00:00:00 ◼ ► Here's the most disappointing part of the show. I'm so appreciative of you taking time in the
00:00:05 ◼ ► holiday season to do the show that I was going to get you a gift but the gift I was going to get you
00:00:12 ◼ ► was a new series 9 apple watch. Someone just said today in a slack they went to the apple store and
00:00:29 ◼ ► I do want to talk about it because I think there is some poetic justice here right with the
00:00:35 ◼ ► and it's a perennial topic with you guys on ATP about your unanimous dislike of the US patent
00:00:45 ◼ ► system and long whatever the situation here is between apple and Massimo. I don't know how do
00:00:52 ◼ ► you think it's pronounced Massimo Massimo. Ultimately it comes down to patents right. It's
00:01:00 ◼ ► that Massimo has patents apples filed counter patents they both claim each other's products
00:01:05 ◼ ► are violating each other's patents and the international trade commission I forget what
00:01:11 ◼ ► ITC stands for has this whole injunction against apple selling apple watches in the US is about
00:01:19 ◼ ► a ruling that says yes you're violating Massimo's patent or patents and therefore the apple watch is
00:01:27 ◼ ► off the market and you can't I sympathize with anybody who still wants to buy an apple watch and
00:01:37 ◼ ► isn't going to be able to if this holds through Christmas and I wrote on my website today.
00:01:48 ◼ ► people who were going to do a last minute watch gift that wasn't a joke like the one I was going
00:01:53 ◼ ► to buy for you had time to get one you could still go into the retail store and get one
00:01:59 ◼ ► but the after Christmas thing is real right like people who got silver but wanted midnight or
00:02:06 ◼ ► I guess you could even exchange sizes right if you pay the difference or I you know depending on the
00:02:11 ◼ ► size you might get money back if you got gifted a 44 millimeter and you wanted 41 you could do that
00:02:19 ◼ ► none of that's going to be possible and the big one to me is the gift money right and gift
00:02:23 ◼ ► certificates right everybody so anybody who is like just give me a gift certificate and I'll go
00:02:29 ◼ ► to the apple store after Christmas and buy myself an apple watch well you may not yeah plus all the
00:02:36 ◼ ► repairs like all the models that have the blood oxygenation uh sets around them that people
00:02:41 ◼ ► already have if they break them they don't repair apple watches they give you a new one but they
00:02:45 ◼ ► can't give you a new one if they don't have a new one to give you and you're like well it's I've got
00:02:48 ◼ ► apple care and it's under warranty you're supposed to replace it yeah we don't have it yeah and that's
00:02:53 ◼ ► another thing that's sort of coming back to bite apple like the basically unrepairability of apple
00:03:01 ◼ ► watches yeah and I maybe I don't who knows what they do with them but basically as far as I know
00:03:07 ◼ ► if you have any sort of physical problem with an apple watch they just take it in the back and then
00:03:13 ◼ ► come out with a different watch and give it to you and I guess it's supposed to match but I think
00:03:19 ◼ ► if you have an a still under warranty series eight and it breaks in a way that's covered by the
00:03:27 ◼ ► warranty or apple care and you take it in the store they just give you a series nine now I think
00:03:32 ◼ ► yeah yeah that's that but these are doing with max back in the day if you had a really old mac
00:03:36 ◼ ► and it was something was wrong with it and they couldn't repair it or they tried to repair it and
00:03:40 ◼ ► messed it up they'd give you a new one I think that happens to some people in my family a couple
00:03:42 ◼ ► times that's always an exciting surprise you're sad that your computer's broken you're excited
00:03:46 ◼ ► to get a better computer yeah so in some ways for a customer that's great as a ecological thing I
00:03:55 ◼ ► mean I don't know I don't know what they do with those watches I presume if possible they ship them
00:04:00 ◼ ► somewhere and if they can be repaired they do that's what refurb apple watches are is ones that
00:04:07 ◼ ► were taken in the store and they can't fix them in the store they ship them off to someone yeah it's
00:04:14 ◼ ► not can't it's how much would you have to pay someone of what level of skill for how much amount
00:04:19 ◼ ► of time to fix it and then how much money you're going to make selling the refurb you know what I
00:04:22 ◼ ► mean because I don't doubt that someone very skilled could make repairs on these things but
00:04:27 ◼ ► they're so small and so delicate you have to be so careful and it's just it's a skilled job and you
00:04:31 ◼ ► have to pay that person for the 15-20 minutes one hour two hours they spend and maybe you've just
00:04:37 ◼ ► burned all your profitability on that so I think giving it to the recycling robot that yanks all
00:04:40 ◼ ► the metals and everything might be better I guess I don't know and I also think it's a function of
00:04:46 ◼ ► how they're put together I and I know that over the years there have been iFixit I guess is the
00:04:53 ◼ ► premier gadfly publicly badgering apple over the repairability of iPhones but there are the iPhones
00:05:04 ◼ ► are fundamentally held together by screws that you can unscrew and take it apart and there is
00:05:09 ◼ ► glue involved and whenever there's glue it it gets messy I guess a huge issue with repaired iPhones
00:05:16 ◼ ► is to restore them to the same level of water and dust resistance not just oh it looks like
00:05:22 ◼ ► it's repaired but it actually yes you can still dunk it in a pool or whatever and it's safe but
00:05:27 ◼ ► the watch is there's no screws it's all glued together I mean yeah it's the same problem and
00:05:33 ◼ ► everything is smaller on the watch of course every little bit and piece in there is smaller the watch
00:05:37 ◼ ► itself is smaller there's not a lot of margin for error yeah so how do you how what was your guess
00:05:49 ◼ ► before Christmas so it'll be out but the show will be out before the deadline who knows by the time
00:05:54 ◼ ► the show's out there might be some resolution to this it feels like something that could be resolved
00:05:58 ◼ ► at any second right like it I mean it could have been resolved at any point in the past it's just
00:06:03 ◼ ► there was not a meeting of the minds in terms of how much money is going to exchange hands here and
00:06:08 ◼ ► they're playing a game of chicken and I feel like apple has sort of lost this round but it it's I've
00:06:15 ◼ ► always said I want to talk about atp I can't imagine that apple is going to allow themselves
00:06:20 ◼ ► not to be able to sell this watch for a long period of time so at a certain point in the semi
00:06:25 ◼ ► near future apple will make something happen that makes this go away yeah the other thing too is
00:06:33 ◼ ► german has reported and this seems like an obvious solution it's whether it would actually comply
00:06:41 ◼ ► legally I don't know but the idea of a software update that would disable the blood oximeter
00:06:49 ◼ ► sensors I guess only in the us I mean it wouldn't make sense I mean as usual masimo doesn't think
00:06:56 ◼ ► it's possible to do that apple thinks we can make a software update and we won't violate your
00:06:59 ◼ ► patents and masimo's no you'll totally still violate them and how will they settle that
00:07:03 ◼ ► disagreement courts lawyers blah it's just it could go on for a while especially if they
00:07:09 ◼ ► continue to have a disagreement about remedies and the only way to settle those is with further
00:07:13 ◼ ► court cases so I'm not quite sure how a software update would take time though because it's well
00:07:19 ◼ ► they have to figure out a way to do it do we have a way to change the software such that our lawyers
00:07:24 ◼ ► here at apple think that we technically are not violating the patent anymore well but you know
00:07:29 ◼ ► that all of the sensors or at least all the new ones as they get added are gated by country
00:07:36 ◼ ► because whenever they say hey this year's new apple watch has this new sensor like three years
00:07:41 ◼ ► ago when it was the blood oxygen readings it'll and then there's then you get to the part of the
00:07:46 ◼ ► keynote where it's like available in the us and canada and more countries to come later because
00:07:51 ◼ ► there's surely a nightmare of country by country bureaucracy to get these things legally allowed
00:07:59 ◼ ► even if they're not deemed medical class devices or whatever all of those sensors always seem to
00:08:04 ◼ ► roll out country by country I would think I guess it's not as simple as just saying take the us off
00:08:11 ◼ ► the list and now if you're in the us you don't get blood oxygen readings oh no I was well the software
00:08:17 ◼ ► update I'm thinking that I think apple wants to do is we still take blood oxygen readings we just
00:08:22 ◼ ► do it in a way that isn't exactly like that it says in the past that's the whole point that
00:08:27 ◼ ► masamo says no you have to make hardware changes like it's just it's part of the stupidity of
00:08:32 ◼ ► patents right they didn't patent the idea of a watch that gets your blood oxygen level they
00:08:37 ◼ ► patented some specific aspects of it and if they can accomplish that if apple can find a way to
00:08:42 ◼ ► accomplish that task to give you a reading but doing it differently enough that it doesn't
00:08:46 ◼ ► violate their patent then they're in the clear but masamo's like actually there's no way you can
00:08:50 ◼ ► do that with you can't just make a software app to do that we think you have to actually make
00:08:54 ◼ ► hardware changes but you're never going to do so please pay us some money and we'll figure it out
00:08:59 ◼ ► right because and I don't and I don't really feel like wading into the details and I can't I have
00:09:04 ◼ ► you ever I mean I'm sure you have because I know you're a critic of them but patent filings are
00:09:08 ◼ ► like the most obtuse purposely so I don't I'm not sure I've ever read a patent filing that was
00:09:14 ◼ ► cogent to a lay person maybe amazon's one click patent or maybe I'm just misremembering that there
00:09:22 ◼ ► was always sort of a lay person's explanation with it and the actual patent filing is just as obtuse
00:09:29 ◼ ► as everybody else it's got to be like this is a perfect job for chat gpt you feed in patentees
00:09:37 ◼ ► find these phrases and translate them to the lay person's understanding and then at least you can
00:09:42 ◼ ► read it without your eyes glazing over yeah overall I am surprised that apple did not resolve this
00:09:48 ◼ ► beforehand it must be a mountain of money that masamo is asking for part of it is we've all noted
00:09:56 ◼ ► the fairly favorable to apple timing of all this where it's like the sales shut off just as
00:10:01 ◼ ► christmas arrives so you still get your haul your holiday sales and maybe they were just like look
00:10:05 ◼ ► let's play this game of chicken let's run it out if we have to pull them we'll pull them and then
00:10:09 ◼ ► in january we'll come back to the table and dump a dump truck of money onto masamo and make this go
00:10:14 ◼ ► yeah apple rolled this out in an unusual way too seemingly only with once with a a statement given
00:10:23 ◼ ► only to one outlet chance miller at nine to five mac which you know kudos to chance who i just met
00:10:32 ◼ ► uh i think the iphone event for the video i mean so first of all the content of it was just a
00:10:37 ◼ ► let's play the refs right it was a playing the refs letter right and the fact that it was sent to
00:10:42 ◼ ► by media standards an obscure outlet we don't it's not obscure to us but in the rest of the world
00:10:47 ◼ ► they have no idea what it is is a way of playing the refs while also not you don't give it to new
00:10:52 ◼ ► york times or wall street journal right and so it's just kind of like one of their essentially
00:10:57 ◼ ► their last move that they have hey biden maybe give us a break here but only released to nine
00:11:02 ◼ ► to five mac and so we'll all talk about it in the apple technosphere and new york times wall street
00:11:06 ◼ ► journal are all they're all on vacation right all right well and i guess the calculus is not just
00:11:12 ◼ ► it's it's some kind of mix of wanting to get word out so that last minute shoppers stop waiting right
00:11:19 ◼ ► and if you wanted to order online you had a couple days to do it before they cut you off now you know
00:11:24 ◼ ► you can do this uh one of the odd things and again lawyers right who knows but german reported that
00:11:31 ◼ ► apple store retail and store employees have been told that they can't tell customers that they can
00:11:38 ◼ ► go buy them at target and best buy and everywhere else that'll still have them in well if you're in
00:11:43 ◼ ► charge of apple stores especially if you're not an apple person but you're just a retail like i'm i
00:11:49 ◼ ► run retail stores of course you're going to tell your employees that yeah i wonder if that's the
00:11:54 ◼ ► lawyers or the people who run the stores and they're like no we i don't care it's not actually
00:11:59 ◼ ► like we're legally bound not yeah you don't tell the same reason they don't i mean we talked about
00:12:05 ◼ ► this in atp recently that the price match thing that apple stores do that they will essentially
00:12:09 ◼ ► match the price of any other authorized app dealer but they don't advertise that because that would
00:12:13 ◼ ► be admitting there are other places you can buy apple products or every single time you buy
00:12:16 ◼ ► anything major at an apple store if they told you hey just go over there look there's a macbook air
00:12:26 ◼ ► and then come back here we'll give you the money and then we'll come back here no they don't they
00:12:31 ◼ ► don't encourage that yeah i don't know it's such a weird story and it's just i i have the most
00:12:38 ◼ ► sympathy for anybody who's going to get caught up at this after christmas who wants to exchange or
00:12:44 ◼ ► use a gift card or something like that i wonder how many people who otherwise were going to get
00:12:50 ◼ ► a series 9 watch are now going to get stuck with a se which isn't the worst it's a fine apple watch
00:12:57 ◼ ► but it's obviously the worst one i don't know it what a fun time to be a top level executive at
00:13:05 ◼ ► apple during the christmas week ruin your holidays i mean i do wonder how much of this is they have
00:13:10 ◼ ► they had a plan that was sketched out by the beginning of this and said here's the steps
00:13:13 ◼ ► we're going to go through and they're just running the plan right and part of the plan is we make our
00:13:18 ◼ ► last ditch uh plea to biden if it doesn't work we go on vacation we come back we finally settle this
00:13:27 ◼ ► apple could tim cook could obviously like you always say there's just keep adding zeros to the
00:13:32 ◼ ► check and eventually masamo is going to be okay i don't know if there might be a number that is
00:13:37 ◼ ► so high that even just at a bean counting level they're like this isn't actually worth it this is
00:13:42 ◼ ► a major product of ours yeah we'll just pull the feature right apple always has that option of say
00:13:47 ◼ ► you know what we we tried to roll out this feature in our apple watches but the the people who
00:13:52 ◼ ► apparently control the only way to do this in the same manner will not accept a reasonable amount
00:13:56 ◼ ► of money so now apple watches cannot tell you your blood oxygenation anymore which is crappy
00:14:01 ◼ ► but it's who's more stubborn right who is more who feels more righteous and who can afford to be more
00:14:06 ◼ ► righteous and stubborn is masamo a public company that's another question yeah i don't know does it
00:14:10 ◼ ► matter anyway if they're a public company they will have similar pressures to apple and okay
00:14:15 ◼ ► well you can feel aggrieved and ask for a really big number but a certain point take the number
00:14:19 ◼ ► apple is offering you yeah so we shall see all right i'm going to take a break here while we have
00:14:24 ◼ ► a good segue and i'm going to thank our first sponsor it's our good friends at trade coffee
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00:17:13 ◼ ► not to ruin your segue but before i moved on from the uh patent thing i think i've never really heard
00:17:18 ◼ ► your opinion on patents what do you think about patents as a concept i guess i've lived my whole
00:17:24 ◼ ► life so i i've never worked at a big company and so it's never really entered into it i think the
00:17:31 ◼ ► idea when the country was founded in the 18th century was probably pretty good and when you
00:17:40 ◼ ► read like the history of patents and the way they used to work i think it was a pretty good idea
00:17:46 ◼ ► and 250 years later i think it's a mess i i think that they only benefit the biggest companies well
00:17:57 ◼ ► setting aside how it's implemented like the patent system the the concept that if you come up with an
00:18:01 ◼ ► idea there should be some period of times that you legally have the exclusive rights to that idea i
00:18:07 ◼ ► think that's okay but i think that computers in i i think in general going back to the late 1700s
00:18:14 ◼ ► or the 19th century when things were mechanical devices if it was clever then i think a period
00:18:20 ◼ ► of exclusivity i i'm not offended by that it's hard because i i fundamentally believe in the
00:18:26 ◼ ► basic idea i think it was derek sivers i'll put a link to it many people have espoused the same idea
00:18:31 ◼ ► but that ideas are only a multiplier on execution right it's the idea is worth nothing by itself
00:18:40 ◼ ► a good idea multiplied by zero execution anything times zero is still zero right but if you came up
00:18:45 ◼ ► with the idea suddenly now you have the ability to stop anyone else from doing it unless they pay you
00:18:50 ◼ ► so kind of it all of a sudden the idea now has value because the government says it has value
00:18:55 ◼ ► so you don't even need to execute the idea yourself at all you just need to have the idea and then
00:19:00 ◼ ► find somebody else who's executing that idea and make them pay you because you have the exclusive
00:19:04 ◼ ► rights to that idea because you filed a patent before they did yeah i think on the whole it's
00:19:09 ◼ ► been a net negative because it's supposed to promote innovation and i think it only hinders it
00:19:14 ◼ ► and i think that's it sounds like a great system but in practice it is it's hard to defend it i i
00:19:21 ◼ ► think it's a disaster but it's also hard to see a way out of it yeah i mean we used to back in the
00:19:25 ◼ ► day when we used to talk about this there was a big deal i guess in the 90s on the internet where
00:19:29 ◼ ► people were real angry about software patents right because we were talking about how can you
00:19:33 ◼ ► patent software and what is software or whatever but that conversation was so focused on software
00:19:38 ◼ ► and the patent system and this new thing and never really no one ever wanted to revisit the idea yeah
00:19:43 ◼ ► but what about patents in general right right because we have this idea in our head of you're
00:19:47 ◼ ► going to invent the cotton gin right and you're going you're a genius inventor it's like it's part
00:19:50 ◼ ► of our ethos the american dream of come up with an idea you build a better mousetrap you patent it
00:19:55 ◼ ► and that's how you become rich and it seems just and fair because you came up with a good idea
00:20:00 ◼ ► therefore you should be rich and but that idealized version of patents people seem to be on
00:20:06 ◼ ► board with mostly because they haven't really thought about the consequences of it setting aside
00:20:09 ◼ ► does that ever happen in real life because of the patent system i mean as i've said many times and
00:20:13 ◼ ► i'm on the extreme end of this which is i don't think anything should be patentable ever for any
00:20:17 ◼ ► reason and that there is no way that this should work and i don't think you should for all the
00:20:21 ◼ ► reasons you just said like the idea is worth nothing it should not be there should not be a law
00:20:25 ◼ ► that something makes the idea more valuable than it actually is what you get out of having an idea
00:20:29 ◼ ► before somebody else is you get to make your product before somebody else you get to bring
00:20:32 ◼ ► it to market before somebody else you do get advantages but you don't get a 20-year monopoly
00:20:36 ◼ ► on that idea and that's before you start considering okay but what about the really bad
00:20:41 ◼ ► patents what about software patents i'm talking about baseline level patents but you know yeah
00:20:45 ◼ ► that's the type of thing that is so against the the popular notion of patents that it will probably
00:20:51 ◼ ► never get any traction right and the entrenched incumbents have so much at stake that it's hard
00:20:59 ◼ ► to see any sort of let's abolish the patent system getting any traction at all i don't i mean i don't
00:21:06 ◼ ► think that's what would stop it i think the big established companies are so weary of this because
00:21:10 ◼ ► it is essentially a tax on all of their operations right and like they build these patent portfolios
00:21:16 ◼ ► as a defensive mechanism it's mutually assured destruction i have a bunch of patents you have
00:21:19 ◼ ► a bunch of patents let's do patent cross licensing don't you sue me because i'll sue you because i
00:21:23 ◼ ► have patents on the most ridiculous things you can imagine but in the end i think if you get them all
00:21:28 ◼ ► the biggest companies in the in the world together and said what do you think abolish patents there'd
00:21:32 ◼ ► be one or two annoying people who say no but a lot of them would be like boy that would just make all
00:21:36 ◼ ► of our lives so much easier i mean maybe i'm being naive in that way but it just seems like everybody
00:21:40 ◼ ► is weary of it maybe i mean it it's but we can't even get rid of the penny john i know i'm saying
00:21:48 ◼ ► like yes america so yeah i'll send you some links for the show notes for this in case people want to
00:21:52 ◼ ► dig into this further my past couple of podcasts about this or my remember i did a couple hyper
00:21:58 ◼ ► three hypercritical podcasts about patents i do i do it was way back in the day and that that was
00:22:03 ◼ ► linking to a document by uh david k levine and michelle boldren it was called against intellectual
00:22:09 ◼ ► monopoly that tries to make the case that i've just alluded to which is that you should have
00:22:13 ◼ ► government mandated 20-year exclusive rights to an idea what do you think i guess one of the areas
00:22:20 ◼ ► where these things often come up is pharmaceuticals right and the idea is that merc or name your
00:22:28 ◼ ► favorite merc's local here in philly or at least part of the conglomerates local here but big giant
00:22:34 ◼ ► pharmaceuticals spends billions of dollars to create test authorize a new drug and then they
00:22:43 ◼ ► hold a patent for it for 20 years and until then they're the only ones who can make this drug on
00:22:50 ◼ ► the one hand i can see the argument in favor of the patent system there that they need to recoup
00:22:57 ◼ ► these enormous costs and there's no no other way to bring a major drug to market than to spend this
00:23:05 ◼ ► money and if there were no patent protection for the drug then there'd be no reason to spend the
00:23:11 ◼ ► billions of dollars to create the drugs you know that i i there's seemingly some truth to that
00:23:17 ◼ ► right but then on the other hand you're talking about things that save people's lives right and
00:23:24 ◼ ► what you're getting at is obvious people do worry about that because they can't see past the system
00:23:27 ◼ ► that we have but what you're getting at is well but should health care be a thing that is a profit
00:23:32 ◼ ► center and are there any negative consequences to health care being a for-profit industry and that's
00:23:37 ◼ ► even setting aside okay but how does it really work how it really works is these pharmaceutical
00:23:41 ◼ ► companies get billions of dollars for the u.s government to develop a like let's say a covid
00:23:45 ◼ ► vaccine and they develop it and then they get to sell it and make all the money and they jack up
00:23:50 ◼ ► the price to insane levels and that just brings you right back around to the idea of should health
00:23:54 ◼ ► care be a profit center i mean this against intellectual monopoly does talk about these
00:23:58 ◼ ► things and as i talked about in the past i fully believe that it is entirely possible for human
00:24:02 ◼ ► beings to come up with medicines without the patent system but it can't just be everything
00:24:07 ◼ ► exactly the same as it is now but then remove patents because obviously that wouldn't work
00:24:11 ◼ ► right but i am also against the idea of of health care being a for-profit enterprise because we see
00:24:17 ◼ ► how that works in this country we see how you know when someone has a monopoly on something how they
00:24:22 ◼ ► price gouge and how they don't care that they got billions of dollars for the government so they
00:24:25 ◼ ► don't act out of the goodness of their heart to distribute a few small people do like the person
00:24:29 ◼ ► who like gave away the patents for insulin and stuff like that but fast forward 2050 years and
00:24:34 ◼ ► a less scrupulous people come in and it's just bad for everybody i think the motivation to find life
00:24:39 ◼ ► saving drugs is that we're all human beings and we want them to exist and we should form a society
00:24:44 ◼ ► and government that allows that to happen in a way that doesn't just enrich a small number of people
00:24:48 ◼ ► but you know we are far from that as well right and the whole to me that the pharmaceutical
00:24:54 ◼ ► industry's sort of argument in favor of the patent system the hey should this be a profitable a
00:25:02 ◼ ► business that's for profit is above that right it's a higher level than that and there's no
00:25:07 ◼ ► better there's no better example than insulin which is no longer covered by patents or maybe
00:25:11 ◼ ► never was i don't know if that actually the person gave it away like the person came up with it said
00:25:15 ◼ ► i'm giving this patent away for everybody because it's you know i don't want i don't want this to be
00:25:19 ◼ ► a thing that somebody makes money from well then it's a perfect example because we're still fighting
00:25:23 ◼ ► over grossly inflated prices for insulin today right i mean that's what because when someone
00:25:29 ◼ ► needs something to live it turns out you can charge them as much money as they have for it
00:25:32 ◼ ► and if they're not giving you the money you can get the money from the insurance companies and
00:25:36 ◼ ► then you make sure the government can't negotiate drug prices for those insurance companies either
00:25:39 ◼ ► and it's just it's not a great system i don't know if you know that no it is it's heartbreaking
00:25:44 ◼ ► it is absolutely heartbreaking that there that there's a really serious disease diabetes that
00:25:50 ◼ ► has a medicine that really works well and lets people people need to live yeah and they can live
00:25:57 ◼ ► really normal great lives with it and that and it's incredibly inexpensive to manufacture
00:26:03 ◼ ► incredibly inexpensive right and yet somehow there are families who are have to worry are we
00:26:08 ◼ ► going to pay for the food we want or pay for yeah because because the industry is tuned to extract
00:26:14 ◼ ► as much money as it can to keep you alive but how much money do you have in your bank account just
00:26:20 ◼ ► give us all that can you eat a little less food this month can you move to a smaller apartment
00:26:24 ◼ ► because we know you need this to live sorry kids no more netflix yeah people want apple watch
00:26:31 ◼ ► series 9 so people need insulin to live yeah it is very different so i overall i'm not as adamant
00:26:38 ◼ ► as far out on it as you but i also don't think i've given it as much thought as you and yeah
00:26:43 ◼ ► that's the problem with these things people accept the status quo is that's just the way it's always
00:26:46 ◼ ► been and it seems reasonable and i've seen a couple tv movies about it and and you know
00:26:50 ◼ ► the more you learn about anything like this uh the more complicated it seems but you know if you
00:26:54 ◼ ► take small steps in the right direction uh it's the best we can do yeah you brought it up on either
00:27:00 ◼ ► the most recent atp or the second most recent because it was also in the context of this
00:27:04 ◼ ► masa mo apple watch fiasco and ben and i brought it up on dithering but like you brought up like
00:27:12 ◼ ► the sort of eli whitney who invented the cotton gin yeah yeah or edison or any of these prototypical
00:27:20 ◼ ► storybook inventors who like with the view of hindsight we know that even the stories that we
00:27:26 ◼ ► hear about them are obviously not going to be completely accurate right but the edison of our
00:27:31 ◼ ► times steve jobs obviously was very pro patent and it was part of his nature i mean he wore it
00:27:39 ◼ ► on his shirt sleeve that when his companies had a breakthrough and he knew it was a breakthrough like
00:27:49 ◼ ► he just knew it it's like darth vader looking at the screen when they were showing the base on hoth
00:27:53 ◼ ► that's it you know that i know it that's it don't give me any shit take the whole fleet of star
00:27:58 ◼ ► destroyers there that's where they are when they had the iphone he knew it he knew they had magic
00:28:05 ◼ ► in a bottle and he like literally said in the keynote and something to the effect of boy we
00:28:10 ◼ ► patented boy did we patented and the audience laughed because they were you know everybody's
00:28:15 ◼ ► it was like going into conniptions because of this thing that we couldn't believe was possible
00:28:20 ◼ ► was being unveiled to us and i think his whole career was sort of based on that and that whole
00:28:26 ◼ ► it's almost sad to think of how many how much time of the last few years of his life he spent
00:28:32 ◼ ► burned up over google stealing what he thought were patentable ideas from the iphone you know
00:28:40 ◼ ► it's very very very kind of like childlike notion of things like that yes you go to xerox park learn
00:28:46 ◼ ► about the gooey come back to apple make a gooey and think now this is my idea and anyone else who
00:28:49 ◼ ► makes a gooey they're stealing from us and it's like well what about you what you did xerox but
00:28:53 ◼ ► there's who was bad and ours is good and they're copying the good one and they invited us in right
00:28:59 ◼ ► anything like that like where did multi-touch come from yes he was not shy about saying when we make
00:29:04 ◼ ► something it's almost here's the thing i think in his mind it's rude for people to try to make
00:29:09 ◼ ► another phone that works like the iphone it's just not quite it's rude like no you shouldn't do that
00:29:13 ◼ ► and once you do that you're downgraded his book is bad manners right and it's just a very naive
00:29:18 ◼ ► view of the world but he just really like this we deserve this he was he would be very gung-ho and
00:29:23 ◼ ► he loves the patents and was like we came up with this idea it's ours no one can copy it and
00:29:27 ◼ ► the sad fact is they totally can copy it and they can find a way to copy it without technically
00:29:31 ◼ ► violating your patents and if you try to fight them out it'll just burn up time and money it's
00:29:34 ◼ ► a waste of everyone's time like the look and feel lawsuit that no one remembers anymore it's just
00:29:38 ◼ ► it's a it's a tar pit for everybody involved but his sense of justice is once i've done something
00:29:43 ◼ ► and i do the good one no one should have the nerve to copy us and that's not way the market works nor
00:29:49 ◼ ► should it be it is some sort of innate sense of justice that i think is at least in in jobs was
00:29:56 ◼ ► misguided yeah it's like a toddler's innate sense of justice little kids have the same sense of
00:30:00 ◼ ► justice that is just they think that things should be the way they are and it's not really a real
00:30:04 ◼ ► sense of justice yeah but i wonder how many people you know i don't think it's most people people who
00:30:09 ◼ ► work at apple i know many people who work at apple and i guess it's the nature of your and my
00:30:14 ◼ ► both our personalities and our work what we're known for what's gotten us introduced to people
00:30:21 ◼ ► at apple i don't know anybody at apple who would brag about patents and i know people who have
00:30:26 ◼ ► either are still at apple or were at apple who have their name on patents but they're never they
00:30:32 ◼ ► never like brag about it but then i'm sure they exist there are some people i mean well and the
00:30:36 ◼ ► thing is it's not like you should be ashamed of having a patent you should be proud for the work
00:30:41 ◼ ► that is represented by that patent because you did a thing and figured out a thing that's an
00:30:45 ◼ ► accomplishment and having a patent as much as i think they shouldn't exist if it's a reasonable
00:30:50 ◼ ► good patent and not something really stupid it is like an artifact of the work that you did and so
00:30:56 ◼ ► i can imagine being proud of that but i think the more contact people have with the patent system
00:31:01 ◼ ► the less proud they'll be of that particular artifact they still like we came up with this
00:31:05 ◼ ► clever idea we did this good thing and we think we're smart and we're proud of our work but the
00:31:09 ◼ ► patent i think the more you learn about it you're like and yeah i also have a bunch of patents but
00:31:13 ◼ ► a they belong to apple not you really and b you're just like it's kind of like starting to
00:31:18 ◼ ► be ashamed that you want to test the car didn't change it's the same car it always was but ancillary
00:31:22 ◼ ► factors that you now know make you feel differently about it i think as you learn about the patent
00:31:26 ◼ ► system the pride and the patent specifically reduces even if you are still proud of the work
00:31:31 ◼ ► it embodies yeah well on that is i i send a link in the our chat there i'll put i will put it in
00:31:38 ◼ ► the show notes but it's one of my favorite personal home pages i've ever seen in my life
00:31:42 ◼ ► imron chaudhry yeah famously humble yeah very humble he's the co-founder of humane the makers
00:31:50 ◼ ► of the now available for pre-order coming in march supposedly ai pin imron chaudhry.com and his entire
00:32:00 ◼ ► home page it is very attractive very minimal it's a white page with black low contrast light gray
00:32:06 ◼ ► text on a white background very apple medium gray helvetica very small text on a background and it
00:32:12 ◼ ► just says selected patented works volume one 1995 to 2017 and it is a list of i would estimate i
00:32:21 ◼ ► don't want to sit here and count uh i would guess this is about 500 patents yeah more than that i
00:32:27 ◼ ► would say maybe more than 500 patents and it's just the numbers that's all it is on the page
00:32:32 ◼ ► it's just a grid one two three four five six seven i don't know 15 rows a bunch of rows it's like a
00:32:39 ◼ ► huge spreadsheet but very pretty of just the patent numbers with a link to the google patent for that
00:32:46 ◼ ► patent at least 500 patents that he has his name on and then here's here's the part that makes it
00:32:51 ◼ ► my favorite personal home page it's not just that his home page is just a list of patents
00:32:57 ◼ ► it's the footnote at the bottom randomly selected us patents only so in other words he's got more
00:33:04 ◼ ► he's got more patents and maybe there's other ones in other countries who knows because this is us
00:33:08 ◼ ► patents yeah like for a certain kind of person it becomes a way to keep score you know i mean if you
00:33:13 ◼ ► decide your value is based on how many patents you file because you think each patent is a beautiful
00:33:17 ◼ ► wonderful idea and again we're talking about good patents and bad patents i think all patents are
00:33:21 ◼ ► bad but they're still with it within each one you can characterize it for example is this an idea
00:33:25 ◼ ► that works you can patent things that don't work right right is this is this a patent for something
00:33:31 ◼ ► that is a blindingly obvious and would be invalidated if any company wanted to spend 300
00:33:36 ◼ ► grand to invalidate it because apple for example invalidated a bunch of masumos patents because
00:33:40 ◼ ► there are tons of patents that are just stupid that could be invalidated but to do so costs
00:33:45 ◼ ► money and some companies to be motivated to do that so of all the patents here i wonder what
00:33:50 ◼ ► the ratio is of patents that are reasonable ideas patents that are remotely original patents that
00:33:54 ◼ ► weren't done years before by other people patents that actually work right it really narrows it down
00:33:59 ◼ ► if you have to do it to that filter but to make a home page like this makes you think every one of
00:34:03 ◼ ► these is gold i i highly doubt it all right what else is in the news oh the beeper mini the ongoing
00:34:18 ◼ ► that by the time the podcast airs the story will be different i mean i think you're mostly right
00:34:23 ◼ ► that the beeper part of it but i think it's gone to phase two now because now phase two is silly
00:34:28 ◼ ► government hearings that i think isn't going to last but and i well i don't know because you never
00:34:36 ◼ ► know with politicians yeah exactly it's not it's harder to harder to judge that one we could we
00:34:40 ◼ ► kind of know how it was going to work out between beeper and apple because that's a fight that we
00:34:43 ◼ ► understand but the government thing it's hard to even understand why it is exists other than
00:34:49 ◼ ► people want to showboat in front of a committee for a while so they can hopefully help their
00:34:52 ◼ ► reelection chances uh so the news is that beeper mini has they think they're the number one they've
00:35:00 ◼ ► said we're gonna stop playing cat and mouse after this so we'll see what they said in the statement
00:35:05 ◼ ► was paraphrasing we can't play cat and mouse with the biggest company in the world and as i just
00:35:09 ◼ ► said on the atp we just recorded yeah everybody knows that so sody it's presumably they knew it
00:35:15 ◼ ► too but you did it and pretended it was the thing you were gonna do and you're like you know what
00:35:18 ◼ ► we just can't play cat and mouse with a trillion dollar company we know of course you can't i
00:35:24 ◼ ► appreciate their fervor even though they are a real company i i mean and i think that eric
00:35:30 ◼ ► midget kofsky i hope i'm pronouncing his surname right he's the ceo of beeper he's best known or
00:35:37 ◼ ► previously best known as the ceo founder of the pebble smartwatch which was sort of the first
00:35:49 ◼ ► to our audience probably everybody listening remembers the pebble smartwatches that you can
00:35:53 ◼ ► get so caught up in the fact that it does work and thinking it does work and it is extraordinarily
00:36:01 ◼ ► clever this kid the 16 year old i guess isn't pseudonymous anymore he goes by jj tech on github
00:36:07 ◼ ► but he was on cbs news i forget his name but i see clearly this 16 year old kid is super talented and
00:36:14 ◼ ► has a bright future ahead of him it's tremendous work to backwards engineer this but what they've
00:36:20 ◼ ► been doing is using let me see if i can paraphrase this right basically to be an i message client you
00:36:31 ◼ ► need an a registration key that's part of the cryptographic exchange and part of that is
00:36:37 ◼ ► verifying that you the client software are running on an actual legit apple device and for the last
00:36:47 ◼ ► week or two they've been using a bunch of max servers that beeper owns and runs for their
00:36:53 ◼ ► cloud-based messaging service and because there's only so many actual max that they can have and
00:37:00 ◼ ► share with hundreds or thousands of beeper users apple's been whack-a-mole them one by one because
00:37:15 ◼ ► mac right like maybe you and your your spouse and your kids all have accounts on the same the family
00:37:21 ◼ ► iMac and all four or five of you send iMessages from a mac but there's very few families with a
00:37:28 ◼ ► 500 different iCloud accounts that's why a lot of the coverage of this unfortunately calling it like
00:37:32 ◼ ► a hack or whatever makes it sound like they somehow broke the security and are like they're
00:37:36 ◼ ► in the system and they're controlling everything when all they're essentially doing is finding
00:37:40 ◼ ► various ways to masquerade as a legit device it's not like they have cracked the protocol and now
00:37:44 ◼ ► can register any device they want and be totally unseen by apple it wasn't that kind of hack it was
00:37:49 ◼ ► simply we've found various ways to masquerade as legit apple devices and those ways are slowly being
00:37:54 ◼ ► shut down for the reason you said because once you get more than one or two people using the same
00:37:58 ◼ ► device it starts to look hinky yeah so they've updated this now where the android client and i've
00:38:05 ◼ ► went through it before we recorded i went through it today and actually ran it the most ludicrous way
00:38:11 ◼ ► they have of still using beeper mini on an android device is to either have your own old iphone iphone
00:38:21 ◼ ► six seven eight or ten or success right but those eras because i guess there's jail breaks that
00:38:28 ◼ ► still work on those phones you need an old iphone iphone 10 or older you need to jailbreak it you
00:38:35 ◼ ► need to install some sort of beep serve damon that runs on the iphone and can therefore you know
00:38:44 ◼ ► because it's some kind of like server damon it obviously needs the that's why it needs the iphone
00:38:48 ◼ ► to be broken and leave the iphone running and connected to wi-fi 24 hours time yeah all the time
00:38:56 ◼ ► in other words you need to run a jailbroken iphone as a server in your home and then you get to go out
00:39:01 ◼ ► of the house with your android phone and your reward is you get to use iMessage yeah so you
00:39:06 ◼ ► could do it that way or if you are a beeper cloud user which is their older desktop thing that has
00:39:14 ◼ ► a bunch of things other than iMessage i think it does whatsapp and signal and other things although
00:39:19 ◼ ► some of those don't require reverse engineering i think they're open i think that you're sort of
00:39:24 ◼ ► allowed to have clients for i'm not sure but if you're there's a wait list for it though because
00:39:29 ◼ ► it has this tremendous overhead of them needing to partition an entire server or virtual server
00:39:36 ◼ ► for each user or something like that so there's this overhead and so they have a wait list
00:39:40 ◼ ► if you're already through the wait list you can run it on you run their other desktop app on your
00:39:47 ◼ ► mac and that will generate a code that you can use on your phone and if it's only your phone and your
00:39:55 ◼ ► mac using the same code that's not enough that's gonna hopefully probably not enough to for apple
00:40:02 ◼ ► to notice i don't know and then the easier way i'm surprised they don't mention it more prominently
00:40:08 ◼ ► they have a command line tool they wrote on github it's just a it looks like it's written in go
00:40:13 ◼ ► you can download it on github and run it from the terminal on your mac that's what i did and it just
00:40:19 ◼ ► generates a code that you can copy and paste into beeper on android and then share this and use it
00:40:25 ◼ ► but they also say with that route which you might think well then why would anybody possibly
00:40:30 ◼ ► run the jailbroken iphone as a server connected to wi-fi and powered 24 hours a day this other way
00:40:37 ◼ ► doesn't let you register a phone number with iMessage so people would have to address you
00:40:43 ◼ ► by your iCloud email address and therefore it also requires you to have an iCloud account
00:40:50 ◼ ► and you will need to regenerate the key and re-enter it every week every month they don't
00:40:58 ◼ ► know it's obviously it as soon as they said that we're not quite sure if you'll have to do it every
00:41:03 ◼ ► week or month i thought well this seems like something apple could turn a dial on and make
00:41:08 ◼ ► it like every day every 10 minutes and needless to say it's also kind of hard to copy and paste
00:41:13 ◼ ► a 16-digit code from mac to android because they don't have continuity it's all forget it i mean at
00:41:20 ◼ ► this point i'm not sure how much apple is going to care anymore because i can't imagine how many
00:41:24 ◼ ► beeper users there are going to be but they still might continue to turn the screws up on it
00:41:33 ◼ ► i that the other aspect you said the legislature so elizabeth warren from your fine state of
00:41:38 ◼ ► massachusetts started it with a tweet and then a bipartisan group of senators what's her name from
00:41:44 ◼ ► minnesota amy clobichar and mike lee from utah strange bedfellows just i don't know i'm writing
00:41:54 ◼ ► about it i don't know if it'll be out tomorrow i have a half-written piece for daring fireball
00:41:59 ◼ ► about other stuff but we're all related to beeper but their letter is hey this is anti-competitive
00:42:07 ◼ ► and apple's being mean and being anti-competitive and bullying a company and this is why we need
00:42:12 ◼ ► to crack down on big tech and to me it just has there's no grounding and it just belies
00:42:18 ◼ ► like a complete ignorance on their part of what i message is yeah i mean it's so hard to tell
00:42:23 ◼ ► politicians are they it's always the question the cynics dilemma are they ignorant or are they
00:42:27 ◼ ► malicious slash devious right because so here's the question right so we talked about we were
00:42:32 ◼ ► talking about this whole issue as it's been going on it's so clear that if the idea for your company
00:42:36 ◼ ► is to use apple service for free without their permission it's probably not a great business plan
00:42:41 ◼ ► there's this black and white that like what they're doing is not the right thing to do probably not
00:42:46 ◼ ► legal not a viable business so on and so forth right but the other angle on it that so far i
00:42:51 ◼ ► haven't seen anyone actually argue is okay but in certain circumstances when one company has
00:42:57 ◼ ► such dominance in a particular area we have decided they are monopoly and in those cases we
00:43:03 ◼ ► might decide that this thing is so big and so important and so dominant that they have to allow
00:43:10 ◼ ► other people to use it an example might be windows operating system for pcs in the 90s is that the
00:43:16 ◼ ► dominant operating system for pcs in fact so dominant that the rules for them should be
00:43:21 ◼ ► different and they should not be able to do certain things that that keep competition off
00:43:26 ◼ ► of pcs yes like that's the textbook case i remember that when they did the thing in the
00:43:30 ◼ ► hearing of like how many people in this room use windows on their pc and they all raise their hands
00:43:33 ◼ ► remember that one it was like yeah if you're going to argue in the 90s that the windows is not the
00:43:37 ◼ ► dominant operating system to a massive degree not like 60 40 right or 70 30 like it was just
00:43:44 ◼ ► they're massively dominant suddenly different rules apply right so in the case of apple like
00:43:50 ◼ ► the beeper thing is okay what they're doing is obviously illegal and wrong or whatever but what
00:43:54 ◼ ► if iMessage is so dominant that it's we that new rules apply and it's like apple you have to let
00:44:02 ◼ ► third parties put their clients on your network because you're so big and so dominant that's what
00:44:08 ◼ ► you have government hearings about but i don't hear anybody trying to make the argument that
00:44:13 ◼ ► iMessage has been is dominant in the way that windows was as pcs the operating system what
00:44:19 ◼ ► planet are you on iMessage is big but it is not 95% worldwide market share for messaging systems
00:44:27 ◼ ► about any planet china alone invalidates that idea even within the us they're not that big
00:44:32 ◼ ► so if you're going to come from this you can't come at it from saying they're being mean to
00:44:35 ◼ ► beeper you have to start from iMessage is a monopoly and it is dangerous for any one company
00:44:41 ◼ ► to have that control therefore apple must allow third parties to interface with its instant message
00:44:48 ◼ ► network that it runs and if they can successfully make that argument legally within our current
00:44:53 ◼ ► monopoly laws then it becomes an entirely different conversation but trying to say they're
00:44:58 ◼ ► being mean to a small company you can't start from that first convince me that apple is legally
00:45:03 ◼ ► obligated to open iMessage to third parties and then we don't have to talk about beeper because
00:45:09 ◼ ► then anybody can make a client for it because now legally they have to let them but that is a
00:45:13 ◼ ► difficult case to win and that case is not going to be won by a bunch of senators who either don't
00:45:18 ◼ ► understand or pretended not to understand this issue grandstanding while they grill apple employees
00:45:23 ◼ ► about stuff yeah you john are way too sensible to be a senator you you have no chance of taking
00:45:30 ◼ ► elizabeth warren's seat because i like elizabeth warren usually so i can't my guess is that she
00:45:35 ◼ ► actually doesn't understand i don't think so either i think the problem i think what you're
00:45:39 ◼ ► describing is based on a fundamental understanding of basically what iMessage is which is a very large
00:45:47 ◼ ► maybe not by apple standards but by your my standards or beeper standards extremely expensive
00:45:54 ◼ ► hard to run proprietary instant messaging service it's not just a protocol it's not just oh we have
00:46:03 ◼ ► a secret or like a file format right people think like when they send a message it goes directly to
00:46:08 ◼ ► other people's phone through magic tubes and there's nothing in between they don't see the
00:46:12 ◼ ► giant fleet of servers doing a billion requests a second all day every day in giant cooled buildings
00:46:17 ◼ ► that apple pays for right i think it's a testimony to how seamless iMessage is right and part of what
00:46:23 ◼ ► beeper backwards engineered is the fact that you don't even need an iCloud account to use it when
00:46:30 ◼ ► you're on an iPhone right that's the one difference between an iPhone and iPads and Macs that are
00:46:36 ◼ ► which are the other devices that can run iMessage i don't think apple watch counts because i don't
00:46:40 ◼ ► think you can do it with apple watch without going through the phone i think your watch well i don't
00:46:45 ◼ ► know i guess the watches do have their own phone numbers as far as like Verizon is concerned but
00:46:49 ◼ ► they they use your phone's number to call them it's right right they don't register as a you
00:46:54 ◼ ► can't address my watch's secret you don't even learn your secret phone i think it's just like
00:46:58 ◼ ► the account number and Verizon's account system or whatever right but it's so seamless to use
00:47:03 ◼ ► iMessage especially when you're using your phone number as your identifier i mean and it's how they
00:47:09 ◼ ► bootstrap this network off SMS in 2011 or whenever it was that it launched which always surprises me
00:47:16 ◼ ► when i look or did surprise me when i look back on it i thought iMessage came sooner i didn't
00:47:21 ◼ ► know because the messages app was part of the iPhone yeah one but it was an SMS app right and
00:47:27 ◼ ► it's just hey the messages app will now every time it goes to send an SMS or use it not an SMS
00:47:36 ◼ ► message to 212-123-5555 or whatever your phone number is right before it sends it as SMS it'll
00:47:45 ◼ ► check with a server say is this phone number registered for iMessage oh it is oh okay i'll
00:47:51 ◼ ► render the phone number in blue and i will send it over this other network that apple made not SMS
00:47:58 ◼ ► and you getting your number registered on the iPhone as an iMessage user it just happens
00:48:05 ◼ ► automatically so you have no password to remember there is no password you don't sign in you just
00:48:09 ◼ ► have an iPhone with a phone number which comes from your cellular carrier and you just get
00:48:16 ◼ ► iMessage and it will send iMessages to any other phone number that is also registered with iMessage
00:48:23 ◼ ► and beeper backwards engineered that it's so seamless though it's so invisible that i really
00:48:29 ◼ ► do think most people including Elizabeth Warren including Amy Klobuchar and Mike Lee that they
00:48:36 ◼ ► just see it as like you said it just this magic phone-to-phone thing so that when i text you
00:48:42 ◼ ► it just bits go off my phone and they go to your phone and they don't imagine that there's this
00:48:49 ◼ ► whole complicated infrastructure in between oh actually i mean to give them to be a slightly
00:48:54 ◼ ► more charitable the idea is that it is a yet another walled garden that people have it is
00:49:01 ◼ ► and then they should all they should all be able to talk to each other and and it seems unfair that
00:49:05 ◼ ► there is this one network that is just iPhones talking to each other and whenever they talk to
00:49:10 ◼ ► other people it is it is lesser and it's a setting aside obviously you can talk to other people using
00:49:16 ◼ ► other you can get whatsapp on your iPhone i swear you can and i Android people can get it on their
00:49:21 ◼ ► thing and you can talk to them so it's not even much of a wall it's just like choosing which little
00:49:25 ◼ ► playgrounds people are going to be in but the whole idea of technology is i don't care about
00:49:29 ◼ ► the technical deals i'm just a senator i think all phones should be able to talk to each other
00:49:34 ◼ ► and everything should be interoperable based on standards and it seems like there's something
00:49:38 ◼ ► preventing that because it's apple not wanting to play ball and it is it is not much to hang
00:49:43 ◼ ► anything on but my most charitable read is they just kind of wish everyone would all get along
00:49:49 ◼ ► and they don't want to hear about the technical details and i just it doesn't really make sense
00:49:57 ◼ ► inability of android users and iphone users to communicate to each other with their phones is
00:50:02 ◼ ► not a problem there is competition in this section in fact apple is losing across most of the world
00:50:06 ◼ ► because their message app isn't that great and isn't that popular right and china has one that
00:50:11 ◼ ► is essentially government mandated and they have a lot of people and it does a lot of things right
00:50:15 ◼ ► europe runs on whatsapp right and then all of europe and then sms is out there that everyone
00:50:21 ◼ ► is still using is sort of the lowest common denominator for this type of stuff and that's
00:50:24 ◼ ► being heard at rcs which still isn't even as i message which isn't as good as whatsapp which
00:50:29 ◼ ► doesn't do half the things that wechat does and then japan's online kids this is not an area where
00:50:34 ◼ ► there is the lack of competition is causing innovation to be stifled right it's just but
00:50:39 ◼ ► i think they're getting on that bandwagon it's like can we latch on to this as an opportunity
00:50:43 ◼ ► to grandstand about big tech not interoperating because there are problems of technology not
00:50:48 ◼ ► interoperating for competitive reasons that is worse for consumers but i don't think this is
00:50:52 ◼ ► one of them and that's why i think any hearings they have on this are going to be silly and mostly
00:50:56 ◼ ► ridiculous and hopefully not go anywhere yeah i will just well and it's you so i'm risking along
00:51:04 ◼ ► the side but i would argue against the notion that i message is worse than whatsapp it's better in
00:51:11 ◼ ► different ways right there's different priorities and you i hope you'll agree ben and i have always
00:51:16 ◼ ► just been it ben thinks i message is trash and whatsapp is well so here i'll say with that i
00:51:22 ◼ ► think we can all agree that whatsapp has more features yes right so it's so but that but apple
00:51:26 ◼ ► often does that the competitors have more features but apple's things better and i will say uh and on
00:51:30 ◼ ► the sort of simplicity and ease of use front the thing that hurts i message is the bugs uh we don't
00:51:36 ◼ ► kind of get into a bigger side about software quality but like you mentioned typing in a phone
00:51:39 ◼ ► number and having it turn blue how many times have you sent someone an iMessage and for whatever
00:51:46 ◼ ► reason it comes out as a green bubble i've been talking to this person at their apple id for six
00:51:50 ◼ ► months and you're sending them a green bubble how the hell does that happen i don't know either but
00:51:55 ◼ ► it that happens to me less and less but it has happened yeah and that's the thing where if you're
00:51:59 ◼ ► going to make a product that's simple and easy to use it should work 100 of the time and bs like that
00:52:03 ◼ ► and never setting aside the whole like oh and now you want to try to have a group conversation with
00:52:07 ◼ ► some people on sms and some people iMessage and half the messages don't appear and on your mac
00:52:10 ◼ ► the conversation is missing some of the messages that's where i'm going to ding apple it's okay
00:52:14 ◼ ► it's fine not to have as many features as whatsapp because you have different priorities but make the
00:52:18 ◼ ► features you have work i will say like where i think iMessage particularly shines is the the way
00:52:24 ◼ ► that it works on non-phone devices iPads and Macs especially for me the Mac because i care more
00:52:30 ◼ ► about it or the Mac is a first-class iMessage client and it's a catalyst app well but i think
00:52:36 ◼ ► it's a i think it's a better catalyst app i think it's a better mac app than the the the previous
00:52:40 ◼ ► mac yeah i just wish all the messages show up there in a timely manner in the correct order
00:52:44 ◼ ► all the time well and i wish i wish that it would well i have a lot of complaints i mean it does
00:52:51 ◼ ► have a sync button it had the sync button years before the ios version had it that sync button
00:52:55 ◼ ► doesn't always do something but i do feel better when i press it well my favorite part about the
00:53:00 ◼ ► sync button is once you press it it gets disabled oh yeah it didn't used to do that the old in
00:53:05 ◼ ► Sonoma gets disabled in Ventura it wouldn't get disabled you can hit it again it was like that
00:53:09 ◼ ► like the closed door button on the elevator to make you feel good it doesn't tell you what it's
00:53:12 ◼ ► doing no progress bar no progress bar no spinner not even in the indeterminate there is there is
00:53:18 ◼ ► some some very low contrast text at the bottom of the sidebar that says syncing messages from iCloud
00:53:23 ◼ ► all right if you can find that and if you can see it with your old eyes it's there but my problem
00:53:28 ◼ ► with whatsapp and signal which are the two i'm most familiar with i don't use line or some of
00:53:32 ◼ ► the other ones but they're so phone centric that you're always and the way you registered
00:53:38 ◼ ► their other clients is always your phone is your main account for signal or whatsapp and then brutal
00:53:43 ◼ ► i know signal is rolling out usernames and i know both of us probably use signal for the same reason
00:53:48 ◼ ► but i never want to give oh let someone communicate with you on signal that's such i have to give them
00:53:52 ◼ ► my real phone number because i use my real phone number with signal see that's why i use a google
00:53:56 ◼ ► voice number for signal and i have it i should have done that but it's too late it's too late
00:54:01 ◼ ► and it yeah you don't want to give out your phone but they are supposedly rolling out if that if
00:54:04 ◼ ► signal continues to exist now that all this government funding has been pulled from them
00:54:08 ◼ ► i can't wait until they roll out usernames because i will leap on that in a second right and i don't
00:54:13 ◼ ► want to complain about and i know signal takes the sort of privacy part more serious than anybody else
00:54:19 ◼ ► including like iMessage especially in terms of being a target like if you're a political dissident
00:54:27 ◼ ► or a journalist who takes really sensitive anonymous tips from like government employees
00:54:34 ◼ ► or whistleblowers or something and you want the utmost secrecy and privacy of these things that
00:54:42 ◼ ► therefore they they don't really have like online backups of like your message history like so for
00:54:47 ◼ ► the most part and i know they're working on that but for the most part like give it with whatsapp
00:54:51 ◼ ► and signal if you lose your phone you kind of lose your message history and your mac and your ipad are
00:54:56 ◼ ► always these sort of satellites to your phone that you register by shining a qr code from your phone
00:55:03 ◼ ► to this they don't even they don't even try to say oh we're going to keep all these in sync all
00:55:06 ◼ ► the time because doing that would be a security violation because like you're only allowed
00:55:10 ◼ ► it's like you get a message in both places if they're both registered at the time the message
00:55:14 ◼ ► arrives and i understand like that's a totally different focus right the way iMessage is
00:55:20 ◼ ► architected where and again i'm probably like right up there with like an apple employee who
00:55:27 ◼ ► tests a bunch of devices because i keep all these old iphones and i have review unit macbooks and
00:55:33 ◼ ► stuff so at any given time i'm like logged into iMessage on 10 different devices maybe at least
00:55:40 ◼ ► and so every time somebody sends me an iMessage it actually goes to 10 and and each device has
00:55:45 ◼ ► its own key pair and there's a lot of work going on there to make it look as seamless as possible
00:55:52 ◼ ► that my iMessages just show up everywhere all the time right at the same time and the other
00:55:58 ◼ ► platforms don't do that well at all and of course it makes sense that apple the company that sells
00:56:03 ◼ ► things like expensive five thousand dollar macbook pros would make it a more of a priority but it's
00:56:08 ◼ ► neither here nor there here's what i want to run by and i hope you like it because i've actually
00:56:13 ◼ ► spent most of my friday working on it but here's my analogy is that if you are an amex platinum
00:56:21 ◼ ► card holder and they run american express runs centurion lounges at a couple of dozen airports
00:56:29 ◼ ► around the world and so when i go to philadelphia i now go way early this is the best part about the
00:56:35 ◼ ► centurion lounge is it gets me to go to the airport early and so i'm never last minute for
00:56:41 ◼ ► a flight anymore i go early and all i have to do is i go to the centurion lounge show them my
00:56:48 ◼ ► platinum amex show them my boarding pass they make you have the boarding pass because it's
00:56:52 ◼ ► i guess they're worried that people will just go to the airport to get free food i don't know it
00:56:58 ◼ ► seems weird it always seems weird to me that they make you show a boarding pass but they do
00:57:02 ◼ ► but if you have a platinum amex and a boarding pass they say welcome mr grouper do you need the
00:57:08 ◼ ► wi-fi password and i don't because i've been there before but they have very good wi-fi very
00:57:14 ◼ ► comfortable chairs they have desks they have food that is actually really pretty good for free a
00:57:21 ◼ ► full service bar and you could just get alcoholic beverages for free they just give them to you
00:57:26 ◼ ► they've got really nice bathrooms they've even got like showers so that if you're on some kind
00:57:32 ◼ ► of extended trip or have a really long layover or something you can get a shower it's all quote
00:57:38 ◼ ► unquote free but it's not free it's something you get as a perk for paying i think i don't know i
00:57:45 ◼ ► don't know what my annual fee is it's i think three or five hundred dollars or something like that
00:57:50 ◼ ► i don't know you pay like three or four hundred dollars a year to have an atnam amex platinum card
00:57:55 ◼ ► and one of the perks is you get access to these centurion lounges i message is sort of like that
00:58:02 ◼ ► for apple device users it is free they just give it to you if you pay for an iphone an ipad or a mac
00:58:11 ◼ ► and you just get a very nice end-to-end encrypted high speed very reliable messaging service for all
00:58:20 ◼ ► of your devices it doesn't compress your images it lets you send video you can send big video
00:58:25 ◼ ► attachments doesn't recompress those but if you don't have an amex card you can't get in a lounge
00:58:31 ◼ ► you can just wait in the terminal right and pay for your food and that's like sms and beeper is
00:58:39 ◼ ► sort of like a way that you can come into the centurion lounge and show like a fake platinum
00:58:44 ◼ ► card and get in and get all the free food i i think the analogy kind of holds i mean but i think
00:58:50 ◼ ► a very a very john grubber analogy for sure and a long way to go to get to the idea that apple runs
00:58:55 ◼ ► servers you know how to use them without apple's permission i think the government case and this is
00:58:59 ◼ ► you know what everyone should have access to that centurion lounge if that came to pass like
00:59:03 ◼ ► centurion round is so important that you should not deny anyone access but the solution would be
00:59:07 ◼ ► very much you've talked about so many past shows all the degrees that say apple has to allow third
00:59:11 ◼ ► party processing if apple was ever forced to open the iMessage network they would say fine anyone
00:59:15 ◼ ► can go in the iMessage network you just pay us this license fee and show us the source code to
00:59:19 ◼ ► your app and the license fees would be so high we're like oh i'm not going to pay that to get on
00:59:23 ◼ ► that's not fair and it's well the government just said you need to have access and they didn't say
00:59:26 ◼ ► you needed to be able to build a profitable business by selling a client for giving i'm
00:59:31 ◼ ► going to give away the paper client for free i'm going to charge you two dollars a month
00:59:34 ◼ ► but wait apple wants how much money they want how much money per message because there's no
00:59:38 ◼ ► rules in the sort of you let me to allow access dictating the exact economics of how apple allows
00:59:46 ◼ ► 27 instead of 30 well and that holds with the analogy because i could take a if i'm traveling
00:59:53 ◼ ► with a companion who is not a platinum card holder i could take them into the centurion lounge by
01:00:01 ◼ ► paying 50 per adult it's 30 bucks for a kid and 50 bucks for an adult and you have to pay with
01:00:08 ◼ ► a platinum card nice apple doesn't have that option with iMessage but like you said if forced
01:00:16 ◼ ► to then they could say okay anybody can join iMessage it's 50 a year and try telling somebody
01:00:21 ◼ ► that they have to pay for a messaging service yeah or whatever it would cost and this is the
01:00:25 ◼ ► other factor that's why i mentioned them showing the source code is apple doesn't want clients that
01:00:30 ◼ ► it doesn't know about using its network even if they said iMessage is going to be open to
01:00:33 ◼ ► third-party clients they would have to be some sort of validation maybe a test suite they have
01:00:37 ◼ ► to pass maybe they have to see the source code because every new client you have on the network
01:00:41 ◼ ► is a potential security risk because you end and encrypt doesn't mean everything is safe forever
01:00:47 ◼ ► you have to trust the app you're using because the app in the end decrypts your messages to show them
01:00:50 ◼ ► on your phone screen so the app has access to all your messages in going and outgoing in plain text
01:00:56 ◼ ► and you hope the app isn't secretly sending them off somewhere right and storing them for later
01:01:02 ◼ ► but the only we trust apple not to do that but do you trust this third-party client or that one and
01:01:06 ◼ ► if there's any third-party client on the network that's essentially exfiltrating conversations in
01:01:10 ◼ ► plain text apple would want to know that because that changes the security like people say oh it's
01:01:15 ◼ ► the apple has no argument about security they have a great argument would you want a an unknown
01:01:20 ◼ ► third-party client that's able to exfiltrate messages in plain text on your network you can
01:01:24 ◼ ► no longer say the iMessage network is secure end to end because you don't control the ends anymore
01:01:29 ◼ ► so if they were forced to open the network they would have to have some system whereby they
01:01:33 ◼ ► validate okay this client app this binary say something like app review but actually sane and
01:01:38 ◼ ► working is not doing something nasty with the messages that it is receiving yeah i don't know
01:01:46 ◼ ► what they would in a hypothetical world where regulators do force them to quote unquote open
01:01:51 ◼ ► it up i don't know if that would mean that they would be forced to just have you know would they
01:01:55 ◼ ► comply by apple releasing its own iMessage app for android and say that that's not opening i mean
01:02:02 ◼ ► this will never happen because again i don't think if you want to pick something that apple needs to
01:02:05 ◼ ► open up let's start with the app store maybe and not the thing that actually has competition there
01:02:09 ◼ ► aren't a whole bunch of competing app stores and apples is not the most popular there are a bunch
01:02:13 ◼ ► of competing messaging clients and apples is right it's the most popular in the us but not worldwide
01:02:18 ◼ ► right and it the point i've made this too the other one of the other security points that
01:02:22 ◼ ► beeper keeps brushing past is and as they keep reimplementing the register your phone number
01:02:29 ◼ ► without an iCloud account to use it is as beeper mini first existed and as they keep trying to come
01:02:37 ◼ ► back to apple has lost control over user account creation on their own network yeah and that is a
01:02:43 ◼ ► security problem and beeper might have the best i i do actually believe that beeper has the best
01:02:48 ◼ ► of intentions and are and trustworthy intention yeah we don't think they are exfiltrating it but
01:02:54 ◼ ► how do you know and what about they're not exfiltrating now what if someone buys beeper
01:02:58 ◼ ► what if their client gets hacked what if their company gets hacked right how does apple know
01:03:02 ◼ ► that they're actually storing the messages on device like the cache or whatever's there in a
01:03:06 ◼ ► trustworthy way that other apps on the phone can't read them they don't know and they're like well
01:03:11 ◼ ► we'll show you our source code apple did they didn't want to do this you can't just say they
01:03:15 ◼ ► don't want they don't want to audit your source code it's hard enough for apple to keep its own
01:03:18 ◼ ► clients secure they're constantly bugs in apple's own clients they don't want to multiply that out
01:03:23 ◼ ► and so it's just right particularly iMessage right i it's a the number one source of zero days or it
01:03:29 ◼ ► had been in the past because people receive messages so it's taking years and years for
01:03:34 ◼ ► apple to to work on security problems to wall off the parts of the message app so they're less
01:03:39 ◼ ► exploitable and that's just that's the richest company in the world working on the one and only
01:03:44 ◼ ► ios message app over the course of a decade and a half right we want to open the door to to a
01:03:49 ◼ ► company of the size of beeper yeah sure you can write a client throw in the network it'll be fine
01:03:52 ◼ ► right with a lot of it being operating level operating system level security things like the
01:03:58 ◼ ► whole blast door thing is in the operating system not iMessage for security so that whenever
01:04:03 ◼ ► i long story short or layperson's explanation when an image comes in on iMessage it gets put in
01:04:11 ◼ ► behind a quote-unquote blast door and the image is rendered or read the bits the decoding part of it
01:04:19 ◼ ► is the dangerous part all right this series of bytes claims to be a jpeg let's decode it but
01:04:28 ◼ ► do it in a sandboxed process so that if it's a maliciously formed jpeg it's the code is running
01:04:35 ◼ ► in a process that has access to nothing else including the rest of imus did you hear about
01:04:39 ◼ ► the bios speaking of decoding images you're at the bios bug is uh yeah you don't remember this well
01:04:44 ◼ ► anymore because we have all these apples with a max remember uefi that like the firmware that was
01:04:49 ◼ ► on like efi firmware that was on intel max it was basically like the tiny bit of stuff that gets the
01:04:53 ◼ ► machine running in the beginning that kind of firmware you can put firmware passwords in anyway
01:04:57 ◼ ► there's a bios in the days of pcs some bios are uefi firmware on pcs and it had a feature where
01:05:05 ◼ ► pc makers could have it so it shows their logo when you turn it on oh yeah and the and of course
01:05:10 ◼ ► this tiny little firmware code and it's very simple and it's just it's not a full operating
01:05:14 ◼ ► it's just the firmware and the thing that decodes the vendor image to display on the screen had a
01:05:20 ◼ ► security exploit so you could basically route a machine by giving it a malicious vendor image
01:05:25 ◼ ► to the uefi bios and what can you do you can't like you can't patching the operating system's
01:05:30 ◼ ► gotta help the operating system hasn't come yet you just turn the machine on right the operating
01:05:34 ◼ ► system hasn't even been woken up yet yeah it's too late it's just that yeah so image decoding and why
01:05:39 ◼ ► didn't they make it a little an isolated thing and blast like it's firmware there's not even like a
01:05:44 ◼ ► full operating system running in there yet it's just you're just turning yeah anyway and it was
01:05:49 ◼ ► tricky and again most programmers even really clever ones aren't thinking like an asshole
01:05:58 ◼ ► right they're not thinking like a jerk they're just like oh wouldn't it be cool if instead of
01:06:03 ◼ ► showing all of this stupid terminal garbage you know auto exec bat it probably still shows that
01:06:08 ◼ ► but it shows the logo first yeah well wouldn't it be cool if it showed our logo first and they would
01:06:13 ◼ ► say yes anybody's logo because we're gonna sell this we're gonna sell this bios to lots of pc
01:06:17 ◼ ► makers so just put your logo file right there and you'll be fine right and it's yes that would be
01:06:22 ◼ ► a much cooler way a much cooler thing to see upon first booting your pc so yes let's ship it
01:06:29 ◼ ► and like you said there is no operating system it's just literally just the firmware that's
01:06:35 ◼ ► bootstrapping the computer so it can load an operating system so obviously it's probably very
01:06:46 ◼ ► uh anyway i do not expect i i expect that this iMessage beeper thing will now settle down and go
01:06:53 ◼ ► away i don't know it's fascinating to me though i guess that to me the most fascinating thing is
01:06:58 ◼ ► the fact that people just people who should know better including i think even the people at beeper
01:07:03 ◼ ► just overlook what iMessage is it is a tremendously large proprietary messaging platform that it just
01:07:12 ◼ ► is sort of seen as invisible it's it must be frustrating to the people who work on like the
01:07:18 ◼ ► iMessage infrastructure because it's like hey what about us i'm busy all the time you know how hard
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01:10:18 ◼ ► reads on any of your podcasts i do not do you think you could would you like to uh i would not
01:10:23 ◼ ► like to i could but i would do a terrible job i used to do a terrible job you know that because
01:10:29 ◼ ► i know you listen to my show no yeah you did a terrible job but you got better i think the same
01:10:32 ◼ ► thing would happen to me i would do a terrible job for a few years eventually i would get better but
01:10:36 ◼ ► it is not a thing i relish doing i will tell you that's one thing you cannot you can't practice it
01:10:41 ◼ ► or at least i couldn't i tried talking to myself without a microphone on tried doing it can't do it
01:10:47 ◼ ► you got to actually do it i don't know how did marco end up as the sponsored guy seems like casey
01:10:53 ◼ ► because casey's sort of like to do all the work yeah but marco does an amazing job on them he's
01:10:57 ◼ ► really good he was not as good at the beginning but he started off better than you and he got
01:11:02 ◼ ► better real fast and i think casey does a great job too casey is you're right casey is more
01:11:06 ◼ ► naturally inclined to do it he's casey's only done a few ads and i think he started off even better
01:11:09 ◼ ► than marco but he just hasn't done as many so he doesn't have the experience yeah it seemed it was
01:11:14 ◼ ► casey's job seems to be to do all the pre-show work he told he said on the last episode hey
01:11:20 ◼ ► what planet do you want to do all the pre-show work he he said the other day that on the days
01:11:25 ◼ ► you guys record he said yeah he sits down in the morning what he said was he sits down in the
01:11:30 ◼ ► morning and he goes over all the notes and all the links how do you think all those notes and
01:11:33 ◼ ► links get there that he's looking at in that morning who put them there that was me he sits
01:11:38 ◼ ► down in the morning of the show and looks at now what am i going to do today because i've already
01:11:42 ◼ ► put it all there don't get this wrong okay we all do our own we all pitch in and we all do our own
01:11:49 ◼ ► things but there are they're somewhat distinct and when marco does the post he does all the editing
01:11:55 ◼ ► and yes exactly actual publishing it's i don't know you should try it on one of your podcasts
01:12:00 ◼ ► too late for atp but no thanks what else do i have on the agenda here oh there's the ios passcode
01:12:07 ◼ ► story which is ongoing i don't have a lot more to add about this i know that you guys talked about
01:12:12 ◼ ► it but the are you gonna are you gonna turn your you're gonna turn on the stolen device protection
01:12:18 ◼ ► i am i'm gonna try it i i have mixed feelings about whether i want to or not because i kind
01:12:23 ◼ ► of feel like what happens am i going to be annoyed if i ever do but then i thought like i don't think
01:12:28 ◼ ► i've learned enough about it to think that i'm actually not going to be annoyed assuming there's
01:12:31 ◼ ► no bugs that are catastrophic and screw me over right i think it really won't impact my life at
01:12:38 ◼ ► all i think so too because i realized i never change i never change passwords right like the
01:12:44 ◼ ► idea that you don't tell people that on a podcast you change passwords constantly they're all very
01:12:49 ◼ ► unique and random and they're always changing i think it's i think a lot of my passwords including
01:12:54 ◼ ► i think my iCloud password are easily 10 years old like the idea that you're supposed to regularly
01:13:00 ◼ ► change your passwords as good password hygiene i think is not just nonsense but you shouldn't
01:13:07 ◼ ► change it every 90 days but you can change it once every few decades i mean your security practices
01:13:12 ◼ ► may not be the best yeah they're probably not but but then i think but if i don't change my iCloud
01:13:17 ◼ ► password and or if i do only change it once a decade why do i care if i have to wait an hour
01:13:22 ◼ ► and i guess i i don't have to wait an hour if i do it at home i know you changed your apple id
01:13:27 ◼ ► password at least once because you told me your apple id password remember when you reset your
01:13:30 ◼ ► apple id password to something so i could use it do you remember that it was ages ago before our
01:13:36 ◼ ► apple ids were email addresses and you wanted me to do something with your apple id so you changed
01:13:40 ◼ ► your password to some simple phrase that i could use and then i logged into your apple id and did
01:13:45 ◼ ► something and then you changed it back i don't i have no recollection of that whatsoever i i you
01:13:49 ◼ ► know why i know that because i was recently cleaning out my keychain and i found that iCloud
01:13:53 ◼ ► password for your old non-email apple id do you remember what the password was nope but i remember
01:13:59 ◼ ► the apple id was john space grouper yep and the the password was the other john ah there you go
01:14:06 ◼ ► the other john now that rings a bell yeah yeah remember that oh you changed your apple id password
01:14:11 ◼ ► at least once i'm hoping it's not still the other john you know what though that's a different apple
01:14:18 ◼ ► id yeah i know it's nice again we've all so much has changed since then no that's but the main
01:14:24 ◼ ► thing my takeaway about this whole saga since joanna and nicole when first started reporting on
01:14:29 ◼ ► it is you're okay as long as your device passcode is a secret and as long as you treat it as a holy
01:14:37 ◼ ► i saw you when you say that the pines like i'm just gonna be real careful and not let people see
01:14:43 ◼ ► my passcode who do you think you are i just hold it real close to my chest you don't you go to
01:14:48 ◼ ► casinos everyone can see everything i don't i but i i almost never need to enter my device
01:14:55 ◼ ► passcode all the time i don't think you're as as james bond as you think you are and hiding your
01:15:01 ◼ ► i wouldn't i if i were in a casino i wouldn't enter my device passcode on my phone i really
01:15:07 ◼ ► have three three drinks in you just want your phone unlocked face id fails for some reason you
01:15:11 ◼ ► get frustrated you type in no i wouldn't because i and i'd be super i would actually be extra
01:15:15 ◼ ► suspicious in a casino because there's shifty people about well i mean if you're in a casino
01:15:21 ◼ ► you got another problem because you got the what is it rubber hose encryption you know about that
01:15:24 ◼ ► one where they just put you in a chair and beat you with rubber hose until you right on the passcode
01:15:28 ◼ ► they don't even have to do that they're just going to grab your phone from you hold your arms behind
01:15:31 ◼ ► your back hold up to your face all right so i don't know maybe i should turn it on and and i
01:15:36 ◼ ► thought that uh talking to joanna like when apple announced the stolen device protection last week
01:15:42 ◼ ► she wouldn't tell me she didn't she did not spoil it she's a good wall street journal employee and
01:15:47 ◼ ► would not say what it was but she said i'm so annoyed because i've spent a ton of effort on
01:15:53 ◼ ► something coming next week and i'm worried that this spoils it and i was like oh i'll look forward
01:15:58 ◼ ► to it and then the the thing was she traveled all the way to minnesota to visit a guy in prison who
01:16:06 ◼ ► was part of a crime ring who had stolen police say at least 300 000 not just of phones but then
01:16:13 ◼ ► using this technique of get the passcode then go in the phone and change the icloud password and
01:16:20 ◼ ► turn off find my so the victim is can't do anything with the phone and is locked out of their icloud
01:16:27 ◼ ► and now you can get into their keychain and look for bank accounts look for paypal look for venmo
01:16:34 ◼ ► and start clearing the cash out of that and then start going to retail places and uh using apple
01:16:41 ◼ ► paid to buy what you can and he told her that while the police said that they stole 300 000
01:16:48 ◼ ► worth of stuff he thinks it was more like a million which i'm not quite sure it whether to believe him
01:16:53 ◼ ► and give him credit for honesty he had a ridiculous accounting i'm sure of everything he stole in a
01:16:59 ◼ ► notebook like in the style of the wire i also i do i i do think he was being honest at the end
01:17:06 ◼ ► where his regret was getting too greedy not that he had been living a life of crime there's a lesson
01:17:12 ◼ ► for the silicon valley people that he just had a lifestyle criminal business but no we have to try
01:17:16 ◼ ► to be as big as facebook but my my my favorite takeaway from the video and again and i i'll spoil
01:17:23 ◼ ► the detail she did not make public but she she actually went there to interview him on her
01:17:28 ◼ ► birthday so it was ruined the family fun of joanna stern's birthday but i thought one of the best
01:17:34 ◼ ► parts they actually got at the last minute some security footage from like some minneapolis bars
01:17:41 ◼ ► it where this guy she interviewed with him showing him like with his victims and it was way more
01:17:50 ◼ ► social engineering than even i was thinking and as soon as i saw it i was like you know what i should
01:17:55 ◼ ► you should all never underestimate how much of any of these hacks is social engineering like it
01:18:00 ◼ ► wasn't like surreptitious it wasn't oh we'll set up a guy with a camera to look at this thing it
01:18:06 ◼ ► was like he everybody had a couple of drinks and he's got his arm around the one guy they're like
01:18:11 ◼ ► friends and he would say it's like hey you should like join my snapchat account follow me on
01:18:17 ◼ ► instagram or something here give me your phone i'll give you my account and people would just
01:18:21 ◼ ► hand their phone over to this stranger and then he would squeeze the two buttons and say hey it's
01:18:25 ◼ ► locked oh and then they'd say and some of them he said would just give him the number it's one two
01:18:31 ◼ ► three four and he'd say one two three four and then he'd put them on his snapchat give him the
01:18:35 ◼ ► phone back and then later on steal their phone and now he knows their number and the game is over but
01:18:41 ◼ ► it's the willy-nillyness with that people were willing to share their device passcodes with a
01:18:47 ◼ ► stranger it surprised me and then i thought about it and i thought i don't think people have any
01:18:52 ◼ ► idea how i think that's the fundamental problem it's one of those things that you're never going
01:18:57 ◼ ► to think about until it happens to you and then the dawning real the series of cascading dawning
01:19:02 ◼ ► realizations of how much power someone has if they have your access to your phone yeah i mean
01:19:07 ◼ ► and then any in any security system humans are always the weakest link so it makes perfect sense
01:19:11 ◼ ► to go after them first don't try to crack the encryption just get the guy to get a few drinks
01:19:15 ◼ ► and tell you the number i think that most people think that it's just sort of that the passcode is
01:19:21 ◼ ► on your phone just to keep people from like nosing through your pictures or something you know right
01:19:27 ◼ ► going through all of your pictures reading all of your emails and and they think if i'm only going
01:19:33 ◼ ► to hand my phone to this guy for a minute while he pops types right i got the phone right back
01:19:37 ◼ ► i'm fine i got the phone right back i know that he wasn't going through my pictures or whatever
01:19:42 ◼ ► they think what's the difference they don't care it's almost like the sharing the bathroom code
01:19:48 ◼ ► with somebody right right oh what's the code to go to the bathroom oh it's four three two one
01:19:52 ◼ ► oh okay and then they go in there they don't think of it that way whereas they would never give a
01:19:58 ◼ ► stranger their atm pin code exactly but their device and the atm is way better protected because
01:20:05 ◼ ► you can't take out more than 200 or whatever and there's a camera right there in front of the thing
01:20:10 ◼ ► and your phone probably has access to the same bank account that your thing so your phone passcode
01:20:16 ◼ ► is like a superset of your atm pin code but nobody would just give their pin code to a stranger so i
01:20:22 ◼ ► think basically treating your device passcode as a secret at least as valuable as your atm code
01:20:28 ◼ ► gets you most of the way to not having to worry about this but like you said on the other hand
01:20:33 ◼ ► i don't even know what the downsides are to turning on the stolen device protection for me
01:20:37 ◼ ► you should turn it on and see if you even notice the downside because if you said share location
01:20:40 ◼ ► to your house that you never leave and given how often you change your passwords this will not
01:20:45 ◼ ► come up in your life i don't think you'll notice that it is there but and in fact i would suggest
01:20:49 ◼ ► as we talked about an atp they're like maybe have all the your family members turn it on as well
01:20:54 ◼ ► and see if it annoys them because you can always disable it after but like why not try it and see
01:20:59 ◼ ► if you turn it on and they don't even know get their consent obviously but if you say i'm going
01:21:03 ◼ ► to turn this on and if it ever annoys you in any way let me know and we can turn it off but i just
01:21:07 ◼ ► want to try it yeah i i kind of think that's probably true i've kind of coming around to that
01:21:12 ◼ ► because the worst case scenario oh okay i don't like having this on then the worst case scenario
01:21:18 ◼ ► is you have to when you decide i don't like having this you have to wait an hour before you turn it
01:21:23 ◼ ► don't have to wait an hour for you to trust the location right and i guess you don't i i'm still
01:21:27 ◼ ► not confused about that because i was but i i think part of the reason that my test device
01:21:34 ◼ ► didn't recognize my home is my home is that it's a test device using a spare apple id not my apple
01:21:41 ◼ ► id i just don't want to turn this on on a beta operating yeah yeah yeah i mean that's why is it
01:21:45 ◼ ► usually using your test apple id too but also i think the trust the location thing is going to be
01:21:49 ◼ ► configurable so it's not like it's just your home and your work i think you can set locations but
01:21:53 ◼ ► we'll i i definitely wouldn't use this in beta if you don't have to and don't use it on your real
01:21:57 ◼ ► apple id in beta but once it comes out we'll see yeah uh also in the news apple's journal app
01:22:03 ◼ ► shipped have you used it have you looked at it i launched it for the first time while you were
01:22:07 ◼ ► doing an ad read literally the first time ever launched it i have no interest in an app like this
01:22:12 ◼ ► but i do know that this type of app is popular and i think it is i think it has reached a level
01:22:17 ◼ ► popularity that it is reasonable for apple to ship a rudimentary one of these with their phone plus
01:22:23 ◼ ► the whole thing what they're doing with api so that third parties can contribute items that might
01:22:27 ◼ ► appear in the journal it's kind of one way it's not quite the way you'd want it to be kind of like a
01:22:32 ◼ ► calendar where third parties can make full-fledged calendar apps for example or photos apps where you
01:22:37 ◼ ► know but this is like the other direction where like well third-party apps can contribute stuff
01:22:41 ◼ ► that you might want to put into your apple journal in your apple journal app which is not
01:22:44 ◼ ► completely open but like i said i think it is a reasonable thing for there to be a default one
01:22:50 ◼ ► of these on every iphone i can't pass any judgment on the feature set of this app because i do not
01:22:55 ◼ ► use journaling apps but presumably it's a 1.0 and it will get better i have never kept a journal or
01:23:01 ◼ ► a diary really regularly but i've been playing with this app and so i am but i don't think i'm
01:23:09 ◼ ► going to keep it up but i'm doing it mostly just because i keep i'm really interested in the app
01:23:21 ◼ ► didn't ship until 17.2 in december and it's iphone only for the moment there's no ipad or mac app
01:23:31 ◼ ► and it is a really simple app it is just a list of entries there's a plus button at the bottom
01:23:38 ◼ ► to make a new entry and you make entries and then there's a list of them it doesn't have a search
01:23:44 ◼ ► feature yet so you can't search it again doesn't have ipad or mac clients i was like how could this
01:23:50 ◼ ► have not shipped on time and then the light bulb went off and i realized the app is very simple
01:23:57 ◼ ► and thin and iphone only but the work was all of these apis because the apis work two ways there's
01:24:05 ◼ ► the suggestions that the system gives to the app so like when you hit the plus button it'll say
01:24:11 ◼ ► oh you went on a walk yesterday do you want to use that as a journal entry for yesterday and there's
01:24:17 ◼ ► a map a little map insert that'll show you the course or wherever it was that you went or it'll
01:24:24 ◼ ► show you recent photos or something like that and those are apis that third-party journaling apps
01:24:30 ◼ ► can use so like day one to name the i guess the most popular long-standing ios journaling app can
01:24:38 ◼ ► and i guess is using those apis to get suggestions or prompts for entries and i guess it works
01:24:44 ◼ ► the other way too where those third-party apps can offer their own suggestions to the system
01:24:52 ◼ ► so that any journaling app that that subscribes to this can do it that's where all the work was
01:24:57 ◼ ► to do this to add these features and to cross every i or cross every t dot every i to make
01:25:10 ◼ ► is inherently needs to be private that's where all the work was and why it didn't ship till 17.2
01:25:17 ◼ ► but i find the app itself fascinating because i think most journaling apps i've looked at day one
01:25:23 ◼ ► over the years it never again i don't want to keep a journal so i'm not really in the target market
01:25:28 ◼ ► but it seems like most of them it gets to the design idea of what's like the atomic element of
01:25:34 ◼ ► your app and i think for most journaling apps they're sort of like calendars where the atomic
01:25:40 ◼ ► unit is a day where it's like okay here's a new day what happened today and the day is the unit
01:25:48 ◼ ► which i think kind of is like going from the skeuomorphic era of where you kept a diary in
01:25:56 ◼ ► an actual book right and if you can keep a diary in just a plain notebook but they sell diaries
01:26:02 ◼ ► that have like dates at the top already right so you just already it's like a page is a day
01:26:07 ◼ ► like it's like a combination calendar type thing apple has obviously a notes app that's been on the
01:26:16 ◼ ► iphone since the first version you could i'm sure there are probably with a billion plus users
01:26:23 ◼ ► there's probably millions of people who keep a journal or a diary in apple notes right you could
01:26:28 ◼ ► just say here's a new note or here's a folder in my notes that's my journal they have hashtags in
01:26:36 ◼ ► notes now so you could use a hashtag to keep your journal entries or something like that and notes
01:26:41 ◼ ► has a lock so that you can put like an extra layer of layer of security on certain notes or
01:26:47 ◼ ► like a whole folder at a time but the journal app used and this is where i was like i wonder what
01:26:53 ◼ ► apple's going to do why they're not making this part of the notes app and what fascinates me about
01:27:00 ◼ ► it is that the metaphor for the journal app to me is clearly inspired not by like a notes app
01:27:07 ◼ ► but instead by like social networking it's like your own personal one person social twitter just
01:27:13 ◼ ► for you and so instead you don't have days you just have entries so you could do three entries
01:27:19 ◼ ► on one day you could do none for a while and you don't need a title you just hit plus start typing
01:27:26 ◼ ► you can add pictures or a map or something and then you're done and then you just have this
01:27:31 ◼ ► one timeline of entries ordered chronologically i it's deceptively simple but i feel like
01:27:38 ◼ ► i've never seen that idea put forth in a personal app rather than a public social networking app
01:27:44 ◼ ► in my first 30 seconds with the app i just said i launched it for literally the first time ever
01:27:49 ◼ ► earlier and i also just tried to like hit the plus button to to make an entry and in the first run
01:27:56 ◼ ► experience it says as it has a sheet that explains what it's going to do and it says do you want to
01:28:00 ◼ ► allow me to do suggestions like the thing you just described so the other apps can suggest things to
01:28:04 ◼ ► it or whatever and i said yes allow suggestions and then it popped up an os dialog for allow
01:28:09 ◼ ► notifications just the regular notification dialog i said okay and then i'm when i hit okay i was
01:28:14 ◼ ► back to the same screen that i had seen previously but the one big button on the bottom that said
01:28:18 ◼ ► allow suggestions was grayed out because i had already hit it and i was like so what do i do now
01:28:23 ◼ ► and i wiggled the sheet a little bit and it wiggled up and down i'm like is this a bug is there
01:28:28 ◼ ► some button i should be able to hit do i swipe the sheet away no is there anything animating on the
01:28:34 ◼ ► screen can i get the thing behind it i tapped on the thing behind the sheet nothing happened and
01:28:40 ◼ ► then eventually the sheet slid down and what it revealed to me is that i had been working hard to
01:28:45 ◼ ► build up that big giant grid of memories and images and prompts and everything behind the scenes
01:28:50 ◼ ► right i know this isn't specifically about the journal app but i'm gonna say that it's another
01:28:55 ◼ ► one of those pieces of basic information about human interaction design that has somehow departed
01:29:00 ◼ ► the company of apple when your computer is doing anything that takes a little bit longer than
01:29:06 ◼ ► expected put up something on the screen so people know that the computer is busy and it will be done
01:29:15 ◼ ► indeterminate spinner and i know you think it's not going to take a long time but i have 175,000
01:29:20 ◼ ► pictures on my phone and when it does take more than two seconds pop up a spinner very frustrated
01:29:26 ◼ ► i think it's another piece of the same mentality at apple that has gotten them away from showing
01:29:34 ◼ ► error messages when things go wrong yeah and i kind of understand that one as well but it's
01:29:39 ◼ ► this is fundamentals it's like fundamentals in basketball dribbling passing there there used to
01:29:45 ◼ ► be in the old days in the prehistoric days in the dinosaur era error messages from any software were
01:29:52 ◼ ► always just cryptic codes right error 128 or something like sometimes it was a negative number
01:29:58 ◼ ► yeah sometimes it was a negative number there i used to know what that meant what the hell did
01:30:01 ◼ ► that mean in classic mac negative meant something i think it was like i don't know but you'd get an
01:30:08 ◼ ► error number and there was no google there was no internet or are there but negative 37 with a bomb
01:30:15 ◼ ► icon would become your friend right and then you could duly report well if you had a way because
01:30:21 ◼ ► you remember a lot of the you know if you go back far enough and you and i both do where you didn't
01:30:26 ◼ ► even have emails reporting a bug to the developer might have meant writing a letter and putting it
01:30:31 ◼ ► into postal mail but you could tell them you've got error 37 and somebody somewhere has a list
01:30:38 ◼ ► of what the error codes are and what they actually mean and we all learned as user interface designers
01:30:44 ◼ ► or critics whichever side or both that we could be that's a bad way of doing errors and that your
01:30:49 ◼ ► error messages should be descriptive and give as much helpful information to the user describing
01:30:54 ◼ ► what went wrong and what what action you might take what actions you might take and i remember
01:31:00 ◼ ► it might even still be there somewhere in the remnants of the human interface guidelines of
01:31:05 ◼ ► what they are but when the human when the hig was really a book there was like a whole chapter i
01:31:10 ◼ ► think about like writing good error messages yeah exactly i mean and that one their heart's the
01:31:15 ◼ ► right place with that one but with the thing that i'm talking about is one of those things where
01:31:19 ◼ ► i think that's probably still in the hick which is look if you have an operation it's going to take
01:31:22 ◼ ► over a certain amount of time put something up so the user knows that they're waiting on the computer
01:31:26 ◼ ► but you know the people who made this program it's like when they hit that button we're going to be
01:31:30 ◼ ► so fast at composing the screen that sheet's going to slide down in a fraction of a second
01:31:35 ◼ ► there's no way this is ever going to take more than a fraction of a second and they don't test
01:31:39 ◼ ► with the photo library the size of mine and now i'm waiting long enough to be struggling to figure
01:31:43 ◼ ► out what the hell i'm supposed to press on the screen trying to tell if the app is frozen yeah
01:31:47 ◼ ► do you need to force quit no where i was going to with the error message to me in modern it like
01:31:51 ◼ ► apple took error messages in the right way long ago where they made them more descriptive and
01:31:56 ◼ ► tried to get third-party developers to get more descriptive but modern apple has said error
01:32:01 ◼ ► messages are bad and rather taking that to mean let's write even more reliable software that
01:32:07 ◼ ► doesn't generate errors they just don't show errors they errors occur and to me far worse
01:32:15 ◼ ► than just saying error negative 37 is not showing anything at all and not having anything because
01:32:22 ◼ ► what it does is it adds doubt to everyone's mind and when anything is happening they're like
01:32:27 ◼ ► is our errors silently occurring or is this normal operation because at least when you're
01:32:31 ◼ ► when you expect if anything goes wrong i'm going to see some stupid error message at least you know
01:32:35 ◼ ► if i don't see one of those nothing has gone wrong yet but you can't make that assumption once
01:32:39 ◼ ► they've trained you that hey something could be going wrong we're not going to tell you about it
01:32:42 ◼ ► right and so i think they're doing the same thing now with progress indicators where they're like
01:32:46 ◼ ► that's a bad experience and so instead of writing that in the next version instead of writing taking
01:32:51 ◼ ► that to heart and writing software that never takes more than a fraction of a second to do
01:32:57 ◼ ► anything they just don't show a progress i mean but that's not possible i know things scale like
01:33:02 ◼ ► they in the common case yes it's not going to take a while the app wasn't hung like i said i could
01:33:06 ◼ ► still move the sheet up and down like it's not it wasn't a hang right it was just simply they just
01:33:10 ◼ ► never expected this take a long period of time so there was no sort of they didn't think start a
01:33:15 ◼ ► timer and if the timer reaches three seconds throw show a spinner there's no place to show a spinner
01:33:19 ◼ ► they're never going to show a spinner no matter how long it takes and they just it's not a big
01:33:22 ◼ ► deal but and by the way speaking of error messages from from the gaming world your son may know this
01:33:27 ◼ ► but the gaming world has to tackle a similar problem because modern video games are fiendishly
01:33:31 ◼ ► complex the the one a popular game that i play destiny the way they handle this is not unique
01:33:36 ◼ ► to destiny many games do this but i'm very familiar with it in destiny is anytime there's an
01:33:40 ◼ ► error for the application for whatever the reason they will they essentially have that same
01:33:46 ◼ ► dictionary of numbers negative 9 57 whatever right but they don't put like an error code up on the
01:33:51 ◼ ► screen to make you report that error they map them all to words so you get weasel errors beaver
01:33:56 ◼ ► errors like they're all like animal like memorable names like that because gamers will all talk to
01:34:02 ◼ ► each other and say oh i got a weasel error it's memorable they remember it it's not like they have
01:34:06 ◼ ► to write it down when it happens or whatever how many beaver errors are happening to and on the
01:34:10 ◼ ► back end that means something to them but that mapping is such great social engineering because
01:34:16 ◼ ► it's not like people know it remember it and report it without having to write it down when
01:34:21 ◼ ► it happens error one h p q 974 that's actually pretty clever i like that i'm not familiar with
01:34:28 ◼ ► that but i will check anyway i just i i admire the design of the journal app as a social feed
01:34:34 ◼ ► that is anti-social because it's just for you i think it's a super clever design and i really do
01:34:40 ◼ ► i don't i mean i'm not the developer of day one so maybe they're not happy about it but i think
01:34:47 ◼ ► in terms of not sure locking the existent entrance in the market doing this ultra minimal version of
01:34:57 ◼ ► a journal that i find very appealing i find this to be that this is the closest i started using it
01:35:03 ◼ ► only to test and explore the app but it's the most inspired i've ever been to actually use it as a
01:35:09 ◼ ► journal because the metaphor is so simple and clicks for me and is so to me original it's just
01:35:18 ◼ ► so not overkill i really like it um i do and i agree i think like this type of thing where apple
01:35:24 ◼ ► when there's a common use case like this where a certain genre of app is popular apple should make
01:35:29 ◼ ► one and include it with the phone it makes the phone more valuable and i don't think if done
01:35:33 ◼ ► well that really hurts the market for third-party ones because what they're doing is introducing
01:35:37 ◼ ► people to the idea of journaling and if they want a better journaling app third-party apps are
01:35:40 ◼ ► available and especially if they take the approach again using calendars as an example there's a
01:35:45 ◼ ► thriving ecosystem for third-party calendar apps because the operating system calendar is accessible
01:35:51 ◼ ► to third-party apps you can make a calendar app that can do essentially everything that apple's
01:35:56 ◼ ► calendar app can do uh if they can do that with journaling as well they haven't quite gone that
01:36:01 ◼ ► far with journaling but if they can do it with journaling as well what it does is make a healthier
01:36:05 ◼ ► more thriving ecosystem for journaling apps instead of saying oh you've sherlocked me and now
01:36:09 ◼ ► i can't uh ship a commercial uh journaling app because you give everyone for free right the
01:36:14 ◼ ► other thing that journal app does that i think is a first for apple is the floating plus button at
01:36:18 ◼ ► the bottom that's a very google yeah yeah that's a androidy googly off the top of my head i can't
01:36:26 ◼ ► think i uh doesn't tweet bot or not tweet bot yeah a lot of a lot of third-party uh twitter
01:36:30 ◼ ► clients and uh and mastodon clients do have the flame i hate it i hate the floating button but
01:36:34 ◼ ► yeah it's there it covers up the content it does it does but it just emphasizes to me the fact that
01:36:43 ◼ ► it is like a personal social network feed right it's yeah yeah the plus button is sort of like
01:36:47 ◼ ► that so hats off to apple for doing that uh i there must be i actually did speak to somebody
01:36:54 ◼ ► at apple pr before journal came out they wanted to i had a 10-minute webex call before 17.2 shipped
01:37:01 ◼ ► because they wanted to sort of build the hype for it and build the awareness for it and of course
01:37:08 ◼ ► i all my none of my questions ever get answered for the most part like i asked is there going to
01:37:13 ◼ ► be an ipad or mac client and of course the answer was we we don't talk about our future products
01:37:19 ◼ ► yeah right but as it stands journal already does sync to icloud by i guess you could turn it off
01:37:27 ◼ ► the way that you can turn off any apps access to icloud but out of the box if you were signed into
01:37:32 ◼ ► icloud it does sync to icloud so if you lose your phone you won't lose your journal and if you have
01:37:39 ◼ ► two iphones yeah which of course you do which of course i do you can see that they stay in
01:37:45 ◼ ► sync with each other so they have built a sync system that would seemingly already work if if
01:37:51 ◼ ► and when there come ipad and mac clients oh yeah speaking of losing your stuff that's the other
01:37:56 ◼ ► thing that it gives me a little bit of pause about journal and why it would be better if it was well
01:38:01 ◼ ► i don't know if it was like calendar would be the same deal i suppose if you're going to spend weeks
01:38:07 ◼ ► months years of your life journaling in there putting your precious memories building up years
01:38:11 ◼ ► worth of content what you hope is that apple respects that and if apple decides that they
01:38:15 ◼ ► don't want to make the journaling app anymore they'll have some way for you to export that in
01:38:19 ◼ ► a reasonable format but even if that happens it's still disappointing oh man i use this app for my
01:38:23 ◼ ► kids childhood years and we put so many memories in it and now the app just is gone and can i get
01:38:28 ◼ ► an export or did i miss the thing and what i'm thinking of is something that i did with my kids
01:38:32 ◼ ► we had iwebsites remember iweb yes of course we had pictures of our kids and a blog about them
01:38:43 ◼ ► great program it was kind of unwieldy but we filled it with years and years of stuff and iweb
01:38:47 ◼ ► of course is no longer a thing at apple and i have these giant iweb archive like the data file for
01:38:53 ◼ ► iweb but it's just sitting in my backups and i don't really have a good way to view it i did
01:38:58 ◼ ► do a bunch of html exports and stuff so you can kind of see it and i believe i still have it
01:39:01 ◼ ► online somewhere but iweb the application no longer exists or runs except for really old
01:39:06 ◼ ► versions of mac stuff and i always worried when apple does something like this is can they be
01:39:10 ◼ ► trusted with my memories when it comes to calendar and photos i think they probably can be trusted
01:39:15 ◼ ► but the journaling thing i'm not entirely sure they're so dedicated that this is worth putting
01:39:19 ◼ ► decades of your time into yeah there is no export feature no import feature i mean it's a 1.0 it is
01:39:26 ◼ ► a 1.0 like i said there's no search even yeah which is seems like there has to be a search
01:39:31 ◼ ► eventually but you would i would imagine you just pull down and a search box will come from the top
01:39:37 ◼ ► yeah search is missing as a day-to-day usability feature now and export is missing but also raises
01:39:44 ◼ ► questions about the privacy security again i think and there there ought to be eventually a way to
01:39:52 ◼ ► export i mean it seems criminal i mean as far as i can tell now if you really wanted to export you'd
01:39:56 ◼ ► have to go through one by one select all copy and paste yeah i mean this is another area where apple
01:40:03 ◼ ► could have a little bit more religion about this because the other example that i hear complaints
01:40:08 ◼ ► about a lot is iMessage believe it or not right people people think of iMessage as i mean maybe
01:40:14 ◼ ► this is like some people have it in their mind some people have in their mind that iMessage is
01:40:18 ◼ ► forever and so the conversation they had when they first met their wife five years ago before
01:40:23 ◼ ► they went on their first date and they iMessaged back and forth and they had cute flirting and
01:40:26 ◼ ► stuff they a apparently they think they can somehow get back to that by scrolling which
01:40:31 ◼ ► i don't know how they do that but b if that ever disappears they consider it like data loss you
01:40:36 ◼ ► remove pictures pictures from my wife and i just met if apple accidentally deleted them or they
01:40:40 ◼ ► scroll off the end or if they didn't think people would be furious but some people not all people
01:40:44 ◼ ► but some people view iMessage the same way and apple either doesn't view iMessages that way or
01:40:50 ◼ ► is not able to implement iMessage in a way that makes looking back at that old conversation
01:40:55 ◼ ► possible yeah that's one of my big complaints about iMessage just that it is really hard to go
01:41:01 ◼ ► back in time and search is better than it was but still better right uh that's a that that's
01:41:09 ◼ ► a perfect description yes better than it was but not great you ever try to scroll back on the mac
01:41:14 ◼ ► version it was awful before and it's still bad but it's just so weird like they really need to do like
01:41:18 ◼ ► a month years like they do in photos like where you can go in granular chunks but i just think
01:41:23 ◼ ► the sync system for messages and the way the service is designed is not meant to be a permanent
01:41:28 ◼ ► archive for of decades long conversations forever and ever which means that if you want that out of
01:41:33 ◼ ► it apple should implement an export feature of some kind to make some kind of offline archiver
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01:44:54 ◼ ► favorite podcast ATP over on the other side of this conversation so I guess it's getting close
01:45:06 ◼ ► that just happened this week or they're going to close it next month have you were you ever at the
01:45:10 ◼ ► infinite loop company store yeah I think I've been there a couple times I was only there once that I
01:45:16 ◼ ► can remember and it was recently because it was in the era when it looked like it didn't look it
01:45:21 ◼ ► it looks a little different than most apple stores but it looked mostly like yeah I was never there
01:45:26 ◼ ► back before apple retail because I heard it looked very different then did you see I I linked on on
01:45:32 ◼ ► daring fireball to a reddit thread that had some photos of what it looked like circa 1993-94
01:45:40 ◼ ► and then I later today I found scrolling down the same thread I guess it's the same user there was
01:45:48 ◼ ► apple made a quicktime vr of the store back in the day when that was a thing and so this industrious
01:45:55 ◼ ► and helpful reddit user made a screen recording of the quicktime vr which because the quicktime
01:46:02 ◼ ► vr doesn't really play anymore so he found I don't know if he was emulating or had an old mac
01:46:08 ◼ ► and used the quicktime vr and made a video and so you could kind of see what it was like to walk
01:46:13 ◼ ► through it is so apple 1993 and if you were an apple user back then or a mac user it can't help
01:46:22 ◼ ► but bring nostalgia but it also emphasized just how far apples come because it really just sort
01:46:29 ◼ ► of looked like a nice it was a nice egghead yeah yeah like a nice egghead exactly like if your
01:46:35 ◼ ► neighborhood mac reseller was really nice and had new shelves that's because that's what computer
01:46:41 ◼ ► stores look like they had box software right lined up on a bunch of shelves you have computers on a
01:46:46 ◼ ► little like a little table kitty corner to the end cap on some display and you had a bunch of it was
01:46:51 ◼ ► like that combined with the merch store at your kid's college right to have the sweatshirts you
01:46:55 ◼ ► could buy yeah it was just very like the the floor plan the layout of how all the racks are arranged
01:47:02 ◼ ► it was like a software retail store combined with the college store in 1990 yeah i have in fact have
01:47:09 ◼ ► been at my son's merch store at his university and it yes it's exactly laid out like the apple
01:47:15 ◼ ► company store was in 1994 drop ceilings apple has leveled up in production values in so many ways
01:47:24 ◼ ► but none more so than architecture yeah the current retail stores and they've always been are so much
01:47:31 ◼ ► more beautiful and elegant but also a little bit more kind of spare and impersonal and i still wish
01:47:38 ◼ ► they had checkout lines i've given up on that but i do i do still wish that they did and i still
01:47:45 ◼ ► i guess the reason i've i complain less is for the most part when i go to my local apple store
01:47:52 ◼ ► it's to buy something that you couldn't order online or that's the it's a little thing like
01:47:59 ◼ ► a battery pack or i did i actually did when they discontinued the apple iphone battery pack i went
01:48:07 ◼ ► and bought one while they still had them because i thought that's it's a really good battery pack
01:48:12 ◼ ► and i thought that's it's a good way to sort of have a iphone that could be charged either by
01:48:20 ◼ ► usb-c or lightning because then if you have usb-c you could plug it in the phone i don't know if that
01:48:26 ◼ ► was a smart move or not but like i wrote on the site the other day money runs through my hands
01:48:30 ◼ ► like water so i bought one i went last week i popped in and bought 12 south a third-party
01:48:46 ◼ ► it's a little aluminum thing i'll put it i swear to god i will put it in the show notes but they
01:48:52 ◼ ► only are selling it it's made by 12 south but they're only selling it through apple stores
01:48:56 ◼ ► and i couldn't buy it online or if i went to buy it online it wouldn't ship till january but i could
01:49:02 ◼ ► go to my local apple store and pick it up right now so i went to the local apple store and picked
01:49:06 ◼ ► it up but i could just walk in pick it up the shelf and then just check myself out yeah check
01:49:11 ◼ ► out thing i still haven't done that yet i've gotten to the point now where i'm comfortable
01:49:15 ◼ ► with it i've i every time i've done it and in the philadelphia store they have actual police
01:49:21 ◼ ► officers at the front door every single time i did it for years i would think i'm gonna get stopped
01:49:27 ◼ ► i'm gonna get stopped and then i'm gonna have to talk show them my phone and nope i could just walk
01:49:32 ◼ ► right out i mean it's it breaks some part of my brain that says that i need to check out right
01:49:39 ◼ ► before walking out just wait until they implement that amazon technology where you just walk in and
01:49:43 ◼ ► pull it off the shelf and walk out and they figure out how much to charge you later the 12th south
01:49:48 ◼ ► thing is a little circular thing it's a little bit bigger than a pair of airpods pro case and it's
01:49:55 ◼ ► two parts and it breaks apart and on the one side it takes usb-c in and it's a charger so you can
01:50:01 ◼ ► put your phone on the one side and then on the other side is an apple watch charger that pops up
01:50:07 ◼ ► so that you could use the watch as a whatever they call it nightstand mode and the recent airpods
01:50:14 ◼ ► cases also charge on that same thing so for traveling it's super small super lightweight
01:50:20 ◼ ► charges your iphone at the high speed for magsafe charges your watch at the new high speed which is
01:50:26 ◼ ► a lot faster than the old speed and you could charge your airpods case on either side of it
01:50:32 ◼ ► and so apple used to make the same thing i forget what apple called theirs but it's you know it folds
01:50:37 ◼ ► yeah i remember that the apple one was like 150 bucks and the problem with the apple one well hey
01:50:41 ◼ ► now the problem is it was like lightning in and lightning is no longer something we talk about
01:50:47 ◼ ► but the other thing was that the size of it the iphones got so big that they kind of got too big
01:50:53 ◼ ► to fit comfortably on it the camera bump the camera bump pushed it off that's a problem with
01:50:57 ◼ ► a lot of the inductive charging things right so this one made by 12 south has a pleather
01:51:04 ◼ ► connector between the two circular halves and they made the pleather thing far enough apart that
01:51:12 ◼ ► i think iphones could get significantly bigger and you'd still have no problem fitting it side by
01:51:17 ◼ ► side so 130 bucks not cheap but it seems like a very good product there's my review just put it
01:51:22 ◼ ► on your christmas list why are you buying this stuff for yourself see that's i'm the worst you
01:51:26 ◼ ► talk to my wife i am the worst you know you're getting this here and i i had nothing charcoal
01:51:33 ◼ ► that's what you're getting because you're almost out i am i should get charcoal no i'm the worst
01:51:38 ◼ ► person to buy gifts for because even in december when the idea pops into my head you just demonstrated
01:51:46 ◼ ► it that i would like x i just i am meat and i i don't just go get it i get it the way that is the
01:51:53 ◼ ► fastest so whatever the fastest way for me to get whatever it is that just popped into my head that
01:51:59 ◼ ► i should buy i just do it as you're walking out the door your wife should have said where are you
01:52:03 ◼ ► going i'm going to the apple store to buy something she said what are you buying tell them tell it to
01:52:07 ◼ ► me i'll get it to you for christmas i want it now well and i bought it i don't know it's probably
01:52:11 ◼ ► four or five days ago i still i'm podcasting about it now but i keep thinking i'll at least link to
01:52:16 ◼ ► it and write some form of minimal review on daring fireball i'm obviously running out of time before
01:52:21 ◼ ► christmas so whatever i would have told you four days ago well i will definitely have written about
01:52:26 ◼ ► it before christmas so i couldn't wait until christmas to do this obviously at this point i'm
01:52:31 ◼ ► i easily could have gotten it as a stocking stuffer but i didn't are you are you like that
01:52:37 ◼ ► do you or are you more diligent and if you have stuff you want you'll suggest to your family it
01:52:42 ◼ ► would be nice if they bought you blank i mean i have the discipline now that around november
01:52:47 ◼ ► things that i would normally just buy for myself instead of buying them put them on a list see i
01:52:51 ◼ ► don't do it i have no discipline i am the absolute worst but you're going to keep that passcode secret
01:52:57 ◼ ► no one will ever see it nope nobody will ever see the person with no discipline is going to make
01:53:02 ◼ ► that happen you know what this feature would have been great for this feature would have been great
01:53:05 ◼ ► during covid when we had masks and the so at the time everybody was wearing masks everywhere
01:53:11 ◼ ► face id didn't yet even have the option to work with a mask and so yeah we were and i wanted to
01:53:20 ◼ ► at the time when we were worried that you know you could die if you touched covid germs contactless
01:53:26 ◼ ► payment seemed more important than ever so i was trying to use apple pay even more than i usually
01:53:31 ◼ ► do but i had to i always have to type my contactless payment even when it works well you still have to
01:53:37 ◼ ► press the button that says no thanks that you don't want to give them your telephone number and
01:53:40 ◼ ► all this other crap before you get to do the contactless payment part so yeah yeah it turns
01:53:45 ◼ ► a quote-unquote contactless but what else anything else on the main agenda oh i know what i wanted to
01:53:50 ◼ ► tell you i wanted to tell you we have a new we have a new pc in the house did i said if you look
01:53:55 ◼ ► at the shared note i sent you you could see a picture of it is this a christmas present it is
01:54:01 ◼ ► but we decided that because he's only got a limited amount of time before he has to head back
01:54:08 ◼ ► to college that he could set it up early it came it arrived yesterday and it is it was nice because
01:54:15 ◼ ► if we have we have an ero household and i got the alert when he set it up it is a curious company
01:54:21 ◼ ► name and i don't know how you'd pronounce it i don't know if they pronounce it n-z-x-t but it
01:54:25 ◼ ► reminds me of course of next right one letter off it is a big black rectangle but my son's gaming pc
01:54:35 ◼ ► i think we've bought him the i think it was 20 christmas 2017 or maybe 2018 but five years is
01:54:41 ◼ ► pretty long in pc gaming so that was that's jonas's big gift for the year you could have told them
01:54:47 ◼ ► your college tuition is your gaming pc now yeah that i would like many gaming pcs i would like to
01:54:55 ◼ ► when he got his first gaming pc i'm gonna say i'm gonna i'll say 2018 i don't know maybe but it was
01:55:02 ◼ ► five or six years ago but it was also a christmas gift and i wanted him to because i don't know shit
01:55:09 ◼ ► about pcs i really don't i mean i guess i i know them in terms of the way i just know how computers
01:55:14 ◼ ► work but i mean i haven't used windows since i don't know i think the last version of windows
01:55:21 ◼ ► i ever actually used was windows 2000 i don't know it's been a long time i just have no interest in
01:55:28 ◼ ► that universe so i wanted him to do all the research i was like we'll get you a good gaming pc
01:55:34 ◼ ► but you have to give me you know you do the research tell me all the comp everything you want
01:55:39 ◼ ► and why and justify it and he how much of that do you think he did yeah he's your kid so not a lot
01:55:46 ◼ ► not a lot and so i got involved and i steered him toward a small smaller case from the company
01:55:57 ◼ ► his msi which makes a bunch of components for pcs but i steered him towards a smaller one
01:56:03 ◼ ► a smaller you thought the small one might be quieter you didn't know about pcs yet no i didn't
01:56:09 ◼ ► i thought maybe it would be louder actually because i realized space makes cooling better but
01:56:14 ◼ ► it probably was a bad decision because i remember i think i actually got help from you about this
01:56:20 ◼ ► remember his video card went bad did you paint yourself into a thermal corner i we painted
01:56:24 ◼ ► ourselves into a thermal corner so his first video card went bad it was probably a 3080 i guess would
01:56:32 ◼ ► that be right from 2017 or 18. no uh was it maybe it was a maybe i don't know it was a good video
01:56:40 ◼ ► card but it was a variant of it that was meant to fit in a smaller case and i think that was the
01:56:47 ◼ ► problem anyway the he ended up the pc worked when the video card went bad but it wasn't it was
01:56:54 ◼ ► only using like the built-in video but it was very just typical pc experience it wouldn't just show
01:57:01 ◼ ► an error it says your video card is toast it was it seemed like something we could troubleshoot
01:57:07 ◼ ► and we wasted a lot of time on it and we just had to replace it and the replacement we got was the
01:57:13 ◼ ► exact same nvidia number whatever the number is 40 whatever or 30 whatever but it was a different
01:57:20 ◼ ► you could because we had to take the old one out and look at the new one and you could see the
01:57:24 ◼ ► differences and specifically there were a lot of a lot of differences with the heat sink this time
01:57:30 ◼ ► he actually did do the work though he did configure everything he configured what brand to buy what
01:57:37 ◼ ► video card he personally wanted amd not intel for the cpu which i think is probably a fine decision
01:57:44 ◼ ► i think seems like a lot of gamers sort of feel that way there's the current state of the art so
01:57:50 ◼ ► he did everything that i wanted him to do the first time but this time he did it but and i told him you
01:57:57 ◼ ► probably shouldn't get it shouldn't get a small case but i said this is going to be a lot bigger
01:58:02 ◼ ► and he was like all right all right he's astonished by how big it is he can't believe it i and i'm
01:58:09 ◼ ► i can't believe that he can't believe it but i guess he just hasn't seen a lot of gaming pcs
01:58:15 ◼ ► because most of the people you just play online you don't see the other people's pcs this is a
01:58:20 ◼ ► pc that he he literally thinks he can't fit on his dorm desk oh yeah that's right if he's going to
01:58:26 ◼ ► take this back to school with him that's you should have more mac pros now so let them know
01:58:30 ◼ ► how big real computers are but actually this form factor of a case it's a tower style case it looks
01:58:34 ◼ ► like i mean i would say like it's an at tower but people don't or xt whatever actually those aren't
01:58:38 ◼ ► the right terms for towers never mind but it's almost as big as a what we used to call a full
01:58:42 ◼ ► height tower back in the day do you remember you ever see a full height tower pc back in like the
01:58:46 ◼ ► windows 95 windows 3.1 days they were so tall so huge they had spaces for five and a quarter inch
01:58:53 ◼ ► hard drives in them they were just monstrous but these days there is a form factor that i've seen
01:58:58 ◼ ► of gaming pcs that is like this tower but take two of these and put them side by side it's like
01:59:03 ◼ ► a more of a cube shape it is like the least efficient most space hogging designed for a
01:59:08 ◼ ► computer either so it's like as big and tall as a tower but twice as wide it's just a giant
01:59:14 ◼ ► sometimes they're made of like transparent materials like a giant cube like a huge cube
01:59:18 ◼ ► and you're like who has room for that literally anywhere you can't even put it under your desk
01:59:22 ◼ ► by your feet because it doesn't leave room for your feet it's so big in a dorm room i don't know
01:59:26 ◼ ► what they're gonna do with this but i mean it'll keep them warm in the boston winters i guess well
01:59:30 ◼ ► so he did not come home he did not come home with his gaming pc so last year he took his freshman
01:59:36 ◼ ► year he took his playstation 5 this year he left the playstation 5 here and took his gaming pc to
01:59:44 ◼ ► college so and he didn't bring it home for christmas because he only took a carry-on for the flight so
01:59:50 ◼ ► his current plan is to stop worrying about shipping this to college and just leave it at home for a
01:59:57 ◼ ► semester and then worry about next year yeah you'll drive it up in the rental van right i'll have to
02:00:02 ◼ ► i may have to get a u-haul for this thing it is very big i mean it's not bigger than mac pro sizes
02:00:07 ◼ ► it looks about no i guess not no i think it's probably about that size hopefully it's lighter
02:00:11 ◼ ► than a mac pro i've i have only owned one big desktop computer in my entire life i i had fresh
02:00:20 ◼ ► out of college so it was probably the summer of 1996 i bought a power mac 9600 350 which i used
02:00:31 ◼ ► the hell out of for oh man probably six seven years a long time never got to at the time they
02:00:41 ◼ ► were talking i think maybe it was 97 when i bought it because maybe they were already promises maybe
02:00:47 ◼ ► the next thing had already happened but they said it would run mac os 10 before it was called mac
02:00:53 ◼ ► os 10. is that around rhapsody yeah yeah rhapsody would run but it never did i was well g3 i think
02:00:59 ◼ ► you had to have a g3 to run mac os 10 and the power mac 9600 was 604 or something yeah i believe
02:01:08 ◼ ► i love that computer though man that was that was a good computer but man you get that computer what
02:01:14 ◼ ► job did you have that gave you enough money to buy that thing it was expensive i i got it after
02:01:26 ◼ ► and so i didn't buy it when it was the top of the line and it just come out but i knew enough to
02:01:32 ◼ ► know that it was better than like i i got it and i think it was like mac connection one of those one
02:01:38 ◼ ► of the catalogs and they just they had like a fire sale on it and i was like holy shit this is an
02:01:43 ◼ ► amazing deal right so i whatever i paid for it was far less than the original retail yet it was still
02:01:50 ◼ ► utterly relevant performance wise and lasted me without uh any complaint for years because it was
02:01:58 ◼ ► such a beast of a machine but i never again bought a desktop that's where you and i share so many so
02:02:07 ◼ ► much that you like that i like and i like that you like but our preference for computers could not be
02:02:12 ◼ ► more you don't even have a mac studio in the house somewhere nope well unless i have a review unit i
02:02:17 ◼ ► forgot to send back which is possible but i don't have one that i use i should that's what i should
02:02:22 ◼ ► do for my podcast setup instead of this yeah i mean yes the laptop is silly although actually
02:02:27 ◼ ► though i don't studio would be overkill though for my podcast setup a mac mini would be fine
02:02:32 ◼ ► i mean there are many yeah either way i was just like desktops that are less obtrusive now
02:02:36 ◼ ► i got my wife on a studio i think she likes it yeah no and i think i i have owned a mac mini
02:02:42 ◼ ► i forget what i bought one years ago so i i say desktop meaning yeah yeah case but boy this pc is
02:02:50 ◼ ► a beast do you have any piece you you don't what's the gaming situation with your kids no no pc is in
02:02:56 ◼ ► this household i've never i came real close years and years ago came really close to getting a
02:03:00 ◼ ► shuttle pc you know that company no i don't think so they make very small form factor pcs i think
02:03:07 ◼ ► sff was the small form factor they're they're kind of like shoe boxes right the idea is you get a pc
02:03:13 ◼ ► into it i mean it was it was also the days before video cards were so massive and took so much power
02:03:19 ◼ ► but back when you could actually fit a gaming video card in a slim shoebox size case without exotic
02:03:24 ◼ ► cooling because they were neat looking it was oh it's like a mac mini kind of like you you cram all
02:03:29 ◼ ► these components there you just pick the ones that you want it doesn't take up too much room in your
02:03:32 ◼ ► desk i'm like you know what i can get a gaming pc shove it off to the corner and use my same desk
02:03:35 ◼ ► and have a kvm these are all things that were possible when briefly there was an overlap between
02:03:41 ◼ ► pc hardware and mac hardware like they were both using vga connectors and they were both using
02:03:46 ◼ ► similar buses or you could you could get a kvkvm they could switch between them right but that
02:03:51 ◼ ► fever passed i never did actually buy it and then the world's diverged again and so no no gaming pcs
02:03:57 ◼ ► so i've got my playstation 5 which is what i do most of my gaming on on a gaming monitor
02:04:01 ◼ ► and i do play games on my mac it is still an intel mac i do have a big apple ridiculously expensive
02:04:07 ◼ ► apple video card in there i do have windows 10 on an ssd that i boot from and i can play windows
02:04:13 ◼ ► games and if any mac games gets it i could play them as well yeah how much of a factor is that
02:04:19 ◼ ► in your i mean and longtime listeners of atp know you held on to your previous mac pro for a
02:04:25 ◼ ► ridiculously long time absurdly long time comically long time while waiting for them to come out with
02:04:31 ◼ ► the next generation mac pro and then bought a very nice one for yourself but how much of your
02:04:37 ◼ ► still using the intel mac pro is based on the fact that you can game on it i mean it is kind of like
02:04:42 ◼ ► i kind of like i'm feeling like i'm saying goodbye you know what i mean because i know this is not
02:04:46 ◼ ► going to be the case for the next one so might as well write that and also i don't really feel
02:04:50 ◼ ► pressure to make this decision because apple's going to make it for me when they stop supporting
02:04:54 ◼ ► intel with mac os like that'll happen and whatever that happens i'll get an m4 mac studio or something
02:05:00 ◼ ► like unless they do something very different with the mac pro i'm no longer interested in that
02:05:04 ◼ ► machine because it doesn't give me any of the things that i want out of a machine that size
02:05:07 ◼ ► and price and i do like the mac studio i just hope you know who knows what the game situation
02:05:13 ◼ ► will be like by then but yeah i'm kind of enjoying this one while i have it because i know this will
02:05:17 ◼ ► be this is the end of an era there could be a new era someday i'm always rooting for this there's
02:05:22 ◼ ► not a lot of signs that it's happening we're always rooting for you know what microsoft and windows
02:05:26 ◼ ► should also come over to arm so that max could once again natively boot windows on i know windows
02:05:30 ◼ ► and arm exists but it's the the hegemony of x86 is still such that it's all it's got a long way to go
02:05:37 ◼ ► before like quote-unquote pc games are binaries that run natively in arm windows right do you
02:05:45 ◼ ► think i'm optimistic i know that and i don't want to rehash deep speculation about the future of
02:05:52 ◼ ► apple silicon but the idea is that the current mac pro with apple silicon just is not all that pro
02:06:01 ◼ ► really i mean compared to the mac studio right it kind of is a mac studio in a bigger case much
02:06:06 ◼ ► bigger case and because it's apple silicon there's not as much stuff that you can put in a case that
02:06:13 ◼ ► you could do on the intel like you said you've got some kind of monster what kind of gpu do you have
02:06:19 ◼ ► what i have the the pro vega 2 mpx module that apple sells that's one of the one of the great
02:06:24 ◼ ► things about this computer is the horrendously expensive video cards that apple sells are giant
02:06:29 ◼ ► and cost way too much money no fans on them right no fans just the biggest heat sink you've ever
02:06:34 ◼ ► seen in your life but no fans so by i at one point i had multiple gpu's in there at various points
02:06:40 ◼ ► none of those gpu's had fans in them adding another gpu would not increase the fan noise
02:06:45 ◼ ► unless heated them up so i love this machine for that but that is yeah yeah i feel like it
02:06:50 ◼ ► even though it's the the smallest selling by quantity mac that apple makes by definition of
02:06:57 ◼ ► it being super expensive and really only optimized for pros it also really was sort of exemplified
02:07:03 ◼ ► apple's design ideals versus the rest of the x86 makers if you wanted to see what would a pc look
02:07:10 ◼ ► like if apple made one like this machine this i don't know if you've seen i mean you have probably
02:07:14 ◼ ► one that oh yeah see whatever like the inside of this machine is immaculate yeah there are no wires
02:07:20 ◼ ► no it's not like the no visible wires like they hid them behind things there are no wires it's
02:07:25 ◼ ► like a work of art in there it really is and they're even the cards are even pretty they're
02:07:30 ◼ ► blue not green no yeah everything is beautiful and color matched and that's why you buy the apple
02:07:35 ◼ ► video card for 20 times the real price and it's like it has no fans it comes in this huge module
02:07:40 ◼ ► and it snaps in and it's got this proprietary connector the mpx module that gives you the
02:07:44 ◼ ► extra power so you don't have to have the extra power leads yeah i love that stuff i just it
02:07:49 ◼ ► pushes all my buttons i'm going to be sad when i get this replaced with a max studio which is
02:07:55 ◼ ► its own in its own right a cute little machine but not the cathedral to personal computers that this
02:08:00 ◼ ► thing is now when that when your intel mac pro shipped and fulfilling the promise of okay we've
02:08:06 ◼ ► completely rethought our approach to the pro market where we're coming back with pro max
02:08:12 ◼ ► we'll have a pro imac for you by the end of this year and then the next year they came out with
02:08:17 ◼ ► this they went no pulled no stops to show off to we in the media the internals they were they're
02:08:24 ◼ ► super proud of it but it's it exemplifies apple's design ideals way better than their laptops do
02:08:30 ◼ ► because a an intel macbook looks so much like an hp laptop because all the other companies that
02:08:39 ◼ ► make these aluminum laptops just copy what macbook airs look like and you don't see the inside of the
02:08:44 ◼ ► inside no apple and the inside of the apple laptops are in general better looking than the insides of
02:08:49 ◼ ► pc laptops but they're still kind of ugly because you got to cram everything in there it's like the
02:08:53 ◼ ► inside of an iphone you can't afford to make it pretty but when you've got as much space as in a
02:08:57 ◼ ► tower computer like it's gaming pc's obviously do this those are like little cathedrals to rgb
02:09:01 ◼ ► lights with their hard cooling tubes carefully arranged and everything but that's a whole
02:09:06 ◼ ► different aesthetic this is the apple aesthetic for a tower personal computer and it's just so
02:09:12 ◼ ► expensive and so low volume and so needless quote unquote needless like it doesn't make the computer
02:09:18 ◼ ► any faster but it makes it nicer it makes it more beautiful it makes it like a work of art this is i
02:09:22 ◼ ► do love this machine i'll miss it it and it's probably one of the last johnny i-visms i mean
02:09:30 ◼ ► because it's certainly the tail end of his time but the way that they hollowed out those circles
02:09:37 ◼ ► around the case and trust me they spent a lot of time talking to us in the media about how much
02:09:42 ◼ ► how much time it takes to to make one of those cases and now they've that it's apple silicon
02:09:47 ◼ ► it's just like a mac studio running inside this beautiful with a bunch of card slots it's just
02:09:52 ◼ ► just a desert in there right and i get it i know it's it for people with tremendous i/o needs it is
02:10:01 ◼ ► more pro than a mac studio so for there's video certainly like video production type people who
02:10:06 ◼ ► are pushing around 4k or even 8k video footage in which is enormous and you want lots of storage
02:10:13 ◼ ► inside it so if i/o is your problem the mac pro actually is a legit upgrade but only because the
02:10:20 ◼ ► next best thing has zero slots right because like the pci the pc a number of pci lanes and the
02:10:26 ◼ ► bandwidth available in the current mac pro is actually less than it was i mean it's not less
02:10:31 ◼ ► because it's a newer version of pci but it's not decked out oh you'll just a huge amount of
02:10:36 ◼ ► bandwidth it's better than zero cards so you take what you can get and you can put big honking things
02:10:42 ◼ ► inside there that you couldn't connect to a thunderbolt connector for example but it's not
02:10:46 ◼ ► even like they said okay well it's just the mac studio but we really went overboard with the with
02:10:51 ◼ ► the pci they didn't they just did sort of the minimum possible to get pci slots plus an m2 ultra
02:10:58 ◼ ► and it's kind of disappointing so i do think though my my takeaway from the introduction of
02:11:04 ◼ ► the m3 a couple months ago and the way that they've clearly rethought what the pro and the max are
02:11:14 ◼ ► compared to the regular where the pro is not just half of a max anymore right the max is sort of a
02:11:22 ◼ ► totally different thing the pro used to not be half of max the per used to be a max with some gpu cores
02:11:27 ◼ ► chopped off and that was right right that was and now it is it's a totally different system on a chip
02:11:32 ◼ ► much much different than something simplistic like that and i know that sounds simplistic but it
02:11:37 ◼ ► really was it was just the max with some gpu cores bend out but then that chopped off like physically
02:11:44 ◼ ► physically yeah is that because like if you believe apple's die shots you could overlay the
02:11:49 ◼ ► pro onto the max and you would see you would cover up all of the max except for the bottom part where
02:11:53 ◼ ► there was more gpu cores there was a project so what the ultimate is right now is the m2 ultra
02:12:02 ◼ ► and what there was a rumor that there would be like an ultra plus i don't know who they're
02:12:08 ◼ ► running out of adjectives but something that would be like two ultras together well that was the
02:12:13 ◼ ► original rumor with the m1 that you would get the you get the m1 and then you would get the m1 max
02:12:17 ◼ ► and you get the m1 ultra and then you get something that was essentially two m1 ultras or four m1 maxes
02:12:23 ◼ ► together what do you what would the adjective be what's more than ultra i think the that was the
02:12:28 ◼ ► jade 4c die i think that thing was canned before marketing got a chance to name any of these so
02:12:34 ◼ ► marketing was probably never faced with the problem of what are you going to call all these
02:12:39 ◼ ► with the quad one in there i think maybe that would have been ultra right yeah or extreme or
02:12:45 ◼ ► who knows yeah extreme apple's names are terrible well they're terrible but they're also funny and
02:12:51 ◼ ► what comes around goes around right i mean who knows they might still make now that they've gone
02:12:56 ◼ ► back to just apple books there might be an iBook again who knows yeah seemingly done keep waiting
02:13:01 ◼ ► they're seemingly done with the i prefix but who knows if they'll bring it back so they've made
02:13:06 ◼ ► extreme products before i they could do it again but it is funny because the one that makes me
02:13:11 ◼ ► laugh is max because max means max it's the maximum well and it also rhymes with max it also
02:13:18 ◼ ► rhymes with max so it's actually like i've all as soon as they named it i've said all the time it is
02:13:23 ◼ ► the worst product name ever for podcasting it works perfectly fine when you're in print and it
02:13:30 ◼ ► is the worst the max with the max chip is really just horrible to speak but the way that they've
02:13:38 ◼ ► clearly rethought the relationship of the different tiers at least in the macbook pros gives me more
02:13:51 ◼ ► it's it's a worthy goal even if the market is tiny to just make the fastest computer that anybody can
02:13:59 ◼ ► buy on the market or at least try to the way i always characterize it is right now in apple
02:14:04 ◼ ► silicon apple has given up trying to even compete in that high end if you think of the highest npc
02:14:11 ◼ ► cpu the highest npc gpu apple has nothing that is even trying to compete with it which is a shame
02:14:18 ◼ ► because it's not like they don't have the technology to do it but they're just not interested
02:14:21 ◼ ► in that market and they always used to at least try to compete at any time in the past you look
02:14:26 ◼ ► at apple's lines of computers they're fielding and you would say if you get the most expensive one it
02:14:30 ◼ ► is in the conversation with the most expensive pc with the most expensive graphics card or whatever
02:14:36 ◼ ► is it always the fastest that's obviously usually not the the best bang for the buck or whatever but
02:14:40 ◼ ► they were in the conversation and now it's like the ultra compared to a single top end nvidia
02:14:46 ◼ ► video card it's not really in the conversation well my son's goofy gaming pc upstairs probably
02:14:52 ◼ ► right yeah for sure you get a 40 90 versus the ultra it's not a contest i mean and i say goofy
02:15:05 ◼ ► almost as much as mine right but i do i have optimism that they haven't given up on that goal
02:15:12 ◼ ► and we just it just sucks for us being on the outside without ever hearing of their plans because
02:15:20 ◼ ► it there's something going on there where they're not just phoning it in on the above or on the
02:15:29 ◼ ► pattern of what is an m3 compared to an m2 they clearly rethought that so whether the m3
02:15:36 ◼ ► generation will be the one where the whatever the maximum that they can stick in the mac pro chassis
02:15:42 ◼ ► is i don't i i wouldn't be surprised if this isn't the year but maybe the m4 series will be i don't
02:15:47 ◼ ► know it seems we're talking about this on atp if you look at the m3 max chip like the dive shots
02:15:53 ◼ ► that apple gives you it looks very much like the m2 max and the m1 max in terms of where the crap
02:15:59 ◼ ► is arranged and we know with the m1 max and the m2 max the stuff was arranged so you could stick
02:16:03 ◼ ► another one to it end to end and make an ultra out of it because that's where they connect with
02:16:07 ◼ ► the silicon interposer and if you look at how the m2 max is laid out it's laid out so that you could
02:16:13 ◼ ► take another m2 max stick at the end and make an ultra and what we know about the the the previous
02:16:18 ◼ ► ones the m1 and the m2 is that they didn't have a way to connect four of them right and i think the
02:16:24 ◼ ► m3 max being end to end with another m3 max to make an m3 ultra is going to happen it will be
02:16:30 ◼ ► available in the max studio uh and they have no way to connect four of them and so if there is
02:16:35 ◼ ► going to be there if they're going to take a run at this i think it's going to have to wait at least
02:16:40 ◼ ► until the m4 and some of the vague rumors that i heard from my vague sources was like forget about
02:16:45 ◼ ► anything that's four of these things connected until past the m7 because that's how long these
02:16:50 ◼ ► roadmaps are and they kind of gave up on it right and i kind of understand that because it's look
02:16:54 ◼ ► why do we need to do that for every application realm that we care about you get acceptable
02:16:59 ◼ ► performance from an ultra and who cares if it's not in the conversation with the fastest nva
02:17:03 ◼ ► gaming card we don't care about that market anyway and we the frame rates you get are acceptable
02:17:09 ◼ ► and we're not used to we're never on a computer same thing with the gpu's you can buy that amd
02:17:13 ◼ ► i think the reason your son was interested in amd well probably not for gaming but amd offers
02:17:17 ◼ ► cpu's that have huge numbers of cores so does intel for that matter more than you more cores
02:17:27 ◼ ► sample we don't need that none of the applications we care about would take enough advantage of that
02:17:31 ◼ ► for it to be worth the cost it's the bargain apple got for itself now that they make their own socs
02:17:35 ◼ ► now they make their own chips they can make just the chips they want until it comes time to make
02:17:40 ◼ ► the one for their top of the line products and they're like how much is it going to cost us to
02:17:44 ◼ ► make that and how many of those do we sell oh and it was kind of easier when intel could sell their
02:17:48 ◼ ► xeons to every like server farm in the world and apple could benefit from that and yeah they would
02:17:53 ◼ ► pay through the teeth for the profit margins on those intel xeons but they didn't have to pay for
02:17:57 ◼ ► the r and d for those xeons and intel paid for the rnd for those xeons so they could sell a million
02:18:02 ◼ ► of them to data centers and also by the way sell them to apple with a huge margin on them and it's
02:18:06 ◼ ► not like okay well now that we don't have to do that we don't have to pay intel's margins we can
02:18:10 ◼ ► make our own xeons oh that costs way too much money that costs way too much money for the
02:18:14 ◼ ► number of mac pros that we sell so i don't know how they square this i think they should do it
02:18:17 ◼ ► and just suck it up as the r and d center for like pushing the envelope and mac performance but i'm
02:18:23 ◼ ► not optimistic about re-engaging with the high end for many more years if they've even decided they
02:18:28 ◼ ► want to do it but of course we don't know if they've even decided they want to do it it's just
02:18:32 ◼ ► what we're hearing and what we're seeing externally is don't hold your breath for a long time yeah i
02:18:36 ◼ ► often trot out the analogy that and i think you have too that it's like consumer car brands making
02:18:43 ◼ ► race cars honda has a race car team yeah mercedes is just a giant money pit it is a money pit but
02:18:49 ◼ ► the other thing that the race cars at least have is at least they can justify it on marketing
02:18:54 ◼ ► grounds where people actually there are millions of races see the millions and millions of yeah
02:18:58 ◼ ► millions and millions of people around the world love to watch f1 racing and and it's a you know
02:19:03 ◼ ► it's sensation on netflix and so there's some you know you could justify it marketing wise nobody
02:19:08 ◼ ► no there are no thousands of fans waiting to watch john syracuse with the the m4 extreme yeah although
02:19:17 ◼ ► i mean there is an equivalent version of that kind of there's esports right and people know about
02:19:22 ◼ ► nvidia and they know about famous gamers and they know about streamers and there is a place to put
02:19:26 ◼ ► your name out in front of people as a high performance brand it's not the same as formula one
02:19:31 ◼ ► but that like the marketing and the image behind nvidia because of their dominance in gaming and
02:19:36 ◼ ► because of how popular gaming is in the mainstream media that is a thing unfortunately nvidia is not
02:19:41 ◼ ► really a consumer company that's also trying to sell you like iphones or whatever but right
02:19:49 ◼ ► a apple style argument which is like long-term big picture don't think about short-term roi
02:19:57 ◼ ► like all the sort of touchy feely things the same reason they do all the environmental stuff and all
02:20:00 ◼ ► the other things they do but you can't make the argument for it as in do this now and at the end
02:20:05 ◼ ► of the year you'll make x amount of dollars because you won't all right and even with the
02:20:09 ◼ ► environmental stuff i kind of feel like you can say this actually is good for business because
02:20:16 ◼ ► it's long term yeah right well i and i definitely long term and i think the younger people are the
02:20:22 ◼ ► more they actually make their buying decisions based on stuff like that so i don't really i
02:20:28 ◼ ► don't i didn't look at the emissions of my macbook pro when i bought it but younger people do and
02:20:34 ◼ ► they care about it and knowing apple's trustworthy and saying what's their promise 2030 they're going
02:20:38 ◼ ► to be carbon neutral across the board uh yeah and yet still they haven't cancelled the car project
02:20:44 ◼ ► somehow i don't i don't understand that i mean i think you guys again i think you guys mentioned
02:20:49 ◼ ► that on atp that it seemed that it seems like impossible i don't i it could be the most most
02:20:55 ◼ ► energy efficient cars ever made but i don't see how you build and ship cars in a carbon neutral
02:21:00 ◼ ► way i but i guess that's neither here nor there the other thing i'm hopeful i do think i think
02:21:07 ◼ ► apple is in the way that all companies take on the personality of their founders and in for better or
02:21:14 ◼ ► for worse apple is and always will be in some ways steve jobs's company and he's a very spiteful man
02:21:21 ◼ ► i do think the fact that apple everybody knows does not like nvidia it can only help right it's
02:21:31 ◼ ► man it must bother them in some ways that a company they do not get along with kicks their
02:21:38 ◼ ► ass on gpu and happened there there was the whole thermal corner with the trash can but the whole
02:21:45 ◼ ► thing it's the way that apple 10 years ago with the trash can mac pro underestimated the next
02:21:53 ◼ ► decade of the importance in size of gpu's physical size it the whole ai thing and gpu as the more
02:22:02 ◼ ► important processor processing unit of all your pus in your computer the way that the gpu is
02:22:10 ◼ ► preeminent over the cpu now i would have never guessed it 20 years ago you'd think apple should
02:22:18 ◼ ► have been a position to guess it but they're so they're in their own little world where they didn't
02:22:23 ◼ ► but it must bother them now right so here they are today and i think it's clear and i know you
02:22:28 ◼ ► called me out i know i misspoke on certain details when the m3 came out about like the single highest
02:22:36 ◼ ► single threaded performance that you can pay you can throw enough money at intel or amd and maybe
02:22:41 ◼ ► beat the m3 not maybe yes definitely well you can and and like you said with the multi-core you can
02:22:49 ◼ ► get things from them with so many cores that of course the multi-core performance is going to win
02:22:54 ◼ ► because it's it's ginormous it's closer than you would think it is that's the frustrating thing
02:22:58 ◼ ► same thing with the gpu that that if you look at what apple does even with the ai stuff like
02:23:02 ◼ ► that recently they have those new recompiling libraries to take advantage of apple silicon
02:23:06 ◼ ► and neural engine they yeah their performance first of all their performance for a while is
02:23:09 ◼ ► amazing second of all the overall performance they're punching way above their weight class
02:23:13 ◼ ► the problem is there's this hulking monster that is seven times as big and it's oh apple if you
02:23:18 ◼ ► just made one that was twice as big as you have now you could compete because what you're doing
02:23:23 ◼ ► with what you got is amazing but nvidia is like this takes 500 watts and fills it's bigger than
02:23:28 ◼ ► an entire max studio and costs 1500 and we're they're winning by brute force right it's like
02:23:35 ◼ ► they're an nvidia is asking you how close do you live to your power station right like it's we're
02:23:39 ◼ ► not you know you don't have to do things the nvidia way like and that must be frustrating
02:23:43 ◼ ► to people involved because they're like we have the technology we have if we just doubled the
02:23:48 ◼ ► number of gpu cores extrapolate linearly from our performance now but but no we don't have a way to
02:23:54 ◼ ► package that and in an soc right i i do think it's fair to say again i misspoke on certain technical
02:24:00 ◼ ► details and you were you as usual were correct on those details but i think apple can rightly say
02:24:06 ◼ ► can rightly hold itself up and say we are the preeminent cpu designers in the world today our
02:24:12 ◼ ► cpu's maybe our top single threaded score isn't the best it's not and maybe we can get beat on
02:24:19 ◼ ► multi-core for whatever but we're good on cpu's we feel they're good at it i don't know if they
02:24:24 ◼ ► could say the preeminent they're very good at it but based on their priorities they are the
02:24:28 ◼ ► best yeah whereas they even by their own priorities they cannot possibly say that they're the best gpu
02:24:34 ◼ ► makers well you have to ask what their priorities are because they're like well everything we need
02:24:37 ◼ ► to do with our gpu's we find that the m3 ultra will it was acceptable and everything is okay
02:24:43 ◼ ► but what if you want to play a high-end game with the maximum frame rate so we don't want to do that
02:24:51 ◼ ► and gamers are like i need 240 frames per second now right it it's it's just you just know that
02:24:58 ◼ ► they're they're wrong they're behind on this when you're saying well it's the apple thing and the
02:25:04 ◼ ► most frames per second the frame rate doesn't matter we don't even sell displays that have
02:25:08 ◼ ► that refresh rate anyway that's that is not the apple way saying that frame rate doesn't matter
02:25:12 ◼ ► right the company that first went to retina for resolution the company that had the smooth still
02:25:19 ◼ ► has by far the smoothest scrolling on phones i don't know i'm sitting in front of a very
02:25:23 ◼ ► expensive apple monitor that refreshes 60 hertz so well it's you should just do all your computing
02:25:31 ◼ ► on a phone or a laptop screen only 120 like 240 hertz exists right well anyway they've and again
02:25:40 ◼ ► it's good for apple to be behind somewhere i think i mean i think one of the as a fan of the company
02:25:47 ◼ ► and a fan of their ideals and the priorities that they have it's been good to see them succeed but
02:25:54 ◼ ► when there's when the second place competitor in factor x that you care about is so far behind
02:26:01 ◼ ► it's easy to get lazy and it's so it's good to see them behind on gpu's but it is an open question
02:26:08 ◼ ► whether they care because the market for the number of people who who want to pay thousands
02:26:14 ◼ ► and thousands of dollars for the gpu to put in their mac pro is so small i don't know but i'm
02:26:22 ◼ ► at least talking to one of them right yeah no i mean so the thing is with the end of the intel
02:26:28 ◼ ► era the question is if you had an arm mac with an nvda class gpu what would you play on it what kind
02:26:34 ◼ ► of games would you play where would you get the games from that you play on that because if you're
02:26:38 ◼ ► thinking you're going to play windows games those don't run natively on arm right and so are you
02:26:43 ◼ ► going to play the the plethora of mac native games it's not really a lot of those out there either so
02:26:48 ◼ ► it's a difficult situation and that's i and that just it's a self-fulfilling prophecy if apple
02:26:56 ◼ ► for it and it's a spiral that goes downward and that's kind of what we're caught in right now
02:26:59 ◼ ► do you i do think as a final point i do think apple is at a very high level more interested in
02:27:09 ◼ ► the fixing this question of mac gaming than they have been i think ever really now i don't know
02:27:16 ◼ ► that not ever don't you remember game sprockets and input sprockets oh yeah that was way they
02:27:21 ◼ ► were making libraries and quick draw 3d not sprite kit quickdraw 3d input sprockets like that whole
02:27:29 ◼ ► thing they had all these libraries where they're going to make it easier to make mac native games
02:27:32 ◼ ► and a whole department doing it it was also equally misguided and terrible but that showed
02:27:37 ◼ ► them that was the most interest i think they ever had i mean they made the pippin game console for
02:27:40 ◼ ► crying out loud also completely misguided but that was their peak of interest you're right that
02:27:47 ◼ ► currently they are more interested than they have been have been in the past i don't know decade or
02:27:52 ◼ ► so but they're not at input sprockets and quickdraw 3d level yet the argument i've heard from people
02:28:00 ◼ ► at apple which i can't quote but probably i'm not even supposed to paraphrase but in an off the
02:28:06 ◼ ► record briefings but the argument from them and i do find part of this true now whether this will
02:28:10 ◼ ► actually lead to anything or not but my question this was when the m3s came out a couple months
02:28:18 ◼ ► ago in the macbooks and they had stuff to talk they didn't spend a lot of time talking about
02:28:22 ◼ ► games but they mentioned it but i my question was framed along the lines of you guys are talking
02:28:29 ◼ ► about games and the game the future of this is better but isn't it counterintuitive that you're
02:28:34 ◼ ► saying gaming is better on apple silicon than when the mac was on x86 which is the platform
02:28:41 ◼ ► that all the games are written for and their answer was that they thought basically the one of
02:28:49 ◼ ► one of if not the single biggest problem mac gaming has faced is the size of the addressable
02:28:54 ◼ ► market and that when the mac was on intel that whole era the addressable market for serious
02:29:02 ◼ ► gaming on mac was just a tiny subset of the mac market because so many macs were running were
02:29:11 ◼ ► laptops running on the shitty intel integrated graphics which are just terrible and so that the
02:29:18 ◼ ► addressable market for max that might be reasonable to run a game at a pretty good resolution at a
02:29:26 ◼ ► really good frame rate is way bigger in the apple silicon era than it ever was going to be on the
02:29:31 ◼ ► intel era and that they think that will get the attention of game makers i mean they're right up
02:29:36 ◼ ► to the point where they have the conclusion and therefore we will now succeed where we've really
02:29:40 ◼ ► failed it is true that they have raised the bar but like gaming very much like we mentioned the
02:29:44 ◼ ► formula one gaming is very much a market where even if most people don't have the high-end card
02:29:49 ◼ ► because it's expensive and you can't even get them it is aspirational and so you have to have
02:29:54 ◼ ► you have to have the high-end card available even though most gamers are going to have the two steps
02:29:58 ◼ ► down last year's model in their gaming pcs and there's just so many other problems they need to
02:30:03 ◼ ► address like it is they have we've talked about this in atp the floor for gaming performance on
02:30:07 ◼ ► max is higher than it has ever been because even the cheapest crappiest exact you get has better
02:30:13 ◼ ► but that is that is just one tiny thing you need to address but there's so much more just so much
02:30:18 ◼ ► more i mean think of it this way if you could make 100 of the current mac installed base any cpu
02:30:25 ◼ ► intel max arm any mac that anyone is using anywhere on the planet suddenly those things
02:30:30 ◼ ► have adequate performance to play games still a that might not be enough people to make a dent
02:30:36 ◼ ► and b do the people who have those computers even think of the idea of playing a game on them
02:30:44 ◼ ► and then see if they had that thought where would they find that game because all their friends are
02:30:47 ◼ ► playing in certain name of game x would it occur to them to get it oh go you can play that on your
02:30:53 ◼ ► mac how do i get it on my mac where do i buy it from is it available for a mac and the answer is
02:30:56 ◼ ► no you can't it's not available for the mac for use from apple will show a keynote where you can
02:31:01 ◼ ► play a game that all your friends played four years ago running at reasonable frame rates on
02:31:05 ◼ ► your mac but that's not they're so far from success in this market and it's going to take
02:31:10 ◼ ► so much for them to get there i what they're doing is they're not wrong that they did a good thing
02:31:14 ◼ ► it is better than it was but this is such a huge mountain for them to climb and they're just really
02:31:21 ◼ ► taking baby steps up the foothills of it right and apple arcade is really a sort of iphone first yeah
02:31:29 ◼ ► that's a whole different thing for what it is apple arcade i think is doing what it has to do
02:31:33 ◼ ► and serving its purpose but that is very different than the quote-unquote pc gaming market right we're
02:31:37 ◼ ► not out here trying to convince apple they need to be interested in the pc gaming market they have
02:31:41 ◼ ► apparently convinced themselves that they're interested in the quote-unquote pc gaming market
02:31:45 ◼ ► they just have absolutely no idea how to get from where they are to be competitive in the pc gaming
02:31:51 ◼ ► market and so they're doing some things that are moves in the right direction but what a hill to
02:31:56 ◼ ► climb for them and a cultural more than technical really i mean ultimately yeah you can't you can't
02:32:03 ◼ ► really have i mean i always use microsoft as the example of this like surely there are people in
02:32:07 ◼ ► apple there that really are for this right just like it at microsoft there was a small group of
02:32:12 ◼ ► people who said we should totally make a game console and i'm sure there were tons of people
02:32:17 ◼ ► microsoft has said no we should not make a game console but the people who wanted to make xbox
02:32:22 ◼ ► eventually made a go of it and even if there are still naysayers inside the organization there is
02:32:28 ◼ ► no doubt within the xbox organization that those people who are working on the xbox are like this
02:32:33 ◼ ► is a thing we want to do and they microsoft spent billions of dollars in many years and worked so
02:32:39 ◼ ► hard to essentially be the second place or possibly third place in in that market but you can't no one
02:32:45 ◼ ► denies that microsoft is a player in the game console market right and that is a thing that
02:32:50 ◼ ► they made happen a small group of people happen despite an organization that was somewhat hostile
02:32:54 ◼ ► to them within apple i feel like the group of people who want to do this is smaller and so much
02:32:59 ◼ ► more of the organization is hostile either unknowingly hostile because they have bad ideas
02:33:03 ◼ ► about how to achieve it or knowingly hostile and they say we should not be doing this at all it's
02:33:07 ◼ ► stupid right and they're not going to it doesn't almost it's the person who maybe should be if they
02:33:13 ◼ ► wanted to most involved wouldn't be like suruji or turnis or somebody or even fedorigi don't say
02:33:20 ◼ ► any q i was gonna say eddie q i know you're gonna to to do for games what he did for video content
02:33:28 ◼ ► for shows i mean i get what you're getting at what you need is someone who knows how to make deals and
02:33:32 ◼ ► do business stuff and how to throw money around right yeah you need but you also need someone
02:33:36 ◼ ► who knows the gaming industry if you look at the people who made the xbox happen in microsoft they
02:33:40 ◼ ► all you have to have game industry inside kind of like when apple made tv shows they didn't hire
02:33:44 ◼ ► people who like they hired people who knew how to make tv shows they found hey who's who's good at
02:33:48 ◼ ► producing television and movie content right but they didn't say they report to eddie q so it
02:33:53 ◼ ► wouldn't be eddie you know it'd be eddie as in a way for content eddie q is sort of like a ceo
02:34:00 ◼ ► within apple right he's like ceo of the content services and i think he's very good at it and i
02:34:06 ◼ ► think in a very humble way i think in a very humble way they went out and they hired people
02:34:12 ◼ ► x hbo people to run to to have that expertise and he said it's like people never go back i do the
02:34:20 ◼ ► claim chowder bit but there were all this stuff before apple tv came out and their first two shows
02:34:27 ◼ ► like literally carpool karaoke and then there was the one that was planet of the apps planet of the
02:34:32 ◼ ► apps right it was like what's that shark shark tank yeah not an auspicious start right it was
02:34:37 ◼ ► well it was worse than carpool karaoke but those didn't exemplify what apple tv plus is all about
02:34:45 ◼ ► right and before tv plus came out there were a couple of stories that like hey apple is meddling
02:34:50 ◼ ► with these people they're telling them tim cook's telling them to take out the dirty words and they
02:34:55 ◼ ► didn't like the gang violence into one show and they want everything to be nice and they're
02:35:00 ◼ ► sending these awful notes and that people in hollywood hate it and this is going to be a
02:35:05 ◼ ► disaster and then it turned out not to be true their shows are great i mean i think pound for
02:35:11 ◼ ► pound arguably the highest quality of any streaming service and without question one of the highest
02:35:18 ◼ ► average qualities of original content and you don't see those stories anymore you actually i've
02:35:24 ◼ ► seen well you got the john stewart story right yeah but i had you heard you i talked about this
02:35:30 ◼ ► i guess with ben but yeah i mean so here's the thing i meddling with the content is not the thing
02:35:35 ◼ ► that we're worried about because think of nintendo nintendo famously it was like no no blood on our
02:35:40 ◼ ► consoles we don't want this type right it doesn't matter as long as you make good games right it
02:35:44 ◼ ► doesn't matter as long as you make good shows it's fine to have an ethos and enforce it and say this
02:35:49 ◼ ► is the kind of movies you want these are the kind of movies we don't there is room for you to be a
02:35:52 ◼ ► pixar pixar doesn't make every kind of movie in the world they make a certain kind of movie that
02:35:57 ◼ ► fits with their studio that's fine the problem is are you going to find the people who know how to
02:36:02 ◼ ► make a good movie period you can set the boundaries we want our movies to be this kind of movie for
02:36:06 ◼ ► these audiences with this kind of subject matter we don't want to anger china like whatever you
02:36:10 ◼ ► want to do fine there's plenty of people making entertainment you don't have to be all things to
02:36:13 ◼ ► all people but you do have to do and i guess you're right that eddie q did have the wisdom
02:36:17 ◼ ► to say hey you know who we should hire to make movies and tv shows people who know how to make
02:36:21 ◼ ► movies and tv shows yeah but they have thus far not done not said you know what we should do to
02:36:26 ◼ ► make the mac into a gaming platform and i this is an atp i think the big barrier is probably
02:36:31 ◼ ► that in order to make the mac into a good gaming platform not only do you need to hire people who
02:36:40 ◼ ► studio you're gonna buy which exclusives you're gonna get but unfortunately to make the mac a
02:36:45 ◼ ► good gaming platform you also have to talk to the people who run the mac and get them to do things
02:36:52 ◼ ► for you so you're going to come to c-fed or whoever else is controlling this internist or whatever and
02:36:56 ◼ ► say oh and by the way as part of this initiative way over here at eddie q's organization we need
02:37:01 ◼ ► you to do this to the hardware and this to the software and it's a top priority they're going
02:37:04 ◼ ► to be like whoa whoa whoa you don't control what goes into the mac you're over there in eddie's
02:37:09 ◼ ► org we decide what goes into the mac you're like but you don't understand for me to pull off my job
02:37:13 ◼ ► to do it with apple tv you don't have to have a lot of influence on the apple tv team you're just
02:37:17 ◼ ► gonna be able to show freaking video right right right but to do it on the mac suddenly now you're
02:37:21 ◼ ► interfacing with organizations in apple that are massively entrenched they do not want you telling
02:37:26 ◼ ► them what they need to do the silicon organization the mac the mac operating system and none of those
02:37:32 ◼ ► organizations want this fledgling gaming is apple tv came and told the mac team they had to change
02:37:38 ◼ ► everything about what they were doing to help the apple tv effort we don't even know if your thing
02:37:42 ◼ ► is to succeed i'm not changing the silicon we're planning seven years from now for this i'm not
02:37:46 ◼ ► changing i'm not putting open gl back into my operating system you don't make those decisions
02:37:50 ◼ ► and that is one of the many institutional barriers that's keeping apple away from being decent at
02:37:55 ◼ ► games yeah it's a good point that basically they could go all in with tv plus and needed no buy-in
02:38:04 ◼ ► from the software or hardware didn't have to tell them what to do just give us a streaming box it's
02:38:09 ◼ ► not too complicated can you play video it truly was a pure content play and doing that with gaming
02:38:15 ◼ ► would not be gaming it would require hardware and software and only apple but maybe that's the way
02:38:22 ◼ ► you sell it to convince tim cook that only apple could do it or tim apple as some people call him
02:38:32 ◼ ► john i do not have you on the show often enough because i work myself up and i think when
02:38:39 ◼ ► syracuse is on the show it's got it i got to bring i got to bring my a-game and then i get
02:38:43 ◼ ► too worked up about it and then all of a sudden years go by and you're not here well you should
02:38:47 ◼ ► bring your a-game well i need to you're you're because you know you're doing 15 minutes with
02:38:52 ◼ ► ben all the time you just gotta think of me like that i'm just like it's just like ben it's like
02:38:56 ◼ ► anytime you could just stop it and chat but yeah i do have my own tech podcast so you gotta fit me
02:39:01 ◼ ► into the schedule that way i do you've also got what else you have you want to pimp you've got
02:39:05 ◼ ► reconcilable differences with uh merlin you haven't had merlin on ages see that's another
02:39:11 ◼ ► one i gotta gear up i gotta gear up that's a different kind of show yeah it's a different
02:39:15 ◼ ► kind of show and it's a different kind of gearing up but i should have him on i mean you put in a
02:39:19 ◼ ► good word for me and see if you can get him to agree to it what else anything else robot or not
02:39:24 ◼ ► on the incomparable have you ever listened to robot or not you probably haven't i actually i
02:39:28 ◼ ► honestly have never listened to an episode of it's it's very it was very much like dithering before
02:39:32 ◼ ► dithering well it's not 15 minutes will you do like five minute two minute episodes three minute
02:39:36 ◼ ► episodes these little bite-sized thingies if you start from the beginning you'll get the idea of
02:39:41 ◼ ► the show but like super short like tiny nuggets and me being me occasionally we'd have a little
02:39:49 ◼ ► know the problem yeah do that with jason snell over on the incomparable yeah and speaking of
02:39:54 ◼ ► jason snell you you subbed in for uh mr mike hurley and either the most recent or the most
02:40:00 ◼ ► recent episode that i listened to of upgrade which was a real treat yeah he's being he's becoming
02:40:04 ◼ ► like uh who is it um terry gross on fresh air that she's not there half the time mike yeah appears he
02:40:10 ◼ ► had a whole bunch of subguests coming in to to take up the mike slot he's backing up well that
02:40:15 ◼ ► was like uh carson at the end of his career on the yeah it doesn't come in on thursdays yeah you know
02:40:20 ◼ ► carson by the end was doing like three shows he was like doing like tuesday wednesday thursday
02:40:24 ◼ ► he had a guest host on monday and a rerun on fridays yeah i remember they were like inducting
02:40:33 ◼ ► the backbreaking three day a week schedule and literally it was like people just died because
02:40:39 ◼ ► carson was like right next to him on the ds and nobody laughed harder than him but yeah that's
02:40:44 ◼ ► sort of snow that was really funny well you said there was something i wanted to say about that
02:40:48 ◼ ► upgrade but they made me do video that they're ruining the dream of podcasting just like you are
02:40:54 ◼ ► yeah maybe all i wrote down is consistency is key oh that's it that's it consistency is key you and
02:41:02 ◼ ► jason were talking and giving advice to like up and coming podcasters and about the importance of
02:41:08 ◼ ► a consistent publishing schedule and talking about the really staggering run atps had of one episode
02:41:17 ◼ ► a week every week for i i don't for over 10 years we do 52 shows a year for over 10 years haven't
02:41:23 ◼ ► missed one yet right they never haven't missed one yet and your bastards are sneaking in members only
02:41:29 ◼ ► episodes in addition that's right which is which i literally do consider to be a backbreaking schedule
02:41:35 ◼ ► which is it's not that bad whereas the talk show schedule is not quite as regimented no well that's
02:41:42 ◼ ► what i'm saying who knows how successful hey when you said you were gonna do dithering you do three
02:41:47 ◼ ► shows a week i'm like there's no way he's gonna be able to do that like how many talk shows but
02:41:49 ◼ ► you've been doing it i guess ben is a well we did switch to two episodes a week oh that's right
02:41:54 ◼ ► even so you're doing i'm proud i'm proud of you for and you can't pre-tape the dithering really
02:42:00 ◼ ► because they're like about current events and stuff so you're actually doing them like two
02:42:04 ◼ ► times a week it's not like you're banking seven of the episodes and then going off to vegas
02:42:07 ◼ ► nope and ben travels more than i do and when ben travels he has to travel literally around the
02:42:12 ◼ ► globe exactly he's going to work like a taiwan to wisconsin right so there are times where the
02:42:18 ◼ ► dithering schedule and again and ben is a very nice friend and gracious partner but you know he's
02:42:25 ◼ ► like can you do the morning on thursday and i'm like well where are you going to be and he's like
02:42:29 ◼ ► i'm going to be coming off a 17-hour flight from and i'm like oh yeah i'll wake up for this i'll do
02:42:34 ◼ ► it really guilt tripping you into waking up before noon right but he's recording from a hotel after a
02:42:40 ◼ ► 17-hour flight he's recording from his like his is a covid lock there aren't even covid lockdown
02:42:45 ◼ ► and like oh yeah they're pushing his food under the door or whatever he's doing those are my
02:42:50 ◼ ► favorite episodes yeah he was in some kind of taiwanese prison for me exactly i came back into
02:42:55 ◼ ► the that's the show i want to be on i know dithering doesn't have guests but i'll be like
02:42:58 ◼ ► every email in your inbox and say you should have me as a guest on dithering even though it's a
02:43:02 ◼ ► podcast that doesn't have any guests because i just want to argue with ben about things you'd
02:43:05 ◼ ► be at the top of my list for a suggested substitute we don't even have to tell anybody really i don't
02:43:10 ◼ ► know that anybody would notice oh they would notice he could he'd just address you as john
02:43:15 ◼ ► and there'd be a lot more arguing anyway i will also i thank you for your time i thank you for