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ATP

582: Can't Render, Fog It

 

00:00:00   Have either of you ever had an SD card go bad?

00:00:04   - Hmm, don't think so.

00:00:07   I think what happens, either the capacity becomes so low

00:00:11   that they become useless to you or you lose them.

00:00:13   I think those are the two failure modes for me.

00:00:15   - Fair.

00:00:16   - I actually had one go bad for I think the first time.

00:00:19   And it's a good one, it's like a SanDisk Extreme Pro,

00:00:22   you know, it's like one of the really good,

00:00:24   fairly expensive ones. (laughs)

00:00:27   And it actually went bad, like it's producing

00:00:29   write errors on any camera that tries to write to it.

00:00:32   I'm like shaken to my core, like I always heard

00:00:34   this was a possibility, but I've never seen it happen.

00:00:37   I'm questioning everything now.

00:00:39   Is the sky blue?

00:00:40   - I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often,

00:00:41   because they are so inexpensive in the grand scheme

00:00:44   of things in terms of how many bits they hold, right?

00:00:46   And they're small and flimsy and have those exposed contacts

00:00:49   but you know.

00:00:50   - I guess, yeah.

00:00:51   - I think the only failure I've had,

00:00:53   which JJ in the chat has said the same thing,

00:00:56   one where the plastic around the contacts broke

00:00:59   and then that made it like super dodgy to continue to use

00:01:02   'cause it was super duper like structurally compromised.

00:01:05   I've had that happen, I don't think in terms of like

00:01:07   what you're talking about, Mark,

00:01:08   where it's just a read or write errors.

00:01:10   I can't recall that ever happening.

00:01:11   Although I will say that there is a special place in hell

00:01:15   for both the USB-A designers and the person who designed

00:01:19   the write protect switch on SD cards,

00:01:21   because I have only ever found one device in my entire life

00:01:26   that I think can actually, into which I can insert an SD card

00:01:30   without tripping that switch and that is my MacBook Pro.

00:01:33   Actually, so the M1 was the same way.

00:01:34   So the M1 and the M3 MacBook Pros,

00:01:36   I can successfully insert an SD card into that

00:01:39   without tripping the switch.

00:01:40   - That's because it sticks out

00:01:41   when you stick it in those, right?

00:01:43   Doesn't actually go.

00:01:44   - No, not the--

00:01:44   - The switch doesn't though,

00:01:45   'cause the switch is near the front of the card.

00:01:48   - Right, exactly.

00:01:49   The card absolutely does,

00:01:50   but the switch does not like Marco said.

00:01:52   But I tell you what, every other frickin' device I've ever,

00:01:55   well, that's not fair, not the cameras in my life,

00:01:58   but the readers in my life, my beloved CalDigit TS4,

00:02:02   that, every single frickin' time I put one in,

00:02:04   it trips the thing.

00:02:05   Oh, it's off.

00:02:06   - I've never tripped that switch.

00:02:08   I even thought it was where the floppy disk one,

00:02:10   this just goes to show, that's why I said it sticks out.

00:02:11   I thought the switch was the other part.

00:02:12   I've never tripped it.

00:02:14   - Yeah, I don't think I ever have either.

00:02:15   - No, you are a unicorn.

00:02:17   - I do have a problem though with SD cards

00:02:19   where it's kind of like USB, micro-USB ports,

00:02:21   where I have to put it in three different times

00:02:23   to figure out which direction it goes.

00:02:24   - Oh, yeah, I have a mnemonic for my cameras

00:02:26   to remember which way the little notch goes,

00:02:28   you know, like this one side at the end.

00:02:30   'Cause at least it is visually asymmetrical,

00:02:33   even though slot-wise, you can put it in both ways.

00:02:36   But yeah, that's annoying.

00:02:38   - We have some excellent news.

00:02:42   It is that time of year.

00:02:45   The ATP Store is back, baby.

00:02:47   It's WWDC time and it is back.

00:02:50   We've got all sorts of stuff.

00:02:51   We got old stuff, we got new stuff.

00:02:53   We got yellow stuff, we got blue stuff.

00:02:54   All sorts of different stuff that we can talk about.

00:02:56   Now, Jon, I'm happy to do a nickel tour,

00:02:58   but would you rather do it or you wanna just interject?

00:03:01   - Let me go through the store products.

00:03:02   So yeah, as Casey said, this is the WWDC sale,

00:03:05   which you may be thinking, it's April.

00:03:06   WWDC is not until June.

00:03:08   Well, you know, it takes a long time to have the sale

00:03:10   and then to take the orders and then to make the shirts.

00:03:12   And as always, we try to get products to people

00:03:16   in time to go to WWDC.

00:03:17   Now, so very few people get to go to WWDC

00:03:20   in person these days.

00:03:21   As it stands right now, none of us are gonna be there,

00:03:23   but we love to see photos of people from WWDC.

00:03:26   And if there's someone in that photo wearing one

00:03:28   of our shirts, that's just wonderful.

00:03:30   So if you order now, you may, may get your merchandise

00:03:34   in time to attend WWDC.

00:03:36   So we get it earlier and earlier every year.

00:03:40   Maybe it'll, we'll start doing it in January sometime.

00:03:43   Anyway, here are the products we have.

00:03:45   So our first new shirt is called ATP Windows.

00:03:48   No, not the Microsoft kind, the Me kind.

00:03:51   (laughing)

00:03:53   If you watched our recent member special

00:03:57   that had a video version where you got to see me try

00:04:01   to explain how I use Windows on my Mac,

00:04:03   we thought we'd have a shirt sort of in that theme.

00:04:06   I'm not sure the design entirely captures

00:04:10   the profound beauty that is my window management technique.

00:04:15   - All right, all right.

00:04:16   I think you're looking for a different word there.

00:04:18   Yeah.

00:04:19   - Yeah, I did my best.

00:04:20   It's got Windows on it anyway.

00:04:22   So we have this shirt in two different versions.

00:04:25   One has the full color ATP logo on it

00:04:28   and it also has color window widgets.

00:04:31   And the other one, I guess, is the graphite mode

00:04:33   where it is monochrome and a little bit,

00:04:34   a little bit cheaper and everything is a single color,

00:04:37   I think, so okay, it's been Windows and ATP,

00:04:38   Windows monochrome.

00:04:39   - And it is, by the way, it's amazing.

00:04:41   Like when we do shirts with colors, like we,

00:04:46   when you, when you make shirts, when you, when they're,

00:04:48   when they're being screen printed,

00:04:49   you generally pay per color.

00:04:51   And so every additional color you have on a shirt,

00:04:53   either the price goes up or your profit goes down or both.

00:04:58   And so, and, but we don't want to make, you know,

00:05:00   a crappy shirt and our logo happens to be a rainbow.

00:05:03   - Not great planning on our part.

00:05:05   - We get killed on shirt costs.

00:05:07   - Yeah, we do.

00:05:08   - And the funny thing about the Windows shirt is like,

00:05:11   yeah, even if we gave it a monochrome logo,

00:05:12   you have to have those traffic light colors

00:05:15   in the window widgets to make it look right.

00:05:16   So yes, we do have a monochrome version of the shirt,

00:05:19   but the color version looks so much better

00:05:21   and there's a reason why it's going to be more expensive.

00:05:23   - Yep, so same as it ever was.

00:05:25   Although for both of these shirts,

00:05:27   something is true that's true of the other products as well.

00:05:29   We are trying to offer a large variety of things.

00:05:33   We keep saying shirts and yes, you can buy a t-shirt,

00:05:35   but now you can buy a long sleeve t-shirt

00:05:37   if you don't want a short sleeve one and a sweatshirt.

00:05:41   And in some cases, a tank top.

00:05:43   So just because just you're thinking,

00:05:45   no, I don't want a t-shirt,

00:05:46   I already have a bunch of t-shirts,

00:05:47   maybe you want a long sleeve one,

00:05:49   maybe you want a sweatshirt for the warmer weather,

00:05:51   maybe you want a tank top for the hot summer weather.

00:05:53   So take a look.

00:05:54   So the HP Windows one comes in mostly dark colors

00:05:57   to fit with the multicolor logo

00:05:58   because the multicolor logo clashes

00:06:00   with lots of different shirt colors.

00:06:01   And then the monochrome one comes in a huge variety of colors

00:06:03   because it's just white ink

00:06:04   and then it has all sorts of different shirt colors.

00:06:06   The second new shirt we have this year

00:06:09   is inspired by Marco's nostalgic eBay hunting

00:06:12   for palm devices.

00:06:15   And it is the ATP graffiti shirt.

00:06:17   It is the ATP logo written

00:06:19   in Palm's graffiti handwriting system.

00:06:21   In particular, the little like instruction sheet

00:06:24   they would give you to teach you how to use graffiti

00:06:27   for younger people who don't know it was a way of writing

00:06:29   with a stylus on a little writing area.

00:06:32   And you would draw characters that look mostly like,

00:06:35   you know, the Roman alphabet,

00:06:37   but a little bit modified so that the computer

00:06:39   had an easier time telling what the characters are.

00:06:42   - Yeah, in particular,

00:06:42   every character was exactly one stroke.

00:06:45   So like every time the pen went down

00:06:47   and then moved around and then went up,

00:06:49   that was one character.

00:06:49   So that made it with the hardware at the time,

00:06:51   that made it much, much easier for the, you know,

00:06:54   basic computers of that time to recognize individual letters

00:06:57   as opposed to what the Newton tried to do,

00:06:59   which was write however you wanna write

00:07:01   and we'll try to figure it out and we won't be able to.

00:07:03   So that's one of the reasons why Palm like really succeeded

00:07:07   and took off is that they forced the user

00:07:09   to adopt a different style of writing

00:07:12   in exchange for it working really well.

00:07:14   - Yeah, and the way they would tell you

00:07:16   in the little instruction guide thing

00:07:17   is they would have like a little dot

00:07:19   where you're supposed to put your pen down

00:07:21   or put your stylus down

00:07:22   and then you'd see where the stroke goes.

00:07:23   So in the shirt, you'll see lines

00:07:25   with a little like lollipop circle.

00:07:27   That's where you're supposed to start the line

00:07:29   and then you ended where the line ends

00:07:30   'cause they're all one stroke.

00:07:32   One of the most fun characters I always thought

00:07:33   was the way they had you do a T, as you can imagine.

00:07:36   If you try to do a T without lifting your stylus,

00:07:38   how are you gonna do that?

00:07:39   It was basically like a rotated L and that's great.

00:07:42   It's in our logo.

00:07:43   So we've got our little slashes

00:07:45   that representing the rainbow stripes

00:07:46   and we've got ATP.

00:07:47   So it's the ATP graffiti shirt/long sleeve shirt/sweat shirt/tank top.

00:07:52   - By the way, so excluding symbols,

00:07:54   what are your favorite graffiti characters?

00:07:55   For me, it's gotta be probably a tie

00:07:58   between the four and the K.

00:08:00   - Oh golly, I don't even remember.

00:08:01   The K was very good.

00:08:03   I'm looking at the alphabet now.

00:08:05   - Yeah, so the four, you just do like,

00:08:07   you know, like the way little kids write a four

00:08:08   where it has an open top,

00:08:09   you do like the little like down to the right

00:08:12   and then a big line down.

00:08:14   You just skip the big line down.

00:08:15   So it just like, it looks almost like the opposite

00:08:17   of the enter character on a keyboard.

00:08:19   It's just like an arrow going down to the right

00:08:21   and that's it.

00:08:22   And then the K is, it's as if you're drawing

00:08:25   a capital letter K without the big straight stick down.

00:08:29   So you skip the straight sticks down

00:08:30   and you just do a big whoop loopy thing

00:08:32   on the other side.

00:08:33   - Yeah, might be my two favorites, all right.

00:08:34   Well, I would pick A and T, surprisingly.

00:08:36   I like the upside down V for the A.

00:08:38   I like the T is like a rotated L

00:08:40   and I would probably also pick K 'cause that's a fun one.

00:08:42   - When Palm Devices came out, before I had one

00:08:45   and I was just like learning about them, researching them,

00:08:48   I thought this was the coolest thing in the world.

00:08:50   I would like, I would write handwritten notes in graffiti

00:08:54   just because I thought it looked,

00:08:56   it looked like the future, like it looked so cool.

00:08:59   - No, the new one was the future.

00:09:00   I remember the first time I think I told a story.

00:09:02   - I don't think that played out, John.

00:09:03   I don't think that worked out that way.

00:09:05   - The company that made it actually did pretty well

00:09:06   in handhelds. (laughing)

00:09:08   - Yeah, but it had nothing to do with the Newton.

00:09:10   - Pretty sure they killed it pretty quickly

00:09:11   once the new leader came in who made the company succeed.

00:09:14   - The spirit of the Newton lives on.

00:09:15   When I first saw Newton in like a computer store

00:09:18   for the first time and I picked it up

00:09:20   because I'd seen, like I'd seen,

00:09:21   I'd read in Apple magazines about the Newton

00:09:24   and I saw it in real life

00:09:25   and probably in a college computer store

00:09:28   when I was going on college tours for my sister.

00:09:30   And so I immediately picked it up, took the pen

00:09:33   and I wrote like, I don't know about it, right?

00:09:35   It might've been "Hello World" but probably not.

00:09:36   I wrote something but I wrote it in cursive.

00:09:40   Like, you know, 'cause I knew how to write cursive then

00:09:42   and it translated it perfectly.

00:09:44   I'm like, this machine is magic.

00:09:46   And then, you know, it more or less never did that again.

00:09:48   But the first impression was like how,

00:09:50   I mean, think of this, like in the pre-Palm days,

00:09:54   you had this device that was in your hand

00:09:56   and you could write cursive

00:09:57   and it would figure out what you wrote

00:09:58   in my cursive handwriting.

00:10:00   It was amazing.

00:10:01   I still have a couple of old ones in the attic, but yeah.

00:10:03   Before it's time.

00:10:04   - Of course you do.

00:10:05   All right, next product is,

00:10:07   these are all blasts from the past now.

00:10:09   The ATP Performance shirt, which we had on sale ages ago.

00:10:12   It is, well, Casey, you describe this one

00:10:14   'cause this is your baby.

00:10:15   - Yeah, so it's in the spirit of Under Armour.

00:10:17   If memory serves, it's the Nike equivalent of Under Armour

00:10:20   but this is the sort of thing where if you have it on,

00:10:22   first of all, it's fairly lightweight.

00:10:24   - It's Adidas by the way.

00:10:25   - Oh, sorry.

00:10:26   I thought it was Nike, but you're probably right.

00:10:27   No, you know, the Polos are Nike.

00:10:29   That's what I'm thinking of.

00:10:29   It is Adidas, you're right.

00:10:30   Anyways, one way or another,

00:10:32   when you get super duper sweaty,

00:10:33   if you're working out or whatever,

00:10:35   or you're just listening to our dulcet tones,

00:10:37   one way or another, if you get super sweaty,

00:10:38   if you try to yank this shirt off of you,

00:10:40   unlike a cotton shirt or whatever,

00:10:42   it won't just say, stay suction cup to your body.

00:10:46   It will actually come off of you, which is really nice.

00:10:48   And so it is 100% my preferred workout shirt.

00:10:52   I actually am wearing one right now

00:10:54   'cause I worked out this afternoon

00:10:55   and I should have looked at my left sleeve

00:10:57   where there is an Adidas logo playing this day.

00:10:58   Thank you, Marco.

00:10:59   Anyways, so I really, really, really like these

00:11:02   as a workout shirt.

00:11:03   Again, it's not literally Under Armour as stated,

00:11:06   but it's spiritually the same idea.

00:11:07   So really enjoy these.

00:11:08   And I believe these are several different colors,

00:11:11   but T-shirt only.

00:11:13   - Yep, T-shirt only,

00:11:13   but the new colors this year, I think,

00:11:15   are navy, gray, and blue, I think.

00:11:19   Maybe it was just in red before.

00:11:20   Anyway, a bunch of new colors.

00:11:21   - Red and blue were previous.

00:11:22   I don't think we had anything about those.

00:11:24   - Yep, so the next returning shirt,

00:11:26   I like to have my classic shirts come back.

00:11:28   This time it's coming back

00:11:29   so I can buy some for my children

00:11:31   because they like the shirt

00:11:32   and they're annoyed that we haven't sold it

00:11:33   in like four years.

00:11:34   Actually, it can't be four years really,

00:11:36   but they have the older version of the shirt.

00:11:38   So this is ATP Monochrome Pro Max 2019.

00:11:42   So we sold a shirt that had the side profile

00:11:45   of a bunch of Pro Max many, many years ago,

00:11:49   and then we updated it after the 2019 Mac Pro came out

00:11:52   to stick the 2019 Mac Pro at the end of the line

00:11:54   next to the trash can, and that is this shirt.

00:11:57   It's not the one with wheels.

00:11:58   In general, when we do something with wheels,

00:12:00   that's like a one-time only thing,

00:12:01   so treasure your wheel shirts

00:12:02   because those probably aren't coming back.

00:12:04   But it is a bunch of Pro Max.

00:12:06   It is a monochrome shirt.

00:12:07   It comes in black and white, short sleeve and long sleeve,

00:12:11   and I will be buying this for my kids

00:12:12   and hopefully enough other people will buy it

00:12:13   that they will print the order

00:12:15   and my kids will get replacements for their shirts.

00:12:17   They like it because it's not so rainbowy colored

00:12:19   and I don't know, I think it's less embarrassing for them.

00:12:23   It does say Accidental Tech Podcast

00:12:25   like spelled out underneath it.

00:12:26   - It has a bunch of computers on it.

00:12:28   - Well, people don't know that they're computers.

00:12:30   They just think it's an interesting design.

00:12:31   - I think people recognize those as computers.

00:12:34   I mean, if it only had the trash can,

00:12:37   maybe they wouldn't recognize that,

00:12:38   but I think the rest look identifiably enough

00:12:40   like computer towers that they figure it out.

00:12:42   - I don't know.

00:12:43   I mean, I think maybe the classic Mac,

00:12:45   but the ones that are towers in the side view,

00:12:46   you have to be a pretty big nerd to even pick out

00:12:49   that those are supposed to be side views

00:12:50   of tower computers, I think.

00:12:51   - Yeah, either way, it has six tower computers

00:12:53   and the word podcast on it,

00:12:55   so I think it's a pretty nerdy shirt.

00:12:57   - And a little trash can.

00:12:58   - All right, next one is our usual ATP six color shirts.

00:13:03   Once again, the colors, there's more than six of them,

00:13:04   refer to the color of the shirt.

00:13:05   It's just a monochrome ATP logo

00:13:07   on lots of different colorful shirts.

00:13:09   These are good and cheaper than the other ones

00:13:11   because it's just one color of ink

00:13:12   and you can get them in long sleeve

00:13:14   and tank and sweater and all that good stuff.

00:13:16   All right, and then we have our classic ATP logo shirt

00:13:18   with way too many colors on it

00:13:19   and even that one has changes here.

00:13:20   Now you can get a long sleeve version of that shirt

00:13:23   and I think also a tank top version of that shirt.

00:13:25   So that's our classic shirt.

00:13:27   We've got the hoodie, no different versions of this.

00:13:29   The hoodie is the hoodie, the hoodie is great.

00:13:31   My kids also both have the hoodie.

00:13:34   Thankfully they haven't lost or destroyed them yet,

00:13:35   so I don't need to buy them another one,

00:13:37   but if they did lose or destroy them,

00:13:38   I would get them another one, it's a really good hoodie.

00:13:41   This is another Casey special, we're nearing the end here.

00:13:43   The ATP polo, which Casey loves.

00:13:46   This is a Nike shirt

00:13:47   and even the polo comes in new colors this year.

00:13:50   I think what we have like gray and navy and black,

00:13:52   not very exciting new colors,

00:13:53   but remember it's got the full color embroidered ATP logo

00:13:57   on it, so again, the rainbow colors and logo tend to clash

00:13:59   if you have a shirt that's a different color.

00:14:01   So they're kind of sticking to neutral colors.

00:14:03   It works with navy and black and gray.

00:14:06   And then the final blast from the past,

00:14:08   the ATP hat, a baseball hat in new colors

00:14:12   because everything's in new colors.

00:14:13   The new color is I think navy to go along with the gray.

00:14:16   We haven't sold this in years,

00:14:18   so if you want a baseball hat

00:14:20   with a full color embroidered ATP logo on top of it,

00:14:23   now you can get one.

00:14:24   Oh yeah, and then bringing up the rear,

00:14:26   the very final product.

00:14:28   Would you believe we still have like a dozen pint glasses

00:14:30   left over from our last sale last year?

00:14:33   Please, somebody buy this dozen.

00:14:35   I don't have to bother myself

00:14:36   just to get them out of inventory.

00:14:38   12, 12 pint glasses, we can do it.

00:14:40   I guess maybe I'll just buy a handful

00:14:43   and then we'll be down to single digits,

00:14:44   but yeah, a few pint glasses are left.

00:14:46   So there you have it, full line of stuff.

00:14:48   Again, even if we're not at WWDC,

00:14:50   we would love to see pictures of people

00:14:52   who are lucky enough to attend

00:14:54   maybe wearing one of these shirts

00:14:56   or an older ATP shirt, whatever.

00:14:57   And of course, if you are an ATP member,

00:15:00   don't forget to use your promo code.

00:15:02   It is available on your member page.

00:15:03   You go to ATP.fm/member,

00:15:05   and right at the top of that page,

00:15:06   you will see a section that says ATP store discount,

00:15:08   and it will have a little code,

00:15:09   and you can copy it and paste it into the thing.

00:15:11   But this year we're trying something new.

00:15:14   If you are logged into ATP.fm,

00:15:16   like if you can go to your member page

00:15:17   and see your membership account in your email,

00:15:19   that means you're logged in.

00:15:20   We know who you are.

00:15:21   If you are logged into ATP.fm

00:15:22   or if you log into ATP.fm to see your member page,

00:15:25   and then you go to the store page

00:15:26   and click through on any of these products,

00:15:28   we will attempt to stick your discount code

00:15:31   into your cart for you. - Oh, this is news.

00:15:34   - If it doesn't work, just copy and paste it.

00:15:36   Like the old ways always work,

00:15:38   but what we're trying to avoid is a situation where people,

00:15:40   oh, I forgot to copy and paste my discount code.

00:15:43   And then we have to give them the discount retroactively,

00:15:45   and it's a big hassle and everything, right?

00:15:47   So try to remember to copy and paste the code,

00:15:49   but if you don't, it should auto-populate.

00:15:51   You'll be able to tell.

00:15:52   It'll show when you're in the cart,

00:15:53   when you do the checkout.

00:15:54   If you see the promo code area,

00:15:56   if there's something already filled in for you,

00:15:58   that's because we got it by you being logged in.

00:16:00   So again, you can go to ATP.fm,

00:16:02   log into your thing, go to the store page,

00:16:05   and then click through on any of the products,

00:16:06   and we will try to put the discount code in your thing.

00:16:09   And I guess bearing the lead here,

00:16:11   how do you get all this stuff?

00:16:12   ATP.fm/store.

00:16:15   That's where all this stuff is.

00:16:16   That's our landing page, ATP.fm/store.

00:16:19   If you go there and you are logged into your member account

00:16:21   and clicked through on any product,

00:16:22   your discount code will be used.

00:16:24   And if you aren't a member and want to join for one month

00:16:27   to get a 15% discount, you can do so at ATP.fm/join.

00:16:31   - Indeed.

00:16:32   Just a couple of quick notes.

00:16:33   First of all, this is still a cotton bureau behind the scenes

00:16:37   so for Europeans, we genuinely are very sorry,

00:16:40   but it is expensive.

00:16:41   If it's not for you, if you don't want to buy this time,

00:16:44   that's totally fine.

00:16:46   It would also make us feel a little better

00:16:48   if you did join at ATP.fm/join,

00:16:50   but we don't have to do that either.

00:16:51   But we get it, it's expensive.

00:16:53   I understand, I'm sorry.

00:16:55   We've been laying into cotton bureau constantly

00:16:57   to ask them to open up a European office

00:16:59   and they've told us maybe one day.

00:17:01   So today is not that day.

00:17:02   - Although one option since we are on WWDC season,

00:17:05   I know this is very rare, but it has happened in the past.

00:17:08   Sometimes if you are going to be,

00:17:10   if you are living outside the US

00:17:11   and you're going to be attending WWDC in person, lucky you,

00:17:15   and you know somebody else who lives in the US

00:17:17   who's also gonna be at WWDC, have them order it

00:17:20   and then just meet up at WWDC.

00:17:21   Like have them order it and ship it to themselves

00:17:23   in the US with US shipping, and then just meet up at WWDC

00:17:26   and have them give you your order

00:17:27   and then just take it back with you when you fly home.

00:17:28   - Well, and we wouldn't want to encourage our listeners

00:17:32   to commit tax fraud, so check your local laws,

00:17:34   but everyone does that.

00:17:35   - I think they're gonna be prosecuted

00:17:36   for ringing her one t-shirt.

00:17:38   - Hey, Europe's been pretty aggressive recently.

00:17:40   - Either way, definitely do what you think is best

00:17:43   and what you think is right, but one way or another,

00:17:46   this is my favorite part.

00:17:47   You have until the 28th of April, Sunday,

00:17:50   the 28th of April, ATP time.

00:17:53   Here's the moment where you're driving or you're walking

00:17:57   or you're somehow listening to us.

00:17:58   And what you're gonna do is you're gonna use

00:17:59   your turn signal because you're not an animal

00:18:02   if you're driving, or you're just going to move yourself

00:18:05   to the right-hand side or whatever of the walkway

00:18:08   that you're on, pull over if you will,

00:18:10   and you'll go to ATP.fm/store

00:18:12   and you'll place that order right now.

00:18:13   Why you place that order right now?

00:18:15   Because every time, every single flippin' time,

00:18:19   the store is closed for literally minutes or at most hours

00:18:23   and somebody says, "Oh my God, I missed it.

00:18:25   "I'm that one.

00:18:27   "Casey has said this to me all these years

00:18:29   "and now it's me, I'm that person."

00:18:31   - It happens.

00:18:32   - Don't do that, don't be that person.

00:18:34   Stop what you're doing right now.

00:18:36   Signal, get to the side of the road,

00:18:39   use your turn signals please.

00:18:40   If you're walking in Manhattan or something like that,

00:18:43   be aggressive as you get over to the right-hand side

00:18:46   because that's what you're supposed to do,

00:18:47   but then get out of the damn way

00:18:49   and go to ATP.fm/store, place your order,

00:18:51   make sure you use your member's discount if applicable.

00:18:54   Thank you so much.

00:18:55   We will remind you of this next couple of weeks,

00:18:57   but again, until Sunday the 28th.

00:19:00   John, as always, thank you for all your work on this.

00:19:01   I am very excited for this lineup.

00:19:03   This is, I think, far and away

00:19:05   the most different options we've had,

00:19:06   both in terms of different items

00:19:09   and in terms of flavors of each item.

00:19:11   We're trying to do our best here

00:19:12   to give you whatever options you want.

00:19:14   - Try to diversify people's wardrobes.

00:19:16   You won't just have podcast t-shirts,

00:19:17   now you'll have podcast long sleeve t-shirts.

00:19:20   (laughing)

00:19:22   - Podcast tank tops, podcast baseball hats,

00:19:24   we got you covered.

00:19:25   - Podcast the flamethrower. - Podcast the flamethrower.

00:19:27   There we go, thank you, John.

00:19:28   (laughing)

00:19:30   All right, let's do some follow-up.

00:19:32   The unpatchable M-series exploit explanatory video.

00:19:36   I don't know if this made the edit or not,

00:19:38   but there was a link in the show notes

00:19:40   where there was an explanatory video

00:19:42   and in between the time that John had put it

00:19:44   in the show notes and when I started getting

00:19:46   the released version of the show notes ready,

00:19:49   that video went private and I don't know,

00:19:51   John, is this the same one that you would watch

00:19:53   or a different one, but one way or another,

00:19:54   we've got a video for you.

00:19:55   - It is the same video.

00:19:56   So I was so disappointed that it went private

00:19:58   'cause I thought the video was great

00:19:59   and sure enough, I clicked on it

00:19:59   the last time we were recording.

00:20:01   I'm like, ah, I don't know,

00:20:02   maybe they took it down or something.

00:20:03   But after the show, I'm like, I need to find that video.

00:20:06   Because why would they have taken it down?

00:20:08   And sure enough, it exists, it's on the same channel,

00:20:10   it's the same exact video I was trying to link to.

00:20:12   Maybe it was just something wrong with the video

00:20:13   and YouTube doesn't let you update videos,

00:20:15   you just have to delete it and make a new one.

00:20:17   So anyway, we will have a link in the show notes.

00:20:19   It is from the Molly Rocket channel.

00:20:21   It describes what is known as the Go Fetch Attack

00:20:24   on the M-series of System on the Chips.

00:20:28   And it is a great video if you actually wanna know

00:20:32   what is happening inside the chip.

00:20:34   It is explained well enough that if you actually care,

00:20:37   anybody can watch it and understand.

00:20:39   And like I said, this is a specific instance

00:20:41   of a common pattern of attacking chips,

00:20:44   but this particular one is pretty weird.

00:20:46   - Yeah, it is a very good video.

00:20:48   It is an hour long, so buckle up.

00:20:50   But it does a very good job.

00:20:51   If you have even a passing knowledge of how computers

00:20:54   and computer science works,

00:20:56   I think it'll be very palatable and understandable.

00:20:58   I know nothing about security-related things.

00:21:01   And the person who hosts the video is coming at it

00:21:03   from a microarchitecture perspective,

00:21:05   not from a security perspective.

00:21:06   And so they do a really good job of kind of distilling it

00:21:10   down to the brass tacks, and it is very good.

00:21:13   Hector Martin found the chicken bit.

00:21:15   I've never even heard of a chicken bit before.

00:21:17   This was news to me.

00:21:18   So John, tell me about this.

00:21:20   - The DMP-disabled chicken bit.

00:21:21   So DMP is, I have that in here, what is it called?

00:21:26   - Data Memory Dependent Prefecture.

00:21:27   You have it like 10 lines down from where you're looking.

00:21:30   - DMP is the feature that this security exploit is exploiting

00:21:34   and chicken bits are bits in a silicon chip

00:21:38   that allow you to disable some feature

00:21:40   if you're not sure about it, right?

00:21:42   So if you're designing a chip, you're like,

00:21:43   well, we think this thing is, this feature is a good idea,

00:21:47   but if there's ever any problem with it,

00:21:48   like it has a performance problem or there's a bug

00:21:50   or there's a security flaw, if you just flip this bit,

00:21:53   the chip will just disable that entire feature.

00:21:55   So apparently there is a chicken bit for DMP.

00:21:59   Hector Martin found it.

00:22:00   This is from a post I'm asking, I think.

00:22:03   He says, one interesting finding is that the DMP

00:22:06   is already disabled in EL2 and presumably EL1.

00:22:09   It only works in EL0.

00:22:11   So the EL things are exception levels

00:22:14   in the ARM microarchitecture.

00:22:16   This is from a page that we'll link.

00:22:18   The ARMv8 architecture defines four exception levels,

00:22:20   EL0 to EL3, where EL3 is the highest exception level

00:22:23   with the most execution privilege.

00:22:25   And here's the common usage.

00:22:26   EL0 is where applications run.

00:22:28   EL1 is for OS kernels and associated functions

00:22:31   that are typically described as privileged.

00:22:32   EL2 is the hypervisor and EL3 is secure monitor.

00:22:35   I don't even know what that is,

00:22:37   but that's what the webpage said.

00:22:38   So apparently DMP, this data memory dependent prefetcher

00:22:43   is disabled for the kernel.

00:22:46   So what Hector says is,

00:22:47   it looks like the CPU designers already had some idea

00:22:51   that it is a security liability

00:22:53   and chose to hard disable it in kernel mode.

00:22:55   That means kernel mode crypto on Linux

00:22:56   is already intrinsically safe.

00:22:58   And this data memory dependent prefetcher

00:23:02   is a cache prefetcher that looks at cache memory content

00:23:05   for possible pointer values and prefetches data

00:23:08   at those locations in the cache

00:23:09   if it sees memory access patterns

00:23:10   that suggests that would be useful.

00:23:12   So it looks at a number and says,

00:23:14   that number looks like it might be a pointer.

00:23:16   I should go treat it as a pointer

00:23:18   and grab the data that's at that location.

00:23:21   And if you watch the video,

00:23:22   you'll see how that's exploited to detect

00:23:24   what another process is doing on the CPU.

00:23:27   There's some more stuff that other people turned up about DMP

00:23:29   like there's a, aside from the chicken bit for disabling it,

00:23:33   there's like a command I think on the M3

00:23:34   where you can just turn it off.

00:23:36   Like you would imagine on the M3,

00:23:37   you could turn off the MP, do your encryption stuff

00:23:40   and then turn it back on to like avoid this issue.

00:23:41   But I think the M1 and M2 don't have that command.

00:23:44   They just have this chicken bit

00:23:45   which disables it entirely in particular modes.

00:23:48   So anyway, CPU designers are fairly conservative

00:23:53   and cautious and that's why things

00:23:55   that are quote unquote unpatchable

00:23:57   usually have some kind of work around.

00:23:59   Sometimes the work arounds have performance problems.

00:24:01   Sometimes the work arounds are painful and annoying

00:24:04   and require software changes.

00:24:05   But usually there's something that can be done

00:24:08   and I'm assuming Apple is,

00:24:10   I don't think Apple's commented on this at all.

00:24:12   But since it is better in the M3

00:24:14   than it was in the M2 and M1,

00:24:15   maybe they already knew about it

00:24:16   and they have these bits to deal with.

00:24:18   So hopefully OS updates will help with this in the future.

00:24:21   - Indeed.

00:24:22   A lot of people wrote in last episode

00:24:24   and they did so because they were trying to help.

00:24:27   And there's a charitable read on this

00:24:30   which is that they are all members

00:24:32   who have gone to in the past atp.fm/join

00:24:35   and they were listening to the bootleg

00:24:37   which does not have robust show notes.

00:24:39   But one way or another, a lot of people wrote in to say,

00:24:42   and Alan Pope was one of the first,

00:24:44   last episode you guys briefly mentioned

00:24:45   weird square monitors.

00:24:46   I wonder if the LG dual up 28 inch 16 by 18 ratio display

00:24:49   may be the one you were thinking of.

00:24:50   It is.

00:24:51   And I said verbally on the show,

00:24:54   oh there's that one weird squarish monitor

00:24:56   that people have been talking about recently

00:24:59   and then I kind of let it go.

00:25:00   But during the course of the recording of that episode,

00:25:03   I think somebody in the chat room found it

00:25:04   and I put the link in the show notes.

00:25:06   So the uncharitable read is none of you,

00:25:09   pains in my butt, clicked on the,

00:25:11   looked at the show notes to see that it was already there.

00:25:13   But the charitable read is you're just all bootleg listeners.

00:25:15   So anyways, we will put it in this episode

00:25:19   show notes as well.

00:25:20   But it was indeed the LG dual up 28 inch

00:25:24   that I was thinking of.

00:25:25   - You know, it's an audio podcast.

00:25:26   People aren't looking at the show notes.

00:25:27   Although I have to say,

00:25:28   I don't know why I continue to be fooled by this,

00:25:30   but did I complain about this show already?

00:25:33   I don't think I did.

00:25:34   I was listening to a famous podcast,

00:25:36   The Shower Rain, named this mostly

00:25:37   because I can't remember what it was.

00:25:39   And they were talking,

00:25:40   they were talking out,

00:25:41   but it's a really popular podcast

00:25:43   and they were talking at length about--

00:25:44   - Security through forgetfulness.

00:25:45   - Yeah, about an image that they were looking at.

00:25:47   And they're like, don't worry, this image will be,

00:25:49   you'll be able to see it.

00:25:50   Like, and there was actually two versions of this image

00:25:52   says don't worry, we'll put the more detailed versions

00:25:54   of this image if you just go to our webpage

00:25:56   and they gave a URL and they're like,

00:25:58   in your podcast player, like right now,

00:25:59   we're looking at it and you can't see it,

00:26:00   but like by the time the podcast goes up,

00:26:02   you'll be able to see this image.

00:26:03   So everyone go and look at this image right now.

00:26:05   And let me tell you, I tried to find that image.

00:26:08   The URL they read had nothing on it.

00:26:10   Notes in the podcast client, absolutely nothing.

00:26:12   And when I say nothing,

00:26:13   I don't mean there was nothing there.

00:26:14   I mean, it was a bunch of like SEO garbage come on,

00:26:18   like just random generic texts

00:26:20   that had nothing to do with the episode, right?

00:26:22   Like you see sometimes in YouTube videos

00:26:23   where every single YouTube video in a channel

00:26:24   will have the same garbage tech pasted into the description.

00:26:27   That has nothing to do with the video.

00:26:29   They spent so long talking about this image.

00:26:31   No chapter images, no show notes, website had nothing on it.

00:26:35   No URL I could go to, go to the top level of the website,

00:26:37   try to find the thing, Google, whatever.

00:26:39   I don't know what it is with podcasts.

00:26:42   Like they have 60 people, a person's staff

00:26:44   making their podcast and they can't put an image

00:26:47   in show notes, so anyway, this link will be in the show notes.

00:26:50   - There are two different worlds of podcasting.

00:26:52   Like there's probably more than that honestly,

00:26:53   but like there's at least two different worlds of podcasting.

00:26:55   The first world of podcasting is these high production,

00:27:00   high staff, high budget shows.

00:27:03   They're all hosted on megaphone, they're all using DAI,

00:27:07   they're all using the same backend tools,

00:27:09   they all have these big productions

00:27:11   and so they put huge amounts of money

00:27:13   into the usually writing and editing

00:27:17   and production of the podcast.

00:27:20   But then all of these basics of the podcasting format,

00:27:23   they don't ever participate in.

00:27:26   They've never used good show notes,

00:27:28   which are very easy to do.

00:27:30   Their tools don't even support them, they don't care.

00:27:34   They certainly have never used chapters.

00:27:36   Back in the day it's because they didn't know they existed.

00:27:39   Now they probably still don't know they exist,

00:27:41   but now their DAI tools like megaphone don't support.

00:27:44   Like on the Vergecast, which is actually a pretty good show,

00:27:46   I enjoy it, but on the Vergecast,

00:27:48   they were just complaining this week

00:27:50   how megaphone doesn't support chapters

00:27:51   and they keep getting requests from listeners

00:27:52   to add chapters and it must be hard to add chapters.

00:27:56   It's not.

00:27:57   DAI tools splice ads into the file.

00:28:01   So what they were saying was,

00:28:03   oh it must be hard to add them

00:28:04   because you don't know how long the ads are, which is true.

00:28:07   One of the ways DAI makes everything worse for everybody

00:28:11   is that timestamps are no longer consistent

00:28:13   between downloads because the ads that are injected

00:28:16   into each download could be different durations.

00:28:18   So if you are trying to say share a clip of a podcast

00:28:21   at a certain timestamp, you don't really have a way to know

00:28:25   whether someone else's future download of that episode

00:28:28   will have the timestamp lining up with the content

00:28:31   that you want because it might have had

00:28:33   a different length ad inserted before it than what you have.

00:28:36   But the thing is they know this at download time.

00:28:38   You know where chapters are?

00:28:40   In the MP3, in the header.

00:28:43   You know what you have to modify

00:28:44   when you use DAI to splice an MP3?

00:28:47   The header.

00:28:48   So they're already, well, they don't always modify

00:28:51   the header but you're supposed to.

00:28:52   It makes certain things work better.

00:28:54   But the early DAI platforms did a very bad job

00:28:58   'cause MP3s are so easy you can just kind of

00:28:59   stick them together and they work.

00:29:01   But anyway, so the point is at serving time,

00:29:05   they know what they're putting into the MP3

00:29:07   so they can just offset the timestamps

00:29:10   of the chapter markers in the file

00:29:12   to account for the ads they're inserting at that time

00:29:15   as they write the header of the file.

00:29:17   - That sounds like it might involve addition though.

00:29:19   - Yeah, or maybe subtraction.

00:29:20   It depends on how you're doing it.

00:29:21   - Yeah, I don't know if computers can do that.

00:29:23   - Yeah, either way, it's so easy.

00:29:26   The only reason they don't do it is that

00:29:28   the people who write these tools

00:29:30   don't even know chapters exist.

00:29:31   And I understand from the point of view

00:29:33   of a big podcast publisher,

00:29:35   regular people don't want this, we don't need this.

00:29:38   But I cannot tell you, first of all,

00:29:40   how many regular people do find it useful.

00:29:43   That's why things like YouTube support chapters.

00:29:46   There's a reason they added chapters

00:29:48   that people find useful.

00:29:48   Second of all, everybody always comes up

00:29:52   with some crazy idea for some new podcast spec

00:29:56   that we should all implement for something

00:29:58   that can be solved already with chapters

00:30:00   we've had for like 20 years.

00:30:01   It's like, there's so many,

00:30:03   you wouldn't believe how many pitches I've heard

00:30:05   for some new standard.

00:30:06   We're gonna make this new standard, it's gonna be great.

00:30:08   We're gonna have the ability to show timed metadata

00:30:12   during playback of a podcast.

00:30:14   - Amazing.

00:30:15   - And guess what, we can do that already.

00:30:17   We can show timed images, timed links, timed text,

00:30:20   all of that with specs that already exist

00:30:22   and are supported by pretty much every podcast app out there,

00:30:25   including Apple Podcasts.

00:30:27   So that already, but no one knows.

00:30:29   And then third of all, it blows my mind,

00:30:32   why don't they do this for their own commercial gain?

00:30:35   When they insert an ad,

00:30:37   why don't they insert the image of the sponsor

00:30:40   with a link right there as a chapter?

00:30:41   I don't understand, like,

00:30:43   there's reasons they would benefit directly from it.

00:30:46   But I think ultimately the cause of all of this

00:30:49   is that there's always been this

00:30:51   kind of underlying problem in big podcasting.

00:30:57   It started out as kind of a disrespect of the medium

00:30:59   that for a long time podcasts were so looked down upon,

00:31:03   similar to how blogs were looked down upon by old media,

00:31:07   podcasts were so looked down upon

00:31:08   that people would put podcasts out there

00:31:11   and then make a point of saying, "I don't listen to podcasts."

00:31:14   As if that was some kind of bragging thing.

00:31:16   Like, imagine if you wrote books for a living

00:31:19   and you said, "Oh, I don't read."

00:31:21   Like, that's ridiculous,

00:31:22   but podcasting was looked down upon,

00:31:24   so there was this kind of attitude from early on

00:31:26   among big companies and big publishers

00:31:28   and even big media people of like,

00:31:30   "Oh, I don't listen to podcasts.

00:31:31   "I'll put a podcast out there

00:31:32   "'cause I wanna take everyone's time and money,

00:31:34   "but I don't listen to podcasts."

00:31:35   And what that resulted in over time

00:31:37   is a lot of that kind of big podcasting industry stuff,

00:31:41   a lot of those people and the tech stacks

00:31:44   and all the stuff that we built upon

00:31:47   comes from people who don't really listen to podcasts.

00:31:52   First, there was a disrespect to the medium.

00:31:54   Now, I think the disrespect is gone now,

00:31:55   but now it's just like more of an unfamiliarity

00:31:58   with the medium.

00:31:59   And so the people who make these tools

00:32:01   have no clue that any of these options exist.

00:32:04   So then that's one world of podcasting.

00:32:07   That world of podcasting thinks

00:32:10   it is the only world of podcasting.

00:32:11   This is a separate problem.

00:32:13   Shows up in a lot of different ways.

00:32:14   But those people who make and listen to those kind of shows

00:32:18   typically think that's all of podcasting.

00:32:21   And the wonderful thing about this medium

00:32:22   is that it's such a bigger medium than that

00:32:24   and there's all these other shows out there

00:32:26   like what we make and what a bunch of people we know make

00:32:28   and what millions of people we don't know make.

00:32:31   It is a huge, wonderful world

00:32:33   and the rest of us can have things like show notes

00:32:37   and links and chapters and artwork

00:32:41   and we can enjoy these technologies

00:32:43   and the rest of the podcast world

00:32:45   will never know about them

00:32:47   and they are doing their listeners

00:32:48   and themselves a great disservice,

00:32:50   but we will never convince them to use them

00:32:52   because they don't even think we exist.

00:32:54   - It makes me wonder what the people on the show,

00:32:55   like all the hosts of the show seem sure

00:32:58   that they knew not only that this image would be linked,

00:33:01   but that they knew the URL to it and they were wrong.

00:33:04   They were entirely wrong.

00:33:05   So maybe they've never looked at their own podcast

00:33:07   and don't realize that the people who produce their show

00:33:09   stop as soon as the audio is done

00:33:10   and never do another thing after that,

00:33:12   but anyway, frustrating.

00:33:14   I never did find the image.

00:33:15   The end of the story is I never did find it.

00:33:17   If it's on the internet, I literally could not find it

00:33:20   because so much of the show was looking at this image

00:33:23   and making jokes about it or whatever, couldn't find it.

00:33:25   - You know what I would have done in your shoes,

00:33:27   which is ridiculous that this is how

00:33:29   I would have solved the problem,

00:33:30   but I probably would have found the subreddit

00:33:32   for that particular podcast because you said it was popular

00:33:35   and I guarantee, and I mean, rolling your eyes about Reddit,

00:33:38   I'm here for it, I get it, but I bet you anything

00:33:41   that would have come up with the image,

00:33:43   the people, the Redditors, what have you,

00:33:45   in that subreddit would have come up with the image

00:33:47   and made a thread about it and put a link up,

00:33:50   all to do, all of this work to do something

00:33:52   that should be table stakes.

00:33:53   I don't know, occasionally I'll get asked,

00:33:57   I can't think of a way to phrase this

00:33:58   without sounding like I'm tooting my own horn here,

00:34:00   but I'll get asked, how did you become successful

00:34:04   at podcasting or how did you become successful

00:34:05   at this or that and not to say I'm always successful,

00:34:07   by any means, let's talk about fast text and my icon design,

00:34:10   but occasionally I've gotten lucky

00:34:12   and I've come up with something decent

00:34:15   and the consistent thing that I think the three of us share

00:34:19   in both this show and in our other endeavors

00:34:23   is just giving a crap.

00:34:24   Like, you'd be surprised that just by giving a crap,

00:34:29   you're gonna be better than almost everyone around you.

00:34:31   I feel like Marco, you've made this speech in the past,

00:34:33   but just give a crap, just care,

00:34:36   and you're already better than almost anyone around you.

00:34:39   It's not table stakes, my friends, just care,

00:34:42   just give a crap and you'll be so much better

00:34:45   than almost everyone around you.

00:34:46   - Yeah, and job interviews, competition,

00:34:48   any place where you are competing with other people

00:34:50   for professional success in some way,

00:34:53   like if you just care, you will be ahead

00:34:56   of the vast majority by a surprising and sad amount.

00:35:00   - Yeah, just don't phone it in

00:35:02   and you'll be toward the top of the pack.

00:35:04   You may not be number one,

00:35:05   but you'll be toward the top of the pack.

00:35:06   Yes, I'm sure there's exceptions

00:35:08   and the things that would prove that this isn't true,

00:35:12   but by and large, just give a crap.

00:35:15   That's all you need to do, just give a crap.

00:35:17   Anyway, how did that happen?

00:35:18   We got off on a tangent there.

00:35:19   That's okay, though, it's accidental.

00:35:21   - That's what happens when John

00:35:22   doesn't find out an image in show notes. (laughs)

00:35:25   (upbeat music)

00:35:26   We are brought to you this episode by SwiftCraft.

00:35:29   SwiftCraft is a brand new conference

00:35:31   for Swift and iOS developers in the UK, Europe, and beyond.

00:35:35   Running in May, that's next month,

00:35:38   and it's set right by the sea

00:35:39   with fantastic views across the English Channel,

00:35:41   this event has the feel of a code retreat.

00:35:44   If you like the windows of Syracuse County,

00:35:46   I love an in-joke for our show,

00:35:48   you're gonna love the windows at their venue.

00:35:50   With 28 sessions and two keynotes

00:35:52   over the two main conference days,

00:35:54   a full day workshops day with three workshops,

00:35:57   and tutorials day with eight half-day workshops,

00:36:00   there's plenty of content to keep you engaged,

00:36:02   educated, and entertained.

00:36:04   What better time to focus on the craft of writing Swift

00:36:07   than just before WWDC has us all chasing new APIs again?

00:36:11   I love this focus, by the way,

00:36:12   this is such a great idea, such great timing,

00:36:15   and I love a conference at a beautiful venue.

00:36:17   That to me is, if I'm gonna go to a conference,

00:36:19   it has to have a nice view or some other nice venue

00:36:23   because it's so much nicer that way.

00:36:25   So, also some of the community's best speakers

00:36:27   are on their schedule, led by keynotes

00:36:29   from Daniel Steinberg and Jessica Kerr,

00:36:31   better known as Jessatron.

00:36:32   Daniel's running a workshop too,

00:36:34   along with Paul Hudson and John Reed.

00:36:36   So check out the full program at swiftcraft.uk

00:36:40   and use code ATP when you come to register for 10% off.

00:36:44   So once again, swiftcraft.uk,

00:36:47   use code ATP for registration for 10% off.

00:36:51   Thank you so much to Swiftcraft for, first of all,

00:36:53   hosting a beautiful conference and beautiful venue,

00:36:55   again, love that, and also for sponsoring our show.

00:36:58   (upbeat music)

00:37:02   Matthias Woolard writes,

00:37:03   "Regarding the rumor of an M3 family chip

00:37:05   "with no efficiency cores,

00:37:07   "having some efficiency cores makes sense,

00:37:10   "since for highly threaded, multi-threaded tasks,

00:37:13   "an efficiency core can do more compute per transistor

00:37:16   "than a power core."

00:37:17   Tell me about this, John.

00:37:18   - Yeah, that was one point

00:37:19   that we didn't bring up the last time,

00:37:21   like, oh, well, why do you need efficiency cores?

00:37:22   You don't need to save energy.

00:37:23   Well, if your job is massively multi-threaded,

00:37:26   more cores are better, and as Sperson points out,

00:37:31   if you just have something that's a simple job

00:37:34   that doesn't require a power core,

00:37:35   that power core is wasted doing that job,

00:37:37   but you can do more compute per transistor

00:37:40   with an efficiency core than a power core.

00:37:42   So there's that.

00:37:43   I mean, historically, especially for the Mac Pro,

00:37:44   Apple has always offered their top-end thing,

00:37:47   their top-end chip in the Mac Pro in the past decade or so,

00:37:50   has always been the one with the most cores,

00:37:53   and that one usually actually is slower in single core,

00:37:56   especially in the old days,

00:37:57   but it makes up for it for being massively multi-core.

00:37:59   So that is a role efficiency cores could play

00:38:03   in a hypothetical, bigger-than-two-M3-Maxes-stuck-together chip

00:38:08   in the Mac Studio or the Mac Pro.

00:38:11   And on that topic, the Max Tech Channel on YouTube

00:38:14   had a bunch of rumors about this upcoming chips,

00:38:19   and the idea was that this new chip,

00:38:22   they're still on the idea that it's not gonna be

00:38:24   two M3-Maxes stuck together,

00:38:25   it'll be an entirely new chip,

00:38:27   and they're saying they think this new chip

00:38:28   will be built on M3e,

00:38:30   which if you've heard our show in past months,

00:38:32   you know is the three nanometer fabbing process

00:38:35   after the N3b process

00:38:37   that the current M3 series chips are made with,

00:38:40   and it will supposedly have higher yields.

00:38:42   So if you have a process that has higher yields,

00:38:44   that's good if you're gonna make a bigger chip,

00:38:46   because the bigger the chip you make,

00:38:47   the more chance you have to have errors in the chip.

00:38:50   And this was presented as a possibility

00:38:54   to avoid the situation where Apple rolls out new M chips,

00:38:59   like the M3 and the M3 Pro and the M3 Max,

00:39:04   but the quote unquote high-end chips

00:39:07   are still last year's model.

00:39:08   So right now, if you buy a Mac Studio,

00:39:09   it doesn't have an M3 anything in it,

00:39:11   it's got an M2 something in it.

00:39:13   And same thing with the Mac Pro,

00:39:14   it has M2 something in it.

00:39:16   And when the M3 Max is so powerful,

00:39:18   in some tests it can best the supposedly better Pro Max,

00:39:22   because the lower end computers have the M3 chip,

00:39:26   but the higher end ones don't.

00:39:27   Now, one way to solve that would be

00:39:29   release the chips closer to each other.

00:39:30   So yeah, you release the M3, then the M3 Pro,

00:39:33   then the Max, then the Ultra, then the Extreme.

00:39:35   If you do that in fairly short succession

00:39:37   within the course of a few months, nobody really cares.

00:39:38   But if you leave the Studio and the Mac Pro languishing

00:39:41   with the M2 chips for a long period of time,

00:39:43   makes them look kind of crappy

00:39:44   and makes them look less attractive.

00:39:46   I don't know if Apple cares about that,

00:39:48   that was just a theory presented here.

00:39:49   And that theory was presented in the context of saying,

00:39:53   and maybe at WWC presumably,

00:39:55   when Apple comes out with the new Mac Studio and Mac Pro,

00:39:58   the chip that's in them will be a brand new chip

00:40:01   that we haven't seen before,

00:40:03   not two M3 Maxes stuck together, right?

00:40:06   And they'll actually call it M4,

00:40:08   because it'll be made with the M3e process,

00:40:10   and the M3e process is not compatible

00:40:12   with the M3b designs, right?

00:40:14   So if they're gonna fab something in M3,

00:40:16   they have to redesign anyway.

00:40:19   Names like M3 and M3r are marketing decisions,

00:40:21   have nothing to do with technology really,

00:40:22   it's just up to Apple what they do.

00:40:24   So I'm not putting much stake in that.

00:40:26   It would seem pretty weird for me to go,

00:40:28   to skip the M3 generation for the high-end chips

00:40:30   and go to M4, but maybe it'd be a marketing coup and say,

00:40:32   "Hey, we, you know, they're leaping ahead

00:40:34   'cause they're such great, you know,

00:40:36   high-end chips for high-end Pro Max or whatever."

00:40:39   Setting that aside, another topic that came up

00:40:41   related to this in this discussions

00:40:43   that we're having online since last week's episode,

00:40:46   was the reticle limit,

00:40:47   which is how big a thing can you make on a silicon wafer

00:40:52   at three nanometers with TSMC's process?

00:40:55   You can't make something like, you know,

00:40:57   12 inches by 12 inches or whatever.

00:40:59   Like there is a limit to how big a thing that you can make.

00:41:02   You can make a bunch of them on a wafer,

00:41:03   but each one of those things has a certain size

00:41:06   and it can't be any bigger than that size

00:41:07   due to the way they do the lithography

00:41:08   with the extreme ultraviolet, blah, blah, blah, right?

00:41:12   I don't know what the reticle limit is

00:41:15   for TSMC's three nanometer process.

00:41:17   The best I could find was somewhere online,

00:41:20   somebody said 858 square millimeters.

00:41:23   That's the best I could do.

00:41:25   I couldn't find any authoritative,

00:41:26   maybe it's secret proprietary information,

00:41:28   maybe I'm just looking at the wrong websites.

00:41:29   But anyway, 850 millimeters squared,

00:41:33   probably in that ballpark.

00:41:34   And to give a comparison,

00:41:35   the plain old M3 is 146 millimeters squared.

00:41:38   I think that is a official figure,

00:41:42   or at least a measured figure or whatever.

00:41:43   What I wanted to know is how big is the M3 max?

00:41:47   How close is the M3 max to the reticle limit?

00:41:50   Because if this rumor is they're gonna make a chip

00:41:52   that's not two M3 maxes stuck together,

00:41:55   but is itself a single bigger chip,

00:41:57   how much bigger can it be?

00:41:59   And again, this is just extrapolated from die shots

00:42:03   I found on the internet, as in me measuring pixels

00:42:05   and saying, okay, well, if the M3 is 146 millimeters squared

00:42:08   and this is how big, if this is pictures to scale

00:42:10   and this is a max next to an M3 next to a pro,

00:42:13   how big are they?

00:42:14   Here are my extrapolated values.

00:42:16   I could not find official figures for this.

00:42:17   If anyone knows, please tell me.

00:42:19   M3 pro, 238 millimeters squared,

00:42:22   M3 max, 522 millimeters squared,

00:42:24   and then again, the theoretical reticle limit,

00:42:27   858 millimeters squared.

00:42:29   So the M3 max is not at the reticle limit,

00:42:33   but it's not too far away, 500 to 800.

00:42:36   Like there's room to be bigger,

00:42:38   but not a huge amount more room.

00:42:39   And I did find an Nvidia GH100 GPU

00:42:42   that TSMC fabs on their 4N process,

00:42:45   which is not the same as three nanometer,

00:42:46   but anyway, their 4N process,

00:42:48   and that is 814 millimeters squared.

00:42:51   So by the way, the transistor sizes here is M3,

00:42:54   25 billion, M3 pro, 37 billion, M3 max, 92 billion.

00:42:58   And the big Nvidia thing is only 80 billion

00:43:01   because it's on the 4N process, not on the three nanometer.

00:43:03   So can Apple make a bigger single chip

00:43:07   on TSMC's three nanometer process?

00:43:11   I think yes.

00:43:12   How much bigger?

00:43:13   Well, the M3 max is 500-ish,

00:43:15   and they could probably push up into the 800s.

00:43:17   And after that, they can't make any single chip

00:43:21   any bigger than that.

00:43:21   We've talked in the past about chiplets

00:43:22   and combining multiple ones,

00:43:23   and of course there's the ultra fusion stick

00:43:25   and things end to end,

00:43:27   and they could make like a six or seven

00:43:29   or 800 millimeter squared chip called the ultra

00:43:31   and stick two of those together for the extreme,

00:43:34   or it could just be two M3 maxes stuck together

00:43:37   and they call it the ultra

00:43:38   and it's in the pro in the studio.

00:43:39   But that's boring, so I hope it doesn't happen.

00:43:41   (laughing)

00:43:42   And I spent so long looking like,

00:43:43   you know, remember we talked last week,

00:43:44   like oh, did they just crop out the ultra fusion thing?

00:43:47   I don't know.

00:43:49   It's really easy to crop something out of,

00:43:50   Apple itself cropped it out.

00:43:52   Remember when the M1, you know,

00:43:54   the M1, M1 pro, and M1 max came out?

00:43:56   Apple itself cropped out the little interposer part.

00:43:59   So when the ultra came out, they're like,

00:44:00   look, we have the secret thing here, and blah, blah, blah.

00:44:02   I just don't know if it's been cropped out

00:44:04   of every picture I'm finding.

00:44:05   It's really easy to crop things.

00:44:06   So I'm sure this information has to be out there

00:44:10   'cause people are cutting the tops off these chips

00:44:12   and taking pictures and it's all written in Chinese

00:44:14   and I can't read it.

00:44:15   - All right, there are upcoming Apple layoffs

00:44:18   affecting 700 or more workers,

00:44:20   including Apple Car and MicroLED teams.

00:44:23   From 9to5Mac, Apple's laying off more than 700 employees

00:44:26   as the company has just canceled its Apple Car project

00:44:29   and is also reconsidering the project

00:44:30   to develop in in-house MicroLED displays.

00:44:34   The layoffs became known after the company filed

00:44:36   warn notices in the state of California.

00:44:39   MacRumors adds, "Under California law,

00:44:40   "employers must give employees and state representatives

00:44:42   "a 60-day notice before a mass layoff event."

00:44:45   So here we are.

00:44:46   - Yeah, we didn't talk about the MicroLED thing recently.

00:44:49   I think we talked about it ages ago

00:44:51   with Apple looking into MicroLED displays

00:44:53   for the Apple Watch to begin with.

00:44:55   And to recap, MicroLEDs are very, very, very tiny LEDs,

00:45:00   like the little LED lights that are annoying

00:45:02   in your electronics that you cover up

00:45:04   with little black pieces of tape.

00:45:06   Those like a little colored LED.

00:45:07   Imagine those, but very, very, very tiny.

00:45:10   That's what these are,

00:45:11   and it would be really cool display technology

00:45:13   because unlike organic OLEDs or organic LEDs or OLEDs,

00:45:18   they don't wear out as fast,

00:45:20   so there would be less problems with image retention

00:45:22   and potentially could get brighter, yada, yada, yada.

00:45:25   It's also really hard to make

00:45:26   because everything on it is really tiny.

00:45:27   And Apple was apparently trying

00:45:30   to make these displays itself

00:45:31   rather than like buying them from Samsung or Sony

00:45:33   or whoever else they buy display stuff from.

00:45:36   And rumor was that a little while ago they said,

00:45:39   "Yeah, we're giving up on that for now,"

00:45:40   which is sad.

00:45:41   I really want to see a MicroLED-based Apple Watch,

00:45:44   but maybe Apple just found a supplier that can do it.

00:45:46   But that's a small team.

00:45:48   The car people I would imagine is the majority of this.

00:45:50   You cancel the project.

00:45:51   A lot of those people whose expertise has to do

00:45:54   with car stuff probably don't have anything else

00:45:57   they can do at Apple at this point.

00:45:59   - Except maybe robotics, who knows?

00:46:02   One way or another, Apple has struck a deal

00:46:04   with Shutterstock to license millions of images

00:46:07   for AI training.

00:46:09   From 9to5Mac, Reuters reports that Apple struck a deal

00:46:12   to license millions of images owned by Shutterstock,

00:46:14   a stock image site.

00:46:15   The value of the deal is likely in the $25 to $50 million

00:46:20   range and was said to have been signed

00:46:23   in the months following the release of ChatGPT in late 2022.

00:46:26   Apparently multiple other big tech firms

00:46:28   have made similar deals with Shutterstock,

00:46:29   including Meta, Google, and Amazon.

00:46:32   - We talked about this when the New York Times

00:46:33   did something similar.

00:46:34   This is just a smart thing to do if you are a big company

00:46:37   with a lot to lose and you have a lot of money

00:46:40   and you're not sure about the legal landscape

00:46:42   in terms of training your AI models on YouTube videos

00:46:46   that you scraped from Google or images that you downloaded

00:46:49   from the internet, you can just pay somebody and say,

00:46:52   you have the rights to these images.

00:46:54   Will you sell us the rights to train our AI models on them?

00:46:56   And they apparently gladly will for a handful

00:46:59   of million dollars, which is pocket change to Apple,

00:47:01   but it is priceless when it comes time to justify

00:47:04   the legality of your AI model.

00:47:07   - Indeed, and then finally for follow-up this week,

00:47:10   here's our first look at Apple's in the box

00:47:12   iPhone updating machine.

00:47:13   So for context, it's really crummy when you pick up

00:47:17   an iPhone and you get it home or maybe you're in the store

00:47:22   and you wanna set it up and do a transfer

00:47:24   and so on and so forth and the iPhone comes out of the box

00:47:26   and says, ah, nope, you're gonna have to update me first.

00:47:29   No fun, and so we had heard a while ago

00:47:31   that they were working on a mechanism by which

00:47:35   they could update an iPhone in a sealed box.

00:47:39   Well, apparently this thing is real and so according

00:47:42   to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Presto, which is the name of it,

00:47:45   uses MagSafe and other wireless technologies

00:47:48   to turn the phone on, apply the update,

00:47:49   and turn it off again.

00:47:50   An earlier report from iGeneration also mentions

00:47:52   that the machines are connected to specific servers

00:47:54   that can access software updates 24 hours ahead

00:47:56   of their general release.

00:47:58   Gurman says that Presto machines are unlimited testing

00:48:00   in the US with a wide deployment plan for April.

00:48:02   So if you buy a new iPhone from Apple after April

00:48:04   and it comes with the latest OS version installed

00:48:06   in the box, you'll know you have Presto to thank.

00:48:08   Marco, there is a very important image associated with this.

00:48:11   Where will users be able to share,

00:48:13   listeners be able to find this image?

00:48:15   - Directly on your podcast app right now is Chapter Art

00:48:18   and also in the show notes.

00:48:20   - Imagine that.

00:48:21   I'm so proud of us.

00:48:23   You know, you just gotta give a crap.

00:48:24   That's all it takes.

00:48:25   - It's so easy.

00:48:27   (upbeat music)

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00:50:21   (upbeat music)

00:50:24   - I had a very interesting week over the last week.

00:50:27   Everything's fine.

00:50:28   (laughing)

00:50:29   - That's a great way to start.

00:50:30   - Yeah, nobody's in trouble, everybody's fine.

00:50:32   Everything's fine.

00:50:33   Last week, all three of us to varying degrees

00:50:35   were very blase at best

00:50:39   and kind of really grumpy at worst

00:50:41   about the state of Vision Pro and VisionOS.

00:50:44   And I stand by everything that,

00:50:47   at least that I said last week,

00:50:49   and yet I kind of want to take it all back

00:50:51   because over the last week,

00:50:53   I have had three different experiences.

00:50:56   One is kind of related,

00:50:58   that I wouldn't say have changed my mind

00:51:00   about the Vision Pro,

00:51:01   but have really shaped or changed,

00:51:04   I guess changed my mind and certainly my opinions

00:51:07   to a degree about what the Vision Pro is

00:51:08   and what it's all about.

00:51:09   So I, shortly after recording,

00:51:12   I spent some time with our friend, Mike Hurley,

00:51:15   of Upgrade and Connected and many other shows,

00:51:18   including Analog for that matter.

00:51:19   I spent some time with Mike

00:51:20   doing a Spatial Persona FaceTime call,

00:51:22   which was a little bit frustrating at first

00:51:24   because I connected via FaceTime

00:51:26   and I hadn't yet updated my persona

00:51:28   for VisionOS 1.1 or whatever it is.

00:51:30   And I couldn't do a FaceTime call with personas

00:51:34   and I don't recall the specifics,

00:51:36   but it was like, it wouldn't,

00:51:38   it really, the VisionOS took away my old persona.

00:51:43   Like it's not that they just let it hang out,

00:51:45   it just erased my original 1.0 persona

00:51:48   and I needed to create a new one.

00:51:49   But as with so many things,

00:51:51   the error messaging about that was very vague

00:51:53   and not very actionable, but eventually I figured it out.

00:51:55   So I did Spatial Personas with Mike.

00:51:58   As it turns out, this past Monday,

00:52:00   I was on Upgrade because Jason

00:52:02   was chasing waterfalls, eclipses.

00:52:05   And so I stood in for Jason

00:52:06   and we talked, Mike and I, about this.

00:52:08   And so I'll refer you to that show

00:52:10   if you wanna hear the long, long version of this story.

00:52:12   But the short, short version is it's unreal.

00:52:15   Leaving aside the fact that Mike's Spatial Persona

00:52:18   or Mike's persona, his mouth doesn't move

00:52:20   when he talks because his mustache apparently is too bushy

00:52:24   for the cameras to see when his mouth is moving.

00:52:26   - Has he ever considered the fact

00:52:27   that maybe people can't see his mouth move

00:52:30   because his mustache is too bushy?

00:52:32   Like it's an accurate representation of reality?

00:52:34   He should look in the mirror and talk

00:52:35   and see if he can see his mouth moving.

00:52:36   - Yeah, that's something I'm sure he'll try

00:52:38   and take that on as homework.

00:52:39   But one way or another, that is extremely disconcerting

00:52:42   and you never really get used to that.

00:52:44   But, leaving that aside, his persona visually,

00:52:48   when he's not talking, is pretty darn good.

00:52:51   And he said mine was looking pretty good as well.

00:52:53   But the Spatial Persona thing is incredibly cool

00:52:57   and incredibly well done.

00:53:00   When I did FaceTime calls in the past,

00:53:03   just straight up regular FaceTime calls,

00:53:05   it didn't take very long for me to think

00:53:07   that I was talking to Mike or James Thompson or whoever.

00:53:10   But it was still, it was never like really, really right.

00:53:15   I felt like, oh yeah, that's James.

00:53:17   But it was never like, that's frickin' James.

00:53:20   And of course, it's never gonna be like 100%,

00:53:24   but the Spatial Personas got us so much closer

00:53:26   because there's a presence there that just isn't there

00:53:31   when you're looking at a rectangle.

00:53:32   And Mike was facing me and then he decided

00:53:37   to share a freeform board and next thing you know,

00:53:41   we're on either side of the freeform board.

00:53:42   And he can point to things on the freeform board.

00:53:45   Like, oh, look at this red rectangle over here.

00:53:47   And I see his kind of ghostly kind of weird hand,

00:53:50   but nevertheless, it looks like a hand.

00:53:52   I see his hand with his pointer finger extended

00:53:55   pointing at a red rectangle.

00:53:58   And then I could do the same thing

00:53:59   and he sees what I'm doing.

00:54:00   It's like we were standing in front of a whiteboard.

00:54:02   Now, doing anything with freeform was not a lot of fun

00:54:05   because you know, gaze-based manipulation

00:54:09   and pinching and whatnot, maybe it's just user error,

00:54:11   but I did not find it fun to try to manipulate the board.

00:54:13   But in terms of looking at the board

00:54:15   and talking about what was on the board,

00:54:17   it was very, very cool.

00:54:18   And with spatial audio, Mike sounded,

00:54:21   you know, I was on the left side of the board,

00:54:22   he was on the right side of the board

00:54:23   and it sure enough, when I was looking at the board,

00:54:25   it sounds like he's over to my right.

00:54:27   If I turn my head to look at him,

00:54:28   then it sounds like he's right in front of me.

00:54:30   It was very well done.

00:54:32   Then at one point,

00:54:34   I forget exactly what the circumstance was.

00:54:35   I believe we were facing each other.

00:54:37   I don't remember for sure, but one way or another,

00:54:39   there was a situation in which he said, "Watch this."

00:54:42   And I'm just looking at his spatial persona

00:54:46   and all of a sudden, I could tell that he stood up.

00:54:50   Not only because his persona got higher and above my head,

00:54:55   but just the way in which it moved, you could tell.

00:54:58   Holy (beep) Mike just stood up.

00:54:59   That's what just happened.

00:55:01   That's incredible.

00:55:02   Like, it's so silly.

00:55:04   And as with so many things in the Vision Pro,

00:55:06   you kind of have to experience it

00:55:08   to truly and properly understand it.

00:55:10   But it was so cool.

00:55:12   And I had a presence there

00:55:17   that I had not experienced with a regular FaceTime call

00:55:20   that I really hadn't experienced in a lot of other ways.

00:55:22   So if you are one of the people who has a Vision Pro,

00:55:26   you need to find somebody else with a Vision Pro

00:55:28   that you can FaceTime.

00:55:29   Maybe I should offer this as like a cameo or something,

00:55:31   but find somebody else that you can do a FaceTime call with

00:55:34   and do the spatial persona thing.

00:55:35   It's extremely cool.

00:55:37   But then it got better.

00:55:39   Mike says to me, "Go to the App Store.

00:55:41   "Go to Apple Arcade and download the Game Room app."

00:55:45   And I will put a link in the show notes.

00:55:46   I believe it is only available in the Vision Pro.

00:55:48   - But actually, I believe it's actually available

00:55:50   on other VR platforms as well.

00:55:51   - Oh, sorry, yes.

00:55:52   I was just thinking Apple platforms.

00:55:53   That very well could be true.

00:55:55   So it's only available on Apple platforms in Vision Pro.

00:55:57   And it's genericized versions of, I think,

00:56:00   Yahtzee, Solitaire, one or two other things, and Battleship.

00:56:05   And so Mike said, "We're gonna play around a Battleship."

00:56:07   And I'm like, "Okay, Mike, I'm really hungry.

00:56:09   "It's right before lunchtime.

00:56:10   "I wanna go make my lunch.

00:56:11   "I'll play a couple of shots or what have you.

00:56:13   "And then I'm gonna go and I'm gonna eat my lunch."

00:56:16   Fast forward 15 minutes later,

00:56:17   and I couldn't resist playing the whole damn game

00:56:19   because it was so freaking cool.

00:56:22   So not only is the game board 3D rendered

00:56:25   and the art looks really, really good,

00:56:29   but beyond all that, it was incredibly cool.

00:56:34   The idea of Battleship is you have a board

00:56:38   in between you and your opponents,

00:56:40   and you place pretend ships in a square grid,

00:56:43   and you call out, "Oh, C5."

00:56:46   And the person on the other side of the board

00:56:48   either says, "Hit or miss."

00:56:49   And you have to deduce where their ships are

00:56:51   based on this experience,

00:56:53   and based on hits or misses or whatnot,

00:56:55   and you try to sink all of their ships.

00:56:57   And so we're doing this.

00:57:00   And the way this particular app works

00:57:05   is that it's all 3D rendered.

00:57:09   And so when I fire, a missile launches

00:57:12   from a little missile launcher adjacent to my game board

00:57:15   over the game board between us and flies into Mike's view

00:57:20   and either hits or misses his thing.

00:57:21   And if it lands in the water,

00:57:23   the dead missile just kind of bobs around in the water

00:57:25   where I had launched it to.

00:57:27   And then he launches a missile

00:57:28   and flies over the game board toward me

00:57:30   and hits one of my ships.

00:57:32   And you can see the damage in the ship.

00:57:34   You can see the 3D water flow into the damage

00:57:36   within the ship.

00:57:37   And then when he finally sank one of my ships,

00:57:39   the ship sank into the 3D water.

00:57:42   This sounds so bananas, the way I'm describing it.

00:57:44   I am quite confident.

00:57:45   I probably sound like I am Looney Tunes.

00:57:48   I cannot begin to tell you

00:57:49   how freaking cool this experience was.

00:57:52   And the other thing is,

00:57:54   if he could lean over to the side,

00:57:57   like away from the game board,

00:57:58   and then I could see his face again.

00:58:00   And if I held up my hand above the game board,

00:58:02   he could see my hand above the game board.

00:58:04   The presence here was so unbelievably cool.

00:58:09   Again, it's one of those things that for better and for worse

00:58:11   you really just kind of have to experience.

00:58:13   And if you don't own a Vision Pro

00:58:15   and you can't do the Spatial Persona thing

00:58:17   or FaceTime thing, I don't know what to tell you.

00:58:19   And I don't mean that to be flippant.

00:58:21   I don't know what to tell you.

00:58:22   You can't just go to an Apple store and try this.

00:58:25   There's nothing you can do.

00:58:27   And it is incredibly cool.

00:58:29   It was a transformative moment

00:58:32   for me to play freaking Battleship on the Vision Pro.

00:58:35   I know that sounds nuts, but it really was incredible.

00:58:38   - I think one of the things you left out

00:58:40   for people who don't play Battleship

00:58:41   is the reason it's such a good example of this,

00:58:44   a good game example of this,

00:58:45   is that the Battleship board is a vertical,

00:58:48   there's a horizontal portion,

00:58:49   but there's also a vertical portion.

00:58:51   And the vertical portion has two sides to it.

00:58:54   And the whole point of the game,

00:58:55   when you play in person in real life,

00:58:57   is that you can't see what's on the other side

00:58:59   of that board.

00:59:00   So the side that's facing you, you can see,

00:59:02   and the side that's facing them, they can see, right?

00:59:05   And so they render this in 3D space.

00:59:06   So I would imagine, I don't know if you've tried this, Casey,

00:59:08   but I imagine what the game would let you do

00:59:10   is could you peek around and cheat, just like real life,

00:59:13   by looking at his board on his side?

00:59:15   - I could try, but it wouldn't let me

00:59:16   because it clears his game board from my perspective.

00:59:18   - Oh, that's stinky.

00:59:19   Well, anyway, so the whole point is

00:59:21   they're modeling a game that,

00:59:24   when you play it in real life,

00:59:25   your physical presence is part of the game.

00:59:27   Like it forms a blind between you, it blocks,

00:59:30   yeah, your view is private to you and their view.

00:59:32   And that's trivially easy to do in computer games.

00:59:34   Oh, I'm seeing my screen here,

00:59:36   you're seeing your screen over in the UK, right?

00:59:39   But of course we're not looking at each other's screens.

00:59:41   But when you're in the same virtual place

00:59:43   with the whole presence thing is now we're back to like,

00:59:46   just like the real life thing where,

00:59:48   well, there are two sides of this board.

00:59:49   And the reason I could see my side

00:59:50   is because I'm sitting on this side of it.

00:59:52   And the reason you can see your side

00:59:53   is 'cause you're sitting on that side,

00:59:54   but we're all in the same shared space.

00:59:56   That's kind of annoying that doesn't let you cheat,

00:59:57   but at least it knows that you're trying to cheat

00:59:58   and blanks it out.

00:59:59   - Right, right, right.

01:00:00   It is so cool.

01:00:01   I am making no promises,

01:00:03   but I did record a little bit of this from my perspective.

01:00:06   And I recorded a video of it.

01:00:08   Gentlemen, for you, it's in Slack right now.

01:00:10   I'll see if I can like cut it down

01:00:11   and I'll have to ask Mike if he's okay with this

01:00:13   'cause I didn't ask permission for me to like,

01:00:15   you know, make this public.

01:00:16   If it's cool with Mike

01:00:18   and if I can figure out a way to cut it down

01:00:20   so it's a little bit slimmer and post it somewhere,

01:00:22   then I'll put a link in the show notes.

01:00:23   No promises.

01:00:24   You don't have to tell me if it's not there.

01:00:26   Again, I don't know if I'll be able to work it out or not,

01:00:28   but I'll see what I can do.

01:00:29   But it is incredibly cool.

01:00:31   It's such a silly thing to play Battleship with somebody,

01:00:35   but he is across a freaking ocean

01:00:38   and it feels like we're there together playing Battleship.

01:00:41   It was unreal.

01:00:42   I cannot begin to tell you how cool it was.

01:00:45   Then the final thing in Vision Pro Corner,

01:00:48   I hope you two are sitting down

01:00:49   because I gotta tell you,

01:00:52   Marco, whenever you get your Vision Pro back,

01:00:54   if you ever take it back,

01:00:56   you have to download the Gucci app.

01:00:59   I'm sorry, what did I just say?

01:01:00   - Is it like the fashion brand?

01:01:02   - You need to download the Gucci app, the fashion brand.

01:01:06   I am not kidding.

01:01:07   Somebody wrote to me and said,

01:01:09   "Hey, why is nobody talking about this?"

01:01:12   Gentlemen, why is nobody talking about the Gucci app?

01:01:15   I am not kidding.

01:01:16   So what this is, and I know nothing.

01:01:20   - Can I guess that maybe a lot of tech podcasters

01:01:23   in the Apple space aren't necessarily Gucci shoppers?

01:01:26   - It turns out that that seems to be accurate.

01:01:28   And so what this is is apparently,

01:01:32   and I'm sure I'm gonna get the details wrong,

01:01:34   but the broad strokes are all that really matter.

01:01:36   Apparently what this is is that

01:01:38   they have a new creative director.

01:01:40   The Gucci company has a new creative director,

01:01:41   Sabato Desarno, and they do this 20-minute video

01:01:46   of who is, I think the title is literally,

01:01:48   Who is Sabato Desarno?

01:01:50   And it starts as just a regular old video.

01:01:54   I'm not talking 3D video, just a regular old video.

01:01:57   But then during the course of this 20-minute video,

01:02:00   the app is free, the video is 20-ish minutes long, try it.

01:02:05   During the 20-minute video,

01:02:06   and I'm gonna spoil a little bit here,

01:02:07   there are different things that happen

01:02:09   and it suddenly becomes immersive

01:02:11   in a way that is so well done and so freaking cool

01:02:16   and such a great example of,

01:02:18   look at what is possible with this device.

01:02:21   So silly example.

01:02:22   At one point, I forget the exact context,

01:02:24   but at some point they talk about being on a tram

01:02:26   or something like that.

01:02:27   And so they're talking about this in the video.

01:02:29   And again, this is a rectangle

01:02:30   that you're seeing in your space.

01:02:32   It is not 3D.

01:02:33   I know John and I were going back and forth

01:02:34   about this last week.

01:02:35   It's just a regular 2D rectangle in your space.

01:02:37   But then outside of this rectangle,

01:02:40   suddenly you see the tram tracks,

01:02:44   like just silvery gray tracks,

01:02:46   extend out from this rectangle.

01:02:49   And then a tram, a 3D tram rendered,

01:02:51   but a 3D tram comes in along the tracks.

01:02:54   And I think you can interact with it.

01:02:56   I'm not 100% sure, but I believe you can.

01:02:58   And it's just so cool and so different.

01:03:01   Later on, they show that there was,

01:03:05   Sabato walks into a room that there's a bunch

01:03:07   of Gucci red balloons inflated in it.

01:03:09   And what they did during that moment

01:03:12   is they have a gazillion rendered balloons.

01:03:15   Again, it's not real, it's just renders.

01:03:17   But there's a zillion rendered balloons

01:03:19   between you and the video.

01:03:21   Not in a way that's like,

01:03:22   yeah, I guess you're obscuring the video a little bit,

01:03:24   which is weird.

01:03:25   In a complimentary way, not in a way

01:03:27   that takes away from your viewing experience.

01:03:29   And there's a lot of this.

01:03:31   It is so cool.

01:03:33   It's 20 minutes.

01:03:34   It is so freaking cool.

01:03:36   And if you have a Vision Pro,

01:03:38   there is a link in the show notes to this app.

01:03:40   I cannot tell you how cool this is.

01:03:42   I love that this is what we're starting to get now.

01:03:46   Again, I stand by just a week ago,

01:03:48   I hadn't seen anything like this.

01:03:50   Doesn't mean it didn't exist,

01:03:51   because I'm pretty sure it did.

01:03:52   But I hadn't seen any anyway.

01:03:54   But now, at least, people are starting to let me know

01:03:57   of cool and interesting takes and different things

01:04:00   that people are doing now with the Vision Pro.

01:04:02   Does the Gucci app justify a $3,500 Vision Pro?

01:04:06   Hell no, it doesn't.

01:04:07   - Do Gucci shoppers care?

01:04:09   - Well, yeah, Gucci shoppers probably don't care.

01:04:11   But we're getting a glimpse now

01:04:13   with Game Room, with the Gucci app.

01:04:16   And I'm sure some of you who have used the Oculus

01:04:18   in the past are telling me,

01:04:20   or thinking to yourselves, of course, you moron.

01:04:22   This is where we've been for years.

01:04:23   And that very well may be true,

01:04:24   but this is not where I've been for years.

01:04:26   And some of this stuff, the special personas,

01:04:29   the presents there, the Game Room app,

01:04:31   the freeform thing, this Gucci app,

01:04:35   they are so incredibly cool,

01:04:38   and has made me so much more, what's the good one, bullish?

01:04:42   Bearish is bad, bullish is good, I always get it wrong.

01:04:44   So much more bullish about the Vision Pro,

01:04:46   because I'm starting to see an inkling

01:04:49   that people are starting to experiment.

01:04:52   Now, it bums me out that Apple doesn't seem to be doing much

01:04:55   as we talked ad nauseum last week,

01:04:57   but at least people are starting to do it.

01:04:58   And this stuff is so cool.

01:05:00   And Marco, whenever you get this thing back,

01:05:03   we've got to do a spatial persona call.

01:05:05   And maybe you'll say to me, I hate this and it's awful,

01:05:07   but you know what, it's worth trying.

01:05:09   So whenever you get that thing back, let me know.

01:05:11   We'll get on FaceTime together.

01:05:12   - Something I had to mention last week

01:05:14   about the spatial personas,

01:05:15   comparing them to other virtual representations of people,

01:05:19   both VR and non-VR.

01:05:20   So for example, the Miis and Nintendo's Wii,

01:05:23   where you make a little avatar, 3D avatar of yourself,

01:05:27   and the meta ones, where you're in a meeting with people

01:05:31   and you got these little rendered versions of yourselves.

01:05:33   All those have made a different choice than Apple has

01:05:38   with the spatial personas, both the current ones

01:05:41   and the previous one that were inside the little rectangle,

01:05:44   in that the Miis and the meta ones modeled you in 3D,

01:05:48   and yeah, they mapped your face on there

01:05:49   and you had your little cartoon hands

01:05:51   and sometimes you didn't have legs or whatever,

01:05:53   but they model you entirely from all directions.

01:05:57   And the Apple ones, the original ones

01:05:58   and the current quote unquote spatial ones,

01:06:02   basically just do your front and some of your sides.

01:06:06   And as you go towards the back, they kind of go,

01:06:09   it's blurry, like just blur that out.

01:06:12   And you can see a lot in a lot of the spatial persona videos

01:06:15   like the Verge article that we linked last week's episode,

01:06:18   where when somebody turns in profile,

01:06:20   you can see their profile and it looks like them,

01:06:22   like it's clear that their persona has mapped that,

01:06:24   so it's not just like, you know, generic.

01:06:26   But as you get back past like the ear,

01:06:29   the back half of the head doesn't exist, right?

01:06:33   And they blur it artistically,

01:06:35   like before when you were in the little rectangle,

01:06:36   they had all sorts of artsy blurring around the edges there

01:06:39   and now that you're out of the rectangle,

01:06:40   still the back half of you doesn't exist,

01:06:44   which makes sense because you didn't scan

01:06:46   the back half of you, you just scanned the front half of you

01:06:48   when you did the persona setup.

01:06:50   And it could, like the Miis or the meta things

01:06:52   extrapolate and sort of close off your head shape there

01:06:57   and try to make it whatever.

01:06:58   But so far Apple is doing the sort of,

01:07:00   I guess the Nintendo 64 school of like,

01:07:02   can't render it, fog it, right?

01:07:04   Just the wall of fog that's like,

01:07:07   we can't render past this distance,

01:07:08   but we need something that looks, you know,

01:07:10   realistic in context.

01:07:11   So like everything is always foggy

01:07:12   in the land of Turok for some reason.

01:07:14   (laughing)

01:07:16   And the personas are doing that with you.

01:07:18   They're like, oh, your head kind of fades into a mist.

01:07:22   You go back on your way.

01:07:23   And it's fine, 'cause mostly you're looking at people

01:07:25   from the front, but like what Casey was saying

01:07:27   when if two people are collaborating on like a free forum

01:07:30   board or whatever, like you do have an occasion,

01:07:33   especially if it's like three people,

01:07:34   you might have an occasion to see them from the side.

01:07:36   And it is a little bit weird.

01:07:38   So I am wondering if eventually that the next step

01:07:40   and this is that Apple will be brave enough

01:07:41   to try to do the back of your head.

01:07:43   Of course, the other thing that's the problem

01:07:45   with the back of your head is there's even more hair

01:07:47   back there for most people.

01:07:48   - Not me these days.

01:07:50   - Yeah, rendering hair is tricky.

01:07:53   Like they kind of get like your hairline is kind of fuzzed

01:07:56   out anyway with the current personas.

01:07:57   Like, oh, you have hair and whatever we scanned,

01:08:00   but then it just fades into blurriness, right?

01:08:02   But like, I don't know, ponytails would have to be rendered

01:08:05   with physics or whatever.

01:08:06   And the reason I'm drawing a distinction

01:08:08   with between the Miis and the Meta ones

01:08:09   is those are all cartoonish, like to varying degrees.

01:08:12   I know Meta has ones that are not cartoonish

01:08:14   and we've talked about those in past episodes as well,

01:08:15   but the cartoonish ones, it's like,

01:08:17   like kind of like my emoji.

01:08:18   It's like, well, we can just render that

01:08:20   because the back of your head is just like the front of you.

01:08:21   You're all made of plastic, right?

01:08:23   But they're trying to make them realistic.

01:08:24   And I think they're like, we're not ready to do hair yet.

01:08:27   So hair equals blur and back of your head does not exist.

01:08:30   And I'll definitely be watching for that to see how far back

01:08:34   they can push the fog.

01:08:35   Already I think it feel like it's farther.

01:08:37   Obviously there's not the rectangle anymore

01:08:39   that had all that weird fog in it,

01:08:40   but now the personas themselves have fog on the back of them

01:08:43   and we'll see how far back that goes.

01:08:45   But that's gonna be quite a challenge.

01:08:46   But as Casey said, most of the time you're facing the people

01:08:49   and like it goes a long way.

01:08:51   Having you feel like you're there in a physical space

01:08:54   with a physical thing like the battleship board between you

01:08:57   that you can interact with or whatever

01:08:59   goes a long way towards making you feel like

01:09:00   you're in a place even if the back half of your body

01:09:02   doesn't exist.

01:09:03   - Yeah, it's just, it's so funny because again,

01:09:07   I stand by last week's episode

01:09:09   and that was my perspective at the time and I stand by it,

01:09:12   but I feel so differently now after this one,

01:09:14   well two experiences if you include the Gucci thing.

01:09:17   It's just, it's so cool.

01:09:18   - Could you play patty cake with Mike?

01:09:20   - Kind of, we did high five once and obviously

01:09:23   you kind of float through each other,

01:09:24   your hands float through each other

01:09:26   because what's gonna stop you?

01:09:28   You know, it's not like you're--

01:09:28   - Yeah, I just meant like the alignment.

01:09:30   Like could you, were you--

01:09:31   - I think we could.

01:09:32   - Was the spatialness good enough

01:09:33   where you felt like it was pretty easy to high five, right?

01:09:36   Although what's gonna stop you reminds me

01:09:38   of my window management thing where I was talking about

01:09:40   how in Fitz Law, like the top of the screen

01:09:43   stops your cursor, but nothing stops it in the 3D world.

01:09:45   But a choice that Apple could have made

01:09:47   and I think some other VR people have made

01:09:49   is that virtual hand that you're waving around,

01:09:52   there's no reason that the Vision Pro OS

01:09:56   can't choose to stop your virtual hand

01:09:59   when it encounters another virtual hand

01:10:01   or a piece of scenery.

01:10:02   Your actual hand will keep going.

01:10:04   Just like when you jam the mouse cursor

01:10:05   against the top of the screen,

01:10:07   your mouse hand keeps going, but the cursor stops, right?

01:10:11   And that disconnect, like wait a second,

01:10:13   my hand is still moving, but the cursor is not.

01:10:15   We are familiar with that as like,

01:10:17   oh, my cursor has hit the edge of a thing.

01:10:19   So Apple could in the future choose to have you interact,

01:10:23   for example, for window management,

01:10:24   interacting with window management with a virtual hand

01:10:26   where you jam your hands, turn the window,

01:10:28   and you don't have to get the depth exactly right.

01:10:30   Because when your virtual hand hits the virtual window,

01:10:33   it will stop just like your cursor stops

01:10:34   when it hits the top edge of the screen,

01:10:35   and then you'll grip and grab and move.

01:10:37   And I think that type of interface could be good,

01:10:39   because it would essentially be

01:10:40   the equivalent of Fitts' Law in 3D space.

01:10:42   I will jam my hand cursor towards this window,

01:10:45   because I know, just like you would in real life,

01:10:46   I know it eventually will hit it,

01:10:48   so I don't have to be exactly precise,

01:10:49   and when it does hit it, the cursor will stop,

01:10:51   and then I'll grip.

01:10:52   That would be cool.

01:10:53   So you could actually high-five with mic,

01:10:55   and your hand would actually stop,

01:10:57   and they'd have a little high-five sound,

01:10:58   and it would sound spatially correct, maybe in version two.

01:11:01   - Oh, that was the other thing.

01:11:02   That reminds me, the other thing that we did

01:11:04   during this time is, I actually don't recall

01:11:07   how you enable it, but one way or another,

01:11:09   you can share play your perspective

01:11:13   in your actual physical space.

01:11:15   And so he took me on a tour of his studio office,

01:11:18   whatever he calls it, I think studio.

01:11:20   He took me on a tour of Mega Studio,

01:11:22   and I could see this studio.

01:11:25   I'd have seen photos of it,

01:11:26   but it's different when you can see.

01:11:28   And if memory serves, it wasn't 3D.

01:11:30   It was like, I don't think it was rendered in 3D.

01:11:33   I'd have to try it again at some point.

01:11:35   But it was very, you have this presence

01:11:39   when you're getting whipped around a space

01:11:42   from somebody's perspective.

01:11:44   It was very, very, very cool.

01:11:46   And I really enjoyed that as well.

01:11:48   So again, if you have two people,

01:11:50   if you know another person with a Vision Pro,

01:11:52   you gotta try this.

01:11:53   It's all so very impressive.

01:11:55   And it really gives me hope that even if Apple's

01:11:57   dropping the ball on immersive stuff,

01:11:59   people are trying, and people are trying,

01:12:01   and people are doing cool stuff.

01:12:02   And we just gotta give it time.

01:12:03   - Yeah, and I wanted to clarify what I actually said

01:12:08   last episode about the Vision Pro.

01:12:10   I feel like I need to defend myself a little bit

01:12:12   against what sounded like Mike sub-tweeting me

01:12:15   in the beginning of the podcast, sub-potting me.

01:12:18   I didn't say the Vision Pro has already failed,

01:12:20   or is a failure.

01:12:21   My concern is that the Vision Pro will fail

01:12:25   if it continues on the path it appears to be on so far

01:12:29   in terms of support from developers and Apple.

01:12:33   What I stand by is that they have a pretty significant

01:12:37   challenge on their hands of there being a massive

01:12:39   chicken and egg problem here.

01:12:40   That there are not many users, there are not many apps,

01:12:45   there is not almost any content.

01:12:48   That's a big problem.

01:12:50   In order to get more users, somebody has to be making

01:12:54   the content or the apps or both to get them there.

01:12:57   And right now it seems like the biggest chance

01:12:59   of that support coming from somewhere is from Apple.

01:13:03   Because the other content makers and publishers out there

01:13:07   are gonna have a hard time justifying making content

01:13:09   for Vision Pro if it's gonna be for such a small

01:13:13   number of people.

01:13:14   Now, there's also obviously other VR platforms,

01:13:17   but even they, like the MetaQuest series have been

01:13:20   very popular, relatively speaking for a VR platform

01:13:24   for a number of years now.

01:13:25   But even that has not been enough to get tons of custom

01:13:28   content made for it.

01:13:29   So really, Apple needs to seed this ecosystem

01:13:33   with a whole bunch of content that they are making

01:13:36   even though it appears as though it's probably not gonna be

01:13:38   like quote worth it yet for a while.

01:13:41   And what you're saying Casey is not wrong.

01:13:44   Like, I haven't tried the 3D personas yet,

01:13:48   but I've heard everyone else's takes that they're amazing

01:13:50   and everything.

01:13:51   And you're describing experiences that I've had

01:13:53   on the Vision Pro of just like being blown away,

01:13:57   really feeling something different,

01:13:59   feeling like you're having an experience or being able

01:14:02   to do something that you cannot do on any of Apple's

01:14:04   other platforms or any other platforms

01:14:06   sometimes in the world.

01:14:08   And that is correct and also not enough.

01:14:12   Those are amazing experiences.

01:14:15   Those are amazing possibilities.

01:14:16   That's amazing potential.

01:14:19   What it is right now so far for most of these things

01:14:21   is more like a tech demo than a long lasting product.

01:14:26   We've seen other VR headsets do this for years.

01:14:30   Look back to when META's Horizon workroom,

01:14:33   is that what it was called?

01:14:34   When that launched, what was it, about a year or two ago,

01:14:37   we heard from people who tried that,

01:14:38   especially Ben Thompson was a huge champion of it,

01:14:42   of just how amazing it was to do basically these kind of

01:14:47   like virtual meetings with 3D avatars in a virtual room.

01:14:51   And it was everything you were saying about how great

01:14:53   the spatial personas were of like spatial audio being,

01:14:58   coming from the person and like a 3D representation

01:15:00   of that person in the room.

01:15:01   Ben Thompson was saying for, when they came out,

01:15:05   and I believe when Mike and Gray did it on Cortex

01:15:07   a couple years back, I believe they came to a similar

01:15:09   conclusion of like, it really is way better than like

01:15:12   a Zoom or FaceTime meeting for virtually meeting with people.

01:15:16   And we know this already.

01:15:18   But yet, that product never really took off.

01:15:20   Like Horizon workrooms doesn't seem to have gone anywhere.

01:15:23   The coolness of the meeting is not enough.

01:15:27   The coolness of these experiences of wow,

01:15:29   I played a battle show with my friend once,

01:15:31   that's not enough.

01:15:32   That's a great experience.

01:15:34   It's a cool demo.

01:15:35   It's more like going to a theme park though.

01:15:38   How do we get people to integrate this into more

01:15:42   everyday life or work types of uses?

01:15:45   And that really comes down to kind of

01:15:48   more fundamental things.

01:15:49   How do you get the hardware to be more mass market friendly?

01:15:53   Whether that's through cost or change it to the hardware

01:15:55   itself, probably both.

01:15:57   And then how do you get people to buy it

01:15:59   and to use it regularly?

01:16:01   Not just use it once, have a cool experience,

01:16:04   and then put it back in the drawer and not use it

01:16:07   for another six months.

01:16:08   That's really hard.

01:16:10   My concern is that we're not yet seeing Apple

01:16:14   really ramp up the content story or the app story.

01:16:18   That's concerning because if not enough people buy this

01:16:23   or the people who do buy it end up not using it very often,

01:16:27   then all those cool experiences that you're describing

01:16:30   won't happen.

01:16:31   People will do them once and then never do them again.

01:16:33   It's only so useful if you and a handful of your podcaster

01:16:38   friends have this but no one else in the world does.

01:16:40   (laughing)

01:16:41   They have to get the product from where it is now

01:16:45   to more people being willing and happy to buy it

01:16:50   and use it more often.

01:16:52   That's the chasm they have to cross.

01:16:55   And they might do it.

01:16:56   They might really blow us away and get there.

01:16:59   Or maybe it'll be a really slow boil,

01:17:01   like John was saying last week.

01:17:02   And maybe three years from now we might say,

01:17:04   hey, you know what, it's slowly gaining steam.

01:17:06   That may happen, I hope that happens.

01:17:09   I'm not like pessimistic about the product being able

01:17:14   to be good, I'm scared that Apple won't do what it takes

01:17:18   to get it there because they're not investing enough

01:17:21   in the content ecosystem.

01:17:24   That's my main concern here is first for any

01:17:27   of these experiences to be compelling,

01:17:30   to be used more than once, you have to get a bunch

01:17:33   of people to buy this thing.

01:17:35   How are they gonna do that?

01:17:37   Well, the easiest way to do that I think is

01:17:38   with really compelling content because the apps

01:17:41   aren't gonna be there.

01:17:41   So next best thing, really compelling content.

01:17:45   Get a bunch of like music and movies and sports videos

01:17:48   and concerts and like get like all this different types

01:17:51   of content that people will be like, yes, I want to watch

01:17:55   my basketball or my fish concert in 3D.

01:17:57   I will get it just for that.

01:17:59   Yes, do that.

01:18:00   Somehow get people to buy it.

01:18:02   That would be step one.

01:18:04   And then once you have people accepting this device

01:18:08   into their lives and using it more than once,

01:18:11   then you can start having these amazing experiences

01:18:13   with people where you're playing Battleship in 3D together

01:18:16   or something.

01:18:17   But it's not gonna get beyond, this is a fun demo

01:18:20   we did twice until you have a lot of people buying it.

01:18:24   And how are you gonna get a lot of people to buy it

01:18:27   without this whole ecosystem existing already?

01:18:30   That's a very tough thing.

01:18:32   And I still don't think we've seen enough from Apple yet.

01:18:36   But again, it is very early days.

01:18:38   It's been out for two months.

01:18:39   WWDC is another two months from now.

01:18:42   So we still could see great things here.

01:18:45   But it seems like we should have seen more of it already

01:18:48   being two months post launch.

01:18:50   I would have expected to see more of a push from Apple,

01:18:54   more of a content push, more of a press push.

01:18:56   Just something like to keep reminding people,

01:18:58   hey, this cool thing that we did, it's out there,

01:19:01   and here's a new thing this week

01:19:03   that we've released on it or something.

01:19:04   And we're not really getting that yet.

01:19:08   - Yeah, I think a lot of the reason people talk

01:19:11   about content so much for it,

01:19:13   and particularly content that is either entirely made

01:19:15   by Apple or essentially paid for or sponsored

01:19:17   or subsidized by Apple, is because that is the one realm

01:19:22   where nobody contests that headsets can do something

01:19:26   other platforms can't.

01:19:27   You can use a web browser on a Mac, on your phone,

01:19:30   on your iPad or whatever.

01:19:32   You can't watch 3D video on any of those devices, right?

01:19:35   You need a headset to get the headset experience.

01:19:37   And why should Apple help fund that?

01:19:39   Well, if Apple either produces or helps fund content,

01:19:44   A, they can make sure it is optimized for their headset,

01:19:47   which happens to be very expensive

01:19:49   and has high resolution, right?

01:19:50   So they're not gonna make the lowest common denominator

01:19:52   content, and B, they can essentially say,

01:19:54   this is exclusively for people with Vision Pro, right?

01:19:57   Because if they help pay for it,

01:19:59   it doesn't need to be for everybody.

01:20:00   It can just be for people who have the Vision Pro.

01:20:03   And content is the most compelling use for the product

01:20:08   that Apple has put out.

01:20:09   Despite the fact that they say it's spatial computing,

01:20:10   that's not the other thing.

01:20:12   Everything you can do in spatial computing

01:20:14   in terms of I can use applications and scroll windows

01:20:17   and type text, you can do all those things

01:20:19   on other platforms.

01:20:20   There are advantages and disadvantages,

01:20:22   but it's not a slam dunk.

01:20:23   Well, you can't do any 3D video on any other thing

01:20:26   that Apple makes.

01:20:28   This is the only one.

01:20:29   So there's no, you don't need to make

01:20:31   some sophisticated argument about how it's better

01:20:33   to manipulate windows in 3D space

01:20:35   and how you like looking up at the ceiling

01:20:36   to see your web browser.

01:20:37   You don't have to make a nuanced argument like that.

01:20:39   It's like literally you cannot do this

01:20:40   on anything else that Apple sells.

01:20:42   And also, by the way, people who see the 3D video

01:20:45   find it impressive and compelling, right?

01:20:47   So yes, apps and make the OS better and so on and so forth,

01:20:51   but we're like, Apple, just make more content.

01:20:53   It's the easiest thing, because first of all,

01:20:55   it doesn't require anything of the user.

01:20:56   You just have to like launch it and look at it

01:20:57   and be amazed, right, and look around, right?

01:20:59   It's very natural.

01:21:00   You don't need to learn any weird pinch gestures.

01:21:02   You don't have to, you know, this,

01:21:03   there's the learning curve is low.

01:21:05   It's incredibly impressive.

01:21:06   I feel like it is the thing that is most impressive

01:21:08   to people when they do the in-store demo

01:21:10   is seeing the 3D video.

01:21:12   It has no competition in Apple's entire line,

01:21:14   and if Apple pays for it, they can essentially make it

01:21:17   optimized for and exclusive for this device.

01:21:19   That is a short-term thing.

01:21:20   Like eventually, if watching NBA games with a, you know,

01:21:24   court side perspective in 3D becomes a thing,

01:21:26   presumably the NBA would want that to be available

01:21:28   on every headset platform, not just Apple's.

01:21:31   But if Apple puts the bill in the beginning,

01:21:33   yeah, you can make that stuff Apple exclusive,

01:21:35   only on Vision Pro, not because Vision Pro

01:21:37   is the only headset, but because Apple paid

01:21:39   literally millions of dollars to make this happen,

01:21:40   or because it's MLB and Apple owns the right store.

01:21:43   Like that's the part of the frustration is.

01:21:47   We see how you can make this product more compelling

01:21:50   simply by producing content, and that's not the story

01:21:53   Apple wants to tell about this device.

01:21:55   They want to call it a spatial computing device,

01:21:56   and it is, right, but the easiest sale is

01:22:00   you can see 3D video like you've never seen it before.

01:22:02   And how about you make some of that Apple?

01:22:05   - I do, I concur it's the easiest.

01:22:08   I'm not sure it's the most striking,

01:22:12   for lack of a better word.

01:22:13   Like it, unquestionably, it's the easiest way

01:22:15   is to do this immersive or even 3D video.

01:22:18   But I don't know, some of the most compelling

01:22:21   experiences I've had were, you know,

01:22:23   like the spatial persona thing and these FaceTime calls.

01:22:25   - Yeah, that's quite a learning curve.

01:22:27   You gotta know somebody else with one,

01:22:28   you gotta be computery, like yeah,

01:22:30   like that's, I'm kind of of the mindset of like,

01:22:33   you know, kickstart this, and then once people

01:22:35   will get accustomed, because just getting them used

01:22:37   to the idea of you put this on your head

01:22:38   and you somehow navigate to a thing

01:22:39   where you can see the game, eventually they'll be like,

01:22:42   you know what, I'm feeling comfortable in this world.

01:22:44   And then, hey, can I watch a game with my friend?

01:22:47   Grubber and Ben talked about this recently.

01:22:48   You can be sitting in the stands of a baseball stadium

01:22:50   next to each other, it started out

01:22:51   as you're just watching a baseball game.

01:22:53   But now you're doing what you're talking about, Casey,

01:22:55   where now you're sitting next to your friend

01:22:56   watching the same game together,

01:22:57   and you can turn and talk to them.

01:22:59   It's like, I feel like that's the way in,

01:23:01   because starting with a thing that doesn't require

01:23:02   almost anything of the user is a good way to get them

01:23:05   used to all of the stuff that comes with it, you know.

01:23:08   Get them to shell out for it in the first place,

01:23:10   get them used to putting it on their head,

01:23:11   get them to figure out how it fits into their life,

01:23:13   whether they're gonna feel comfortable using the library

01:23:15   or in the Wegmans or whatever,

01:23:16   and then eventually you ease them into like,

01:23:18   oh, now my friend is sitting next to me

01:23:19   and we're watching the same movie screen together,

01:23:21   but now we're watching a baseball game together,

01:23:23   and now we're both courtside,

01:23:24   but now we're talking to each other and playing Battleship.

01:23:26   I feel like that is a long road to drive down,

01:23:31   and Apple has not even really set out on it yet.

01:23:35   - Yeah, and I mean, I think this,

01:23:37   by virtue of this Game Room app being in Apple Arcade,

01:23:41   it would imply to me anyway that it was funded,

01:23:45   at least in part, by Apple.

01:23:46   Now, to Marco's point earlier,

01:23:47   perhaps it was already written for other platforms

01:23:49   and the funding was just porting onto Vision Pro,

01:23:51   but still, this is the kind of thing

01:23:53   that all three of us are talking about.

01:23:55   Do more of this, please, Apple.

01:23:57   Give us immersive video, give us 3D video,

01:23:59   give us all this stuff,

01:24:01   and I really want there to be more of it.

01:24:04   And I think that there is a world

01:24:08   in which the Vision Pro can take off to the degree

01:24:12   that a $3,500 device can,

01:24:14   a frivolous device can take off,

01:24:16   but it's gonna be a long road.

01:24:18   I mean, Marco, you're not wrong about that, so we'll see.

01:24:21   - Yeah, and it will be a long road,

01:24:23   but they have to start driving down it.

01:24:25   - Yeah, right.

01:24:26   - You can make it down a long road.

01:24:28   Just wait, like, over time.

01:24:29   Be patient.

01:24:30   If you continue driving down a long road,

01:24:33   you will get there.

01:24:34   For me to have more confidence in the products,

01:24:35   I need to see that they're actually driving down the road.

01:24:38   And Apple Arcade is a great tool they can use.

01:24:42   We don't really see a lot of ways

01:24:45   that Apple funds development of third-party software.

01:24:48   They don't really do that.

01:24:50   Obviously, they'll let you put it in the store,

01:24:52   asterisk, asterisk.

01:24:54   But you don't see Apple behaving like a studio very often,

01:24:58   where they will front the money

01:24:59   to fund some third-party making something.

01:25:02   Apple Arcade is, I think, sort of one of those things.

01:25:05   I don't know the details,

01:25:06   and I know it's kinda shifted

01:25:07   and changed a little bit over time,

01:25:09   but from what we understand,

01:25:11   Apple Arcade is a way they could do this.

01:25:12   So if they wanted to fund some games

01:25:15   and interactive-type entertainment experiences,

01:25:18   that's a great place to do it,

01:25:19   like a great tool they already have.

01:25:20   Use Apple Arcade.

01:25:21   Use the relationships you have there.

01:25:24   But everything we keep hearing

01:25:25   is that the relationships there aren't that good, maybe.

01:25:27   So I worry that it's going to take types of relationships

01:25:32   and types of skills and attitudes

01:25:35   that Apple historically has not really shown that they have

01:25:39   in order to make good software happen for the vision progress.

01:25:43   Honestly, you guys were saying a few minutes ago

01:25:45   about the computing aspect.

01:25:47   I know John was saying that the computing aspects

01:25:48   kind of were less important or less doable, maybe,

01:25:52   than the video aspect,

01:25:53   but longer term, I think there is more promise

01:25:58   in some of the computing aspects than we think now.

01:26:01   For instance, I'm currently trying to furnish some rooms

01:26:08   in a house and figure out certain decor choices and stuff.

01:26:12   It would be great to have some of the 3D house remodeling

01:26:16   kind of apps or room envisioning.

01:26:19   What is it?

01:26:20   Like if I paint this room green, that kind of stuff.

01:26:22   How does this chair look in my room?

01:26:24   Some of that stuff is there now.

01:26:26   Very, very little.

01:26:28   Mostly through Safari and the support for the AR model stuff.

01:26:32   Some of that stuff exists, sort of,

01:26:34   but it's very, very minimal.

01:26:35   The Vision Pro would be amazing for stuff like that.

01:26:38   What about virtual tourism?

01:26:41   Take me to a balcony in a villa in Spain or whatever.

01:26:46   You can do amazing stuff with 3D worlds and virtual tourism,

01:26:51   mindfulness kind of exercises and environments.

01:26:55   Apple's own environments, they can broaden that.

01:26:58   There is a lot of value to a lot of that stuff,

01:27:02   but for most of that to happen,

01:27:05   you first need enough users on the platform

01:27:08   that it's worth those developers making those things.

01:27:11   So that's hopefully where content

01:27:13   can kind of jumpstart the install base.

01:27:15   Make must-have, must-see content.

01:27:18   And again, I'm not a sports person,

01:27:20   but sports seem like a really obvious good way to do that.

01:27:24   I see Apple as kind of sort of

01:27:26   dipping their toe into that so far.

01:27:28   That could be very compelling for a lot of people.

01:27:32   I think also concerts, live events, stuff like that,

01:27:34   that could get a lot of people as well.

01:27:37   I just hope they're doing that,

01:27:39   but I'm scared because what they have launched with

01:27:41   is basically nothing and two months in

01:27:45   and it's still basically nothing.

01:27:48   So how are they gonna get from here to there?

01:27:51   If the answer is just that we don't know

01:27:54   about their production pipeline

01:27:56   and it turns out maybe over the course

01:27:57   or the rest of this year,

01:27:58   maybe they have a bunch of cool stuff coming, great.

01:28:01   Then we can look back at this and look how wrong I was.

01:28:03   That'll be awesome 'cause I want this to succeed.

01:28:06   But so far we have no sign of that.

01:28:08   So I hope I'm wrong.

01:28:09   Again, just like I said last week, I hope I'm wrong.

01:28:12   - Yeah, we'll see what happens.

01:28:14   It's just funny how I wasn't,

01:28:18   or I don't think I was deeply pessimistic

01:28:21   about the Vision Pro.

01:28:22   I just wasn't deeply optimistic about it.

01:28:24   And now I'm not sure if I would go so far as to say

01:28:26   I'm deeply optimistic about it, but my goodness,

01:28:29   I feel like I'm much closer to that than I was ever before.

01:28:32   And so, yeah, I mean, there's,

01:28:36   with time I'm finding more and more ways

01:28:38   that this thing has impressed me and I think that's cool.

01:28:41   (upbeat music)

01:28:42   - We're sponsored this episode by Computex 2024,

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01:30:07   (upbeat music)

01:30:10   All right, let's do some Ask ATP.

01:30:12   Chandler Kent wrote probably six months ago,

01:30:15   but here we are.

01:30:16   Lesson learned, don't ever use Ask ATP

01:30:19   for timely related things

01:30:21   because we probably won't get to it in time.

01:30:23   - Sometimes it happens though.

01:30:24   Sometimes someone writes an Ask ATP

01:30:25   and it goes in the next day's recording,

01:30:27   so you never know.

01:30:28   - You never know, but I wouldn't rely on it.

01:30:29   But Chandler wrote 18 years ago,

01:30:32   "I need to buy a car, but I don't know how."

01:30:33   - I was thinking about buying a Power Mac G5.

01:30:36   - Yeah, right.

01:30:37   I'm a tech nerd with no experience buying cars.

01:30:39   I fear that having the feeling of getting screwed

01:30:41   by a sleazy car salesman.

01:30:43   As tech nerds who are also into cars,

01:30:44   what are your best tips for first time car buyers

01:30:47   to make the process less stressful

01:30:48   and hopefully get a fair price?

01:30:50   I'm based in the US.

01:30:51   We are buying our first family car since we have two kids

01:30:53   and are thinking about expanding our family.

01:30:54   Currently own a Volkswagen Jetta

01:30:55   that my wife bought in 2011.

01:30:57   So my two cents, and I will try to make this quick

01:30:59   'cause this could go on for another 90 minutes if we let it.

01:31:03   My two cents are twofold.

01:31:05   Number one, if you really want a stress-free experience,

01:31:10   I haven't bought from this company,

01:31:12   but I have sold to this company.

01:31:14   And there are other equivalents, I think, similar to it.

01:31:17   And full disclosure, they're based out of Richmond,

01:31:19   but CarMax, they sell used cars

01:31:22   and their whole thing is no haggling.

01:31:24   Like the price is the price.

01:31:26   Granted, you probably will not get the world's best deal

01:31:29   by going to CarMax, but you will have an easy transaction.

01:31:33   Carvana, I've heard very mixed things about,

01:31:35   this is sort of similar, but it's all internet-based.

01:31:37   But I would consider CarMax,

01:31:39   if you're not trying to buy new,

01:31:40   go to CarMax and just find something on their lot

01:31:42   or find something nearby and it'll be fairly straightforward.

01:31:44   You won't get the best price, but it'll be easy.

01:31:47   But for me, when we've bought cars,

01:31:49   in the last couple of cars we've bought,

01:31:51   we've bought new, mostly to get CarPlay.

01:31:53   And what we did was I emailed

01:31:59   or reached out to the salespeople.

01:32:01   For all the dealers within two to three hours of my house

01:32:05   and said, "What is your best out-the-door price

01:32:07   for the following car?"

01:32:09   An XC90 with this, that, this, that, this, that, this, that.

01:32:11   What's your best price?

01:32:12   And by the way, I'm emailing a bunch of other dealers

01:32:15   to ask the same thing.

01:32:15   And so what ends up happening is

01:32:18   one or two of the dealers will come up with a decent price

01:32:20   and you can, via email, you can just say,

01:32:22   "Oh, well, the dealer down the road said 50,000

01:32:25   and the dealer up the road said 55,000.

01:32:27   Can you come down dealer up the road?"

01:32:29   And you can kind of create a bidding more.

01:32:30   Now, granted, you have to be the intermediary to do this

01:32:32   and it's a pain in the butt and it takes forever,

01:32:34   but we've gotten some pretty darn good deals

01:32:37   on our last couple of cars by doing something like that.

01:32:40   So it takes a lot of work,

01:32:42   but you can get a pretty decent deal.

01:32:44   And pretty much all the haggling is done up front,

01:32:47   which is really, really nice.

01:32:49   So by the time you go in,

01:32:50   it's mostly about just signing a few papers

01:32:53   and getting the car.

01:32:54   The other thing I would also advocate,

01:32:55   and then I'll stop talking,

01:32:56   is if you can provide your own financing,

01:32:59   I would at least be prepared to.

01:33:00   Now, there's catches and caveats with that

01:33:02   because oftentimes you may get a better deal

01:33:04   if you use the dealer's financing,

01:33:06   but sometimes the dealer likes an easy transaction

01:33:08   and when you just hand them a check or pay cash,

01:33:11   that can go a lot easier.

01:33:12   So I think Jon has some links he's gonna talk about.

01:33:15   So before we get there, Marco,

01:33:16   what would you like to add to this

01:33:18   or anything else you'd like to contribute?

01:33:20   - Some brands, notably like Tesla

01:33:23   and also Rivian and many of the new brands,

01:33:26   they don't like the ones that sell direct

01:33:28   where you're not going through dealers.

01:33:30   Usually they don't even have negotiable prices.

01:33:33   Like usually it's just here's the price.

01:33:34   It's like buying something on Amazon.

01:33:36   Like this is the price.

01:33:37   You can order it or not.

01:33:39   And in some ways, that kind of takes

01:33:41   some of the quote fun out of it for some people.

01:33:43   For me, that took a lot of stress out of it

01:33:44   because I didn't have to worry am I getting screwed.

01:33:47   Everyone's getting screwed equally.

01:33:48   So you don't have to like feel bad about it

01:33:51   or put any thought or time into it.

01:33:53   So that's wonderful when there's a brand

01:33:54   that just there is no negotiation.

01:33:57   When you're dealing with most other brands

01:33:59   where you're going through dealers

01:34:00   and having all these markups,

01:34:02   it's like any other negotiation.

01:34:05   The more information you have about their situation,

01:34:08   the better.

01:34:09   It helps to know things like for instance,

01:34:11   if you can use online nerdery to find out

01:34:15   what does this car cost the dealer?

01:34:17   I believe this is called the invoice price

01:34:20   in some circles or whatever else.

01:34:22   But you can usually use some kind of online research

01:34:25   to figure out what does the dealer cost for this car.

01:34:29   Now it's a little more complicated.

01:34:30   Sometimes there's like certain incentives

01:34:32   and everything the dealer gets

01:34:33   to kind of cut into it a little bit.

01:34:34   But for the most part, you should have some idea

01:34:37   of what you can reasonably even ask for.

01:34:40   Because if you're asking to buy a $35,000 car

01:34:44   and it costs the dealer $32,000

01:34:46   and you go in there and say I'll give you 20,

01:34:49   they're gonna laugh at you.

01:34:50   'Cause what you're asking for is totally impossible

01:34:53   and unreasonable and that just shows

01:34:54   you don't know what you're talking about.

01:34:56   If you go in there with some idea

01:34:58   of what you're talking about

01:34:59   and you know that their cost is 32

01:35:03   and you say I'll give you 32, five,

01:35:05   right now I'll walk out the door.

01:35:06   Like you're giving them a profit margin,

01:35:08   you know they're gonna,

01:35:09   'cause you know they're not gonna give it to you

01:35:11   for their cost, they're gonna want some profit.

01:35:13   So you give them 500 bucks or 1,000 bucks in profit

01:35:16   and usually they'll be fine with that

01:35:18   and they'll be happy to have the deal done quickly.

01:35:19   Now Casey's method is better.

01:35:21   You should probably combine these two.

01:35:22   So you should probably like,

01:35:25   if you have multiple dealers in the region

01:35:27   who will compete with each other,

01:35:28   who you can just email and deal with it that way,

01:35:31   that's better.

01:35:32   But you should also know what to ask for in the first place

01:35:35   and you should know kind of what kind of pricing

01:35:37   is reasonable to expect.

01:35:38   You should also know about other factors.

01:35:40   So for instance, oftentimes,

01:35:43   depending on how you wanna finance it,

01:35:45   oftentimes some of the best values in the car business

01:35:49   are lease specials.

01:35:51   Because if you want to and can lease the vehicle,

01:35:56   leasing is usually backed by some financial arm

01:35:58   of the car company who you're buying the car from.

01:36:01   And so if the car company is say,

01:36:04   kinda is maybe looking to miss some of their sales targets

01:36:07   for the quarter and the end of the quarter's coming up soon,

01:36:10   they might borrow against their future selves

01:36:13   by offering a lease special

01:36:15   to give you a pretty good deal on a car

01:36:17   to get you to please for the love of God,

01:36:19   start this lease now in this quarter.

01:36:21   So you can take advantage of factors like that.

01:36:24   End of month, end of quarter things,

01:36:26   there's some wiggle room there.

01:36:29   Ultimately though, all of this comes down to

01:36:31   basic negotiation, which of you needs it more?

01:36:35   Do you want this certain car a lot?

01:36:38   Do a lot of other people want that same car?

01:36:40   So for instance, if what you're going for

01:36:43   is a very in-demand car that maybe is a bit of a short supply

01:36:47   you're gonna pay through the nose and they know it

01:36:49   and there's nothing you can do about it.

01:36:50   'Cause if you don't buy it, someone else will come in

01:36:52   later that day and they'll buy it.

01:36:55   But whereas, if the flip side is true,

01:36:57   if what you're trying to buy is a car

01:36:59   that is pretty plentiful and the dealer

01:37:02   is gonna miss their sales target

01:37:03   or the manufacturer is gonna miss

01:37:05   their quarterly earnings target,

01:37:07   you can take advantage of that and you can get a good price.

01:37:09   So the more information you have, the better,

01:37:11   because you wanna know where you stand.

01:37:15   How much leverage you have depends on how much

01:37:17   they wanna sell you that car

01:37:19   and you need to know how far down you can even go

01:37:23   in the price while still being reasonable

01:37:26   and within what they can accept.

01:37:27   - What's the John answer to this question?

01:37:30   - So my suggestion is, so there's lots of online tools

01:37:33   to help you with this stuff and there's a YouTube channel

01:37:36   that I found interesting and it's a good example,

01:37:38   I'm not gonna, a good example of a genre

01:37:41   of YouTube type channel where the channel

01:37:45   is essentially a come on for you to sign up

01:37:47   for a service, but they have lots of free videos on YouTube,

01:37:51   all of which are telling you to go to the website

01:37:53   and sign up for the service and pay the money.

01:37:55   This is, the channel's called Car Edge

01:37:58   and they have a website and they do have a thing

01:38:00   they want you to pay for, but there's a lot of free value

01:38:05   that you can extract from something like Car Edge

01:38:08   without ever paying them any money.

01:38:09   I've never paid Car Edge any money,

01:38:11   but I've watched a bunch of their videos

01:38:13   and the thing I like about Car Edge is,

01:38:17   if you watch enough of the videos,

01:38:18   the free videos that are on YouTube,

01:38:20   you will eventually start to get a feel

01:38:23   for what the dealership experience is like,

01:38:27   the bad old negotiated price dealership experience.

01:38:32   One of the people who runs the channel

01:38:34   used to be a car dealer, so he knows what it's like

01:38:37   on the other side, right?

01:38:38   And they do lots of role playing in the channel,

01:38:40   which I think is the other important part

01:38:42   of negotiating for car dealers,

01:38:45   just like any other salespeople will leverage

01:38:49   social norms, essentially,

01:38:54   to get you to do something you otherwise wouldn't, right?

01:38:57   So social norms of not wanting to disagree with somebody

01:39:01   or not wanting to be rude to them,

01:39:03   those sound like things that wouldn't cause you

01:39:06   to pay thousands of dollars more for a car,

01:39:08   but they absolutely will, right?

01:39:10   And I'm not saying you have to be obnoxious and rude,

01:39:12   but there are many things

01:39:13   that you will feel uncomfortable doing

01:39:15   if you haven't either rehearsed them yourself

01:39:17   or at least seen other people role playing

01:39:19   and rehearsing them,

01:39:20   because it's very easy to sort of get caught up,

01:39:22   and also, frankly, but if you find yourself

01:39:25   in a car dealer, one of the things they do

01:39:27   is keep you there for a long time,

01:39:28   'cause you're like, "I don't wanna go through this all again

01:39:31   "on another day, I just wasted one of my weekend days

01:39:33   "doing this, and I basically decided

01:39:35   "that I don't wanna buy this car at this price,

01:39:37   "but if I leave now, all I'm doing is signing myself up

01:39:40   "to have to do this again next weekend,

01:39:43   "and how soon do I need the car?

01:39:45   "I needed ASAP 'cause my old car was totaled," or whatever.

01:39:48   You don't ever wanna be in that situation, right?

01:39:50   Sometimes you can't help it,

01:39:51   but it's just a thing to keep in mind.

01:39:53   They're relying on you not wanting to feel like you're rude

01:39:57   and you not feeling exhausted

01:39:59   and not wanting to go through this whole ordeal again

01:40:01   to just be like, "Fine, whatever, resist that."

01:40:04   So I would suggest going to something

01:40:06   like the Car Edge YouTube channel or their website

01:40:08   or anything similar and sucking all the value out of that

01:40:11   for free, if you wanna sign up for a client.

01:40:13   I wouldn't give them any money,

01:40:15   but there's so much good knowledge on YouTube of like,

01:40:18   here's what it's gonna be like when you go in the dealer.

01:40:20   Here's what the dealer's gonna say to you.

01:40:22   Here's why this is not true.

01:40:23   Here's why that's not true.

01:40:24   And yes, there are tons of websites

01:40:25   where you can look up what the dealer prices for this car

01:40:28   and incentives and all that other stuff.

01:40:30   And what Marco said about rare cars is true.

01:40:31   If you want a Civic Type R, bad news for you.

01:40:34   You're lucky if you can even find one,

01:40:37   let alone get one that's not $10,000 over MSRP.

01:40:40   So try to buy a car that is not very rare.

01:40:43   Try to not be in a hurry for it.

01:40:46   Do your research ahead of time and practice.

01:40:49   And if you're in a partnership

01:40:52   and your partner is more comfortable

01:40:54   doing this type of negotiation,

01:40:56   if you do role-playing and one of you just can't

01:40:58   bring themselves to just walk out the door

01:41:01   and say, "No," or, "No, I can't do that,"

01:41:03   have the other person to negotiate.

01:41:04   (both laughing)

01:41:07   'Cause you have to end up doing that.

01:41:09   And I will say finally, in the end,

01:41:13   before you even start this process,

01:41:15   if you have in mind, "I think I want a Honda Civic-ish car,

01:41:20   "and I have this amount of money for it,

01:41:22   "and if I paid this amount of money

01:41:24   "and I got a brand new Honda Civic-ish car,

01:41:26   "I would be happy," in the end, if you do get exhausted

01:41:29   and someone says, "Hey, I'll give you a Honda Civic

01:41:31   "for a number that is within the range

01:41:33   "that you wanted to pay," even if you essentially,

01:41:36   "Oh, I'm overpaying, I got screwed."

01:41:38   So you paid an extra $1,000 for a Civic.

01:41:41   The world will not end.

01:41:42   Make sure you get the car you want

01:41:45   for a price that you're okay with,

01:41:46   and then maybe you've done minimal sanity checking

01:41:48   on that price to make sure it's not completely outrageous,

01:41:51   and you'll be fine.

01:41:52   There's no one who's gonna come to your house and say,

01:41:55   "I heard you paid $500 more than your neighbor for your car.

01:41:57   "Don't you feel bad?"

01:41:58   Don't feel bad.

01:41:59   Just get a car that you're happy with

01:42:01   that hopefully you'll like for a reasonable price.

01:42:04   There's no award for shaving down that last $100

01:42:08   off the price.

01:42:09   You're gonna spend that much filling up the tank twice,

01:42:11   or if you get an EV, you're spending so much money anyway,

01:42:14   so who cares?

01:42:15   (laughing)

01:42:17   - No, I think just to reiterate what Jon just said,

01:42:19   it is important to know that no matter how nice

01:42:23   or not sleazy the dealer is,

01:42:25   their profession is to manipulate you into paying them

01:42:29   as much money as you are possibly capable of paying.

01:42:32   And so there will be moments where you have to say,

01:42:35   "Nope, I'm out," and walk away.

01:42:37   And there are moments where you probably will have

01:42:39   to be kind of rude.

01:42:40   When I bought the Volkswagen, I negotiated in advance,

01:42:45   we came to a price, and I said,

01:42:47   "Okay, I'm gonna come up at such and such a time.

01:42:49   "Everything's good to go.

01:42:50   "I'll have all the paperwork I need.

01:42:52   "I'll have a check for you," et cetera, et cetera.

01:42:54   And this was at a Volkswagen dealer.

01:42:57   The Volkswagen dealer nearest the Volkswagen

01:43:00   of America headquarters up in the DC area.

01:43:02   And I was trying to get this car bought.

01:43:06   Everything was squared away.

01:43:07   I just had to sign the paperwork.

01:43:08   And they wouldn't put me in front of the finance people,

01:43:12   which was silly because I didn't even need

01:43:13   to finance anything, but nevertheless,

01:43:15   they wouldn't put me in front of the finance people

01:43:16   for like an hour.

01:43:17   And eventually I sent a text to the child

01:43:20   that was my dealer, and I said,

01:43:23   "Look, I am going to leave if I'm not in front

01:43:26   "of somebody in five minutes."

01:43:28   I was a total chad about it, because I'd been saying,

01:43:32   "What's the story, what's the story, what's the story?

01:43:34   "You need to run off to go ask such and such and such.

01:43:36   "Who's a mob of them?"

01:43:37   And eventually I sent a text and I was like,

01:43:38   "I will leave in five minutes if I'm not

01:43:40   "in front of somebody."

01:43:41   And do you know what, fellas?

01:43:42   Do you know what happened in about three minutes?

01:43:44   I was sitting in front of the finance person

01:43:46   who was then giving me the rigmarole about,

01:43:48   "Oh, you need the underbody protection.

01:43:49   "Oh, you need the wheel protection.

01:43:50   "Oh, you need the tire protection."

01:43:52   And you have to say, "No, no, no, no."

01:43:54   But eventually I sure enough got out of there

01:43:57   with the car I wanted at the price I wanted,

01:43:59   and it all worked out.

01:44:00   But it took me being a chad to get there,

01:44:02   and that was no fun.

01:44:03   - Oh yeah, on the topic of, this is another thing

01:44:05   to watch the carage videos about.

01:44:06   It's complicated, but like,

01:44:08   should I tell them that I'm paying in cash?

01:44:10   Should I tell them I have a trade-in?

01:44:12   When should I tell them these things?

01:44:13   Should I not say anything about it

01:44:14   until we've agreed on a number?

01:44:15   Like, it's more complicated than you think,

01:44:17   which is why I think you should watch these free videos

01:44:19   and get an idea of like, the things you should

01:44:21   and shouldn't say until you get an agreed upon price.

01:44:25   And then you pull out, "Oh, and by the way,

01:44:26   "I have a trade-in.

01:44:27   "Oh, and by the way, I'm paying cash."

01:44:28   Or, "By the way, I'll do your finance thing

01:44:31   "as long as there's no early penalty thing."

01:44:32   Because they often have incentives

01:44:34   to get you to sign up for the finance thing.

01:44:36   They're like, "Look, we know you're gonna pay cash for it,

01:44:38   "but if you will just sign up for this loan

01:44:40   "and then immediately pay it off,

01:44:41   "you'll never pay a penny in interest or whatever."

01:44:43   That's not always a scam.

01:44:45   Sometimes that's a real thing.

01:44:47   I've done it with my own cars

01:44:49   where we get a quote unquote car loan

01:44:51   and then just immediately pay it off

01:44:52   with no prepayment penalty whatsoever

01:44:55   to get a lower price on the car.

01:44:56   But that usually, by the time you're negotiating,

01:44:59   that is after you've essentially got agreed upon price

01:45:01   and maybe you're trying to get it to go even lower.

01:45:03   So anyway, watch his Car Edge videos.

01:45:04   I found them very educational.

01:45:06   It may make you think, "I never wanna buy a car again,"

01:45:08   or, "I wanna buy something with no haggle price."

01:45:11   Do you guys remember when Saturn did that?

01:45:12   It was one of the first-- - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:45:13   We had a Saturn.

01:45:14   That was my first car, was a Saturn.

01:45:15   - And that was a dealership thing.

01:45:16   It was GM.

01:45:17   It wasn't like Rivian or Tesla.

01:45:19   It was a car from a big car company

01:45:21   with a dealership chain where it was still no haggle pricing.

01:45:24   So yeah, no haggle pricing, like Marco said.

01:45:26   Everyone gets screwed equally.

01:45:27   Yeah, but it is possible to find a good deal on a new car,

01:45:31   and if not, then on a used car as well.

01:45:33   And obviously, Marco has the most experience buying cars

01:45:37   into many of us, but I feel like it's not--

01:45:40   - Well, actually, is that true?

01:45:41   I don't know if he has the most experience buying cars.

01:45:43   He has a lot of experience leasing cars,

01:45:45   but buying cars, I don't know.

01:45:47   - You're in a dealership.

01:45:48   You're dealing with those people.

01:45:49   You're giving them money. - Yeah, fair, fair.

01:45:50   - It's all the same.

01:45:51   - But you know leases are also negotiable, right?

01:45:53   Everyone knows that?

01:45:53   - Yeah.

01:45:55   - You can negotiate the price

01:45:56   on which they're basing the lease.

01:45:58   - Fair enough.

01:45:59   All right, we should move on.

01:45:59   And anonymous rights.

01:46:01   When Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and John Deere

01:46:03   sells physical products, we don't actually own the product.

01:46:06   John Deere uses software to prevent farmers

01:46:08   from repairing their tractors.

01:46:09   HP uses software to prevent users

01:46:10   from using non-HP ink in their printers.

01:46:12   Apple uses software to prevent users

01:46:14   from installing Fortnite on their phones.

01:46:16   With all this discussion of the DMA

01:46:17   and Apple's treatment of developers,

01:46:18   there's little mention of Apple's taking

01:46:20   of iPhone device ownership from consumers.

01:46:23   Do you, the hosts of ATP, have any opinions

01:46:25   on how Apple's assertion of ownership over iPhones

01:46:27   after they've sold them to consumers harms said consumers?

01:46:31   I understand the premise here.

01:46:33   Granted, I give Apple a pass on a lot of things

01:46:37   that maybe I shouldn't, but I don't really get vibes

01:46:40   that it's Apple's device.

01:46:42   And in fact, there was, what was the kerfuffle

01:46:45   about like photo scanning or something like that?

01:46:47   There was something recently that all of us were like,

01:46:48   whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

01:46:50   That's not for you to be doing without my permission.

01:46:53   - Yeah, it was the CSAM analysis from last year.

01:46:56   - Yeah, it's not that I have a problem with CSAM analysis,

01:46:59   but just telling me that you're doing this on my phone

01:47:01   and sucking up my battery to do it and stuff like that,

01:47:04   I don't love that, and they reverse course.

01:47:06   But the broader point I don't think is unreasonable,

01:47:10   and I certainly don't love that ownership

01:47:14   is a lot squishier now than it was before.

01:47:17   But with Apple particularly,

01:47:18   I don't really feel that squeeze quite yet.

01:47:21   I think I started with Marco last time,

01:47:23   so John, what are your thoughts here?

01:47:24   - I put this question in here

01:47:25   because just to give myself an opportunity

01:47:27   to say something that I kept meaning to say,

01:47:29   that it basically goes unsaid in all of our discussions

01:47:31   of the iPhone and the App Store

01:47:33   and developers being annoyed or whatever,

01:47:34   but I figure we should say it

01:47:35   in case people don't just assume it.

01:47:38   Whenever we talk about developers being annoyed

01:47:42   that they don't feel like

01:47:43   they're getting their money's worth from Apple,

01:47:45   Apple is running the App Store in a way they disagree with,

01:47:48   it's taking too much of their profits,

01:47:49   whatever their cut is, and people would say,

01:47:51   why are people mad about that?

01:47:53   They shouldn't be mad.

01:47:54   Here is another situation where another company

01:47:56   takes an even bigger cut and people aren't mad,

01:47:58   it's unfair that people are mad at Apple.

01:48:00   And this is, I'll get to it,

01:48:02   this is actually related to the whole

01:48:03   John Deere, HB printer ink thing.

01:48:05   One of the explanations of why people might be mad at Apple

01:48:11   for doing something that they're not mad at other companies

01:48:13   for doing an even worse thing,

01:48:15   is because those people who are mad view the phone

01:48:22   the same way they view Apple's other earlier platforms,

01:48:26   personal computers.

01:48:27   Personal computers have existed for a really long time,

01:48:31   some of the people who have sold software

01:48:33   for personal computers are still alive

01:48:35   and selling software or trying to sell software

01:48:37   for things like iPhones.

01:48:39   And on personal computers,

01:48:40   for the whole history of that product,

01:48:44   companies would make a computer

01:48:47   and there'd be an operating system,

01:48:48   sometimes made by the same company,

01:48:49   sometimes made by the other,

01:48:51   and then you'd buy applications for them

01:48:53   and you'd run them.

01:48:54   And the applications used to be sold through Eged Software,

01:48:57   Eged Software would take 55%

01:48:58   of every single box of software they sold,

01:49:00   which is way more than 30%.

01:49:02   And then the rest would go to the software developer

01:49:04   or the publisher, whatever, in any way,

01:49:06   and you'd put it on your computer.

01:49:07   And then with the advent of the internet,

01:49:09   people said, "I don't need Eged Software,

01:49:10   "I can sell you my software directly."

01:49:12   You buy it from my website, download it to your computer,

01:49:15   you install it and you run it.

01:49:17   And Apple isn't involved at all in that transaction.

01:49:19   Apple sold you the computer,

01:49:20   maybe Apple sold you the operating system.

01:49:23   Apple has its own applications that you can buy,

01:49:24   but when you buy the application from me,

01:49:26   you go to my website, you give me money,

01:49:29   maybe I pay a credit card processor,

01:49:30   maybe I pay some other payment processor or whatever,

01:49:33   but that's all my business.

01:49:34   And if you own a computer, you can buy from me

01:49:37   and put that software on your computer.

01:49:39   And people look at the phone and they think,

01:49:42   "That's how the phone should work."

01:49:44   Because we have literal decades of precedent,

01:49:46   maybe not decades with the internet buying on websites,

01:49:49   but decades of precedent of like,

01:49:50   "Hey, I buy a computer from a company

01:49:52   "and maybe they make an operating system,

01:49:54   "but after that, I can do whatever I want."

01:49:56   And yeah, maybe Eged Software gets 55%

01:49:58   of every box of software, but that's not my problem,

01:50:00   I don't have to deal with that.

01:50:01   And in some respects,

01:50:02   people are more okay with retailers taking stuff.

01:50:05   It's like, look, they have to make a physical box

01:50:07   and we ship it to them and they have warehouses

01:50:08   and inventory and they pay employees

01:50:10   and they rent a building and they heat and they cool it.

01:50:13   There's obvious costs involved there

01:50:15   and retail is a long-established thing,

01:50:17   but still the computer is sort of like,

01:50:20   "It's my computer, I own it,

01:50:21   "I can run whatever software I want."

01:50:23   It's not like Microsoft can reach out

01:50:26   and say or Dell or whatever and say,

01:50:27   "No, I'm sorry, you're not allowed to play Fortnite anymore

01:50:29   "because Dell says you can't."

01:50:31   And when Apple says that you can't have Fortnite

01:50:33   on your phone anymore,

01:50:34   a lot of times it feels like Dell is telling them

01:50:36   that they can't play Doom on their PC.

01:50:38   It's absurd to them.

01:50:40   I'm not saying they're right or wrong,

01:50:43   I'm just saying that this is a thing

01:50:44   that happened in history.

01:50:46   People remember that history.

01:50:47   In fact, that history continues to this day

01:50:49   on platforms that Apple sells like the Mac

01:50:51   where they can't stop me from downloading a piece of software

01:50:54   off the internet and playing it and using it on my Mac.

01:50:57   And so far Apple has not, I mean they could,

01:50:59   but so far Apple has said they won't and they haven't.

01:51:01   So there is this other thing

01:51:05   that looks a lot like a computer

01:51:07   or a lot like the phone, if you squint,

01:51:09   that makes people feel like the phone should work that way.

01:51:12   And I feel like this person's question is similar.

01:51:15   They say they remember a world

01:51:18   or know about currently a world

01:51:20   where the situation is different.

01:51:22   And they say what's different between the phone

01:51:26   and the iPad and a Mac and a PC?

01:51:29   They're all computers with screens and RAM

01:51:32   and communication device, like what's so different?

01:51:35   And I'm sure you can come up with the reasons

01:51:38   why it's different.

01:51:38   Certainly Apple has tried over the years.

01:51:39   I remember when the iPhone first came out,

01:51:41   a lot of the reasons that Apple said it was different

01:51:42   was because it's the cell phone network

01:51:44   and you don't want arbitrary software running on here

01:51:46   'cause that could destroy the cell phone.

01:51:47   Remember the whole scaremongering about it?

01:51:49   - Yeah, wasn't that Steve Jobs himself who gave that excuse?

01:51:51   - Yeah, yeah.

01:51:52   It's like before the App Store existed,

01:51:54   like why they have to be web apps

01:51:56   and can't be regular apps, obviously.

01:51:57   But like, I'm not explaining this to say

01:52:01   this is why Apple is wrong.

01:52:03   I'm just putting this out there so people know

01:52:07   this is one of the things that contributes

01:52:09   to people's dissatisfaction

01:52:11   because they know it has been, can be,

01:52:13   and is different on other platforms

01:52:15   that people think are close enough to the iPhone

01:52:19   that it shouldn't be that different.

01:52:20   And we don't really mention that.

01:52:22   We don't talk about that because we're also like,

01:52:24   oh, everyone knows on PCs,

01:52:25   it's not like it is on the iPhone.

01:52:26   But I just want to reiterate,

01:52:27   on PCs, it is not like it is on the iPhone.

01:52:30   And that contributes greatly to certain,

01:52:33   maybe just old people's,

01:52:34   but certain people's attitude towards the iPhone

01:52:36   and iOS and the Mac App Store and stuff like that

01:52:38   is because maybe they're old

01:52:40   and they remember the olden times,

01:52:40   but even if not, even if they're young people,

01:52:42   if you buy a Mac today,

01:52:44   you can run any software you want on it

01:52:46   and Apple can't stop you.

01:52:47   And that's a platform that Apple sells today.

01:52:50   So I don't think when all us old people die,

01:52:52   I don't think everyone will just accept Apple's cut

01:52:54   and their total control over the App Store.

01:52:57   I think as long as the Mac continues to exist,

01:52:59   as long as the PC continues to exist,

01:53:01   as long as those platforms like that exist,

01:53:03   as long as the web exists

01:53:05   and people are born every day and see those things,

01:53:07   they will ask that same question.

01:53:09   And the question is, why is this phone different

01:53:13   than this PC?

01:53:14   Or, you know, the John Deere tractor people.

01:53:16   I've been buying John Deere tractors for 50 years.

01:53:19   Why is this tractor something I can't fix it myself?

01:53:22   Right?

01:53:22   Why can't I take my cracked phone screen

01:53:24   and get it fixed at the mall kiosk

01:53:26   if I'm willing to do that for less money?

01:53:28   Parts pairing, like, I hope that we don't lose sight

01:53:31   of the way things used to be

01:53:33   because the way things are today on the iPhone

01:53:35   are not necessarily the way they always have to be.

01:53:38   Same deal with John Deere tractors or whatever.

01:53:40   And in particular, when it comes to Apple's platforms,

01:53:43   the fact that they were founded

01:53:45   as a personal computer company

01:53:46   and have all those decades of experience

01:53:48   with personal computers,

01:53:49   and we did have that time

01:53:51   when personal computers existed and the internet existed

01:53:53   and you could buy software directly from software developers

01:53:55   without the platform vendor being involved at all,

01:53:57   that contributes greatly to people's dissatisfaction.

01:54:01   - It's just things used to be simple and now they're not.

01:54:03   And before we even started recording the bootleg,

01:54:06   I was whining and moaning to the boys

01:54:09   about doing some Minecraft-related things

01:54:11   for Declan this evening.

01:54:12   And I couldn't help but think to myself

01:54:15   as this was going on,

01:54:16   like, what's the canceled comic

01:54:19   when he was talking about Wi-Fi on a plane?

01:54:21   Like, everything's awesome and nobody's happy.

01:54:24   This is kind of like everything's awful and nobody's happy

01:54:26   because there were like so many layers I had to jump through

01:54:29   and so many hoops I had to jump through

01:54:30   in order to get something working

01:54:32   where it used to be that you installed a piece of software

01:54:35   and then it ran.

01:54:35   And I get why things are not that way today

01:54:37   and for the most part, I prefer it the way it is today,

01:54:40   but golly, when it goes bad, it goes real bad.

01:54:43   - Well, but also, you know,

01:54:44   there's kind of an overton window effect here of,

01:54:47   you know, like the sliding window of what we accept

01:54:50   as normal/acceptable/palatable in computers.

01:54:55   And that changes over time, you know.

01:54:57   And to kind of build on what Jon was saying,

01:55:00   back in the day when many of our listeners

01:55:04   were probably not even born yet,

01:55:06   we had, there was a huge ripple

01:55:10   throughout the computer enthusiast community

01:55:13   when hardware started including DRM in hardware.

01:55:17   I remember there was, was it the Intel TPM?

01:55:21   There was like, Microsoft and Intel were working together

01:55:25   on like a trusted platform.

01:55:27   And this was when they were first adding

01:55:30   basically security in the hardware for DRM

01:55:34   for DRM media playback to PC hardware for the first time.

01:55:38   This was, I believe, in the late 90s.

01:55:40   It was around the time, you know, DVDs had come out

01:55:42   and all of the DRM arguments over the DVD CSS,

01:55:47   you know, horribleness and the DCSS lawsuits

01:55:49   and all this other stuff was going on.

01:55:51   And it was really the rise of mainstream DRM in PC hardware.

01:55:56   And, you know, before that, you had formats like the CD,

01:56:01   which had absolutely no protection whatsoever.

01:56:04   I mean, people tried to add it later,

01:56:06   kinda sorta worked sometimes, but for the most part,

01:56:09   it was, you know, no protection whatsoever.

01:56:11   - My guy, we had protection before CDs.

01:56:13   Do you not remember trying to photocopy

01:56:15   the SimCity black on red?

01:56:16   - Oh, the red, yeah.

01:56:17   (laughing)

01:56:19   - Come on.

01:56:20   - Right, anyway, so like, there were all these,

01:56:22   like, you know, in the olden days before, you know,

01:56:24   before basically the late 90s,

01:56:26   there was really no good way to do DRM for most PC media,

01:56:30   or most media at all.

01:56:31   And so it was kind of just unprotected and left to,

01:56:34   well, most people probably won't copy it,

01:56:36   or copying it's a little bit hard,

01:56:38   or a little bit expensive, maybe people won't do it a lot.

01:56:40   And then we started adding DRM to PC hardware,

01:56:44   and it was, like, all the enthusiast forums and the media

01:56:48   and everybody, like, exploded when people started

01:56:51   adding these things.

01:56:52   I'm never gonna buy a PC with a DRM chip in it,

01:56:54   it's my PC, I can do whatever I want.

01:56:56   Now, every PC has DRM chips in it,

01:56:59   every phone of the modern, you know, phone type

01:57:03   has always had DRM type support in it.

01:57:05   Now, DRM is everywhere.

01:57:08   Everything we play, everything we stream,

01:57:11   everything we download.

01:57:13   Remember Steve Jobs' thoughts on DRM,

01:57:16   thoughts on music, where, you know,

01:57:17   he gave this big thing about,

01:57:18   oh, DRM basically shouldn't exist?

01:57:20   Now, it's all back.

01:57:22   Every streaming service that you play music from,

01:57:25   or that you watch video from,

01:57:27   if it's a streaming service, everything's DRMed.

01:57:29   There's DRM in web browsers now.

01:57:32   There's all these wonderful, you know,

01:57:34   web streaming media things that you can view

01:57:35   in a web browser with, you know,

01:57:37   various web standards, like HLS.

01:57:39   But then you have DRM in those,

01:57:42   like I believe Widevine is the one

01:57:43   that keeps getting up my butt

01:57:44   when I try to download fish concerts.

01:57:46   - Mm-hmm.

01:57:47   - There's DRM in your web browser,

01:57:49   in the open world of the web,

01:57:51   running on your open world of your PC.

01:57:53   It's full of DRM now.

01:57:55   And that's just considered normal.

01:57:56   Like, no one even blinks an eye.

01:57:58   So, the window of what's acceptable to consumers

01:58:01   does shift over time.

01:58:02   You know, it's kind of a frog-boiling thing,

01:58:05   in that, like, this is not necessarily a good thing

01:58:07   for us in many ways.

01:58:09   But over time, people stop caring.

01:58:13   You know, you fight a little bit,

01:58:15   and then you give up, and you move on,

01:58:17   or something compelling is on the other side,

01:58:20   like you really want to use one of those streaming services,

01:58:22   or you really want to use the iPod,

01:58:23   or whatever it is that has some kind of DRM in it,

01:58:26   or some other form of restriction of you as an owner,

01:58:30   and you go to it for other factors.

01:58:32   You know, it's hard to service your own car these days,

01:58:35   in many ways, 'cause cars have all these different

01:58:37   electronically bonded parts, and everything's complicated,

01:58:40   and requires special computers and everything.

01:58:42   And yeah, it is hard to do a lot of that stuff yourself now,

01:58:45   but most people are not driving big, blocky cars

01:58:48   from the 1970s that are death traps today,

01:58:51   but are easy to service,

01:58:52   because we have other alternatives,

01:58:54   or other advantages to modern vehicles now,

01:58:58   that, okay, fine, we'll accept that we can't

01:59:00   do all of our own work on our car anymore.

01:59:02   Not that I ever could, but other people could. (laughs)

01:59:05   You know, technology moves forward,

01:59:07   and it gives us certain advantages

01:59:08   that convince people to move forward with it,

01:59:11   and we generally accept some of the restrictions

01:59:13   that didn't exist in the old world.

01:59:15   So as we move from PCs to phones,

01:59:17   largely for a lot of people,

01:59:20   phones have always been incredibly locked down.

01:59:23   The result of all of that is,

01:59:25   we do, as consumers, have less control than we used to

01:59:29   over a lot of these devices in our lives,

01:59:31   but the result also is that because it's so locked down,

01:59:36   we have Netflix and HBO and stuff

01:59:39   willing to bring their content to these devices,

01:59:43   and not have to worry that it's all gonna get ripped off

01:59:45   super easily off of somebody's hacked up phone.

01:59:49   It's at least more difficult to do that.

01:59:51   Not that stuff doesn't get pirated,

01:59:52   but it's more difficult to pirate it directly that way.

01:59:54   And this is not a defensive DRM by any means,

01:59:58   or of these various control mechanisms

02:00:00   that these companies use.

02:00:02   It's just the reality of how this works.

02:00:04   Like, over time, more of these control systems are added

02:00:07   because it benefits the companies,

02:00:09   and in some cases it benefits the product,

02:00:11   and people accept them over time.

02:00:14   That's just how it goes.

02:00:15   People accept it because there's some trade-off

02:00:17   that they decide, you know what,

02:00:18   yes, I wish I could copy the songs

02:00:22   in the opposite direction off my iPod,

02:00:24   but I can't, and I'm just gonna buy the iPod anyway

02:00:27   because I like everything else about it.

02:00:29   That's what happens.

02:00:30   And that's what has happened with our phones,

02:00:32   and with John Deere tractors.

02:00:33   The only thing that won't happen too is HP printers,

02:00:35   'cause they're terrible no matter what.

02:00:37   - Well, it's not always just in one direction.

02:00:39   There is a moment when you have an amazing advantage

02:00:41   that you can essentially force people

02:00:43   to take these other things that are not advantageous for them

02:00:45   but that are advantageous for you,

02:00:47   but that moment does eventually pass.

02:00:48   That's why you have the pushback

02:00:50   of these right-to-repair laws,

02:00:52   you may even push back against the John Deere stuff

02:00:54   or whatever.

02:00:55   We try to come to an arrangement

02:00:58   that is acceptable to all involved,

02:01:01   and on the one side are the big companies

02:01:03   that have a lot of power,

02:01:04   and initially, they usually use that power to say,

02:01:08   look, we have the amazing iPod.

02:01:10   We know you want the iPod.

02:01:11   There are restrictions on it,

02:01:14   but you will accept those restrictions

02:01:15   because the iPod is so amazing, right?

02:01:18   But eventually, that does shift.

02:01:19   I mean, you saw the shift of people

02:01:21   going away from DRM music downloads

02:01:23   because it became commoditized, and DRM was more annoying,

02:01:26   and even Apple eventually went DRM free,

02:01:27   but then streaming came, and you want the streaming

02:01:29   'cause now you don't have to worry

02:01:30   about syncing and downloading,

02:01:32   and by the way, with the streaming, you're getting DRM

02:01:34   because I know you want the streaming.

02:01:35   And so I feel like it's more of a seesaw.

02:01:38   We get the advantage.

02:01:40   The big companies take advantage of it,

02:01:41   but then we push back.

02:01:42   We push back as things become commodified.

02:01:44   We push back with regulation,

02:01:45   push back with things like right-to-repair laws.

02:01:48   Even the things like the TPUs and the DRM, stuff like that,

02:01:51   that's essentially the same technology

02:01:52   that gives us the secure boot on modern Apple hardware

02:01:55   that lets us know that the OS that it's booting

02:01:57   is really the OS that it's booting,

02:01:58   so there are advantages to some of that technology as well.

02:02:01   The people are like, no, I never want

02:02:02   any cryptographic stuff, no secure enclaves on my,

02:02:05   no, we want that stuff.

02:02:06   It can be used to work for us as well

02:02:08   because we want our things to,

02:02:09   we wanna know that the OS that our phone is running

02:02:12   is the one that we expect it to run,

02:02:13   and it hasn't been modified in some way.

02:02:15   Like, all that cryptographic stuff can work for us as well,

02:02:17   and that's what we want in the end.

02:02:19   And in terms of the marketplace things

02:02:21   with platform orders controlling things,

02:02:22   like I said, it's like, it is the institutional memory

02:02:25   and the actual present of the Mac and the PC

02:02:28   that lets people know that like,

02:02:30   this isn't the only way a software marketplace has to be.

02:02:35   We either, they remember how it used to be,

02:02:37   or they can see, hey, over there,

02:02:38   that's a software marketplace,

02:02:39   and it doesn't work with this software marketplace.

02:02:41   So explain to me again why this software marketplace

02:02:44   has to be so different, and in the beginning it was like,

02:02:46   be quiet, we're selling a billion iPhones.

02:02:47   And now it's like, well, you know,

02:02:49   it's been a decade or two, or having some doubts

02:02:52   about this arrangement between us and Apple.

02:02:54   Governments have doubts about it,

02:02:55   and people have doubts about it,

02:02:56   and software developers have doubts.

02:02:57   So I feel like this is an ongoing negotiation,

02:02:59   but there is definitely an ebb and flow

02:03:01   of amazing thing comes out,

02:03:03   and we will accept a lot of compromises,

02:03:05   but that does fade over time as we push back.

02:03:08   So hopefully, and you know, HP printers, who cares?

02:03:11   I'm with Marco on that one,

02:03:12   but hopefully on John Deere tractors and right to repair,

02:03:15   and Apple's complete control of the iOS marketplace,

02:03:18   hopefully we're starting to push back

02:03:19   in the other direction now.

02:03:21   - Jonathan Sibley writes,

02:03:22   "The recent episode where you,"

02:03:24   gosh, he only knows how recent it was,

02:03:25   "where you discussed native

02:03:26   versus Electron-style apps on the Mac,

02:03:28   made me wonder what you think about Catalyst

02:03:30   as a development platform.

02:03:31   I recently came across an article,

02:03:33   which we will link in the show notes,

02:03:35   which is complaining about it.

02:03:37   Does it feel abandoned, neglected,

02:03:38   as this author seems to think it is?"

02:03:41   I don't really have a lot of constructive things

02:03:43   to say about this, 'cause I've never really done

02:03:46   that much Catalyst.

02:03:47   I mean, I'm doing the thing with CallSheet

02:03:50   where I have the iPad app allowed to be run on Mac OS,

02:03:54   but that, Catalyst is the thing

02:03:55   where you're using UIKit on Mac OS, right?

02:03:58   Do I have that distinction correct?

02:03:59   - Yeah, I think when we did the first episode,

02:04:01   but I think this was the episode title,

02:04:03   and I think it was something that I said on the show.

02:04:04   So putting UIKit as a way for you to write Mac applications,

02:04:09   I described it as an extinction-level event for AppKit,

02:04:11   because there are so many developers

02:04:13   who are familiar with UIKit,

02:04:15   and once you're able to use UIKit to make Mac applications,

02:04:18   if Apple actually continues to support that

02:04:20   and make it a thing,

02:04:22   why would Apple itself even continue to develop AppKit?

02:04:26   Of course, I believe at that time,

02:04:27   we didn't know about SwiftUI.

02:04:29   So as it turns out, the story is a little bit different,

02:04:33   because Apple eventually decided after several years

02:04:36   of kind of just implying, they came out and said,

02:04:38   "SwiftUI is the way you make applications

02:04:41   for our platforms.

02:04:42   Yes, we have AppKit.

02:04:43   Yes, we have UIKit.

02:04:44   Yes, we have UIKit on the Mac

02:04:45   that we call Catalyst or whatever,

02:04:46   but just so you know, SwiftUI,"

02:04:48   and we all said, "SwiftUI is not yet ready,"

02:04:51   but Apple said, "Doesn't matter.

02:04:53   It's what we're doing."

02:04:54   And so it's not like Apple has stopped developing AppKit

02:04:57   and Catalyst entirely,

02:04:58   but that's not where the action is.

02:05:00   So as it turns out,

02:05:01   Catalyst didn't have a long life in the sun,

02:05:05   but it did effectively make AppKit on the Mac,

02:05:09   which, you know, Coco,

02:05:10   it's complicated API history on the Mac,

02:05:12   but setting aside carbon for now,

02:05:13   which let's not go back too far in history,

02:05:16   AppKit was the approved native way to make Mac apps,

02:05:19   because there was no other approved native way

02:05:21   to make Mac apps,

02:05:22   but then came Catalyst,

02:05:23   and once Catalyst arrived

02:05:25   with all the UIKit iPhone developers,

02:05:27   was like, "All right, well then what is AppKit now?

02:05:30   Are you gonna keep making AppKit better?

02:05:32   Or are you just gonna concentrate entirely on UIKit

02:05:36   and Catalyst?"

02:05:36   And Apple just said, "Nevermind all that, SwiftUI."

02:05:39   But either way, you look at AppKit

02:05:41   and UIKit and Catalyst,

02:05:43   and you think, "How much more work is Apple going to put

02:05:48   into these things?"

02:05:49   And year after year at WWDC,

02:05:51   when you go to the "What's new in UIKit,

02:05:53   what's new in AppKit sessions,

02:05:54   how much big new stuff do you see

02:05:56   versus the "What's new in SwiftUI" session?"

02:06:00   That is the thing that you have to gauge.

02:06:02   And it's not like there's not new stuff happening in AppKit.

02:06:04   There still is, and will be this year, I predict,

02:06:06   a "What's new in AppKit" session,

02:06:07   a "What's new in UIKit" session,

02:06:09   a session about Catalyst,

02:06:10   and there'll be stuff in them,

02:06:11   and there'll be exciting things, and they'll be cool.

02:06:14   But that's, Apple has told us, that's not the future.

02:06:18   The future is SwiftUI,

02:06:19   and the future is not quite ready yet,

02:06:21   but the future is SwiftUI.

02:06:23   And if you're trying to look at like,

02:06:25   how is Catalyst doing?

02:06:27   If SwiftUI hadn't arrived,

02:06:28   I think Catalyst would be doing a lot better.

02:06:30   Apple has made a lot of the apps

02:06:32   that come with the Mac with Catalyst.

02:06:35   Now, very, very slowly, Apple is starting to make apps,

02:06:39   or parts of apps, with SwiftUI on the Mac.

02:06:41   So I think the story about Catalyst

02:06:44   is kind of the same story as AppKit,

02:06:46   which is there is a new star in town,

02:06:50   and it's SwiftUI, and it's not ready yet,

02:06:52   but Apple says it's the future.

02:06:53   So all of the frameworks are essentially legacy.

02:06:58   AppKit is the most full-featured.

02:06:59   I think it makes the best looking, best working Mac apps.

02:07:03   It's had literal decades of development.

02:07:05   It came from Next, and then Apple took it on,

02:07:06   and it just had so much, incredibly full-featured.

02:07:10   But Apple has not said the future

02:07:12   of Mac development is AppKit, so don't keep looking at that.

02:07:15   Same deal with UIKit.

02:07:16   It grew on the iPhone, has so many things added to it.

02:07:19   It's amazing, but Apple has not said

02:07:21   that UIKit is the future of phone, and iOS,

02:07:24   and VisionOS development.

02:07:26   So that's the answer.

02:07:27   Catalyst is in the same sad little car

02:07:30   with AppKit and UIKit on iOS and iPadOS,

02:07:34   and VisionOS for that matter, and all like,

02:07:36   it's all, Apple says it's Swift and SwiftUI,

02:07:39   and even though we all agree that SwiftUI

02:07:41   is not ready to replace any of those things yet,

02:07:44   someday Apple thinks it will be.

02:07:46   - Well, and a huge part of the value of Catalyst is,

02:07:51   hey, you can take your UIKit code

02:07:53   that you wrote for your iPhone app,

02:07:55   and you can make a Mac app with most of that same code

02:07:59   running pretty much the same way with not too many changes.

02:08:03   That's the appeal.

02:08:05   But then when the Apple Silicon Mac transition happened,

02:08:08   they allowed iPad apps to just run unmodified.

02:08:13   When you compare the, as a developer,

02:08:15   when you compare the amount of work it takes

02:08:17   to make a Catalyst version of your app,

02:08:19   it is way more custom work, it's not a ton of custom work,

02:08:23   but it is way more custom work

02:08:25   than just letting your iPad app run.

02:08:27   You need to have a separate app store entry

02:08:31   so that you can upload to the Mac app store,

02:08:33   and that can't be the same upload

02:08:35   that you use for the iOS app store.

02:08:37   You need Mac screenshots.

02:08:39   You need to submit updates separately for your Mac version

02:08:43   and deal with app reviews separately for your Mac version.

02:08:46   - This is all applicable, by the way,

02:08:47   if you make a VisionOS native app,

02:08:49   which this bit me because,

02:08:51   I don't know why I didn't realize this,

02:08:53   but I assumed that even once I flipped the,

02:08:56   no, no, no, go from iPad compatibility mode

02:08:58   to VisionOS native, I just assumed I would still be

02:09:01   uploading a single binary, so on and so forth,

02:09:02   and then I realized, oh, oh, oh no.

02:09:07   Yeah, that adds a whole bunch of just overhead

02:09:10   and potential for problems for developers,

02:09:13   so it is pretty compelling for developers

02:09:16   if we can get 80% of the way there

02:09:18   just letting our iPad app run

02:09:20   and not have to take on any of that overhead,

02:09:23   it's pretty compelling to say, okay, yeah,

02:09:24   we'll just do that.

02:09:25   So what really ultimately I think made Catalyst

02:09:28   a lot less appealing for third-party developers

02:09:31   was that iPad apps running on the Mac

02:09:34   with Apple Silicon transition,

02:09:36   and as time goes on, that's only going to increase

02:09:40   because at least three years ago

02:09:42   when this transition began,

02:09:43   or four years ago, whenever that was,

02:09:45   at least then the argument was,

02:09:46   well, you can let your iPad app run on the M1 Macs,

02:09:50   but if you do Catalyst,

02:09:51   it will run on the entire install base of Intel Macs also,

02:09:55   but over time, the install base of Intel Mac

02:09:57   is going to get smaller,

02:09:58   and the install base of the Apple Silicon Mac

02:10:00   is going to get larger,

02:10:01   and so that keeps shifting the balance even more towards

02:10:05   I'm just going to let my iPad app run.

02:10:06   Now with Catalyst, you can make a better app by far.

02:10:09   Like you can take advantage of very, you know,

02:10:12   Mac specialized things with Catalyst.

02:10:14   Like Catalyst gives you a lot of good abilities

02:10:17   where you're still using mostly UI kit code,

02:10:20   but you have certain kind of like custom hooks into,

02:10:22   you know, Mac specific things to a larger degree

02:10:25   than you have when running your iPad app.

02:10:26   But from a developer point of view,

02:10:28   that comes with some pretty large costs,

02:10:30   and so I don't see it really being compelling

02:10:34   for most developers.

02:10:36   But it is useful just as kind of a middleware layer for Apple.

02:10:39   You know, and I think that, you know,

02:10:41   like what John was saying earlier,

02:10:42   like many Mac OS Apple provided apps

02:10:46   are now written in Catalyst,

02:10:48   and I think that is for the best,

02:10:49   because we saw in the era before that was really a thing,

02:10:53   Apple had a lot more trouble keeping up feature parity

02:10:57   between their platforms.

02:10:58   Like the Mac really got low priority work,

02:11:02   and it showed, and Mac versions of apps

02:11:06   that were also on iOS or that were supposed to be

02:11:08   on other platforms, the Mac versions were lagging

02:11:11   way behind before Catalyst.

02:11:13   Since Catalyst, you know, the Mac is still not like

02:11:16   the first priority, and it probably never will be,

02:11:19   but it's way closer now, and they keep up way better

02:11:22   ever since then.

02:11:23   So the greatest value to the platform of Catalyst

02:11:27   is that it made it easier for Apple

02:11:28   to keep up their own software between the platforms

02:11:31   better than they were before.

02:11:33   So-- - That's a good point.

02:11:34   - And it's going to keep doing that

02:11:35   for the foreseeable future.

02:11:36   - I don't think the iPad apps are really

02:11:38   the nail in Catalyst coffin.

02:11:40   It was SwiftUI, right?

02:11:41   'Cause like you said, you can get your iPad app on the Mac,

02:11:43   and yes, they're all gonna be ARM,

02:11:44   so you don't have to worry about Intel or whatever,

02:11:46   and that's great, but you're like, oh, it's so much easier

02:11:48   than all the work I'd have to do with rewriting with Catalyst.

02:11:50   Not that you need to write entirely,

02:11:52   but you gotta do more work.

02:11:53   Well now, if you're gonna take that step to do more work,

02:11:56   you're not gonna use Catalyst.

02:11:57   You're gonna say, oh, Apple has another way

02:11:59   that if I'm willing to do some rewriting,

02:12:01   I can get the same app running on all their platforms,

02:12:03   and it's called SwiftUI.

02:12:05   That's the thing that's killing Catalyst.

02:12:06   It's not like, hey, if you're gonna write an application,

02:12:09   if you write it in UIKit, you can get a Mac version

02:12:12   pretty easy, like do a little small amount of work,

02:12:14   you know, and you'll have like a quote-unquote

02:12:16   native Mac version with Catalyst,

02:12:17   and you'll have an iOS and an iPad version,

02:12:19   and that's not Apple's answer anymore.

02:12:21   Apple's answer is do it in SwiftUI.

02:12:22   That's how you get a Mac version and a tvOS version

02:12:24   and a Vision Pro version and an iOS version.

02:12:27   Like, that's their answer, and so it's like,

02:12:29   what place does Catalyst have anymore?

02:12:30   If you don't wanna do any work, run your iPad app.

02:12:33   If you wanna do some work, use SwiftUI.

02:12:35   If you're Apple and already did some work, use Catalyst.

02:12:39   That's like, that's basically the answer.

02:12:40   - Yeah, it's legacy code bases.

02:12:42   Like, that's, look, there's a ton of UIKit

02:12:44   and AppKit code out there, like, believe me,

02:12:46   I know I'm trying right now, I'm trying to replace--

02:12:49   - It's easy, just rewrite it in SwiftUI, Mark.

02:12:50   How hard can it be? - Yeah, how hard can it be?

02:12:52   For like, it's taken me like two years to do this.

02:12:55   - Yeah, but like for new development,

02:12:56   Apple's obviously pushing people to SwiftUI,

02:12:57   but yeah, but Apple is one of the biggest holders

02:12:59   of legacy UIKit code in the entire world,

02:13:02   so that's obviously really important for them.

02:13:04   But that's why I think it feels like

02:13:05   if you're like a new developer and you're like,

02:13:07   what should I use?

02:13:08   If you're starting from nothing

02:13:09   and you have no legacy code base,

02:13:10   Catalyst is not screaming to you

02:13:12   for you to be your choice for making a Mac app.

02:13:15   Like, under no circumstance.

02:13:16   It's only like, I've already got a UIKit app

02:13:20   and I have a Mac app and it's written in AppKit,

02:13:22   but I don't wanna maintain it.

02:13:23   Is there a way I can just leverage the work

02:13:25   I had to already do for the phone and the iPad?

02:13:27   And the answer for Apple is yes.

02:13:28   You can make a Catalyst version of Messages

02:13:30   and finally, the Mac can have frickin' laser beams.

02:13:34   - That did actually happen.

02:13:36   - Yeah, we didn't have the lasers feature.

02:13:38   It was very annoying and then we got the Catalyst version

02:13:40   and now we have it and still,

02:13:41   the Catalyst version of Messages is not great,

02:13:43   but you know, I mean, anyway,

02:13:46   like Apple's got tons of AppKit code too,

02:13:47   so AppKit's not going away,

02:13:48   Catalyst is not going away and SwiftUI is still,

02:13:51   still I think not as good, especially not as good as AppKit,

02:13:54   but probably not even as good as Catalyst

02:13:56   at making native Mac apps, but Apple wants it to be,

02:13:59   so presumably it eventually will be.

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02:14:13   We're now doing a member special extra topic every week

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02:14:18   This week's Overtime for members only,

02:14:20   it is Apple's work on robots,

02:14:22   the new rumors and what we know so far

02:14:24   with Apple possibly working on robots,

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02:14:34   Thank you so much and we will talk to you next week.

02:14:37   ♪ Now the show is over ♪

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02:14:46   ♪ Accidental ♪

02:14:47   ♪ Oh, it was accidental ♪

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02:14:52   ♪ Marco and Casey wouldn't let him ♪

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02:15:39   - So I went on an Eclipse trip.

02:15:42   - As everyone but me did.

02:15:44   And I'm assuming John, 'cause John never leaves his house.

02:15:46   But as everyone but John and I do.

02:15:48   - The Eclipse came to me, more or less.

02:15:50   - I mean, yeah.

02:15:53   Anyway, it was a wonderful trip.

02:15:55   I'm very, very glad I did it.

02:15:57   And as part of this trip,

02:15:58   I got to drive all the way up to Lake Placid.

02:16:02   Now what's interesting about this trip

02:16:03   is that I actually made the same trip

02:16:06   for a different vacation in the fall last year.

02:16:09   So I, and I've seen over the course of that time,

02:16:13   this is like a seven hour drive for me.

02:16:16   It's a very long, it's a lot of driving from here.

02:16:19   It involves a good amount of distance

02:16:20   and a good amount of car charging.

02:16:22   And this is now a trip I've done twice with the Rivian.

02:16:24   And I kinda wanna give an update on

02:16:27   some things that have changed with Rivian

02:16:29   and kind of CCS versus Tesla/NACS charging

02:16:34   and fast charging.

02:16:35   There have been substantial changes

02:16:38   in the charging environment

02:16:40   in the last whatever it's been, seven months.

02:16:42   And as we stand here right now,

02:16:44   Rivian has just done a deal with Tesla.

02:16:47   And the latest software update to Rivians

02:16:49   allows you to plug directly into a supercharger

02:16:52   with the right adapters and have them just bill you.

02:16:57   Somehow Tesla and Rivian worked it out behind the scenes.

02:16:59   So it's basically the same experience you get

02:17:02   as a Rivian as Tesla owners get.

02:17:04   You just walk up to it and plug it in.

02:17:06   And if you have a payment method on a file

02:17:08   in your Rivian app, it just works and you get charged.

02:17:11   So that's awesome.

02:17:12   And they're going to start sending out adapters soon.

02:17:15   There's a couple of third party ones

02:17:17   I might take a risk on in the meantime

02:17:19   'cause they're talking about later this year.

02:17:21   The other thing about that though is that Tesla,

02:17:25   before everyone was talking about adapters,

02:17:27   Tesla actually built adapters

02:17:29   into some of their superchargers.

02:17:31   They call them magic docks.

02:17:33   And I actually used that in September for the first time,

02:17:36   on the last time I went up this trip

02:17:38   'cause they have some of those upstate New York.

02:17:40   So I used that already and it worked great then.

02:17:42   I went to the same one this time and it worked great again.

02:17:45   Here's what's interesting.

02:17:46   Now that Rivian and Tesla have this deal going,

02:17:49   Rivian's infotainment system now shows Tesla charging stops

02:17:53   on the map along with everyone else's.

02:17:55   You can say like, only show me charging stops

02:17:59   from brand X, Y, or Z

02:18:00   because they have different reliability, let's say.

02:18:04   And so what I've been doing most of the time

02:18:06   before all this is only show me Electrify America chargers

02:18:10   because they were the most reliable last fall

02:18:13   when I was first using the car.

02:18:14   Tesla got added, by default it's on by default,

02:18:17   and so every Rivian nav system

02:18:19   is now recommending Tesla charging stops

02:18:21   as like, you should stop here

02:18:24   for in the middle of this trip at this point.

02:18:26   So one thing I noticed, first of all,

02:18:28   is that over the last seven months,

02:18:30   the quality and reliability

02:18:34   of the Electrify America chargers

02:18:36   has gone down, noticeably so.

02:18:39   - I didn't think that was possible.

02:18:41   - I assure you it is possible

02:18:42   because it has been noticeable

02:18:44   that the number of times I approach an EA charger

02:18:49   and it's broken or it's offline

02:18:52   or it tries to connect

02:18:54   and then somehow something times out

02:18:56   and you can just never get it to begin the charge,

02:18:59   that has gone up significantly.

02:19:01   Also, the crowding at them has gone way up.

02:19:06   The entire time that I owned my two Model Ss

02:19:11   and the entire time I've owned a Rivian

02:19:13   until about two months ago,

02:19:15   I've never had to wait for a charger.

02:19:17   Two months ago I had to wait for the very first time.

02:19:20   I had to wait like a half hour, it sucked.

02:19:22   And I know this has been different on the West Coast.

02:19:24   They've had more crowding over there

02:19:26   'cause they've had more people using Teslas

02:19:28   and stuff like that,

02:19:29   but that's never been a problem over here.

02:19:31   What has happened noticeably over the last seven months?

02:19:34   I know everybody keeps saying

02:19:35   that apparently EVs aren't selling that well

02:19:36   'cause high-end cars aren't selling that well right now.

02:19:39   You wouldn't know it by looking at the chargers

02:19:41   because what I've seen really just like in the last

02:19:44   like three to four months is a huge increase

02:19:48   of not only other vehicles with the chargers,

02:19:50   but a huge increase in the variety of different models

02:19:54   of vehicles with the chargers.

02:19:56   There are tons of them,

02:19:57   and you're seeing them from all different brands.

02:20:00   And what's interesting is that the other vehicles

02:20:03   tend to not have deals with Tesla superchargers so much.

02:20:08   So what you're seeing is at the CCS chargers

02:20:11   like Electrify America,

02:20:13   they are just being crammed full of all the other cars.

02:20:18   In the meantime also, Tesla has sold more Teslas.

02:20:21   So the superchargers, the Tesla superchargers

02:20:24   are also really getting much more full

02:20:27   than they were before.

02:20:28   Now granted, the trip I just took,

02:20:30   it was a high travel trip 'cause it was for the Eclipse.

02:20:32   A lot of people are traveling,

02:20:34   especially a lot of the kind of people who would have EVs.

02:20:36   So this was more than usual,

02:20:38   but I've been seeing this just recently

02:20:40   with any trip I've taken.

02:20:42   The charging situation is getting way worse for both,

02:20:46   for CCS because the chargers are getting worse

02:20:49   and no one seems to be working on them,

02:20:50   and for Tesla because they're getting more crowded.

02:20:53   What's interesting though is that now that I have a Rivian

02:20:58   that has a deal with Tesla and some adapters here and there,

02:21:03   I can go to some chargers,

02:21:05   and a lot of times now Tesla superchargers

02:21:08   and Electrify America superchargers or other CCS chargers,

02:21:11   a lot of times they share a parking lot.

02:21:13   Now that the Rivian has this deal,

02:21:14   I can use either of them.

02:21:17   I can go to wherever the open space is.

02:21:19   Now there's a bunch of other problems

02:21:21   like the fact that Tesla superchargers

02:21:23   have really short cables that are optimized

02:21:25   to fit only where a Tesla's charging port is,

02:21:27   and that Rivian's charging port on their vehicle so far

02:21:29   is in the total wrong spot to do that.

02:21:31   So you have to kind of take up two bays

02:21:33   or take the one on the end.

02:21:35   So it messes up the whole parking arrangement

02:21:37   at superchargers, but I see a future

02:21:40   in which things get really good

02:21:44   because you can just go to Tesla chargers,

02:21:46   and Tesla's gonna keep building more of them

02:21:48   'cause they have to for their cars

02:21:50   because Tesla has the best chargers.

02:21:52   It is simple as that.

02:21:53   They are the best chargers,

02:21:55   although actually, sorry, with one exception.

02:21:57   For the very first time I got to try

02:21:58   a Rivian adventure network charger on this trip.

02:22:00   - Oh nice. - It's amazing

02:22:02   because I think only Rivians can use it,

02:22:05   so no one's there.

02:22:06   I went to the one in Newburgh.

02:22:09   It was empty.

02:22:10   - In Newburgh? - Yeah.

02:22:10   - Why is there an adventure charger in Newburgh?

02:22:13   - Because there's a huge hole

02:22:15   in the New York State Thruway

02:22:17   that there were not enough chargers,

02:22:18   so they just put that one there recently.

02:22:20   It was not there in the winter, and it's there now.

02:22:22   - That's bananas.

02:22:23   My mom grew up in Newburgh.

02:22:24   I've been to Newburgh many times.

02:22:26   That's wild.

02:22:27   - Yeah, and it's right across the parking lot

02:22:29   from a Tesla supercharger that's been there forever.

02:22:32   So anyway, that was an amazing charger.

02:22:34   Everything's brand new.

02:22:35   It overlooks this river in the back of the parking lot,

02:22:37   so it's an adventure.

02:22:38   It was nice, and there was no one using it,

02:22:42   and it was amazingly fast.

02:22:44   I got like 218 kilowatts.

02:22:47   It's the fastest charger I've seen so far,

02:22:48   so that was wonderful, but anyway,

02:22:51   other than that, Tesla otherwise has the best chargers,

02:22:53   generally speaking, 'cause they're reliable,

02:22:54   and there's a bunch of them, and they're in good spots.

02:22:57   The problem that I see here,

02:22:58   so we were saying back when Tesla gave this standard

02:23:03   to whatever the standard body was and kind of opened it up

02:23:07   and made all these deals to make everyone

02:23:08   convert all their ports over and all this other stuff.

02:23:11   We were saying, what a great move from Tesla.

02:23:14   This will be great because then they can become

02:23:16   like the great charging network of the country.

02:23:19   That's true, and they are, and they will keep doing that,

02:23:24   but the more I see how incredibly bad the CCS ecosystem

02:23:29   has gotten just in the last like six months,

02:23:32   the more I think Tesla gave away the farm.

02:23:35   Now already at Tesla chargers,

02:23:37   you're starting to see Rivians move in.

02:23:38   You're gonna start to see other brands move in.

02:23:40   Tesla owners are now having a worse experience

02:23:44   because their chargers are now gonna get crowded up

02:23:46   with people like me who are not Tesla owners,

02:23:49   so it's making it worse for Tesla customers.

02:23:51   Meanwhile, CCS chargers have gotten so bad,

02:23:55   if Tesla would have kept their chargers proprietary,

02:23:58   that would be a really strong selling point

02:24:00   for people to say, you know what,

02:24:02   I'm just gonna get a Tesla next time

02:24:03   because their network is just better

02:24:05   and I'm tired of dealing with all the CCS crap.

02:24:07   So I think honestly they might have done a big disservice

02:24:12   to themselves here.

02:24:13   I mean, maybe regulation would have forced it

02:24:14   in the end anyway, and so maybe they kind of got ahead

02:24:17   of it from that angle, but things are different now,

02:24:20   and I think they might have given away the farm.

02:24:23   I'm happy they did as a non-Tesla owner

02:24:25   because they're making my life a lot easier

02:24:28   on long highway trips now, but I don't know.

02:24:31   I think if I was a Tesla owner,

02:24:32   I'd be a little upset about it.

02:24:34   - I think you're right that they got ahead

02:24:35   of the regulation, 'cause if the government

02:24:39   had mandated something other than the Tesla connector

02:24:41   or some other market force,

02:24:42   Tesla would have to change all of its charging stations,

02:24:44   so at least now Tesla doesn't need to change it

02:24:46   other than making longer cords maybe.

02:24:49   And then also to keep in mind those crappy CCS ones,

02:24:51   setting aside the compliance network,

02:24:53   which is like a Volkswagen force

02:24:55   because of the diesel gate thing to make,

02:24:57   you know, the electrify America charger things

02:25:00   that it doesn't actually want to do, but whatever.

02:25:03   All those CCS chargers presumably, eventually,

02:25:06   will not be CCS chargers anymore,

02:25:08   because I think pretty much at this point,

02:25:10   pretty much everybody has pledged to go NACS

02:25:13   in North America.

02:25:14   I think, is there anybody left?

02:25:15   I don't remember if Stellantis went.

02:25:17   I think they did, right?

02:25:18   - I think they did, yeah.

02:25:19   - I think it's everyone.

02:25:20   - Anyway, all those CCS chargers,

02:25:21   like this is an opportunity to get eventually

02:25:25   greatly diminished the number of CCS chargers,

02:25:28   which means either just simply by building massively more

02:25:32   NACS ones so the CCS ones become a smaller percentage,

02:25:34   or literally removing the really old cranky CCS ones

02:25:37   and leaving one or two for legacy connections

02:25:41   as more NACS cars are sold in the US.

02:25:44   But yeah, now there is still an opportunity

02:25:47   for either Tesla or anyone else who wants it

02:25:49   to become a good NACS-based electric charging

02:25:54   infrastructure in the US.

02:25:56   And Tesla's got the biggest head start.

02:25:58   I feel like it's possible to make money doing this well,

02:26:02   and with a single standard for all of North America,

02:26:04   it should simplify the landscape,

02:26:07   but we are definitely in a very uncomfortable

02:26:08   transition period, as you're noting,

02:26:10   where there's the CCS ones,

02:26:11   and there's tons of CCS cars out there,

02:26:13   and they're still gonna need to charge,

02:26:14   but the charging network, nobody cares about it,

02:26:16   and they care even less now because those connectors

02:26:18   aren't even the future anymore,

02:26:20   and there's the Tesla one that's getting overcrowded,

02:26:22   and I feel like there's an opportunity for either one

02:26:25   of these existing companies or a new one to come in

02:26:27   and start building out NACS things.

02:26:28   There's something, speaking of overtime,

02:26:31   there's something way down in the show notes

02:26:32   from the latest US government plan involving

02:26:35   a bunch of car companies and a bunch of money

02:26:38   to start building an NACS-powered charging network

02:26:42   that is not Tesla, that is an effort

02:26:46   through a cooperative effort through a bunch of companies

02:26:48   that are not Tesla to basically make a bunch

02:26:50   of NACS chargers that plug in and charge

02:26:52   and all that other stuff or whatever,

02:26:53   so maybe eventually we'll get to that,

02:26:54   because like all government thinks,

02:26:55   it's probably years and years in the future,

02:26:57   but I feel like the future is still bright,

02:26:59   and I feel like Tesla still made a smart move,

02:27:01   because now, at the very least,

02:27:03   Tesla does not need to overhaul all of its charging stations

02:27:06   and change all of its connectors on its cars

02:27:07   and all of its connectors on its charging,

02:27:09   like it's good, like I think it was a smart move.

02:27:12   It's just, you know, I think they held the advantage

02:27:16   that you were talking about, oh, I'll buy a Tesla,

02:27:17   'cause they have the best charge,

02:27:18   they held that advantage for essentially

02:27:19   as long as they could, and now, as you noted,

02:27:21   the floodgates are open, everybody has EVs,

02:27:23   they're all gonna need somewhere to charge,

02:27:25   so hopefully they'll just build more of them and better.

02:27:27   You know how good we are at building infrastructure

02:27:29   in this country, so I'm sure it'll be fine.

02:27:32   - Well, honestly, I think for Tesla to have this be a big,

02:27:37   to be a growing part of their business,

02:27:40   obviously, I don't know about stock financing

02:27:43   and expectations and everything,

02:27:45   so I'm sure this is less exciting to Tesla's investors

02:27:48   than like, they might replace taxis everywhere,

02:27:51   whatever all their crazy self-driving promises were.

02:27:54   - Well, if they want it to be a big part of their business,

02:27:56   they need to sell snacks, because as we all know,

02:27:58   gas stations make all their money on the convenience stores.

02:28:00   (laughing)

02:28:01   - But yeah, like honestly, I think Tesla has a giant

02:28:04   head start in just being the default high-speed EV chargers

02:28:09   for the US highway system.

02:28:11   I don't know how it is in other places,

02:28:12   like how competitive it is, but here, it's very competitive,

02:28:15   extremely so.

02:28:16   They have a huge head start.

02:28:17   This could be a huge part of their business,

02:28:19   but I think it's an unsexy part of the business

02:28:22   for investors.

02:28:23   This is the kind of thing that it'll just throw off

02:28:26   regular, dependable amounts of cash forever,

02:28:30   but it's not going to be a hockey stick kind of situation,

02:28:34   and so it's not very exciting, but I think it's a really,

02:28:38   really good kind of just baseline cash generator for them,

02:28:41   and I want them to keep expanding it and doing well with it,

02:28:43   because really, the Tesla chargers are,

02:28:46   they do a very good job with them,

02:28:48   a very, very good job with them,

02:28:49   and again, everyone else is nowhere close.

02:28:52   (door coming open)