, for example, which is made on the Mac for the Mac, but also shipped on other platforms.

01:11:30   But most of the time, you couldn't play the big new game. Nowhere was that felt more than in the

01:11:35   early days of PC first-person gaming when Doom came out. Wolfenstein and then Doom. If you were

01:11:43   the right age, teen, pre-teen, around the time that Doom was coming out, and you were a Mac user,

01:11:49   you knew that Doom existed. You wanted to play it. You couldn't play it because you had a Mac,

01:11:55   and your friends had Doom on their PC. First-person shooters were the popular genre.

01:11:59   It was a genre-defining set of games from id Software, and there's a reason that that genre

01:12:06   still exists. Destiny is a first-person shooter, so it's still going strong. It is a very appealing,

01:12:11   popular genre for a reason, and that was the beginning of it. And you felt left out of it

01:12:15   as a Mac user because all your friends had Doom, and you didn't. Part of that was, "Oh,

01:12:20   color on the Macs was not as common as color on PCs because they could have disgusting EGA

01:12:26   screens with rectangular pixels." Well, CGA had rectangular pixels. I forget which one. Anyway,

01:12:30   the pixels are really big. I joined at VGA. Yeah, CGA was all purple and green. EGA looked

01:12:37   a little better. VGA had a reasonable number of colors, but still. Anyway, so the lack of

01:12:42   color was one problem. But the other one is that the Mac was an entirely different API for doing

01:12:48   stuff, and there were very few Macs, and very few people had them. They were really expensive,

01:12:51   so no, there was no Doom available for the Mac until much, much later, and it was a bad port.

01:12:55   But what the Macs did have a little bit later was a game called Marathon, which was a first-person

01:13:02   shooter that was only available on the Mac, made by a company called Bungie, that was filled with

01:13:09   Mac nerds that made games for the Mac. And they were not very well known. They had made a couple

01:13:14   of games before that that were also kind of first-person-y, but with a bunch of other stuff

01:13:19   around there. Even Marathon was not really the full Doom experience. I remember one of the

01:13:24   things that Marathon did is because it had to run on a Mac which had pixels that were not the size

01:13:28   of boulders, if you just made like, what was Doom's resolution? It was like 300 bytes, whatever.

01:13:34   Something like that. Probably 320 by 240. Yeah, 640 by 240 divided by two, basically.

01:13:40   No Mac screen ran at that resolution. So if you tried to make something fill the smallest color

01:13:46   screen available for the average Mac, which probably ran 640 before, although there was a

01:13:50   little bit smaller one for the LC, you would be slinging more pixels than Doom was. And of course,

01:13:54   that would destroy your performance. This is before, you know, GPU acceleration. It was all CPU

01:13:58   stuff. So what Marathon did was shoved the viewport of the first-person game into a sub-window

01:14:06   surrounded by a bunch of Chrome and crap that was cool and gamey-looking Chrome. But the bottom line

01:14:10   was like, look, we can't do 30 frames per second at 640 by 480. We don't have the computing power.

01:14:16   Neither can Doom on most machines when the game first came out. So we're just going to make a

01:14:21   smaller window. But the things that had it going for it was, it did have small pixels, you know,

01:14:27   ran it in quote-unquote full color. It had really cool, you know, artwork and enemy design and gun

01:14:35   design, all the things that Bungie is known for today for all of its games, the Halo series,

01:14:38   Destiny, all that stuff, that started back then. So it was a cool game. It had an interesting and

01:14:44   deep story, which Doom did not have. And you'd run around and shoot things. Oh, and it also had

01:14:49   a physics engine, which was incredible fun for the PVP experience when you're playing, like,

01:14:54   on a land against other people. It had rockets and other things with physics that could, you know,

01:14:59   shoot and explosions would push things around. You know, the PC didn't get that until Quake,

01:15:03   when you could do rocket jumping and stuff like that. So Marathon was ahead of its time.

01:15:06   People will say, oh, it was a better game than Doom. Doom was more visceral. Doom had

01:15:13   higher frame rates. It had that whole moving and shooting thing was better than Doom. Oh,

01:15:17   and by the way, you could look up and down at Marathon as well. And of course, every Mac had

01:15:21   a mouse, so you could use what they called mouse look, which also didn't become particularly popular

01:15:25   until Quake, right? Marathon way ahead of its time. Mac exclusive. That's why Marathon is

01:15:31   loom so large in the memory of Mac users, because it was a time when the Mac was really getting

01:15:37   it rubbed in its face that it didn't have a lot of good games. All your friends are playing Doom.

01:15:41   You can't play it. You had to say, yeah, but we have Marathon. Eventually, we have Marathon.

01:15:46   And even though you had that time in the sun with Doom, now Marathon is the best first person

01:15:51   shooter. It is better than Doom in all the possible ways and, you know, even better than

01:15:54   Quake because Quake still has no story and it's all brown and, you know. I'm just trying to really,

01:15:58   at the time, like I was in the PC side of that gaming space. It's kind of like, you know,

01:16:04   the madman, like, I don't think about you at all. Like there's, there is this big perceived war

01:16:09   going on by the Mac people with this game. As a PC person, I don't think I noticed at all because

01:16:14   we just had all the other games and we were fine. We had GamesCam out of our butts. We had too many.

01:16:19   - But that's why Mac users love this game all the more because they could know their secret little

01:16:25   treasure. It's like, well, you may not know. You may think we have no games or whatever,

01:16:28   but actually we have Marathon and actually Marathon is amazing and actually Bungie is amazing and they

01:16:32   made a sequel and then a third one. I think Bungie was the first one to do this. So the second one

01:16:39   was called Marathon 2 and the third one was called Marathon Infinity, which was the company's way of

01:16:43   saying we're not making any more Marathons, right? We're just going to increment the number to

01:16:48   infinity to say, can we be any more clear? This is the last Marathon game. Yeah, like it's, it didn't,

01:16:56   it's not as if that changed anything about the gaming market, but it was, it was a great thing.

01:17:00   It was kind of in line with the whole thing that Mac had always had. Mac had always had,

01:17:04   the games that were exclusive to Mac were always weird and special in a particular way.

01:17:08   Marathon was sort of the second generation of those. The first generation of those was way

01:17:12   more numerous and that's what the book I was talking about. I can't remember the title of it,

01:17:15   but it's like this guy who writes a bunch of books by interviewing authors of old classic software in

01:17:21   narrow genres. And so he did a whole book on classic Mac games. They were amazing. I would

01:17:27   always, whenever someone came over to my house and they were a console gamer or a PC gamer,

01:17:32   I would show them my weird black and white Mac games and they would be blown away because they

01:17:36   had never seen games like this because they were so weird and so distinctive and so interesting in

01:17:40   the way that like Apple stuff is the whole surprise and delight and the type of person

01:17:45   who makes games for the Mac type of person who is a Mac programmer is just a little bit different or

01:17:50   weird. And so were the games. It's not like they were saying, I'm going to give up my PC.

01:17:54   I can't believe how many colors you removed from this game.

01:17:56   Yeah, no, but like even, even the fact that they were black and white, they were just, you know,

01:18:00   they couldn't believe how finely detailed everything was. And very often back in the

01:18:04   DOS days, like how good the sound was, because if they didn't have a sound card on their PC,

01:18:07   they just had the bleeps and boops or the big staticky text in that Lynx game where they tried

01:18:11   to make people talk. It was, you know, it was impressive, but it was also a weird little sub

01:18:18   genre. So that's why Marathon looms large in the minds of Mac users. And of course, Bungie would

01:18:23   eventually go on to make Halo, which was debuted at Mac world and then Microsoft bought Bungie.

01:18:28   And that was a terrible blow to Mac gamers everywhere. And there's that whole history

01:18:32   going, going on through that. Eventually Bungie broke away from Microsoft and the Halo IP stayed

01:18:38   with Microsoft and then another developer was it three, four, three industries. I'm sorry. I'm not

01:18:45   remembering the top of my head. Some other company developed the next two Halo games. And then Bungie,

01:18:49   of course, went on to make destiny, which I love. But Bungie retained the Marathon IP and a bunch of

01:18:55   other IP, I believe. I can't keep track of where all of it is. I don't think they have myth anymore.

01:18:59   I think Take-Two has that. I don't think they have Oni or maybe they do. Anyway, they had the

01:19:04   Marathon IP and destiny actually has references to Marathon stuff buried in it as like Easter eggs

01:19:11   and a little bit of the story continuity or whatever. So today as part of the PlayStation

01:19:15   showcase, oh, by the way, Bungie split from Microsoft, but then Sony bought them more

01:19:19   recently. So Bungie has been passed around. So far, Apple has never bought them and I hope they

01:19:22   never do because Apple has no idea what to do with Bungie, but Microsoft was a pretty good steward to

01:19:26   Bungie and Sony, I think, will be a pretty good steward to Bungie because they're good with their

01:19:31   game developers as well. Anyway, Bungie just announced Marathon. No, not the original Marathon

01:19:37   game remade or something like that. They are making a new game. Destiny fans have known that

01:19:42   Bungie has been making this new game for years. And in fact, what kind of game it was was also known.

01:19:48   And also the rumor was that they were going to reuse the Marathon IP. But it's not the same as

01:19:54   the first Marathon game. The first Marathon game was a first person shooter with the story. It was

01:19:57   a single player and had a multiplayer component. And it is set in a particular universe. Halo,

01:20:02   by the way, also connects in that universe and has tons of references to Marathon inside it or

01:20:06   whatever. This is what's known as an extraction shooter, which I think is a phrase that both of

01:20:12   you have probably never heard before. Nope. Never. I have never played one. The most popular one,

01:20:17   sort of the standard bearer for the genre is Escape from Tarkov, which I've never played

01:20:22   because it's a military style shooter. I'm not into those. But you've played Fortnite,

01:20:26   both of you, right? Nope. I know of it, but I've never played it. I think it's some kind of dancing

01:20:31   game, right? Fortnite is what they call a battle royale thing. Neither one of you have seen battle

01:20:36   royale, so that doesn't help you. Correct. But it's like an open world multiplayer game where

01:20:41   you have a big map, you chuck a bunch of human players into it, and they have some kind of thing.

01:20:44   And the battle royale ones, they all fight each other until there's one person left. In an

01:20:48   extraction type game, you have a goal to get to some point for extraction. There's other players

01:20:54   there. If you kill someone, they drop their stuff. If you die, you drop your stuff and lose it

01:20:59   potentially permanently. It's just twists on that type of genre. That does not sound like a first

01:21:06   person game where there's a story where you go through this sci-fi story and that's not like

01:21:10   that at all. Halo was like that. Halo and Marathon were very similar. If you don't know what I'm

01:21:13   talking about with Marathon, have you played Halo, the first person campaign? Marathon was like that.

01:21:18   Marathon was the first Halo essentially. Same developer, very similar storyline,

01:21:23   lots of crossover there. So they're taking the Marathon IP and the universe, the enemies. If you

01:21:29   look at the teaser trailer that we'll link in the thing, if you know Marathon, you see some enemies,

01:21:33   you see some text that you'll recognize from Marathon. They're taking that world and that

01:21:37   universe and putting it into an extraction shooter. They said they're going to have a

01:21:42   little bit more of a story type of experience to it than the average one, and I'm sure they'll have

01:21:46   the bungee twist on it or whatever. But yeah, when will it be ready? There's no date. There's

01:21:51   just a teaser. The teaser doesn't even show any gameplay. The rumor was 2025. Maybe they'll hit

01:21:56   2024. The game is coming out for PS5, the Xbox series X and S, and for PC, no Mac version.

01:22:03   Wait, are you serious? This thing that was the king of Mac gaming isn't going to be on the Mac?

01:22:12   Well, after Microsoft bought them, the door kind of closed on bungee really being a Mac game

01:22:19   developer in any way, shape or form. Halo was eventually released for the Mac, but it was a

01:22:25   port by a third party company, not by bungee, and it wasn't a particularly good port. Doom also came

01:22:32   to the Mac, but it was not by id Software and it wasn't a particularly good port. They haven't been

01:22:38   a Mac gaming company ages, despite the fact that some of the people, including one of the founders,

01:22:43   at least one of the founders who were there making Marathon and it was four people in a little room

01:22:49   on a bunch of Macs, are still at bungee and are still essentially running the company. But the

01:22:54   world moves on. I think when they were owned by Microsoft, them not making Mac games makes perfect

01:23:01   sense. When they're independent, still makes sense because nobody plays games on Macs. When they're

01:23:05   owned by Sony, still makes sense because they're owned by Sony and why would you make a Mac version?

01:23:09   The only reason they're making this on Xbox and PC or whatever is the same reason everybody does,

01:23:14   because you want to hit most of the market. And if you hit those platforms, that's most of the

01:23:19   market. If Apple was in any way competent at understanding the gaming market, they would be

01:23:26   spending money, throwing money at companies like bungee, at companies like Sony, whoever to say,

01:23:34   "Hey, you're going to make a game that everyone's going to hear about and everyone's going to be

01:23:38   playing. I know we don't have a lot of Macs, but we do have reasonable GPUs. Could you make that

01:23:44   game for the Mac?" And they're going to say, "No." And you say, "What if we give you this many

01:23:48   millions of dollars?" And then they'll say, "Yes." That's what it takes Apple, but of course Apple

01:23:52   doesn't care about that, so that's not going to happen. But that was the announcement today and

01:23:57   I'm excited by it. I don't particularly care about extraction shooters, but I do trust bungee

01:24:02   to make a good one and I do like marathon. So I will absolutely try this game. Destiny is not dead,

01:24:08   destiny is continuing. I continue to play destiny, I'll get back to it when I'm done with Zelda,

01:24:13   I suppose. But I will give bungee the benefit of the doubt and try this game. The trailer itself

01:24:20   is pretty cool. It looks very different from destiny. It looks very different from the

01:24:24   original marathon, but there is enough goodwill and memories of the old folks in the Mac community

01:24:30   to make us interested enough to fire up our Xboxes or PlayStations or gaming PCs that we might have

01:24:36   and try this game out. I don't think any of us are going to be particularly surprised or

01:24:40   disappointed that it's not available on the Mac because honestly most people's Macs don't have

01:24:45   enough GPU grunt. Mine does, haha. Don't have enough GPU grunt to play this game in even the

01:24:50   lowest settings, but that's just the way the world has gone in recent years with the Mac. So

01:24:58   I'm excited by this. I'm ready to play the game, but I'm also excited for the next Destiny

01:25:01   expansion. And I'm also excited to continue playing Zelda. I guess I should finish Breath

01:25:05   of the Wild at some point, huh? I mean, you don't have to finish it, but you could, you know.

01:25:10   I really enjoyed Breath of the Wild, but I just put it down at some point. I think Mikaela was

01:25:17   a baby at this point, and so I was just completely overwhelmed and I just never really picked it back

01:25:22   up. And I would like to finish it at some point. Have Declan eventually pick it up and then

01:25:28   you can play together with him. That's true. Once he gets old enough to be interested and

01:25:33   coordinated enough to do it, then you can be, you know, and if he's not interested, away from Mikaela

01:25:37   to get old enough and coordinated enough to, you know. Oh no, he is interested, but we try to,

01:25:41   you know, not park them in front of screens for hours a day. We're still in that stage of

01:25:44   parenting. It's a little bit, and it's also a little bit of a complicated game for every kid,

01:25:49   to not just play with it as a sandbox, but to actually like do things in it. But it's fine to

01:25:54   play with just as a sandbox as well. Yeah. Sony had one more announcement. This is like some Sony,

01:26:00   a bunch of Sony news, and because Bungie is a Sony company, that's why it was tied up in it.

01:26:03   They kind of pre-announced, which is weird, this thing they're calling PlayStation Q, which is not

01:26:09   going to be the real name, which is a handheld device for streaming PS5 games. Everyone's into

01:26:14   like the Steam Deck. Not Steam Deck. Yeah, I got it right. Steam Deck. Yeah, not the Stream Deck,

01:26:20   the Steam Deck. There's one from Asus as well. They're basically like handheld PCs for playing

01:26:25   PC games on the go, and they're really cool and interesting. Sony said, "Hey, we went on in on

01:26:31   that." But what they're putting out is basically like a PlayStation 5 controller cracked in half

01:26:36   with a screen wedged in the middle, which ergonomically I think is good because I like

01:26:39   the PS5 controller, but it's not a game player. All it is is a way to stream games from your PS5.

01:26:46   I occasionally do this for my bed on my phone or my iPad when I forgot to get something in Destiny,

01:26:50   just do the remote play thing because it's like a PS app on an iOS. It will turn on your PS5

01:26:56   remotely, start it up, and then you get little on-screen controls. I just swipe little on-screen

01:27:00   controls and go do some chore I forgot to do in Destiny and then shut the thing down.

01:27:03   This is like that, but it's not an iPad or a phone. It has no smarts in it other than the

01:27:08   networking and stuff like that. You can only do it, you can't do it to stream it. I don't think

01:27:12   it streams over the internet or anything, but we wouldn't actually know because it's not a real

01:27:15   product yet. But I think it's really interesting that the Switch and the Steam Deck and whatever

01:27:21   that Asus thing are have made this a big enough market that Sony says we should have something in

01:27:27   that space. And you know what? Sony did lay all the groundwork for it with the streaming stuff,

01:27:30   and they should have something in this market. And I'm vaguely interested in this if it works

01:27:35   over the internet. If it doesn't, I probably am not interested in it, but I just thought it was

01:27:38   curious that Sony feels so much pressure in this area that they pre-announced a product,

01:27:44   but they don't even have a name for it, let alone a price or a date. Just to say, "Hey,

01:27:47   we're doing this too, so don't spend all your time on your Switch playing Zelda because we're

01:27:51   going to have a way for you to play stuff in your bed too." Awesome. All right, let's do some Ask ATP.

01:27:59   It has been a while, I'm sorry for that. But Jesse Stiller writes, "If someone was looking

01:28:04   over your shoulder and says to you, 'Scroll down,' what direction do you assume the person means?

01:28:08   Are they asking to continue further down the page, perhaps reaching the bottom if you were

01:28:12   to keep going? Or do they mean they want the contents of the page to move downward,

01:28:16   meaning you're now seeing content that lies closer to the top of the page?" I don't think this is up

01:28:20   for grabs. This is 100% move the contents of what you're looking at upward so you are approaching

01:28:28   the bottom of the contents, right? I think that's the common answer, but the problem is context.

01:28:37   If someone is looking over your shoulder and says to you, "What if you're on an iPad? And what if

01:28:44   something is barely visible on the top of the screen, but part of it is cut off by the top

01:28:49   of the screen?" And they reach their hand out and point at the screen a little bit,

01:28:52   and they say, "Scroll down," then they want you to pull down on the screen. What makes the

01:28:57   context different there? Because it's a touch device, because there is something that is cut

01:29:01   off at the top of the screen, because you know in the context of the conversation that that's

01:29:04   probably the thing they want to see, because whatever you said before that makes you understand,

01:29:08   "Oh, they probably want to see the thing that they can't see all of," right? And because they reached

01:29:12   out to the screen, maybe with their finger extended, all that would combine to let you,

01:29:16   as a regular human, know without thinking what they mean is put your finger on the screen and

01:29:20   slide it downward, revealing more of the top of the document. But in the absence of all that

01:29:25   context, yeah, when someone says, "Scroll down," and you're not on a touch device, and they're not,

01:29:29   if all those things aren't true or some combination of things aren't true,

01:29:32   they mean, "I want to see more of the document that's lower down," eventually getting to the

01:29:36   bottom up. StraysNod00 writes, "Why is it received wisdom in the Apple opinion space that it makes

01:29:44   sense for Apple to skip a generation of Apple Silicon in desktop Macs to save on the cost of

01:29:49   re-engineering the internals on lower volume products? Why is putting an M2 where the M1

01:29:54   used to be on an iMac any more complicated than a teenager slotting in a different CPU in a PC tower?

01:29:59   What re-engineering do they need to do?" Ah, see, this is, this question, I think,

01:30:05   presupposes a reality of the old slotting a new CPU into a PC tower game. That was never really

01:30:12   actually the case. See, you could swap CPUs in a self-built PC, you still can. However,

01:30:22   at least in the days that I was doing this, the socket would change, and what a motherboard,

01:30:29   what processors a motherboard could support would change every so often. And so generally speaking,

01:30:36   you could generally swap in any processor you wanted from a given family that was available

01:30:43   at one time. So for instance, when the Pentium 7 comes out and it has four different clock speeds,

01:30:50   you can put any of those four clock speeds generally into most motherboards that would

01:30:54   support the Pentium 7 or whatever. But when the Pentium 8 or the Pentium 9 would come out,

01:30:59   oftentimes those same motherboards would not support those new chips. And there were lots of

01:31:05   reasons for this, you know, simple physical stuff like the socket would change, or the thermal

01:31:09   requirements or the power needs would change. But one of the key things that would change oftentimes

01:31:16   is what used to be called the Northbridge. The Northbridge was the chip on the motherboard back

01:31:22   forever ago. I know things are different now, but they're not that different. The Northbridge was

01:31:27   the chip on the motherboard forever ago that would include a lot of the high speed interconnect

01:31:32   components. So things like the AGP or graphics slot interface, oftentimes the memory controller,

01:31:41   you know, any kind of like, you know, high bandwidth stuff, stuff that was faster than like USB or,

01:31:46   you know, old slow ports, like faster stuff than that. And over time, the way computer design went

01:31:52   was we started more and more integrating that kind of functionality into the chip. And so the chip

01:31:59   started including things like the memory controllers, and the high speed interconnects

01:32:04   like Thunderbolt interfaces, you know, stuff like that PCI Express, you put more and more of that

01:32:09   stuff on the chip over time. So what ends up happening is, as you know, back then even a

01:32:16   motherboard would only last maybe one or two generations of processors. Now, so much of that

01:32:21   stuff is on the chip itself, that we've gone even further in that direction. So when you talk about

01:32:27   like, you know, the the M1 or M2, whatever chips, so much is on that chip, that if you update the

01:32:37   chip, you do actually often need to do a decent amount of reengineering of the surrounding board,

01:32:44   the surrounding IO ports, the components, this maybe the display driver, if it's a laptop,

01:32:49   like there are actually significant differences that come along with whatever new generation of,

01:32:56   you know, memory controller, IO controllers, display controller, like whatever, whatever

01:33:00   new combination of all that stuff exist, that actually changes a decent amount, the thermal

01:33:05   characteristics will change, the power characteristic will change, then maybe the number

01:33:09   of ports it can support will change, or the abilities of those ports will change, the displays

01:33:14   it can support the, you know, how fast it can drive those displays over what interfaces it can

01:33:18   drive those displays. So much of that actually does change when they when they do a new SOC. So

01:33:25   there actually is a surprising amount of reengineering that has to happen to take

01:33:30   advantage of all that. Now, if you want, they could just slow down a lot of those advancements,

01:33:36   they could just say, all right, you know what, we're gonna have, you know, the M1 supports

01:33:40   X displays and X amount of RAM and all that stuff. And the M2 is going to support the exact same

01:33:46   thing. And it'll just be 5% faster. We could do that. But stuff moves faster these days. And

01:33:53   people that people's expectations are high. And whenever there's a new version of HDMI, you know,

01:33:58   17 point whatever, N, Q, that you will never use, and that will only support half of what it claims

01:34:04   to support anyway, whatever, whenever there's a new version of all these standards, we expect Apple

01:34:08   to be there on day one with support, or to be competitive, at least with the market as soon as

01:34:12   they can be. So all that stuff like they're, they're building on quicksand here, just like

01:34:17   software, like, everything around them is changing, all the requirements are changing, they always want

01:34:22   to try to try to deliver the highest end stuff they can. Meanwhile, the both physical reality and

01:34:30   largely the market for upgradeable components and more modular stuff like motherboards that you

01:34:36   could just drop in a new chip in that market is mostly gone. You know, there is still some of it

01:34:42   in like, you know, a little bit of server not even barely even there a little bit in like the desktop

01:34:47   enthusiasts and gaming gamer spaces. But like most computers sold these days, our phones, tablets and

01:34:52   laptops, none of which are upgradeable, none of which the market really demands to be very

01:34:56   upgradeable. So it's that kind of is, it's it's largely a thing of the past where you could update

01:35:04   just the processor and change nothing else around it. And it's we're better off this way overall,

01:35:10   because things move a lot faster now, things are a lot faster now. And our hardware is generally

01:35:15   better this way. Apple's actually pretty awful about doing the things you described, not so

01:35:19   awful that they don't do it at all. But like, what ideally what you hope is if you're going from M1 to

01:35:25   M2, even if everything about the SOC was identical, would be like, well, the but the M1 had supported

01:35:32   this standard of Wi Fi and that was a new version. So the whatever machine we put the M2 in should

01:35:36   support the new version of Wi Fi machines, the new chip from Broadcom, which means new antenna

01:35:40   machine, blah, blah, blah, whatever, you know, the new version of USB, a new version of Thunderbolt,

01:35:44   like you said, new version of HDMI. And when we say new version, Apple was shipping HDMI 2.0 for

01:35:49   years and years and years after 2.1 was out. So every time they put out a new Mac, we're like,

01:35:53   you know, if you're updating the SSC, don't you want to update all the parts to be the newer

01:35:57   version of the stuff and Apple would say nope, we're gonna ship HDMI 2.0 again. So Apple is slow

01:36:03   about doing that. But eventually they do it. They're not still shipping USB 1.0. Like even

01:36:08   Apple has always lagged like how how soon do they get USB 2.0? How soon do they get USB 3.3, Super

01:36:14   Speed, whatever, but you know, we do want we wish Apple would be even better about that. But they do

01:36:20   upgrade those components eventually. So every time there's a new one, we want them to upgrade.

01:36:23   The reason it's it's we talked about on desktop Mac so much, so like Mark said,

01:36:28   they're such a small market. When it comes time to do this, again, if the M2 was a drop in

01:36:33   replacement, and they didn't want to change anything else. The first question you have is,

01:36:36   okay, it's drop in replacement, but we're not changing anything else. So we can do it real

01:36:41   quick. Like anytime you put out any new product, there is a minimum amount of overhead that you

01:36:46   have to do with like certifying with the FCC certifying that your cooling solution still

01:36:52   works for it, because the M2 probably has different thermal characteristics in the M1,

01:36:55   even if it is exactly the same quote unquote, drop in replacement, you know, making the new product,

01:37:01   new skew, all the things that support it, any new parts you might need, you know, like just,

01:37:06   there's a minimum amount of that goes with every product. And then you have to say, okay,

01:37:11   if we just don't only change the SLC, don't change anything else. How compelling of a product is this

01:37:16   versus the M1 one that we're selling? Alright, so it's five to 10% faster and has like, you know,

01:37:21   a different video decode unit. Is this differentiated enough in the market such that

01:37:26   we're ever going to make back the money that we spend this like the minimum overhead it requires

01:37:31   to make a sort of a no op new product that has no changes in it, right? Like, say you just wanted

01:37:36   to make the M1 and change literally nothing about it, but you change the name and it's an all new

01:37:40   product and you get a need to get it recertified with the FCC or something like, can we make that

01:37:44   money back? Is someone going to see this and say, oh, I now I want that one either I was I skipped

01:37:50   the M1 and now with the M2 comes out a real one or is it going to make M1 people upgrade?

01:37:53   An upgrade like that is so minimal, it's not particularly compelling, it may not be able to

01:37:59   make out a make back enough profit for Apple to pay for the overhead required to make the new

01:38:06   product, which is why Apple tends not to do things like that. Sometimes they do, especially if a

01:38:10   product has been like languishing on the M1 for ages and ages and ages and like, oh, we should

01:38:14   eventually make an M2 version of this. But the reason we think they're not in a big hurry to do

01:38:19   it with like, say the Mac Studio or something is if it's a newish machine, and it has a processor

01:38:24   in it that is currently actually pretty good, and there isn't like, you know, we look at the the new

01:38:29   one that would replace it just came out, you can squint and say, what would it be like to have,

01:38:34   you know, M2 Macs, Mac Studio? Would it be that compelling of a product over this one? And would

01:38:40   it be compelling enough to sell enough units to make up for its costs? And we on the outside,

01:38:43   look at that and say, I can understand why financially within Apple, they may do the math

01:38:48   and say, this doesn't actually make financial sense. And the customers for this product can

01:38:55   wait for the M3 version or something like that. We don't like it, we wish they would, you know,

01:38:59   essentially, even if it loses money, you just got to do it. Because when you, my argument has been,

01:39:04   if you're going to make pro products, you just you have to keep up with the times you have to

01:39:08   actually update to the new version HTML, you actually have to put a faster SD card slot in

01:39:12   there. You can't just keep using the old standards forever and ever and ever, especially on the pro

01:39:16   lines, because the pros care about that. But Apple does the math on that and says, I'm sorry, but the

01:39:20   market is just so small, so, so small compared to our other products that we cannot justify

01:39:26   the expenses. Even on the iPad, we talked about it. Why didn't the iPads get updated to have like,

01:39:31   the camera in the new place and stuff like that? Oh, the pencils in the way, why didn't they

01:39:34   re-engineer the iPad Pro? Even the iPad Pro, the volumes are not enough for them to do a

01:39:39   quote unquote, total redesign of internals. And you know, this really would be redesigned,

01:39:43   because you got to move the stuff all around and do all like, even that product could not

01:39:47   justify the redesign cost. And so the the lesser iPad got a bunch of new stuff that the iPad Pros

01:39:53   didn't. The Mac Studio sells way fewer units, I imagine, than the iPad Pros do. So yeah, that's

01:40:01   why that's why we think that it is why we understand why Apple does it, even if we disagree

01:40:07   with it. And even if it was a drop-in replacement, which it almost certainly isn't, because getting

01:40:11   back to reality here, the M2 is not the same as the M1. It does not have the same criminal

01:40:16   characteristics. And we do want them to fix all the stuff, fix the stupid fan that's noisy,

01:40:20   do a better cooling system, update all of the ports and components and Wi-Fi things,

01:40:24   then we wait to see what they actually do. And they do like 50% of that. Well, you know,

01:40:28   we didn't change the cooling, but it does have the better Wi-Fi, the USB is the same,

01:40:32   the SD card is the same, the SSD is a little bit faster. What do you think? I'm like, I will take

01:40:36   it. Indeed. Soreb writes, "How often do you reboot your Macs? Also, given John's exotic window

01:40:46   arrangement, how does he maintain window arrangement continuity after a reboot?" I would

01:40:52   guess I reboot mine every two to four weeks, generally speaking, but there's no hard and fast

01:40:57   rule. We'll come back to John to talk about his window arrangements. Marco, how often do you

01:41:01   reboot your stuff? Whenever either there's a software update that requires it, or if Xcode

01:41:09   really gets wedged in a really weird way. Sometimes, like, there are some problems with like,

01:41:15   you know, like launching stuff in the simulator or just debugging or just, you know, source kit or

01:41:21   whatever in the background. Like there are some problems that just seem to require a reboot. So

01:41:26   typically it'll be maybe every few weeks. All right, John, what's your story? So I'm not

01:41:33   rebooting without any reason. And the reason usually doesn't have anything to do with stability.

01:41:38   To give an example of a time when I'm rebooting a lot frequently is when I was trying to debug that

01:41:44   weird bug I have with the window moving around and stuff. Every time I would like hunt down a

01:41:47   piece of third-party software and remove it, I would reboot for a good measure. If I'm about to

01:41:51   reproduce it and do another sample or spin dump or a sysdiagnose, like when I made two test accounts

01:41:57   that are just fresh accounts to try to reproduce the bug, I would reboot after I did that. Like,

01:42:00   I want it to be fresh. That's obviously not a normal scenario. I'm rebooting there for the

01:42:06   purpose of rebooting because I want to say, "I made a change to the system that will only take

01:42:10   effect on reboots, so time to reboot." And I want a clean slate and I want to just, you know, reboot,

01:42:14   like tons and tons of reboots to try to reproduce this bug that Apple's never going to fix.

01:42:20   But that is an anomaly. But that's an example of like, I reboot with reason. I don't reboot on a

01:42:25   regular schedule. I don't reboot for the hell of it. It's only software updates or things that

01:42:31   require reboot. Like, hey, I just removed some third-party extensions or something. I want to

01:42:35   be sure they're not loaded. I want to reboot and have a clean system. I can't remember the last

01:42:41   time I rebooted for any kind of software problem. Back when I didn't know what caused my weird

01:42:45   window thing, I would reboot to get rid of that. And of course, that would work because when I log

01:42:50   back in, there'd be only one user logged in. I didn't know that at the time, but that was the

01:42:53   last example I can think of when I reboot to avoid a situation that, you know, a bug that I was

01:42:59   encountering that I found annoying and I knew rebooting would "fix it." As for Windows, any

01:43:05   well-behaved Mac app should respect your window arrangement. Most of the apps I use on a daily

01:43:11   basis do that. Some of them, by using the official Apple APIs, all of Apple's frameworks have some

01:43:17   way for you to, on the Mac, have some way for you to restore state. So you can, you know, when

01:43:23   someone selects "shut down" or "restart" and the app is told to quit, it can save the state of all

01:43:27   the windows and where they are. And when you log back in, Mac OS itself, there's even a checkbox

01:43:32   you can check that says, "Hey, when I log back in, I want you to reopen all the applications I had

01:43:37   running before." And then each of those applications, the responsibility for restoring state is

01:43:42   delegated to them. So Mac OS just said, "Okay, I know you're running apps A, B, C, and D."

01:43:46   And it launches apps A, B, C, and D. And then each of those apps, when it's launched, is responsible

01:43:51   for restoring its state, such that you can restart and come back to your computer and the screen

01:43:57   should look exactly the same, everything goes well. Obviously, that can't always be the case,

01:44:00   because say you had a web page loaded, like the front page of the New York Times, and when you

01:44:04   come back in, the new front page of the New York Times will be there. It doesn't remember the old

01:44:07   front page because it reloaded the page, right? Even apps like Chrome, which I'm assuming do not

01:44:12   use Apple's APIs to do this, have a thing that says, "Hey, Chrome, on startup, what do you want

01:44:16   me to do?" And my answer is, "I want you to restore all the windows the same way they were before." So

01:44:20   if any app has an option to do that, that's the option I pick. And that's how I do my window

01:44:25   rendering. And if an app doesn't do that, I tend not to use it or not to like it or seek out an

01:44:30   alternative that does support it. My text editor supports it. TextEdit, the default text editor,

01:44:35   supports that. BbEdit supports that. All the other apps, like the IRC app that I'm in to be

01:44:40   in the chat room. It remembers its window position. It remembers what channel. And then when I launch

01:44:44   the app, it goes back to right where it was. And I don't actually have the checkbox check to relaunch

01:44:48   all the apps because if I reboot, I don't want it to do that. I can launch them myself when I

01:44:52   rather have a clean slate, but that's just a choice. If I had that checkbox check and I rebooted

01:44:56   right now, everything would come back exactly where it is, except for audio hijack would not be

01:45:01   recording. And I think Zoom would not restore state. I think every other app I'm running would.

01:45:08   Fair enough. And then finally for tonight, Brian Coffey writes, "I just went on a Disney cruise

01:45:13   and took hundreds of pictures and many videos and want to share with my tech-lazy family.

01:45:18   iOS shared albums are too many steps for them to do. How can I send hundreds of photos to them

01:45:22   privately over iCloud where all they need to do is click one link in an iMessage? Create iCloud link

01:45:28   appears to have a limit." I have no idea what the answer to this question is. iOS shared albums are

01:45:34   the easiest. It seems like the problem is not that they have a bunch of Android users. If everyone

01:45:38   has iPhones, iOS shared albums are the easiest way for people to see pictures that you want to share

01:45:44   with them. They don't have to do anything. They just magically appear on their phones. Usually

01:45:49   there's a notification. They tap the notification and they can see the pictures. That's it.

01:45:52   That is the best way for tech-lazy people to just deal with photos. But if you're trying to

01:46:00   send them photos, how can I send hundreds of photos to them privately, so on and so forth?

01:46:05   It sounds kind of like you want them to have the photos and not just like the reduced resolution

01:46:09   iOS shared albums thing. And by the way, iOS shared albums do have a limit. And I think it's

01:46:13   like 5,000 photos, so you'd have to make a new shared album every once in a while. But if your

01:46:18   family doesn't like iOS shared albums because it's too complicated, I don't know what to say.

01:46:23   That's the simplest solution I've ever found. If the problem is that iOS shared albums don't

01:46:28   work because you want to give them the photos, like they have copies of the files, I'm like,

01:46:32   "Well, how tech-lazy could they be that they're willing to accept 500 full resolution photos from

01:46:37   you?" But the answer to that is look outside of Apple. There are tons of services that do this in

01:46:42   a cross-platform way. I don't use any of them, but I have relatives who do. What are some of them like

01:46:48   SmugMug or like, there's not Shutterfly. I don't know. There's a bunch of services,

01:46:54   like websites essentially, where you upload your pictures to the website and then you can click a

01:46:58   button and it'll send out an email to a bunch of people. And no matter what platform they're on,

01:47:02   they'll be able to click that link in the email, it'll open a web browser where they'll be able to

01:47:06   see all your photos and download the whole resolution ones if they want to in a web browser

01:47:10   on any platform, on any device, on a phone, on a tablet, on a PC, on a Mac. Most of those services

01:47:15   you have to pay for, but that will solve your problem. But within the Apple ecosystem, if

01:47:21   you're just trying to let people see stuff, get them signed up for iOS shared albums. And if the

01:47:24   problem is they can't figure out how to sort of subscribe to your shared album, because that can

01:47:28   be weird, just grab their devices. Like send the invitation, they grab their devices and say,

01:47:32   "Accept, accept, accept, accept, accept," and then you're done. This is the ultimate side of parent,

01:47:36   grandparent type thing for like pictures of kids and stuff. You just chuck them in the album,

01:47:40   and then grandma gets a notification on her phone and she taps it and she sees baby pictures. It's

01:47:45   the best system. Sorted. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Rocket Money and Lickability. And

01:47:53   thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm/join. And we will talk to

01:47:59   you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. 'Cause it was accidental.

01:48:10   Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.

01:48:18   'Cause it was accidental. It was accidental. And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.

01:48:28   And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's Casey,

01:48:39   Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, N-T, Marco, Armin, S-I-R-A-C, U-S-A-C, R-A-C-U-S-A, it's accidental.

01:48:51   They didn't mean to accidental. Tech broadcast so long.

01:49:01   So Casey, what's going on with your pricing?

01:49:05   I don't know. I don't know. You have analysis paralysis. You have too many different people

01:49:12   with too many different opinions and you just can't decide. Honestly, that is 100% accurate.

01:49:16   My current theory, which I don't want to go on for another 20 minutes discussing this. We can talk

01:49:24   about it next week if we're still interested. My current theory, which I would like you guys to

01:49:28   comment on, but I just don't want to go on forever about it. But my current theory is,

01:49:35   when I spend money on things, be that media, be that experiences, be that whatever.

01:49:44   When I spend money on things, I am most happy to do that when I am being met where I am. So

01:49:54   if I wanted to, I don't know, get takeout, it is easy to do so. It is easy and not hilariously

01:50:02   overpriced to do so. DoorDash makes it reasonably easy to have food magically appear at my house,

01:50:09   but the app is okay. There are markups, which are understandable. I'm not here to

01:50:14   debate whether or not DoorDash is good or bad, but it's all right. If I want to buy a piece of media,

01:50:21   I don't have to think about how I get it, how do I watch it, where does it arrive, am I renting it,

01:50:27   am I buying it, I want to be met where I am. And with that in mind, there are people who would

01:50:35   have no problem paying a subscription and would like to. And certainly, selfishly, I would like

01:50:41   people to pay for a subscription to CallSheet. But there are people that maybe don't want a

01:50:47   subscription, are quote-unquote allergic to subscriptions, or understandably have fatigue

01:50:53   with subscriptions. And so, as we discussed with last week, there's an argument to be made,

01:51:00   and don't jump on me yet, just hold on, there's an argument to be made for something that's a

01:51:04   one-time purchase. Maybe I can phrase it as, this is not a lifetime unlock, there's no guarantee

01:51:10   here. I'm offering this to you only because you might want it, but there is no implied guarantee,

01:51:15   or there's no explicit or implied guarantee that this will last for any amount of time. But if

01:51:19   you're really that allergic to subscriptions, fine, power to you. But the other thing I got

01:51:23   thinking about was, all right, if I'm going to offer that one-time thing, which I'm not sure I

01:51:28   will, but let's suppose for the sake of conversation, I will offer subscription for probably

01:51:33   monthly and yearly, let's suppose for the sake of discussion, I offer a hilariously expensive

01:51:38   one-time thing. Would it make sense, and my current thinking is yes, but I am, this is a weak

01:51:45   opinion held loosely, would it make sense to do consumables as well? So you can buy a 10-pack of

01:51:50   searches, or maybe a hundred-pack, I don't know what the number is, I don't know how much it would

01:51:53   cost. You're gradually approaching the casino games for children business model, and I know how

01:51:58   you're getting there, but I feel like every time you go up, people are used to it and they

01:52:02   understand it, but it's like, really? Consumables for an app? Like, what kind of app do you want to

01:52:08   be vending out there in the world? Do you want people to feel like they're putting quarters into

01:52:11   your thing to look up where an actor is from? I give that a big thumbs down. I agree with you,

01:52:17   I agree with you wholeheartedly, but if you are not the kind of person that watches stuff often,

01:52:25   but you want to be able to use a nicely made app to occasionally do that, do you really want a

01:52:30   subscription or are you going to want to pay? And I genuinely don't know what I would do.

01:52:34   You're not going to get all the customers, like, you know what I mean? You're not going to have a

01:52:40   business model that is going to appeal to everybody who sees your app and finds it useful. That's just

01:52:44   impossible, right? You can't cover all the bases. You have to just decide which are the customers

01:52:50   that you want to get. Hopefully you pick the group that has the most people in it, right?

01:52:54   But I don't think you can get all of them. So if you're fretting over what people are allergic to

01:52:59   subscriptions. If you think you have to have a subscription app because you're using a third

01:53:03   party API with unknown financial things, which as we've discussed in the past thing, then anyone who

01:53:09   doesn't like subscription is out of your market. And I don't think there's anything you can do for

01:53:13   those people. You want to revisit that decision and say, well, really? Do I really need a subscription?

01:53:17   Because right now it's free and I want to take the risk. Then you can revisit. And, but that changes

01:53:20   everything. But if you're deciding you want a subscription, don't spend a second worrying

01:53:24   about the people who don't want to pay for subscriptions because they're not in your market

01:53:27   anymore. Yeah, I would even go further than that. I don't want to pay a subscription is really code

01:53:33   for, I don't want to pay. That's interesting. Well, yeah. Now, yes, you, you listen to her out there

01:53:39   who were screaming, but, but, but I will pay money, but I don't like subscriptions. In today's modern

01:53:46   software world. That really just means I don't want to pay. It's simple as that because look,

01:53:50   there is an alternative here. You're not going to like it. There is an alternative here. However,

01:53:57   software that is on modern platforms that is expected and required to have some kind of regular

01:54:04   maintenance updates at least needs recurring revenue to do it. That's why most apps are moving

01:54:12   to this kind of model. There's other factors too, like the app stores, you know, non-existent

01:54:17   handling of upgrade pricing and stuff like that. If you were doing things that way, but really

01:54:22   subscription pricing is a very clean, clear, mostly consumer friendly option of pricing software. Now,

01:54:31   there are apps that do it badly. There are apps that charge significantly more with subscription

01:54:37   pricing that then, then what might be warranted for what they're doing. There are apps that use

01:54:43   deceptive techniques to trick people into paying more than they might think they're paying or more

01:54:48   than they might expect to pay or take advantage of the fact that they're going to forget to cancel or

01:54:52   whatever else. But the concept of a subscription payment for an app that has ongoing use that will

01:54:59   require ongoing maintenance is not only sound, but is fair. And it's actually consumer friendly

01:55:08   when done right. When you think about all the dysfunction of the old model of like, well,

01:55:13   I'm going to pay this one time chunk and then it turns out next week I don't use this app anymore,

01:55:19   or I buy it and it's not really what I wanted it to be. You know, a lot of times customers just get

01:55:26   screwed or you, you know, you buy some giant app and then like three months later they unveil the

01:55:32   next big version and you got to pay an upgrade fee that was way bigger than if you would have been

01:55:36   paying like five bucks a month for the whole time. So the old model has its dysfunctions. The new

01:55:41   model has its potential abuses. However, this model of subscription priced software, this is just

01:55:47   paid software. This is just how paid software is paid these days because the entire ecosystem of

01:55:54   software development has shifted over time to A make this easier and actually make this the

01:55:59   easiest option. But B, as I mentioned before, like customer customer expectations and the ecosystem

01:56:07   environments are moving so much. Customers expect so much ongoing now and I can't blame them that

01:56:15   you need a way to fund it. You need ongoing revenue for each customer. So there's two options for that.

01:56:22   You can either have subscriptions in some form and the details we can talk about, but subscriptions

01:56:27   in some form or ads. Those are your options. So if you really want there to, if you really want

01:56:36   to satisfy the, I don't want to pay a subscription, but I would pay you for a lifetime unlock. Okay,

01:56:41   first of all, those people are hilarious because whenever, whenever they offer like,

01:56:45   I get emails like this and you know, it'll be like, I don't want to pay your $10 a month or

01:56:51   $10 a year subscription, which is comically cheap for what I'm offering, but fine. I don't want to

01:56:56   pay your $10 a year subscription. I want a lifetime unlock. How about I gave you $15?

01:57:02   Like if you actually like the prices they have in mind when they say, I don't want to pay your

01:57:07   subscription, it's not, it's never that long of a time span worth of the subscription price.

01:57:12   It's maybe two years at most. Like it's never a lot. So if you actually,

01:57:17   I guess the model, the third model that you didn't mention, speaking of lifetime not being that long,

01:57:21   the third model is the one that people hate even more, but it all adds up to the same thing,

01:57:27   which is, okay, I'll give you a lifetime unlock for $15. But every 18 months I come up with a

01:57:33   new version of my program and I abandon the old one. Right. Right. And then you can lifetime unlock

01:57:37   that one for $15. Right. So you just go every 18 months. And by the way, and next time you update

01:57:42   your iPhone and you're required to update the OS with the new phone, that old version of the app

01:57:47   might break. And then you're out of luck. Exactly. No, you totally abandoned it. Pull it from the

01:57:51   store. And just like when that breaks, it's like, well, there's no, in every 18 months you come up

01:57:55   with a brand new version, there's no upgrade pricing in the app store and that's on Apple,

01:57:58   but every is a brand new version. And then you get to pay for it and own it for the lifetime of that

01:58:02   program. But every 18 months you come up with version two, version three, version four, that is

01:58:06   it also a model that works and it is not subscription and you won't get recurring bills

01:58:10   that you don't understand where they come from, but you're still paying $15 every 18 months. Right.

01:58:15   It doesn't matter how we break it up. Like it's the same amount of money. And by the way, the

01:58:18   people like bone, the good old days, there was those Christians in the good old days, Casey's app

01:58:21   would cost an inflation adjusted $80. And it would only work for three years before we came out with

01:58:26   the next major version that you'd have to charge a $40 upgrade fee for like, people don't understand

01:58:30   how expensive software was like, go look at how much like the original version of like, you know,

01:58:36   Mac, right. Version 2.0 costs like, and inflation and do the inflation adjustment calculation. It

01:58:41   will make your eyes bleed. Software used to be so expensive. You'd buy some weird thing like now

01:58:46   menus or something that would make like an icon in your menu bar and like inflation adjusted. It's

01:58:50   like $120 right for a little utility that appears in your menu bar. I'm not trying to $120 for my

01:58:56   little utilities. And they would have major new versions every 18 months to two years.

01:59:03   And the major new versions maybe would have a good pricing, but maybe they'd want another $120 from

01:59:08   you. It was so much more expensive. So in absolute real dollars, like inflation adjusted dollars,

01:59:14   it was so much more expensive to do that thing. So it's like, if you, do you want to just be

01:59:19   a, you know, a now utilities user for the entire life of that product, you're going to pay way more

01:59:24   than if they were somehow transported to modern times and charged you $10 a year.

01:59:27   Yep. And I mean, to be clear, I haven't come up with an answer if I do offer not a like,

01:59:33   like a single unlock. I, again, I would never praise it as lifetime. But first of all,

01:59:39   like if I were to offer it, it would be like a lot of money. I'm thinking like somewhere in the order

01:59:45   of 50 ish dollars to really make it like, look, I don't want to do this and you probably don't want

01:59:52   to do this, but if you are really that allergic to subscriptions, fine. Okay, sure. Yeah. But see,

01:59:58   but see, then you have a problem. Anybody who actually does buy that you have 50 of their

02:00:04   dollars, asterisk apples cut, but whatever, you know, in their mind, you have, I gave you $50

02:00:13   and then you have the nerve in three years to discontinue the product because the API got

02:00:18   shut down. You don't want someone to have 50 of their like your dollar. Like you don't want that.

02:00:25   You don't want anyone to have that over you because they will abuse it. It's you're much

02:00:31   better off. Let's keep this very, very simple. This app exists now. It for the time period that

02:00:38   exists, you pay me X dollars per month or year to use it. And at some point in the future,

02:00:43   this arrangement may change in some way. And that's cool because you're, you didn't pay for

02:00:47   the future. You paid for now. That's the model that is the healthiest model for everyone involved.

02:00:53   There is nothing wrong with that model. If you ship with that model and only that model,

02:01:00   you will have a good business as long as you don't screw up the pricing, but you won't because we'll

02:01:04   guide you, you know, but like you will have a good business and yes, there will be people who say,

02:01:11   I don't, I just don't like subscriptions on principle, but you know what? There's also way

02:01:16   more people who say, I just don't like paying for any apps on principle. It's the same thing.

02:01:21   - It is. - It's the same. It's like,

02:01:23   it's like when we, it's like, you know, like it's the same flag. When you see that flag that just

02:01:27   has like the police blue stripe and it's like, it's the same flag from a few flags we've had before.

02:01:34   Yeah, this, it's the same argument. What they're saying is, I don't wanna pay. That's what they're

02:01:41   saying or hey, could I maybe pay a lot less? I don't wanna pay you over and over again for this

02:01:48   thing I'm gonna use all the time. Like that's what they're saying. You gotta translate. Anything that

02:01:53   says, I don't wanna pay you your 10 bucks a year is really saying, I don't wanna pay you. And that's

02:01:59   fine if you had something like ads where you could monetize non-paying users, but you don't. And you

02:02:05   don't want that. So you have to be okay losing those people. You're never gonna satisfy them

02:02:10   with any purchase option you create that is fair to you. So don't even bother, have a subscription

02:02:16   app and that's it. You are hardly alone in the marketplace if you make that choice.

02:02:23   - Yeah. So with that in mind, and I'm still kicking all this around and I think it was Marco

02:02:29   that said earlier, I am getting feedback from everyone. And while I do appreciate and enjoy that,

02:02:36   every single person is 100% devoutly convinced that they are the most correct and not a single

02:02:42   one of them agrees with anyone else. So ultimately I'm gonna have to make, I'm just gonna have to put

02:02:47   a line in the sand and say, this is the way. And additionally, a lot of people are saying,

02:02:52   including in the chat room earlier, well, you can change it. And that's true. You can.

02:02:55   - Well asterisk. - Well, so here's the thing,

02:02:58   like I'm really worried. So I think if I were to start with just one approach, it would be what

02:03:04   you're describing, what both of you are describing, which is subscription, probably monthly and yearly.

02:03:09   That is my approach that I think that's my bare minimum. I'm going to do that no matter what.

02:03:13   The thing I worry about is, okay, so somebody downloads the app, they really enjoy it,

02:03:21   but they see the subscription and they don't want to pay it and they bounce. How can I get to them

02:03:27   again if I change the model or if I lower the price or whatever? - You're discovering the world

02:03:33   of marketing. How do you find customers? - How about a push notification for marketing spam?

02:03:39   - Yeah, I mean, I could do push notification marketing spam, but you know what I mean? Like,

02:03:43   I feel like, yes, I can. - They will have deleted your app. You're not even gonna send a push

02:03:47   notification. You actually have to, yeah, you have to acquire customers, Casey. And how much do you

02:03:51   pay to acquire them? - Deleting apps is hard now because now they go directly to the app library.

02:03:56   So they will abandon your app very quickly and easily. Even if they like it, they'll abandon it

02:04:00   because they just lose it, but they won't delete it. - Is that the default? Is that the default?

02:04:04   - I think it gives you a prompt that says go to the library, which is considered to be the default,

02:04:09   or they give the destructive, you know, or delete if that's in red or what have you. - Oh no, not

02:04:14   when you delete. I get it where you say, yeah, yeah. I was saying like, if you don't, if you

02:04:17   got a fresh iPhone out of the box and you buy an app from the app store, it doesn't go to the

02:04:19   library, right? - Oh no, I don't think so. No, no, no. I don't believe. Hold on, I got more right here.

02:04:24   Keep talking, I'll tell you in a minute. So in any case, so I think I will do, you know, a trickle,

02:04:33   I will probably do a trickle out like we had discussed last week, a trickle out of free searches.

02:04:38   A lot of people, I shouldn't say a lot, a handful of people have written me on Mastodon being like,

02:04:43   no, no, no, no, no, just do the free trial. Screw the free, screw the, you know, the trickle out of

02:04:48   searches, just do a free trial, which I get. I really do, but I don't feel like it's a good first

02:04:54   run experience to say, hi, here's this app, you must sign up for a free trial that will obligate you to,

02:05:02   I mean, yes, you can cancel it, but will obligate you to pay me soon before you can really do

02:05:06   anything. You know what I mean? Like it just seems very off-putting to me for basically the onboarding

02:05:11   screen to be, hey, screw you, pay me. Like, you know, I don't even know what this thing does. This might be

02:05:17   garbage, you know. I'm not in a position that I want to pay you, I don't even want to sign up for the

02:05:20   possibility of paying you yet. And that's why I think that that's not the right approach.

02:05:25   But I understand, like in a perfect world, yes, I would do that, but I just don't think that that's realistic.

02:05:31   By the way, real-time follow-up, it does not go directly to the App Library by default. I just

02:05:35   test it on my test phone. That's what I thought. I looked up what MacWrite, and MacWrite shipped

02:05:40   free with the Mac for a while, but eventually Claris got it and it became a commercial product.

02:05:43   That's why I was thinking of it, because my parents did buy like a boxed copy of MacWrite from

02:05:47   Claris or whatever. In this MacWorld 1994 review, the inflation-adjusted price of MacWrite Pro 1.5,

02:05:56   if you bought it as a separate product from Claris, was, drum roll, anybody? A thousand bucks?

02:06:02   150 bucks. Remember, this is not like Microsoft Word, it's MacWrite. It's fairly simple text

02:06:08   editors from Claris. Actually, maybe Marco's more right than I gave him credit for. I would say

02:06:14   between $1 and $300, but I'm worried that Marco is much closer to correct than I realize. $498.67.

02:06:20   For a fairly simple, not particularly full-featured, not leader in its market,

02:06:29   word processor. TextEdit that comes free with your Mac does substantially more than its program.

02:06:36   Substantially more and way faster. It's free with your Mac. Software used to go a lot more.

02:06:42   "I want a subscription." Great. By the way, when the next version of MacWrite comes out,

02:06:48   there may be upgrade pricing, but you're not going to get it for free. You're going to have to pay

02:06:53   some amount of money, probably some substantial portion of that $498 for the next version.

02:06:59   Software used to be way more expensive. Like Marco said, people never talk about the bad sides of pay

02:07:06   up front, where you buy it and it turns out you don't like the program. You've spent all that

02:07:12   money and now you basically have to use it for some period of time to make it worthwhile.

02:07:16   If you don't and you can't return it, then you're stuck with it. Or if you buy it and a new version

02:07:21   comes out and the upgrade pricing is $200 for upgrading users, you're like, "Aah!" There's

02:07:27   downsides to every pricing model. The current pricing model is actually pretty good for

02:07:30   consumers minus the part where they don't realize money is slowly draining out of their bank account,

02:07:35   which is why most of the people who hate subscriptions say they hate them. It's like,

02:07:37   "I don't want to forget about it. It's a way for you to sneakily drain money out of my bank account

02:07:41   like a little leech, and I don't want to have a thing that I have to remember to do."

02:07:44   And to those people, I say, "I know this is annoying, but you can get into the habit of

02:07:48   every single time you subscribe, immediately unsubscribe, because the way Apple does

02:07:51   subscriptions is you'll get the app for the full month or year that you used it,

02:07:55   but when it's over, it just basically won't renew." It's annoying that Apple doesn't make that easier,

02:07:59   and you can complain to Apple and try to make that easier. It would be nice if Apple said,

02:08:03   "Oh, by default, when I subscribe, I basically never do auto-renewing. Always immediately cancel

02:08:07   the subscription." But people do do that manually, but it's kind of annoying that Apple doesn't let

02:08:11   you do that. But that would save you the mental anguish of not understanding. That's why people

02:08:16   keep suggesting, "Can I buy buckets of things? Can I buy a one-time thing for 100 searches or

02:08:20   whatever?" They just don't want to have to remember, "Oh, there's something I have to

02:08:23   remember to do. Otherwise, money will slowly drain from me." That's what they want, and Apple

02:08:27   could help fix that. And so I feel like a lot of the time, they're not saying, "I don't want to pay,"

02:08:32   they're saying is, "I don't want to..." Some people are saying, "I don't want to have to remember

02:08:36   to unsubscribe from a thing because I know I'll forget, and then you'll be secretly getting money

02:08:40   from me, and that feels bad." Well, and this is... And first of all, by the way, we do have

02:08:43   literally a sponsor of this episode that addresses this, Rocket Money. But also, this is part of the

02:08:50   niceness of being in Apple's in-app purchase system, is that the customers know how easy it is

02:08:57   to cancel an in-app purchase subscription, and we know how they work. So there are some services...

02:09:02   The developers know, you mean? No, no, the customers know. See...

02:09:05   Well, I'm not sure how many do know, because I think most customers feel menaced by the

02:09:08   subscription system, and they can't find the place where they look at their subscriptions

02:09:11   on their phone. Well, I mean, yes, that is true, and Apple has... That used to be horrendous,

02:09:16   now it is a little bit less horrendous. It should be way easier, and it should be more user surfaced.

02:09:22   However, people learn pretty quickly about that trick of canceling immediately, and that you still

02:09:28   get your free month or whatever. People learn that, and not everything on the web and everything

02:09:33   works that way, but every in-app purchase subscription works that way. Now, developers

02:09:39   do get a server-side callback if you turn off auto-renewing, so apps can tell if they want to,

02:09:47   and maybe they'll do annoying things if you do that. I'm not sure, it's probably against Apple's

02:09:51   policies, but I'm sure people do it anyway, just like the push notifications, where they just

02:09:55   create new categories, notifications that have you automatically subscribed to, that you definitely

02:10:00   did not opt into. Even Apple does this with their own stuff, because their own services team just

02:10:07   throws away any possible goodwill that people have with user experience on their platforms.

02:10:12   Anyway, back to the topic at hand. So, number two, I would... So, the one thing that I think

02:10:18   that the feedback has convinced me of is that I do think a free trial is a good idea, because

02:10:24   it does seem like they do convert a lot better to real purchases than something without a free

02:10:30   trial. So, here's what I'm going to propose. Last week, we didn't really come to a consensus,

02:10:36   but where we kind of stopped talking about it was... (laughs)

02:10:40   - Well, now that you've come around on free trials, we're closer.

02:10:43   - Hold on, hold on, hold on. So, it was some generously-sized bucket of searches, say 20,

02:10:50   that you would get, and then after that, you would only get one per day unless you subscribed.

02:10:57   - Right.

02:10:57   - Now, I'm going to say, based on the feedback and kind of a week of thinking about it,

02:11:02   I'm going to suggest something even simpler. You get your bucket of 20 searches or whatever,

02:11:07   and then you have to start a free trial to proceed after that. No more one a day. No,

02:11:13   you got your 20 searches. After that, you got to start a free trial to continue. And

02:11:19   just leave it at that and just implement that, and then you can just ship this goddamn app and

02:11:24   get it out there in the store and stop spending so much time on the business model. Because

02:11:29   while the business model is important, the product is more important, and getting it out the door

02:11:35   before our audience is tired of hearing about it is even more important. So, that, I think,

02:11:40   figure out something, stop the waffling, and I think that's a pretty good, pretty simple system

02:11:48   that pleases me and probably, to whatever extent possible, a little bit of John. And, you know.

02:11:54   (laughs)

02:11:55   And I think, overall, that's a pretty decent system.

02:11:58   - My thinking on pricing, when I've been thinking about it since, is yes, I still think free trials

02:12:01   are the way you should go. But I was thinking about the total opposite end of this rectum. I

02:12:06   talked last time about pricing it for listeners of the show versus pricing it for people who have

02:12:09   no idea who you are. If you really wanted to go totally on the pricing it for the mass market,

02:12:14   people who have no idea who you are, A, you might have to do a little bit of marketing to sort of

02:12:19   get traction going. But the pricing, the business model that would work best, I think, if we told

02:12:25   you, "Hey, guess what, Casey? You're gonna have lots of people who are going to at least give

02:12:29   this app a shot." Which is hard to do, but if you could somehow make that happen, the pricing model

02:12:34   that would convert those people the most is the pricing model you see everybody else has,

02:12:37   and it's gonna make you cry. And it's, I think, probably not the right pricing model for you,

02:12:42   specifically, Casey List, because you are not the average consumer, the average developer,

02:12:46   that nobody has any idea who they are. But if you were, free trial for seven days, annual subscription

02:12:53   for three bucks, and you're like, "What? That's not enough money. That's not enough money to cover

02:12:56   my API costs. That'll never work, blah, blah, blah. And a free trial on top of that, blah, blah."

02:13:00   That stuff like that is what you see on the App Store, and that converts like crazy. Why? Because

02:13:04   it seems cheap. It seems like a cup of coffee for a whole year, $3, and it has a free trial.

02:13:10   That converts people. But to actually make money with that kind of model, you need a lot of people

02:13:14   to download your app, and that's the tricky part. I've never seen a yearly subscription that low.

02:13:19   I've seen like, you know, $3 a week. No, I see it all the time. I get lowballed all the time on

02:13:23   these apps. They're like, "You're like, 'Sure, why not? Five bucks for a year, why not?'" I mean,

02:13:27   think of, what's the, what's Jelly's app called? Gifwrapped. Right. How much is that? $3.50 if

02:13:33   memory serves. A year. A year. That's way too cheap. It is. I know, but it converts like crazy.

02:13:38   I don't even use that app, and I pay for it. Like, just, why? Because like, "Ah, three bucks a year,

02:13:45   I'll try it." And I see when it renews, I'm like, "Ah, three bucks for another year, I'll try it."

02:13:48   I mean, I know Jelly, and I'm paying for his app to, because, whatever. But it's just like,

02:13:53   apps like that, that seem like they're underpriced, you can make it up in volume

02:13:59   if your volumes are really big. The trick is you don't know if your volumes are going to be really

02:14:03   big. So I don't, to be clear, I don't think that's the model for you, but if you were looking for a

02:14:07   simple pricing model that everybody understands that converts like crazy and is vaguely

02:14:11   sustainable, that's it. Like, single annual, there's just annual, it's such a low price that

02:14:17   it's not a barrier, and there's a free trial, so people are like, "Ah, I can always cancel if I

02:14:21   forget the free trial." And then they forget, and they pay $3 a year, and when it renews,

02:14:24   they see the $3, like, "Ah, it was three bucks, whatever, I'll remember to cancel it next year."

02:14:28   That is the mass market model for an app with a single developer that is sustainable

02:14:35   with a large number of customers. Yeah, but that's predicated on a large number of customers.

02:14:41   If you want to go all in the direction of, like, $100 a year, $100 universal unlock,

02:14:46   and you abandon the app after two years, that probably maximizes your money, but people do this.

02:14:49   So let me ask one, I know I told you I didn't want to go on long, but here we are,

02:14:54   now I'm prolonging it, story of my life. I have an opinion about this, but I'd be curious to revisit

02:15:01   even if only briefly, and I will start with Mark Ostenström's most recent to talk.

02:15:05   Should I just hold my nose and put in ads? Well, first of all, the question would be,

02:15:10   what ads? Like, are you just gonna throw, like, a Google ad box in there? Because that's garbage.

02:15:16   Those are garbage ads, they pay garbage prices, and they make your app look like garbage.

02:15:20   No argument, which is why I don't want to do it, because I agree with everything you just said.

02:15:24   I don't think I have the, I don't know the word I'm looking for, but I don't think I,

02:15:30   I think the overcast ads are just fine for Mark Ostenström, and I don't mean that to be a turd.

02:15:34   I would love to do that sort of thing, but I don't think it'll, I don't think that would work for me.

02:15:38   No, it's not like an easily replicable system to any problem domain. Like, you know, it works in

02:15:42   a podcast app for an app that has a good-sized audience, you know, it's very, that's a very,

02:15:47   those are two very big ifs, you know. No, I, here's the thing, your competitor is IMDb. Like,

02:15:54   your competitor is already an ad-filled experience. People come to you to have,

02:16:00   not fewer ads, they come to you to have no ads. And so, obviously, you know, if you're going for

02:16:08   big mass market, there has to be a free plan to use it in some way, and so that will probably be ads.

02:16:15   But you see in the App Store what that means. You can try to have, like, a little tasteful ad banner.

02:16:22   I have, I've done that. It pays nothing. You will make nothing from a tasteful ad implementation.

02:16:30   The way to make money with generic, like, you know, Google or whatever ads on iOS is you load

02:16:37   in as many ad SDKs as you can into the app, which, by the way, say goodbye to your nice privacy label.

02:16:42   So you have tons of ad SDKs because you have to, you have to bundle multiple SDKs so that if one

02:16:49   ad network doesn't have a good fill for you for that inventory, some other one will fill in.

02:16:53   And you gotta, like, so you gotta bundle a bunch of SDKs. You gotta take, you know, the worst privacy,

02:16:58   you know, approach you can because you won't make any money if you keep things private.

02:17:04   And then what you end up getting is a crapped up app that pays you surprisingly little money

02:17:11   for each use. And also, keep in mind, the usage pattern of your app really matters. In this case,

02:17:18   your app is not something people are spending tons of time in. It's something they're consulting

02:17:22   quickly and then leaving. So, again, you're not gonna make a ton of money from ads unless you

02:17:29   really crap up the experience. Then, if you can make it so that people are constantly having to

02:17:35   view, like, interstitial video ads or if you can arrange them in such a way that you generate a lot

02:17:40   of accidental input and make people click on them, you know, you're basically committing fraud,

02:17:44   but you will make a few more pennies. But that's a terrible way to make a living. And ideally,

02:17:50   you don't do any of those things. Ideally, you can be comfortable with the fact that you're gonna

02:17:55   have a, you know, subscription priced app only, you know, with a generous free trial situation,

02:18:01   but, you know, it will be a subscription priced app only after that. And you're gonna get the

02:18:07   people who are not gonna pay. There will be lots of them. And yes, if you had a totally free usage

02:18:12   pattern, you could get way more people, but you also would make way less money. And, you know,

02:18:18   so I think it's fine to be in this category of I'm just basically paid only because the alternative

02:18:26   would be pretty crappy, I think. - Jon, any other thoughts? - Yeah, no, your whole selling proposition

02:18:33   is supposed to be like IMD but not sucky and filled with ads. So, like, what's the hell is

02:18:36   the point of throwing ads in there? - Yeah. - Yeah. - The only way you could actually make money on ads

02:18:40   and not crap it up entirely is step one, get VC money and fund the development of this app to make

02:18:46   the best movie look up app that is for free and has no business plan whatsoever that is free to

02:18:52   everybody and develop it so it is amazing and do that for two years. And when you have literally

02:18:57   millions of users and everybody knows the name of this app and every celebrity mentions it when

02:19:00   they're on their, you know, talk show if they even still do that, talking to people and they say,

02:19:05   oh, I was looking up in call sheet and blah, blah, blah. Then you roll out one tasteful little ad and

02:19:09   you hire a company to sell that one tasteful ad slot to your millions of people and now you have

02:19:13   an app that is funded by one tasteful ad but that is a long road to go with a lot of things that can

02:19:18   happen in between. It's probably not gonna happen for you so I would say stick to your original plan

02:19:23   which is let's make a version of IMDB that doesn't suck and doesn't have ads all over. - And also, and

02:19:27   you're gonna be offering a premium experience in other ways. So, for instance, you can do things

02:19:33   that most apps can't or won't do because they are less motivated or they don't know the platform as

02:19:38   well or they don't have the discipline or they hire consultants to make the app and they don't

02:19:41   want to bring them back because it's too expensive. So when there's a new iOS 17 feature that your app

02:19:46   could take advantage of, you can be there with it. You can be there like at release in September

02:19:50   with support for that feature. If they launch new Siri abilities, God help them, if they launch a

02:19:55   series of Siri abilities, you can be there integrating with it on day one. They launch some

02:20:00   kind of cool widget thing that might make sense for you, some kind of search integration maybe,

02:20:04   you can be there on day one. Like those are things that your premium app can do because you're an

02:20:10   enthusiast in this area and you care about stuff that power users care about and people will pay

02:20:14   for that. That's a premium thing. Whereas the rest of the market, like the mass market, they're just

02:20:20   gonna use IMDB and have their wall of ads. And if you provide your own wall of ads trying to attract

02:20:26   them, not only does it dilute the value of your app to the people who want the premium experience

02:20:30   but it also, you're gonna lose that battle. They're not gonna find your app. - You don't have the

02:20:36   brand recognition of IMDB. - Yeah, they're not gonna find your app and if they do, they're gonna

02:20:40   be like, why am I doing this instead of IMDB? So your app should be only premium. It should be like,

02:20:46   this is a premium experience for people who are aware that IMDB exists and want something better.

02:20:52   And the way you serve them is with a premium experience with a subscription price.

02:20:58   [BEEPING]