00:00:00 ◼ ► I've gotta tell you, there's a thunderstorm that just ripped through the area, and I think we're in the clear, but if we interrupt the show
00:00:06 ◼ ► because I need to go, y'know, start a generator or something, then my apologies. But it should be fine.
00:00:16 ◼ ► Well, the thing of it is, is that I think I've told the story somewhere, but my parents live only 45 minutes west of me,
00:00:27 ◼ ► obscenely expensive, ridiculous Honda inverter generator that weighs 85,000 pounds, and
00:00:34 ◼ ► well, then they ended up getting a Generac or whatever whole home generator, and they were like, "Here, you can borrow this forever."
00:00:44 ◼ ► Honda generator in our garage for probably five-ish years now, and I believe I've used it once for about 30, 35 minutes,
00:00:51 ◼ ► and that's it, because around the time that they, not bequeathed, but bequeathed us to the generator,
00:00:59 ◼ ► trees that were near the lines leading into the neighborhood, because the lines outside the neighborhood are lines,
00:01:09 ◼ ► Well, the law of, you know, large equipment that you buy for yourself for some kind of, you know,
00:01:15 ◼ ► special conditions is that the moment you, first of all, the moment you buy it, that condition will probably never happen again.
00:01:29 ◼ ► Assuming you can get it started after it's been sitting in your house for seven years without ever being started.
00:01:33 ◼ ► Well, right, in that case, if you can't get it started, the power will stay out for three days.
00:01:37 ◼ ► But yeah, I don't know. It hopefully will not be an issue, but if suddenly I disappear or get very, very quiet,
00:01:47 ◼ ► We know you're dying to use it. You have this big thing, you're like, "I just hope we lose power so I get to
00:01:53 ◼ ► I would very much like to use a generator. I would rather not do it under duress during a podcast.
00:02:02 ◼ ► We have to remind you that the ATP store is back. It is back and better than ever, maybe?
00:02:19 ◼ ► But we have some new stuff. Jon, if you don't mind, would you quickly just talk through the new stuff very, very quickly, please?
00:02:25 ◼ ► If you enjoyed / endured the member special where I showed how I manage my windows on my Mac,
00:02:36 ◼ ► It's just our logo with some windows behind it that most people won't even be able to recognize as windows,
00:02:40 ◼ ► and then you get to explain the shirt and explain how you feel about my window management technique, good or bad.
00:02:47 ◼ ► It's a tank top. It's a long sleeve. It's a sweatshirt. Everything is everything, as Marlin says.
00:02:51 ◼ ► And then we have the ATP graffiti shirt, which is our logo written in Palm OS graffiti style handwriting recognition.
00:03:10 ◼ ► but I want to talk about the performance shirt because that has basically not been for sale for like five, seven years or something.
00:03:16 ◼ ► If you work out and you get sweaty and you want a shirt that will, I guess, wick away that moisture better than normal,
00:03:51 ◼ ► And you're going to go to ATP.fm/store and you're going to place your purchase right now with plenty of time to spare.
00:03:57 ◼ ► We had someone write in, I don't remember if it was an email or a tweet or well, toot or whatever.
00:04:01 ◼ ► And they said, "We all know that what Casey's saying about people saying, 'Oh, I missed it. Ho ho.'
00:04:26 ◼ ► "Yeah, there's a bunch of people who say, 'Oh, it's like two minutes later and I forgot. Ho ho ho.'"
00:04:33 ◼ ► But every single time, there's at least one, usually between two and five people that say,
00:04:39 ◼ ► "Oh my gosh, I'm the one. I never thought it would be me, and I'm the one." So, ATP.fm/store.
00:04:55 ◼ ► But that doesn't apply to you, the listener. So get your order in before the store closes.
00:05:12 ◼ ► ATP.fm/join. Why else might you want to, right this very moment, go to ATP.fm/join, Jon?
00:05:27 ◼ ► wax nostalgic about how they got their starts in computers, we have a podcast episode for you.
00:05:47 ◼ ► and I'm sure this is true for everyone, not just me, but there are moments that are just
00:05:50 ◼ ► crystal clear from decades ago where I just vividly remember a feeling or a thing or an event.
00:05:57 ◼ ► And it was fun going through some of these seminal moments in our lives and talking about,
00:06:05 ◼ ► You know, how did we get to be the way we are? Well, we kind of sort of, at least in the
00:06:09 ◼ ► technologist/nerd way, we tried to do a speed run of that on this week's, or this month's,
00:06:15 ◼ ► excuse me, member special. And I had a lot of fun recording it. I thought it was really,
00:06:18 ◼ ► really fun and happy. And, you know, it was good to be happy and fun and nostalgic for a little while.
00:06:41 ◼ ► and how our lives might have been different, if not for a few connected events, check it out.
00:06:55 ◼ ► but you never know, what have you put the following in our internal show notes document?
00:07:19 ◼ ► And Marco said he liked the fours because it's written like how little kids write fours.
00:07:27 ◼ ► and I feel like I need to bring it to follow up here. Marco, how do little kids write fours?
00:07:33 ◼ ► So what I meant by that, which is actually funny because it's not how my kid writes them,
00:09:48 ◼ ► my son also writes all of his letters from the bottom, despite me and all of his teachers
00:10:20 ◼ ► And so kids are left to their own devices, and maybe left to their own devices is like a 50/50
00:10:26 ◼ ► And all I can say is that I could not convince my son to write his letters from top down.
00:14:26 ◼ ► and then you leave it. And then computers come and you never have to write anything by hand again.
00:14:32 ◼ ► And then once a year you have to read, like, you know, your grandmother's birthday card
00:14:39 ◼ ► No, this, I actually, I was told one time by, around, around, you know, my teenage years
00:14:44 ◼ ► by a psychologist I was seeing who, I mean, he was terrible, let's be honest, but he was telling me that...
00:14:53 ◼ ► He, I think he at the time totally failed to recognize ADD and instead just told me I was just lazy and just keep trying harder.
00:15:04 ◼ ► It was easier to be a psychologist back then. You could just tell the kid they were lazy.
00:15:08 ◼ ► Yes, exactly. Yeah. And every, I'd go in, like, once a week and, you know, I still wasn't doing my homework.
00:15:17 ◼ ► And I go in there and the guy would meet with me for a while, then meet with her, and he would tell her I was just being lazy.
00:15:22 ◼ ► And I was just trying hard, I'd just use a try-harder because that's, you know, that works great.
00:15:36 ◼ ► Anyway, but he told me, he told me with that, with that wonderful skill set that he, he actually analyzed my handwriting.
00:15:47 ◼ ► He did enough for me, but he told me, you know, basically like by, like he looked at it, he's like, well, you know, you can see like I'm kind of doing the bare minimum in each letter.
00:15:58 ◼ ► Like, to like, I'm not, you know, not leaving a lot of space, not putting a lot of effort into it.
00:16:01 ◼ ► Like, it communicates the words enough generally, but, you know, but it does only the bare minimum for that.
00:16:14 ◼ ► I don't have an accent. Why don't you have any pens on my desk? It tells you how much I love handwriting.
00:16:33 ◼ ► I think I've bought more Studio Neat pens than I have depleted pens in the last 10 years.
00:16:44 ◼ ► When's the last time either of you went through a notebook? Like, actually used all the paper in a notebook?
00:16:51 ◼ ► I have. I used to be, there was a window of time where I was a devout Field Notes person, and then I eventually just kind of meandered away from that.
00:16:57 ◼ ► But I filled, I'm no Stephen Hackett that fills them weekly, but whatever it is, but I filled a fair number of Field Notes way back in the day.
00:17:08 ◼ ► Like, they get my highest recommendation. I honestly don't know if they've ever sponsored, but truly they're incredible notebooks.
00:17:19 ◼ ► Yeah, no, I never even purchased one of those. I was never a Field Notes person. The last time I wrote a notebook was, I think, college, and those notebooks I never filled.
00:17:26 ◼ ► Yeah, I was going through some of my old high school stuff when my mom sent me a bunch of my childhood stuff recently.
00:17:31 ◼ ► And I was going through it, like all my school notebooks, you know those black and white Dalmatian print composition notebooks that we had back then? I don't know if they still make them.
00:17:40 ◼ ► You know, there was one for every class, and every class did the same thing. The first three or four pages would have something on them, and then the entire rest was just blank.
00:18:01 ◼ ► All right, so I wanted to quickly call attention to, Paul Turnoff wrote and said, "Hey, the car buying process," that Casey described, this was a reply to an Ask ATP last week.
00:18:12 ◼ ► The car buying process is basically exactly what some guy or group of people, I'm not entirely clear on where the genesis for this was, but there was somebody who wrote the three-step car buying process.
00:18:23 ◼ ► And this is no longer on the internet, but I dug up an archive.org link, which I'll put in the show notes, where they say pretty much the same thing I said.
00:18:32 ◼ ► I mean, it's not exactly, but it's spiritually the same basic idea. And the three steps are determine the make and model of car you want, write a bid letter, which basically means, all right, I'm going to send a letter to these dealers that says, "I want this with this, this, this, this, and this options, and I would like your out-the-door price with tax title, you know, fees, taxes, etc., etc."
00:18:50 ◼ ► And then you contact all your dealers and have them effectively negotiate with each other through you. And that is a lot of work and it takes a long time, but that's how I've done it the last several years.
00:19:00 ◼ ► And you can see a more, a longer write-up of this if you go through this archive.org link. So I wanted to call it to your attention. For the gentleman whose name I don't know who wanted to buy a car like six months ago, and we're finally now getting around to this.
00:19:13 ◼ ► Someone also wrote in to tell us that there are people who do this for you. And of course, because anything involving paying someone to do a thing for you, watch out for the ones who are actually paid by the dealership, because obviously they're going to steer you towards buying stuff from the dealership.
00:19:28 ◼ ► But apparently there are legitimate people who you pay a fairly large amount of money, sometimes even a percentage of the cost of the car. And they will essentially perform the exact process you just described, although presumably a little bit more efficiently because they know all the dealers and are constantly talking to them or whatever.
00:19:42 ◼ ► They're not just a stranger. So if you really don't want to deal with it, if you can find one of these people who will negotiate your car sale for you for either a fixed fee or a percentage of the sale price, just make sure you find one that is not paid based on sending sales to particular dealerships, because that's not what you want. You just want the best price.
00:19:59 ◼ ► That is very true. Also, if you happen to be a Costco member, and this may be true of like BJ's or Sam's or other things, but I know Costco, they have some sort of auto program where allegedly they have effectively pre-negotiated on behalf of all their members. And if you say to a company, "Hey, I'm buying under the Costco program." I think your options are limited, but allegedly they have pre-negotiated. So it's like, this is the price, that's the deal. And it's usually a decent deal, maybe not the best possible deal, but a decent deal with very little work involved.
00:20:25 ◼ ► However, that being said, when we bought Aaron's Volvo, which is the last car that we bought that was applicable for this, that made zero difference whatsoever. Now our dealer, our local Volvo dealer, the sales department in particular, were trash. And it was one of those scenarios where I was very clear up front. Aaron was sitting next to me. This is her car. We're buying it for her. And she would ask a question and the gentleman, the salesman, would then look at me to answer her question, which was super gross. And I hated it. It was real bad. And I could tell you all sorts of stories about this.
00:20:54 ◼ ► But in theory, there are places where you can do this Costco thing and it will help. Marco, I have great news about your car. Rivian's new software update will help you avoid all the broken EV chargers, of which we know there are many. This is from The Verge. Rivian is pushing a new software update that will give its customers better insight into which EV chargers to visit and which to avoid. Rivian's solution is to use their vehicle fleet to gather data about broken chargers, which then get downranked in the company's software algorithm.
00:21:20 ◼ ► Chargers are rated A to F. This is like an anti-Reddit, huh? What was the dig? It was the other one that like predated Reddit. Anyways, Rivian says, "Every time one of our vehicles interact with the charger, we have a number of data points which are uploaded to the cloud and that give us a very accurate understanding of the health of the session that vehicle's having. So we get data related not only to the number of successful sessions, but also how many trials did you make? How was the payment? What's the speed of the interaction? What's the overall peak performance that you have within a session? What's the thermal derating behavior? And so on and so on. So that's cool. That's good news.
00:21:50 ◼ ► - Yeah, this is great. And even, I don't know if they're gonna necessarily surface user comments and all, probably not. But even simple things to know, like hey, this one is like timing out. And I guess this algorithm will include that if, I guess what they mean by trials, number of trials that I made. 'Cause sometimes you'll pull up to Electrify America charger and the first bay you pull up to, you plug in and it just won't connect for whatever reason.
00:22:17 ◼ ► It will time out or it will throw some weird error and then you have to like, alright, get out, unplug, back the car out, pull into the next spot, just start the whole thing over.
00:22:26 ◼ ► This is the experience of modern Electrify America chargers. And that has never happened to me at a Tesla charger. The only thing that ever had happened negatively at a Tesla charger, occasionally you get a slow one.
00:22:39 ◼ ► - It would still be like 60 kilowatts. It would just be slower than like 100, 120, 150, some of the higher speeds we can see these days. But that was the only problem I ever had at a Tesla charger.
00:22:52 ◼ ► So once again, I continue to, first of all, I love my Rivian. Second of all, I love when I get to use Tesla chargers with it because they work better. And third of all, I still maintain that I think Tesla owners are going to be very upset about this.
00:23:10 ◼ ► Maybe Tesla maybe shouldn't have opened up their chargers, but you know, there's a lot of arguments on both sides of that. But I definitely think that they're making everyone else's lives better with EVs except Tesla owners whose lives are being made worse by this change.
00:23:23 ◼ ► - Well actually, one other bit of follow up, I don't have the person to attribute this to, but someone told us that Tesla essentially had to do this if they wanted in on the, what is it called, inflation reduction act, whatever infrastructure bill.
00:23:38 ◼ ► - Yeah, to get, if you want in on that gravy train, you essentially had to open up your chargers to everyone else. They didn't necessarily have to propose their thing as a standard or whatever, but many things aligned to make this essentially the only move that Tesla could make because Tesla wants that government money.
00:23:54 ◼ ► - Indeed. Joe Lyon writes with regard to reticle limits, and I'm going to nope right out of this because I don't even know what the heck is going on here. So John, take it away.
00:24:02 ◼ ► - Sure. Reticle sizes, the physical glass/quartz mask, are industry standards, so chip designs can be shared between foundries and fabs, and reticle designs can be put into different photolithography tools.
00:24:12 ◼ ► In reality, ASML is the only supplier of EUV photo tools, so they more or less determine the reticle size. Any fab using ASML/EUV tools will use the same reticle size and therefore have the same die size limit.
00:24:23 ◼ ► So this was, we were talking about reticle limit and TSMC's reticle limit. TSMC's reticle limit is the same as everybody's reticle limit if they're using these extreme ultraviolet stuff, which they're using if they're doing stuff at like 3 nanometers.
00:24:34 ◼ ► So anyway, EUV reticles are 104mm by 132mm, which can project a field size or die size on the wafer of 33mm by 26mm. That's where the 858mm2 max die size comes from.
00:24:46 ◼ ► So that number we had in last week's episode was correct. That is the reticle limit for how big can a single exposure single die thing on a wafer be. The answer is 858mm2.
00:24:58 ◼ ► Joe continues, "Any chip using modern EUV processes over that size has to be made from multiple physical dies with dot-to-die interfaces or mounted on silicon interposers, etc."
00:25:07 ◼ ► I think you can also do multiple exposures, but that gets even more expensive. Continuing, "All of TSMC's N3 whatever lines are on standard EUV, as are Intel's processes from 3T, 20A, and 18A."
00:25:19 ◼ ► Intel has weird names for their processes. The up, because they're using angstroms, that's what the A is for.
00:25:24 ◼ ► "The upcoming N2 line will also be standard EUV." So N3 and N2 both EUV and EUV max reticle size is 858mm2.
00:25:33 ◼ ► "After TSMC's N2 and Intel's 18A process, the plan is to move to high NA EUV." And the NA stands for numerical aperture. It's the measure of the ability of an optical system to collect and focus light.
00:25:50 ◼ ► "The N2 stuff, this high NA EUV, will allow continued transistor shrinks, thus the N2, 2nm instead of 3, but at a huge cost. High NA EUV will use the same 120x132mm reticle as a UV, but the max die size will be cut in half to 429mm2."
00:26:10 ◼ ► So that's going to be big. Like I said, we've talked about this in past episodes, so just to remind people this is coming. Not in the N2 generation, N3 and N2, they'll still be 858mm2, but after that, the max reticle size will be half.
00:26:22 ◼ ► 429mm2 is, I think, smaller than the M3 max. So you can't even fab an M3 max as it is currently designed on the process that's going to come after N2. I don't know what they're going to call it or whatever.
00:26:34 ◼ ► So this is out there in the future, and this is why we talked about it on the show in the past. An interview with Johnny Suruji where he said, talking about future Apple stuff in very vague ways, he said,
00:26:44 ◼ ► "One of the things that is going to be important is packaging." We'll put a link in the show notes to both that ATP episode and that clip from the interview.
00:26:52 ◼ ► Why is packaging going to be important? Because Apple will literally not be able to make max-sized chips or larger once this process comes unless they cut them up into individual pieces and do chiplets or something like that.
00:27:04 ◼ ► Or I suppose they could do multiple exposures as well. But I think when Johnny Suruji says, "Packaging is important," I think that's what he's talking about. He's talking about not the N3 generation, not the N2 generation, but the one after that.
00:27:15 ◼ ► Those chips are already being designed or have already been designed. There's many, many years lead time in this. So the reason Johnny Suruji is saying one of the things I think is going to be important is packaging is because he already knows about the chips that Apple is planning for this generation where the reticle size is cut in half.
00:27:31 ◼ ► And I don't think Apple is going to just say, "Well, I guess we can't make any chips bigger than a Pro." No, they're going to still make big chips, but they're going to make them out of a bunch of smaller chips.
00:27:40 ◼ ► And that'll be fun to watch. Still doesn't quite answer the question about what the M3 Ultra is going to be. Is it just two M3 Maxes? What about the M4? There's a bunch of rumors this week. I didn't really put them in the notes, but people have been talking about M4 stuff.
00:27:54 ◼ ► Saying, "Oh, here are the rumors for all the M4 ones." Yeah, there will be an M4 and the M4 will have low-end chips, medium-end chips, and high-end chips. The rumors aren't juicy. They don't say, "Okay, but what are those chips?"
00:28:05 ◼ ► Are they going to be a Max-sized chip? Are they going to stick two of them together to make an Ultra? I think once we see the M3 results, we'll know more about that.
00:28:12 ◼ ► Still doubt in the rumors whether there will be an M3 Ultra. Some people say, "Oh, well let us skip the M3 generation for the Studio and the Mac Pro."
00:28:21 ◼ ► And maybe the M4 will be out sooner than you think. I think they're rumors of the first M4 chip coming out before the end of the year.
00:28:27 ◼ ► So lots of rumors swirling about this. But those are the M3 and the M4. They're all still 3nm. I think when we see what the hardware announcements are, WWC will tell us a lot more.
00:28:39 ◼ ► But for now, know that the M4 is coming. It's supposed to be really good at AI. There's a quote from Johnny Cerugi in that interview as well saying,
00:28:46 ◼ ► "Many years ago, we determined that AI would be important. And so obviously, all of Apple's chips going forward will have even more AI stuff in them."
00:28:53 ◼ ► Not that they didn't already have stuff in them. So yeah, the M4 rumors are not exciting or concrete at this point.
00:28:59 ◼ ► But it's exciting to see the number go up. And it will be interesting to see if Apple skips the M3 marketing generation for the chips in its high-end computers and jumps them right to M4 or something.
00:29:17 ◼ ► What was the context for this next item? The robots thing. We talked about robots in the ATP overtime.
00:29:23 ◼ ► And I said I would love something that could hold my phone. And I mentioned the first product that we're going to talk about here.
00:29:30 ◼ ► Yeah, so there are a couple of Belkin iPhone mounts, or phone holders if you will, that exist that are specifically designed for use with a TV.
00:29:39 ◼ ► And there's the $50 Belkin iPhone mount with MagSafe for Apple TV 4K, which you can sit either on top of your television or in front of it on like a mantel if you're a crazy person with TV too high up like me, or perhaps a TV stand or something like that.
00:29:53 ◼ ► And then there's another one, Belkin Auto Tracking Stand Pro with Dock Kit. And this is $180, which is quite a lot of money.
00:30:00 ◼ ► But hypothetically it will follow you around as you're walking around the room and it even has a little battery so if you're like a TikToker or whatever, you know, you're doing Instagram Reels then you can bring this out in the field and have it track you as you walk around.
00:30:19 ◼ ► The tracking stand works with Dock Kit, which is a framework that Apple introduced for this purpose. It lets like third party camera moving thingies have an API that works with them. I assume it works with FaceTime but I don't know that for a fact.
00:30:36 ◼ ► But anyway, I really want the Belkin one because I'm always just like precariously leaning my phone against my television. I do have a TV stand but it's like, especially because the phones are not even with the camera bump on them and everything and they're kind of slippery even with leather case.
00:30:52 ◼ ► So I would like something to hold it like the Belkin stand is but $50 for an inert piece of plastic with a magnet. It seems kind of pricey so I haven't bought one.
00:31:00 ◼ ► And the auto tracking thing I totally forgot about but this is kind of what I was talking about. I would love it if something could just point my camera at me but I think that doesn't change continuity camera.
00:31:08 ◼ ► Continuity camera would still be using the wide angle lens and it would still be cropping out of it and I'm not sure that the Belkin thing would change that.
00:31:14 ◼ ► But on the topic of Apple making robots which we've now talked about on the show in at least two separate episodes, this thing, all it is is a thing that you, it's got a mag safe thing that you stick your phone on and it moves to I guess rotate and possibly tilt your camera.
00:31:32 ◼ ► $180. So I would use that as a context for how expensive is it to make things that have electronics in them and move. This doesn't go anywhere. This doesn't vacuum your house, doesn't clean your dishes, doesn't do anything. It has no cameras, it has no sensors.
00:31:47 ◼ ► It is literally a powered thing with a motor that moves your phone and it sits in one place and it's $180.
00:31:54 ◼ ► Well, I mean you can bring it out like I said. I take your point. Your point is still fair but I mean it is designed for use elsewhere and so it doesn't need to be plugged in always although presumably it's going to need to be plugged in most of the time.
00:32:09 ◼ ► Yeah, and we never really did get any good read on whether or not Apple like feeds Belkin designs, right? Because a lot of people theorized and I mean it tracks if you ask me that a lot of times Apple will be like, "Hey, hey, hey Belkin, take this envelope and see if there's anything interesting here."
00:32:28 ◼ ► And then they end up making these like stands or holders or what have you. There was one in particular, I can't remember what it was now, that was like very clearly an Apple design but was made by Belkin for the life of me. I can't remember what it was.
00:32:40 ◼ ► One of the dongles. Doesn't this Belkin thing look like a Google device to you? It looks kind of like the bottom of a Google home.
00:32:45 ◼ ► Yeah, it does. But nevertheless, this is cool and I would love to try one but I am way too frugal and I also don't do that many FaceTime calls on a TV.
00:32:55 ◼ ► We are sponsored this episode by Fastmail. Not only a wonderful email host but the email host that I personally have chosen to use since long before they were a sponsor since 2007 before the show even existed by a good margin too.
00:33:08 ◼ ► I've been a Fastmail customer since 2007 for all my personal and work email and it is fantastic. I don't have to worry, you know, whenever there's some big privacy dust up with one of the big email hosts, the free email hosts, it doesn't affect me. I'm on Fastmail.
00:33:23 ◼ ► You know, because when you use free email services, you're paying with your data and with your privacy for as little as $5 a month, you can get private email with Fastmail.
00:33:32 ◼ ► They also now have new Duo and Family plans. You can save money if you have multiple people. The Duo plan is for you and a partner. Family goes up to six people for just a little bit more money.
00:33:41 ◼ ► And when you have one of these Family plans, they also have shared features. You can have things like shared calendars and shared contacts with your family group and then also have your own private personal stuff or work stuff off to the side.
00:33:52 ◼ ► It is a great service. They support everything that you might need in a modern email service. Things like scheduled send, snoozing emails, folders, labels, great search.
00:34:02 ◼ ► They obviously have great apps or they also work with all the built-in apps everywhere. So I use them with the built-in mail app on my phone and my Mac.
00:34:09 ◼ ► If I don't want to do that, they have webmail, they have their own apps. It's wonderful. Any email app that supports IMAP, you can use Fastmail.
00:34:15 ◼ ► It's been this way forever. It's very future proof. That's one thing I like. If there's some hot new app of the day, as long as it supports IMAP, you can try it.
00:34:25 ◼ ► And then when they go out of business in a year, you don't lose all your email. It's wonderful. Fastmail is just a great email host. It is rock solid, reliable.
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00:35:00 ◼ ► Alright, moving on. We can talk about a first look at Europe's alternative app stores. This actually posted, I think, before we recorded last week. We didn't have the time to get to it.
00:35:13 ◼ ► This is on the verge. Another potential roadblock to widespread third-party marketplace adoption is just how fiddly it is, with each store taking around a dozen screen interactions to install.
00:35:21 ◼ ► It goes like this. You begin by clicking a browser-based link to load the alternative store. From there, you receive a pop-up informing you that your installation settings don't allow marketplaces from that developer.
00:35:33 ◼ ► Then you head to settings to enable the marketplace. Then you return to your browser and click the download link again. Then you receive another prompt asking you to confirm the installation.
00:35:41 ◼ ► Finally, you can open the store and browse the available apps. That is not exactly delightful. Not surprised at all.
00:35:48 ◼ ► This happens on the Mac too. It's an annoying pattern, but the annoyance serves a function, so you can't really get rid of it.
00:35:57 ◼ ► The Mac experience is you try to run some Mac app and it's like, "You need to give me full disk access or screen recording permission or some other thing that it needs to do its job."
00:36:10 ◼ ► But you can't give it that permission from within the app. If you could, people would throw up a dialogue and go, "Yeah, yeah, okay, okay, yeah, yeah."
00:36:19 ◼ ► If you could approve it from within the app by clicking a button, apps would trick you into doing it.
00:36:25 ◼ ► There always has to be a process that they'll tell you, "Go to System Preferences/System Settings and go to this screen and do this and do that."
00:36:33 ◼ ► Some apps on the Mac went so far as to automate that process. They would lead you through it wizard style and they would bring up system settings and they would make their own windows lined up alongside the window with arrows pointing to the things you had to get.
00:36:45 ◼ ► That was short lived, I think, because System Preferences changed into System Settings and Apple moved everything around and I feel bad for the people who made these wizards to do that.
00:36:55 ◼ ► It's because the user has to, it's like when someone calls you and you don't trust them or whatever, hang up and go to the website that belongs to that company and find the number and call them back yourself.
00:37:06 ◼ ► So you know you're actually talking to the person you think you're talking to, don't trust that the number they called you from is not spoofed or whatever.
00:37:12 ◼ ► So you as the user have to go and do a thing and all the app or alternative app store or whatever can do is say, you know, or in this case the OS saying, "Oh, you haven't allowed that developer to install third party marketplaces. You need to do that."
00:37:27 ◼ ► And users are like, "How do I do that? I don't know how to do that. Go to System Settings. Where in System Settings? Can't you just do it for me? Can't you just send me a button that says, 'Okay, Approve, Yes.'"
00:37:36 ◼ ► And the answer is no. They can't do that because if they did that, if it was possible to do that at all, every app would throw a thing in your face that says, "Do you like puppies? Click yes." And then you just approve the app.
00:37:47 ◼ ► And, "Oh, don't worry. App Review will catch that." Yeah, right. We know how many things get past App Review.
00:37:55 ◼ ► So it is annoying and fiddly and I'm sure Apple didn't really care about streamlining this much because this is still more than one or two back and forths, but some part of that fiddliness is essentially unavoidable to actually implement the security that isn't trivially exploitable.
00:38:14 ◼ ► I think it's too much on the Mac. I think Jason Snell has talked about this a lot when he had to set up his new Mac and he just went into a rage about how many times he had to approve things. I think there should be a way to do mass approvals or a better interface to approvals instead of the current way of digging in to find stuff and scrolling like this.
00:38:31 ◼ ► This process can be approved, but you can never get rid of the part that is essentially the equivalent of the user hanging up and saying, "Whatever you say, I'm going to call now the number that I think is for Visa credit card, like the number on the back of my credit card. I'm going to call that myself. And if you've hacked me so bad that that goes to the wrong place, then you win."
00:38:50 ◼ ► Right. Oh, goodness. Yeah, so we'll see what happens with this. We talked about it, Mike and I, on not the upgrade that just dropped this week, but last week when I guessed it on upgrade.
00:39:03 ◼ ► I really feel like this is a non-starter unless something really, really weird happens. And I think some dorks like us will enjoy doing emulators, which we'll get to actually in a second, or something along those lines, but for most people, I just don't expect that most people will bother.
00:39:22 ◼ ► Unless Facebook pulls their app from the traditional app store in the EU and says, "Oh, you have to go to Facebook's app store now," in which case that's different. But assuming it's just alternative app stores, like what it says on the tin, I just don't see people going through it.
00:39:37 ◼ ► This is surmountable. The number of steps here isn't too hard. There's nothing in it that doesn't involve just tapping things on your screen. People just need to be adequately motivated. And things that can actually motivate them are, like you mentioned, some must-have app like Facebook or whatever doing this. That would do it.
00:39:55 ◼ ► But even stuff like, you know, someone does a TikTok about some app that they saw, and then someone else does a TikTok that's like, "Oh, if you want this cool app, you do these six steps." Never underestimate how influential a fast tutorial video plus the FOMO of some cool app that someone found on alternative app store doesn't take much for that to happen.
00:40:17 ◼ ► You need something like that. You need something to make people do it. They're not going to casually do it on their own. But the things that could lead someone to install a third-party app store can be much smaller and more trivial than, "Oh, you have to go there to get Facebook now," which I don't think is going to happen.
00:40:33 ◼ ► Oh, yeah. I mean, so many people installed things like configuration profiles just to get different app icons on their phone.
00:40:51 ◼ ► Yeah, those are App Store apps. It doesn't matter. Yeah, install a configuration profile to change the icons for your Instagram and stuff. Yeah, go ahead. What could possibly go wrong?
00:41:13 ◼ ► There's API to change your icon, but no APIs for other Mac apps to get what the hell you changed the icon to. The doc can show your icon, but nobody else.
00:41:25 ◼ ► Yeah, no, but for the App Store stuff, I think people will go through this when there's an app they want to use. That's it. It's not going to stop them.
00:41:33 ◼ ► Going back to what John was saying earlier about the Mac with its security dialogues of, "The app can tell you or the system can tell you, 'Go to system settings and do this,' but it won't give you an easy way," I'm not sure I accept without comment that that's good for security.
00:41:51 ◼ ► It seems like a modern Apple security practice is to make something a real pain in the butt and make it really suck and hope that people will just not want to do it or will do it carefully because it sucks.
00:42:07 ◼ ► I have to say, though, the sucking part of the Apple side of it is not necessary for the security. The necessary part is that you have to go do something. The app doesn't have an opportunity to dark pattern you into doing it. The app can't put up a dialogue. That's the necessary part for security.
00:42:22 ◼ ► The fact that when you go to do it, it sucks because system settings is Byzantine and it's a pain to do, that's on Apple. That's not a necessary part of the security. That's just the way Apple did it. System settings is not easy to navigate.
00:42:34 ◼ ► The big scrolling list doesn't sort by most recently requested. There are ways that Apple can do this better and they don't, but that's not part of the security. The security part is the app does not have an opportunity to trick you.
00:42:45 ◼ ► That's the essential part. You essentially have to make the first call. You have to go make the move. I would say Apple could fix a lot of the suckiness by not being so bad at making system settings.
00:43:00 ◼ ► - Yeah, I actually agree with that. You're right. I don't mind, okay, there's one place you have to go do this. That's okay, but it just really sucks. Apple doesn't always follow this themselves.
00:43:13 ◼ ► How often do you get a pop up on your phone saying you gotta enter your password in system settings and you tap that and it brings you to a screen where you need to enter your password. That's terrible for security.
00:43:24 ◼ ► That's doing the same thing with your Apple ID password. There's all sorts of paper cuts around this area. What I hope is that Apple is motivated to improve that user experience side on the Mac.
00:43:39 ◼ ► - That's right. The Mac definitely gets the worst of it. We don't see any evidence that they care. It seems like, as Jason Stelv wrote in that article, it seems like the Mac security team always wins over any kind of remote usability concern.
00:43:57 ◼ ► And that the Mac team in general seems to not really have the resources behind it to make bigger changes to make all this stuff suck less.
00:44:06 ◼ ► - Yeah, especially in the mass case on the Mac, you just set up a new Mac. To do the things that would make that easier actually require the security people to do a bunch of stuff.
00:44:16 ◼ ► So for example, having a thing where like, look, I already gave this app permission and I've set up a new Mac and I want that permission to essentially transfer over. Doing that in a secure way is difficult and complicated.
00:44:26 ◼ ► The UI team can't do that on their own. That's the security team would have to say, you have to come up with a trusted, secure way to transfer permissions from one Mac to another based on, oh, you allowed it on this Mac.
00:44:42 ◼ ► And on this Mac, I say, hey, do you want all the apps on this new Mac to have the same permissions as they did on the old Mac? And the user just says yes. And then security happens and that happens in some way.
00:44:53 ◼ ► And so that's part of the problem is to get the better user experience, you also need buy-in from the security people and they have to do a bunch of work.
00:45:00 ◼ ► And then on top of that is even if with no help from the security team, the UI team could surely make this a hell of a lot better.
00:45:06 ◼ ► Like I said, how about just a different way to sort the app so I don't have to scroll through that giant list? How about default sorting them by the app that most recently asked for something?
00:45:14 ◼ ► Like imagine that. So I'm just constantly scrolling through a list, which I convinced myself is alphabetical until I scroll and it's like the alphabet is started over again. And it's like, is this ASCII about a goal?
00:45:23 ◼ ► And the capital letters come first. What the hell? Yep. It's amazing. All right. So definitely not because of any legal issues or regulations or anything like that.
00:45:33 ◼ ► Absolutely had nothing to do with the fact that Apple is now allowing the app store, the app store to offer retro game emulators. Definitely had nothing to do with any pressure from anywhere.
00:45:42 ◼ ► I love this. I love this so much. This is, it's so, okay, here's, here's how this goes. Apple is now all of a sudden forced in the EU to offer sideloading.
00:45:55 ◼ ► What's a popular reason that people often sideload in a way that wouldn't really matter at all if they allowed it in the app store? Game emulators.
00:46:06 ◼ ► So isn't it interesting that right as they need to force open their, their, you know, sideloading thing in a pretty big market in the world, they suddenly have a change of heart on allowing gaming emulators on the app store everywhere, which somebody might think that might deflate a lot of the demand for sideloading and therefore retain control for the app store.
00:46:33 ◼ ► What a surprise. You know, maybe there's a larger lesson here. Maybe allowing things in the app store that are otherwise harmless is better for Apple's continued longterm control of the platform.
00:46:51 ◼ ► I think Apple, Apple doesn't think it's harmless. One of the reasons they stopped this was like, hey, how, we, there's no in-app purchase in those games. We don't get paid for those games. We don't get to approve those games. Like as far as they're concerned is like, look, you want to put Space Invaders on the iPhone, we better get our cut. Right?
00:47:06 ◼ ► And that's, that's, uh, if you asked them, I think that it would tell you, that's why we don't want to have essentially app stores within app stores. We don't want apps that run other apps. Like that was their main objection to this. Now I agree with you. That's not actually a problem. Apple is being stupid about it, but that's what they think. And so, yeah, they're being forced to this. And this is even more hilarious because, um, what's his name? Riley tested. Um, yep.
00:47:27 ◼ ► So he is the alt store guy. Alt star is a thing that existed for a while to let you install a non Apple approved apps on your iPhone, but it was complicated and use what did they use to use a test flight system or something like that. I forget. I forget the details too. But anyway, it was, it was, it was technically complicated and weird, but anyway, alt store is a name that you might've heard. It is, you know, for all the time before this whole EU thing, you're like, is there another way you can get apps onto the app instead of the app store? You might've heard of Cydia and you might've heard of alt store. And these are all kind of like, you know, skirting Apple's rules.
00:47:56 ◼ ► And technically complicated or whatever. All right. Uh, but Riley's got his start, uh, by making an emulator, a retro game emulator for iOS that then was not a lot on the app store. And then, you know, got on the alt store was just his thing, uh, and is funded through Patreon. And so now he's making alt store a third party app store using the Apple DMA third party app store thing or whatever. And his, the reason he's doing it is so he can put in a third party app store.
00:48:25 ◼ ► He's doing this so he can put his retro game emulator on his alt store using Apple's official thing. So like this, uh, Apple opening the store to retro game emulators is lightning focused on the one dude who ran arts alt store and is now going to put alt star in the EU, you know, alternative marketplace thing. Right.
00:48:45 ◼ ► For his one emulate, it's not like they said, well, here's all the world of things that could possibly be in a third party store and we better compete with them. It's like, I know this one guy and alt star by the way, has been in waiting for approval, I think for like a month or something.
00:48:57 ◼ ► I forgot what his complaint was, but there's, it's been a slow roll for them to get a thing. Like they know he's doing this. So this is, this rule is targeted on one person's alt star to say, we're going to preempt you, which is ridiculous.
00:49:09 ◼ ► And I feel like he should be honored that they feel like he's such a threat to putting an emulator where they're just like, come on back, come on back to the app store. You don't have to have that third party story.
00:49:19 ◼ ► Even though we made you jump through all these hoops and do all this stuff. Nevermind. You can have on the app store. It'll be fine. Which is not because he wants his thing is funded through Patreon and you still can't do it on the app store.
00:49:29 ◼ ► So he's still doing alt star, but whatever. It's, it's, I don't know. I don't know that it's aimed at this one person, but it is strangely coincidental. Yeah. I don't know if it's aimed at that one person, although honestly that is exactly the kind of pettiness that app store leadership would actually do.
00:49:45 ◼ ► But no, I think it's more strategic. I think it's like, it's literally just like, this is a reason why a lot of people might sideload. Let's deflate the air in that balloon because it turns out like this is some low hanging fruit. There really is not any good reason why Apple couldn't have emulators on the app store.
00:50:03 ◼ ► It really doesn't harm them at all. It doesn't really, as long as they keep it within the parameters they're keeping it, which is retro systems and kind of bring your own ROMs and you assert they're okay. Like as long as they do all that, then they're not really in legal, in legal trouble with it.
00:50:19 ◼ ► And so, but yet there is all this demand for it. So this is a clear instance where like they can just allow these because there really wasn't that good a reason to disallow them in the first place. So they're, they're just allowing them now because it is high benefit to the app store and to Apple strategically and very, very low risk and cost compared to like other ways they could open up to, you know, to, to kind of deflate demand for sideloading.
00:50:48 ◼ ► I think other ways would have larger downsides in cost. It wouldn't be as clear cut. So for instance, they want, if they, if for some reason, like, you know, big crypto apps that don't fit what they currently allow in the app store become big, you know, in some kind of sideloading thing, which I mean, is anybody still doing crypto?
00:51:03 ◼ ► But if they are, like maybe that would be a thing. But like there's bigger downsides there. If they started, if they would start allowing like porn apps that, you know, they've never allowed porn apps in the app store.
00:51:12 ◼ ► That's probably obviously going to be like a big thing in sideloading contexts. I'm sure there's obviously bigger downsides to that if they want to keep things a certain way in the app store, keep certain standards, you know, stay out of certain legal problems there.
00:51:24 ◼ ► But with emulators, like there really was not much reason not to allow them. So it's, I think it's pure, I think there might be some element of spite, of personal spite there, but I think that that's probably a small component, if any.
00:51:36 ◼ ► The much bigger thing is this is just pure strategy. Right as they're forced to offer sideloading, remove a big reason why anybody would need to do that.
00:51:46 ◼ ► So that would be, hey, come back to the app store, back inside the wall garden, look, it's nice here, here's an emulator, go nuts, kid.
00:51:52 ◼ ► And you described that as a couple times as like deflating the need to go to a third party app store. The other word for that is competition.
00:51:59 ◼ ► Hey, our competitors are doing things that customers want. If we want to get those customers back, let's do the thing that customers want too. Imagine that competition.
00:52:09 ◼ ► When there was no competition, they could just say, nope, not allowed, and you can't get apps from anyplace else, so no problem. And now something that you can get apps from somewhere else.
00:52:15 ◼ ► And I was like, oh, what do those other people have that we don't have that we can add to your point? Like they're probably not going to add porn and stuff, but like, I guess we'll add retro games.
00:52:23 ◼ ► Someone says, no, don't allow that, we can't get purchases from Space Invaders. And I'm like, but we have to do it. Because competition.
00:52:30 ◼ ► And so I like this development. We should, but let's read the details of this because the devil is in the details as always.
00:52:37 ◼ ► Apple is loosening its app store restrictions and opening the marketplace up to retro game emulators. In an update on Friday, Apple announced that game emulators can come to the app store globally and offer downloadable games.
00:52:47 ◼ ► Apple says those games must comply with "all applicable laws," though an indication it will ban apps that provide pirated titles. The app review guidelines read as follows.
00:52:57 ◼ ► "Apps may offer certain software that is not embedded in the binary, specifically HTML5 mini apps and minigames, streaming games, chatbots, and plugins. Additionally, retro game console emulator apps can offer to download games."
00:53:14 ◼ ► Now of course, James Thompson, friend of the show, immediately quipped, "Well, I'm looking forward to an official Apple definition of the word 'retro.'"
00:53:22 ◼ ► This is where the devil starts in the details. Because remember, this is the app store. And your apps go through app review. And app review is capricious.
00:53:30 ◼ ► What is a retro game console emulator app? What does it mean to "comply with all applicable laws"? App review will tell you. You'll find out, I guess. And that was the question when this story first came out.
00:53:44 ◼ ► Like, what does this mean? Can I put up a Nintendo emulator? Or will Apple... What I immediately thought of was Casey's trying to send screenshots for Call Sheet. And Apple's like, "Hey, before we approve this app, can you tell us that you have the rights to use this movie poster?"
00:54:01 ◼ ► And it's like, "Alright, so if you send a Nintendo emulator, is Apple going to go, 'Hey, before we post your Nintendo emulator, can you tell me that you have the rights to ship a Nintendo emulator?'"
00:54:14 ◼ ► Because we've heard of Nintendo. The same way that they're asking Casey if he has the rights to these known Hollywood movies. This is the thing with app review.
00:54:20 ◼ ► You can send up an app sometimes called, like, you know, I think someone did a Mario app or something like that. Sail through app review and they're like, "Hey, app review doesn't deal with copyright. We just wait for someone to complain. It's not our job to vet all your copyrighted material."
00:54:34 ◼ ► But apparently with Casey's app, that reviewer was like, "You know what? It's my job to vet copyrighted material."
00:54:39 ◼ ► So how is it going to work when they send a game emulator? They're going to say, the disclaimer is Apple basically saying, "Hey, you just have to follow all the laws. Someone complains to us, we're going to say, 'Hey, we told them they have to follow all the laws. Don't look at us. Just directly sue the developer. Don't sue us. We said they have to comply with all laws and they didn't do it so they violated the agreement or whatever.'"
00:55:00 ◼ ► But when your app goes to app review, is the app reviewer going to say, "Hey, everything in your app, are you allowed to do all that stuff? Are you allowed to have a Nintendo emulator? Are you allowed to, like, I see you have an icon that looks like an N64. Are you allowed to have that icon? Do you have the rights to this?"
00:55:17 ◼ ► And we didn't know the answer to that question. I think we continue to not know the answer to that question because we just have one or two data points.
00:55:22 ◼ ► Even just in the guidelines, "Retro game console emulator apps." That's multiple words in there. It's not just retro games. Retro PC games, that's not a console. So I think if you're doing PC games, you can't do this.
00:55:33 ◼ ► And what does retro mean? Last generation? The generation before that? Is it a number of years? Is the Switch retro because it's so damn old?
00:55:46 ◼ ► I think it's probably fairly clear. First of all, yes, they will absolutely make you assert that you own things or prove that you own things that are shown in your screenshots and that come with the app.
00:56:02 ◼ ► Well, look at the IGBA emulator that we're going to get to in a second. I don't think they did that in that app at all.
00:56:12 ◼ ► But who knows? Because we just have the one data point, IGBA, which is a Game Boy Advance emulator.
00:56:17 ◼ ► If you look at it, it's filled with Nintendo proprietary looking stuff right down to the UI that looks like the Game Boy Advance or whatever.
00:56:26 ◼ ► Did someone have to assert that they own all that stuff or did the reviewer just be like, "Eh, it's fine."
00:56:33 ◼ ► Yeah. No, I think if I was making an emulator for the App Store, I would assume that I can't use trademarks.
00:56:42 ◼ ► So, you know, stay away from, like, especially stay away from the word Nintendo. Like, just stay away from it.
00:56:49 ◼ ► Yeah, I think acronyms might be easier to get away with, but, you know, certainly I would stay away from as many trademark names as possible.
00:56:57 ◼ ► I would obviously not include any ROMs with it, or I would only include only, like, you know, open source enthusiast ROMs, which probably exist for most of these systems.
00:57:06 ◼ ► Like, for almost all these old systems, there are enthusiast communities who make new ROMs that were never actually made on cartridges.
00:57:15 ◼ ► So, like, you could ship this with, like, only freely available ROMs. Like, they exist.
00:57:24 ◼ ► Well, if you ship it empty and you get that one reviewer who's like, "Your app does nothing. Rejected." Then you've got a problem.
00:57:29 ◼ ► Because you know those reviewers exist, right? Like, if your app doesn't do anything, you know, when you launch it, you're like, "Oh, well, people have to supply their own ROMs."
00:57:37 ◼ ► Yeah. Anyway, so I think the path is fairly clear there. Like, when they first made this rule, we all thought they're not going to allow arbitrary ROMs to be loaded into apps.
00:57:49 ◼ ► They would, you know, allow somebody like Nintendo themselves to make an app that includes their own emulated old games.
00:57:58 ◼ ► But it turns out, like, they've given a couple of press comments here and there, including there was one in MacRumors today, I believe, that basically where Apple has given statements basically saying, like, "It will be okay for you to, like, bring ROMs to it from the web."
00:58:16 ◼ ► "Apple confirmed to us that emulators on the App Store are permitted to load ROMs downloaded from the web so long as the app is emulating retro console games only."
00:58:30 ◼ ► So I think ultimately this is, we're going to hear about occasional, you know, pain in the butt stories about App Review where somebody's going to have to say, "No, I don't own Mario, so I can't show it in the screenshots. Fine."
00:58:42 ◼ ► And the whole thing's going to be very, like, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, yes, of course you're going to load it up with Mario games.
00:58:50 ◼ ► But it will be just like any other app, like CallSheet, like Overcast, like Instapaper.
00:58:55 ◼ ► Like any other app that has the ability to show third party content, some of which somebody might have rights over and some of which somebody might not care, it's going to have that same kind of trade off of risk versus reward and possible occasional App Store snags mostly involving metadata and screenshots.
00:59:16 ◼ ► So, you know, speaking of App Review problems, our friend Ben McCarthy, they're about to release a Pokedex app, you know, like a Pokemon database sort of thing.
00:59:26 ◼ ► And I don't think there's any marketing site for this, but I'll put something in the show notes that you can look at at least briefly.
00:59:33 ◼ ► Nevertheless, I bet you anything that when we look at the App Store screenshots for Ketchup, which is the name of this app, I think it'll end up being little to no Pokemon in the app or it'll be like, I don't know, outlines or something like that.
00:59:50 ◼ ► Because if you get too close to the actual Pokemon, then you'll end up running afoul of App Review and I bet you any amount of money that Ben has had to do some really heavy lifting to try to show this app in the App Store without, you know, using any of Nintendo's copyrightable assets.
01:00:11 ◼ ► So we've had one example of emulators first, and it's been an unfortunate one. So this is the Verge story. The first approved Apple emulators for the iPhone have arrived and one of them was the aforementioned IGBA, which is a Game Boy Advance emulator.
01:00:22 ◼ ► Unfortunately, it was essentially a clone of Rally Test It's first retro game emulator, which was open source and it was essentially forked and someone forked it and made an iOS game out of it and uploaded it to the App Store and apparently didn't follow the open source license.
01:00:41 ◼ ► And shortly after that story was posted, the thing arrived, there was another story that says, here's why Apple removed the first Game Boy emulator from the App Store.
01:00:49 ◼ ► And according to 9to5Mac, Apple said that it removed IGBA from the App Store for violating two App Store guidelines, copyright section 5.2 and spam section 4.3.
01:00:59 ◼ ► IGBA's functionality was originally approved in compliance with the App Store's guideline. The app was then removed, however, when Apple learned that it was a clone of GBA for iOS, a violation of copyright and spam App Store guidelines.
01:01:11 ◼ ► So this explanation is, we approved it first, but then we made a mistake. And the mistake was not that this retro game thing is not allowed, but two things.
01:01:19 ◼ ► One, there's the copyright thing and I think that's just like failure to comply with an open source license.
01:01:23 ◼ ► And two, is that it was a clone of a previously existing but rejected app, a GBA for iOS.
01:01:31 ◼ ► And I think it's the spam guidelines are like, hey, you can't just, like if we reject an app, you can't just upload another version of it or something.
01:01:37 ◼ ► I don't actually understand this rejection at all, but the bottom line is, retro game emulator appeared and then was quickly pulled down.
01:01:43 ◼ ► And for what it's worth, Riley said that, and Amatoot, he said, "I just want to reiterate that I'm not mad at the developer, everyone makes mistakes, and they even reached out to me via email to personally apologize for the mess, so no hard feelings."
01:01:54 ◼ ► So it's not a big deal that the person uploaded a thing that was a clone and not compliant or whatever.
01:01:59 ◼ ► But the fact is, it appeared and disappeared, and it was rejected by Apple, but not for using Nintendo's copyrighted material or loading ROMs from the web or Amatoot for other App Store guideline-related reasons.
01:02:17 ◼ ► On this topic, though, there are other parties that are able to stop the retro dream from happening on all our phones and iPads and so on and so forth.
01:02:30 ◼ ► Nintendo recently nuked from Orbit the Yuzu Switch emulator, and that's something that hadn't been happening too often.
01:02:41 ◼ ► It was like game console developers turned a blind eye to emulators of their old platforms, which always seemed weird to me.
01:02:51 ◼ ► Because in the olden days, they don't care about their latest console, they don't care that you're emulating an NES and some open source thing that nobody cares about.
01:02:58 ◼ ► But over the past decade or so, all the big console makers have been making money off their own old games, often using emulators and hiring emulator developers into their own companies so that you can pay for and play NES games on your Switch or whatever.
01:03:15 ◼ ► So it's not like these companies no longer care about retro consoles. They do care. Every person who downloads for free an NES emulator and downloads an illegal NES ROM of Mario and plays it is a customer that is less likely to pay whatever it costs to get that in Nintendo's own official store where you can buy old NES games.
01:03:35 ◼ ► But the Nintendo thing with Yuzu, I was asking before if the Switch was retro. The Switch is a really old console, hasn't been updated in a while. The OLED one came out, people thought that might have been a revised Switch, but it was just a better screen.
01:03:49 ◼ ► Anyway, it's been out for a long time, and it was slow when it came out. From hardware perspective, it is retro. But from Nintendo's perspective, it is their current console.
01:03:58 ◼ ► Nintendo didn't like many things about the Yuzu emulator, one of which obviously runs Switch games that people illegally download. But the second one, I think supposedly the people involved with the Yuzu emulator might have been involved with leaking the Tears of the Kingdom game before it was actually officially released.
01:04:17 ◼ ► So people were playing it on their Steam decks before it was even out on the Switch, and Nintendo was just like, enough. And so lawyers descended. And as you can imagine, Nintendo has a pretty slam dunk case against an emulator whose entire purpose and community and website and tutorials and everything is so clearly aimed at letting you figure out how to essentially play your illegally acquired ROMs.
01:04:41 ◼ ► And they had a court case, and I believe the court case was settled, and the settlement was Yuzu loses everything, Nintendo gets everything, bye bye Yuzu. And Yuzu had to pay 2.4 million dollars and shuttered its entire company.
01:04:55 ◼ ► And Nintendo continues to wander the web, finding people and things who are doing things it doesn't like, like it's getting a bunch of Discord servers shut down because Yuzu is open source, there's like forks of Yuzu.
01:05:04 ◼ ► And Nintendo's getting their Discord shut down so they no longer have a place to hang out with each other and work on their emulators. So Nintendo is awake and angry, and I'm kind of not surprised, like I said, because Nintendo, like many other console makers, is making money off "retro game consoles".
01:05:20 ◼ ► So yes, Apple may allow your retro thing up on the App Store, but if Nintendo sees that that thing is essentially being used for piracy, I can imagine Nintendo will ask Apple, "Hey, we think this app violates our intellectual property yada yada yada", and then Apple will take it down, or Apple will direct them to you and you'll take it down yourself because you don't have a bizillion dollars to pay for lawyers to fight Nintendo.
01:05:47 ◼ ► And the same is true, by the way, of alternative App Stores. If you have an emulator, you put it up on an alternative App Store, and Nintendo comes a-knockin', either at the alternative App Store or comes knockin' on your door, guess what? You're gonna fold like a house of cards just like Yuzu did.
01:06:00 ◼ ► And you're not gonna have 2.4 million dollars to pay them to settle a lawsuit. So it's a dangerous world out there for console emulation, especially since, like in the case of the Switch, it's so retro that the Switch emulations, like in Yuzu, play Switch games better than the Switch.
01:06:15 ◼ ► Because any reasonably powerful PC or probably even iPad or whatever can play Switch games at a higher frame rate and higher resolution than the Switch itself can, because the Switch hardware is so anemic and old.
01:06:29 ◼ ► And so not only is it not retro, or the Switch is their current console, but it's so retro that you can play it faster in emulation than you can on the actual Switch. So it actually gives you a superior game experience, superior fidelity than an actual Switch. And partially Nintendo is to blame for that.
01:06:46 ◼ ► But really, Nintendo is not as angry, and they are awake, and I think it's gonna really put a damper on everyone's fun with this whole retro game thing.
01:06:54 ◼ ► Indeed. Yeah, we'll see what happens. I mean, I'm sure something will show up, and I'm glad that Apple's finally doing... I was gonna say what's right, I think that's a bit dramatic.
01:07:03 ◼ ► I think it's good that they're finally embracing things that aren't cut-and-dry, perfect fits for Apple. And again, I think it's this competition that's caused it, and I'm here for it. Like, I want more of this. So I don't want specifically, but I just want more of this. So please and thank you.
01:07:22 ◼ ► Yeah, and this is an example, just to reiterate, where there was the EU DMA thing that's forcing Apple to do a thing, and Apple's response was to change the rules for the whole world in the App Store.
01:07:31 ◼ ► So we actually benefit from it in this case. We don't get the alternative App Stores like the EU folks do, but we do... like, the retro game rule is not just for the EU.
01:07:39 ◼ ► So I think that is what Apple should be doing. You would think that it annoys Apple to have a fragmented ecosystem where the rules are different in the EU in significant ways that impact the OS and the user experience, and I'm sure Apple doesn't like that.
01:07:54 ◼ ► But in every case where Apple can bring itself to make a decision for the whole world, they should, because it's just... you don't want to fragment it even further. And I'm glad they managed to convince themselves that this would not be the end of the world to allow retro game console emulators.
01:08:13 ◼ ► We are brought to you this episode by Squarespace, the all-in-one website building platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just starting out or managing a growing brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything from your products to your content to your time, all in one place and all on your terms.
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01:10:11 ◼ ► Let's do some Ask ATP and Jan Wedekind writes, "How does John manage where new tabs spawn in Safari with so many open browser windows? It drives me bananas in that it always opens in the last active window and it's cumbersome having to manually move them around. Any tips?"
01:10:29 ◼ ► Well, it is cumbersome. Two ways I manage this. One is the not great way, but practically speaking, this happens sometimes. You click on a link. It opens where it's going to open.
01:10:42 ◼ ► Safari has a bunch of rules about where it's going to open new windows and new tabs based on your settings, based on what the front-most window was, yada yada yada.
01:10:48 ◼ ► Whatever Safari picks, it's not that big a deal that if it picked the wrong place, just yank out that tab, put it where you want it. Put it in the window you want it, put it in its own separate window, that's a thing you can do.
01:10:57 ◼ ► The second thing, which I do a surprising amount, is don't click links, right-click them, copy link locations, switch to Safari, make new window, paste in the URL. You can do most of this from the keyboard.
01:11:07 ◼ ► And then you can decide where it goes. You can put the tab where you want it to appear and paste the URL into the location bar and it returns.
01:11:14 ◼ ► I know this probably sounds cumbersome, but as a career web developer, I spend a lot of time in the address bar, let's say. Other people never even touch it. In fact, Apple, I think correctly, de-emphasized it many, many years ago to the point where they don't even show the full URL anymore.
01:11:32 ◼ ► I think people just think of that as the Google search box and ignore it when it has any other text in it. But as a web developer, I spend a lot of time in there.
01:11:39 ◼ ► And so copying and pasting things into the address bar of browsers is how I spend half of my day. And that's a weird way to work for most people. Practically speaking, that is one way that I essentially determine where things are going to open.
01:11:49 ◼ ► It's because I'm inverting the process. I'm not clicking a URL allowing the OS to dispatch and the app to choose or whatever. I'm grabbing a URL as a text string and then I'm going to the browser that I want to go in, because remember, I'm running two of them all the time, and finding the window or tab where I want it to be, or making a new window or whatever, and pasting the URL and hitting return.
01:12:10 ◼ ► Pedro Fernandez writes, "What's your take on using case-sensitive file system formatting for macOS? I had a bug that was driving me crazy because it was working perfectly in macOS but failing in Linux.
01:12:18 ◼ ► A folder was named 'dataset' with capital D, capital S. What is that, Pascal case? I always get it wrong. That's Pascal, right?"
01:12:25 ◼ ► "And I was accessing it with the string 'dataset' with capital D and lowercase s. It worked on macOS but not on Linux. I recall once formatting macOS using case-sensitive and having many problems. I honestly don't even remember what I do. I feel like I do case-sensitive. Where to one thing?"
01:12:43 ◼ ► Yeah, because case-sensitive is not the default. And before we let Jon tell us the right answer, I will put it in and say case-sensitive is wrong in most cases. That is a poor choice in most cases.
01:12:57 ◼ ► I mean, obviously there's a lot of complexity once you get into various other types of Unicode normalization and things like that. There's a lot of complexity there. And I think it creates better outcomes for users and it avoids more problems and potential bugs and even sometimes security problems if the file system normalizes names as much as possible when doing duplicate detection.
01:13:25 ◼ ► So let you enter whatever case you want and then display whatever you entered back to the user but prevent the creation of another file in the same folder with a name that matches it in any kind of normalized form.
01:13:40 ◼ ► So for instance, capital A versus lowercase a in the name. Don't allow that. It's just in the same directory. But even other things like there's this whole mechanism in place for character normalization of letters that are beyond just the English Roman alphabet.
01:13:55 ◼ ► So for instance, an E with an accent over it. Should a word with an accent at E be unique from a file system perspective from that same word with the English E with no accent? They're both Es but they have different forms sort of. Or certain letters that normalize in different ways.
01:14:16 ◼ ► There's that big capital B looking symbol in German that kind of translates to SS I think. So there's all sorts of different, in different alphabets and different languages, there's different characters that kind of can normalize down to other characters.
01:14:32 ◼ ► And there's a question of how should a file system handle this? Should they treat those as two separate spellings and therefore allow two files to exist with one each of those variants or not?
01:14:43 ◼ ► And I think in general, it is better to coalesce those down for duplicate detection so that no similarly translating characters are allowed to coexist as two different file names.
01:14:58 ◼ ► So if you are listening to this and you don't recall what you picked, you took the defaults and the default is not case sensitive. So that's the answer to what most people are doing. There's a long history behind this, a long, mostly sad history.
01:15:13 ◼ ► In the HFS+ / HFS days, maybe this is just HFS+, but anyway, in the classic Mac OS days, what the file system would do was it would perform Unicode normalization. So you'd give it a file name and it would be like, that's great and all, but I'm going to normalize that.
01:15:30 ◼ ► And Unicode normalization is essentially picking, there's a bunch of different normalized forms. You can look it up on the Wikipedia page, in case you can find a link for it.
01:15:37 ◼ ► But to give an example, I would use the word "cafe" with the E with the little accent over it. That little E with the accent can be written at least two different ways.
01:15:46 ◼ ► One of them is there is a Unicode code point for E with the little accent over it. But another way is you can write the Unicode code point for E and then the one for little accent combining character.
01:15:56 ◼ ► And they both make an E with an accent over it. One of them is a single thing, one of them is E plus accent, they combine, there's these combining characters in Unicode.
01:16:04 ◼ ► So they look exactly the same. They are the same comparison size, but the bytes on disk are different for both of those things.
01:16:12 ◼ ► So if you did a blind byte comparison, they're both UTF-8, they're not different encodings, they're both UTF-8.
01:16:18 ◼ ► But if you went byte by byte and you compared cafe to cafe, they look the same, they are the same character, they're the same, but byte by byte, nope, these are different.
01:16:27 ◼ ► And what HFS plus did, I believe it did one of the normalized forms, it normalized everything.
01:16:34 ◼ ► So whatever you fed it, it would do, maybe it was like normal form D or something, I forget what the names are.
01:16:39 ◼ ► And that, you know, setting aside the case sensitivity, that Unicode normalization made some computer nerds angry.
01:16:49 ◼ ► Like Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux. He was very angry about the fact that HFS plus did that because he's like, how dare the file system change the bytes that I gave it for the file name.
01:17:00 ◼ ► Because it violated what he thought was the contract, which is, hey file system, here's a bunch of bytes that is the file name.
01:17:06 ◼ ► And then later the code would go, look for that file in the file system based on those bytes and it wouldn't find it because the file system had changed the byte sequence to do whatever normalized form.
01:17:16 ◼ ► And one normalized form is combine everything, the other normalized form is like, have everything decomposed.
01:17:20 ◼ ► And you wouldn't get back the same bytes that you put in. He's like, this is a violation of the contract.
01:17:24 ◼ ► When I read the file name back from that directory, I better see the bytes that I put in there, otherwise it's insanity.
01:17:29 ◼ ► And he was super angry about that, you can find his email on the internet where he was angry about that.
01:17:33 ◼ ► So when APFS came along, APFS made a different choice, maybe not because Linus was angry about it, but whatever.
01:17:39 ◼ ► APFS, the original version of APFS said, you give me some bytes, I'll store some bytes. Whatever, whatever bytes you give me I'm going to store, that's that.
01:17:47 ◼ ► And when you read the directory and you look at the list of file names, I'm giving you back the bytes that you gave me.
01:17:51 ◼ ► And as soon as APFS came out, in fact before it was released, at least on a Mac anyway, I filed a bug against Apple that said, hey, I can make two files named cafe in the same directory in the Finder.
01:17:59 ◼ ► One of them is the E with the accent as one little thing, and one of them is the E with the combining accent character.
01:18:05 ◼ ► But in the file system they literally look the same, and here they are side by side with each other in the same directory to Marker's point.
01:18:15 ◼ ► And it's because the file system was totally hands off and it was like, I am not, you give me bytes, I store bytes.
01:18:21 ◼ ► I'm not involved in this at all, I just put the bytes in and when you read the directory I give you the bytes back out.
01:18:26 ◼ ► Kind of like what Linus wanted, but of course from user interface perspective that's not great.
01:18:30 ◼ ► Eventually future versions of APFS changed to do, I think this is current, someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the current strategy is this.
01:18:38 ◼ ► APFS still takes the bytes that you gave it and gives them back to you just the way you gave it to it.
01:18:42 ◼ ► But the thing that looks in the directory to see if a file by that name already exists, that mechanism normalizes everything.
01:18:51 ◼ ► So the comparison is normalized. They normalize before they do the comparison of both sides, but it will always give you the bytes out that you put in.
01:18:58 ◼ ► So if you try to make a second file called cafe with a different normalization, it won't let you because it will say sorry file exists. It will clash.
01:19:07 ◼ ► Yeah, well it is certainly better than the previous two that we said, but I believe this is what everything currently does.
01:19:12 ◼ ► And that, and case sensitivity I assume, I don't know how case sensitivity influenced it, but I assume it's in the same type of thing where the case insensitivity comes in the checking whether that file already exists or not.
01:19:23 ◼ ► But when you put the file in the file system, the case is there. So it is case preserving. It is encoding preserving, but it is not encoding sensitive, and if you choose case insensitive, it is not case sensitive.
01:19:41 ◼ ► And I think that higher levels of the OS should implement case insensitivity for places where it matters.
01:19:48 ◼ ► But it doesn't matter what I think because we have decades of Mac OS history where the file system by default has not been case sensitive, and the plain fact is that Mac apps sometimes will misbehave on a case sensitive file system.
01:20:01 ◼ ► It shouldn't be that way. People shouldn't be careless when they write their programs, but reality is what it is.
01:20:07 ◼ ► I would say the answer, the long-winded answer to this is do not format your file system as case sensitive, especially your boot disk, on Mac OS and expect to have a problem-free experience.
01:20:22 ◼ ► And as much as you may want to have a case sensitive file system for your own purposes, don't do it.
01:20:27 ◼ ► Now if you want one, make an external disk with an external file system. Make a disk image. I have this on every Mac for my entire existence.
01:20:34 ◼ ► I've had a case sensitive file system disk image that I would launch and mount and CD into to do stuff.
01:20:40 ◼ ► And why? Well, you may be angered/surprised to learn that one of the file name extensions for C++ source files in Unix, the file name extension is capital C.
01:21:03 ◼ ► I will tell you, as an old school Unix person, one of the five extensions for C++ files was, in the past, capital C.
01:21:13 ◼ ► Well, you download some open source thing and you untard and you try to build it and it doesn't work.
01:21:18 ◼ ► And it's because when it untard, either a foo.capital C overwrote a foo.lowercase C or vice versa, and now you're missing one of the files.
01:21:28 ◼ ► So the culture of Unix and all Unix software is to have case sensitive file systems by default.
01:21:36 ◼ ► So there's tons of Mac software out there where in the source code someone copied and pasted like a folder name or a file name that's part of their application that has the wrong case.
01:21:45 ◼ ► And it's been working for 30 years because Mac file systems are case insensitive by default.
01:21:50 ◼ ► So the sad fact is we are essentially all stuck with case insensitive file systems, which I agree that that should be the policy.
01:21:56 ◼ ► I just kind of wish the file system at the lowest level was case sensitive and that just the higher levels implemented that.
01:22:10 ◼ ► Matt McCurdy writes, "In the style of throw money at the problem for the best product, I'm curious to know what brand of ceiling fan Marco landed on.
01:22:18 ◼ ► I'm trying to avoid the big box storage generic brands for fear of a low quality and noisy product and then I can only seem to find styles that are stuck in the 70s or hyper modern like they belong in space."
01:22:30 ◼ ► So the short version of this is it doesn't matter in my experience that much in terms of like quality.
01:22:45 ◼ ► I've had fans that came with a place that I was renting or an old house that I bought or whatever.
01:23:03 ◼ ► For the most part it's probably better off fashion wise for you not to notice your fan very much because they're not that attractive even the nice ones.
01:23:24 ◼ ► I've occasionally had some that like got loose and rattled and had to be tightened just like any other brand.
01:23:34 ◼ ► The only weird thing that I don't like about their fans is that they seem to mostly or all now come with those dumb like custom remotes to control them.
01:23:46 ◼ ► Now they can be adapted and converted to the three wire system but that requires you to have three wire wiring that goes from the switch to the fan.
01:24:02 ◼ ► Like if you use their little smart remotes you can just have regular two wire wiring that was never planning for a fan on a certain circuit or switch and you can make it work and it'll be fine.
01:24:11 ◼ ► But so I currently in the new house we got a bunch of Fanimation fans and they all have these dumb little remotes.
01:24:30 ◼ ► Can you explain the three wire thing? I don't quite understand what you're getting at there.
01:24:34 ◼ ► Many fans have built in lights and so the idea is if you have a switch on the wall for the fan.
01:24:51 ◼ ► Sometimes the light switch is kind of like the main switch but then the fan will have two pull chains.
01:25:06 ◼ ► One that goes from the switch to the fan and one that goes from the switch to the fan's light.
01:25:22 ◼ ► They also usually now these days are custom LED fixtures as in you cannot replace the bulb.
01:25:32 ◼ ► And so eventually the LED in it will start going bad and will start flickering or will just outright die.
01:25:38 ◼ ► And then you just don't have a light in your fan anymore unless you go through the hassle of replacing the custom LED thing in there.
01:25:47 ◼ ► You know as a non-fan person I would think that what I would want is a fan without a light because it would be lower profile and sleek.
01:26:04 ◼ ► Yeah you're right. If you want to minimize the protrusion from the ceiling, yeah don't get one with a light.
01:26:16 ◼ ► As a final note, and I think I've told this story before, I don't recall the specifics.
01:26:24 ◼ ► But we bought space looking fans. I couldn't tell you what brand they were for the screened in porch.
01:26:33 ◼ ► But certain kinds of fans, I want to say it's AC fans and then there's others that like have a conversion into DC.
01:26:43 ◼ ► But certain kinds of fans will work with say the former sponsor but one of my favorite things in the world, the Lutron Caseta fan switches.
01:26:50 ◼ ► And so what we did was, or what the electricians did was they wired it up to the you know RF receiver whatever.
01:27:06 ◼ ► And I vastly prefer that even though the Caseta, especially the early Caseta stuff wasn't the most beautiful stuff in the world.
01:27:14 ◼ ► And it's so much better looking than the RF boxes that were mammoth and stuck out of the wall and so on and so forth.
01:29:34 ◼ ► So one of the challenges of Lutron's dimmers before is that it was kind of like BMW's controls.
01:29:41 ◼ ► They were fine once you learned them but when you had a guest over like how do I turn on the lights?
01:30:18 ◼ ► So they can be smart controlled but still have the look and feel of regular light switches.
01:30:52 ◼ ► - This is the problem because our main kitchen light has a switch at the entryway from the garage.