536: I Reboot With Reason

43:03Forever. That's problem number one. So we can't tell if you're looking at our bugs. And frankly, it seems most of the time that you're not. Problem number two. I'm sure, dear Apple person, that your team deals well with bugs. Your team takes them in and they go through whatever the screener process is. and when they get to your team, I am sure your team runs those sample projects and actually reads the bugs and actually tries to act on them and doesn't just have an autoresponder that says every time there's a new beta, please verify this is still the case in the beta. And if you don't do it within like two days, it automatically closes the bug.

43:45I'm sure your team doesn't do that. Unfortunately, many other teams do. And so that's the experience we get. the vast majority of the time is either we get no response or we get a response that suggests that the person who is making this response, if it's even a person and not just a script, their goal is to close as many bugs as quickly as possible while doing as little work as possible. And so they're trying. It's almost like, look, I have a child. That child sometimes does not want to do something, say, you know, eat a new food or do homework or whatever the case, you know something kids don't want to do kids that don't want to do something will often try to find some little tiny technicality that they think will cancel their ability to have to do the big thing they don't want to do even if it's not really relevant or even if it barely is relevant it can be easily fixed so for instance this piece of you know broccoli touched this lentil over here therefore this invalidates my need to eat any of the rest of the things on the plate i'm going going back to video games like that kind of logic and of course that's not valid and this is why like you know contracts that are written by lawyers tend to have clauses that basically say something along the lines of like if some part of this contract is invalid or unenforceable it doesn't make the rest of it invalid apple bug reporting does not seem to have such a clause and apple bug reporting it seems to be if we can find any reason to close this bug report we are going to do that immediately and with prejudice if we've looked at it now if we haven't looked at it as i said most of my bug reports just stay open forever but if you do look at it it seems like the most common response i get is those kind of auto responders like please verify this is still the case in the newest beta of whatever whatever and then if i happen to be doing something else that week and i happen to miss the usually unspecified deadline of like hey you know what, I don't actually run the macOS beta, so I don't actually know if this is still happening on macOS or whatever.

45:51If I happen to miss that few day period that they seem to give you, my bug just gets closed. That's it. It seems like they are constantly rushing through large batches of bug reports to close them. That's different from to fix the bugs. See, that's the problem here whatever the incentives are and the processes in apple around bug reporting and bug filtering and bug processing or whatever the process seems to encourage mass closure and invalidation over actually reading them and fixing the problem because oftentimes the very very very few times i've actually gotten like a real response to a bug it sometimes, frequently rather seems that the person does not want to fix anything they really just want to find a reason why they can ignore my bug report or why the thing I'm asking for which seems very reasonable to me like hey this API should behave the way it seems like it should by its name oftentimes the response is basically you're holding it wrong or we don't think it should behave that way because that would be difficult or like you know they it's like oh you don't use this API go use this old deprecated one instead well that's not really a response that I can really use because it's deprecated so often that's been the kind of responses I get usually nothing but when I do get responses it's either been seemingly automated or somewhat dismissive and trying to look for an excuse to not do work and to close the bug as quickly as possible and I can totally see how a large engineering organization can create a system that has this dysfunction.

47:41Because of course, you optimize for the metrics that you have to work with. So it is somebody's job to go through bug reports. They develop an incentive, whether implied or not, that they should go through as many as possible and try to close as many as possible. It is an engineering team's job that when bugs get assigned to them, they should probably look at them and verify them. and if they're real bugs, to schedule them for some kind of priority to get fixed and then actually fix them. However, it sure is a lot easier, especially when you're under crunch time, which is all the time. It seems a lot easier if you can just find some reason why you don't have to fix them, then we can just close that report and move on with the things we actually need to do to solve this crunch time or the feature we actually thought was cool or whatever feature our boss is telling us has to be done by the end of the week.

48:27So it's not that our bug reports are all badly written. I'm sure many of them are. And it's not that Apple never responds well to bug reports, because they occasionally do, but it's that giant fat middle where the well-written, well-supported bug reports are so often, as far as we can tell, either ignored or dismissed for reasons that seem like crappy engineering management to us. There's some text that Casey pulled out of the thing here that is actually vaguely relevant to that. it says please note as an issue is being worked on we can't provide status updates until a fix is available in beta software in a beta software update for everyone or a different resolution has been identified after completing the investigation of the issue so they're basically saying we're we can't tell you anything about it don't ask us when it's done that's what it's saying but that's not the reality and and the thing that it says it can't be until basically until we we think we have until basically we have think we have fixed it we put that fix in a beta release and that beta release is released to everybody who is on the beta program and only at that point can they provide an update to the feedback which seems extremely extremely bad i mean we've all noted that happening like the only thing you hear from them most of the time is like oh check if this is fixed in the beta and mark always thinks that means that someone's going through and just closing all the bugs and asking if they're fixed but it could also be that this process that they've just described in this document is happening which is well they were working on it and they did implement a fix and they did put that fix in the beta and now the only thing they're allowed to do is push whatever button that that you know causes a boot to kick over a fishbowl that pours water onto a cat that runs over a wire that eventually causes someone to hit a uh you know a text expander macro that says check if this is fixed in b287657432 which you just have to know is you know mac os ventura 13.4.1 because they won't say that they'll just give you a build number as if you have them all memorized um and as if you're running mac os betas all the time um this is this is useful because it is official uh apple process documentation of a bad process and the bad process is we can't provide status updates i mean maybe you could say that means like we can't tell you how it's going but it also kind of reads as what we experience is you just won't hear anything and what you would like to happen is a back and forth with the human being who is working on this problem clarifying you sure xyz and did you think about blah blah and so you said you did that but in your sample project you do this but does it work when you do that and what are you actually trying to do and why do you need this feature and why do you think it should work that way back and forth back and forth you know like how bugs work in functioning software projects right um and that process can be the special public facing totally separate from the internal discussion blah blah blah thing because of apple's weird secrecy thing and the division between radar and feedback and all that fine that's on them but it doesn't mean okay but now we can never communicate with you no now you have to have two separate areas of communication the private one that's for all the apple people and the public one with you know the person who reported and experiences the bug because it's important to communicate with them it's important to you know like talk about the bug maybe before you even try to fix it because maybe like you're thinking about a way that you think it should be fixed or you think it might be fixed by this other change or whatever but it's that's the time to communicate with the reporter and i have seen that happen occasionally where they will communicate and say well why is it that you want to do this or whatever but this document makes it seem like actually that should never happen you just report a beautifully formatted bug report and then you hear nothing until we say test this in the latest beta and that's not a good process because skipping that whole middle portion where you discuss the bug may mean that you like maybe again maybe the bug wasn't written clearly enough.

52:13Maybe you wrote it with some context that was in your brain, but it's not in their brain. And maybe even though you had a sample project, they think they understood how you wanted it to work, but you weren't entirely clear how you wanted it to work in the sample project. So they quote unquote fixed it according to what they thought the bug was saying. That can happen even in really well-written bug reports with really well-created sample projects that are very clear. So sometimes software is complicated and sometimes it's just a misunderstanding. That's why you have to have communication, ideally before you dive in and say i know how i'm going to fix this typey typey typey like before you do that make sure you understand the bug and the only way you can do that is talk to the person who's reporting it or the multiple people who are reporting it these people are reporting the same bug maybe this person thinks the api should behave this way this person should behave that way and then you internally you think it should behave a different way and like it's just it's just exhausting and how how much more difficult it makes everybody's lives obviously it makes our lives difficult or frustrated because bugs don't fix but i think it makes lives more difficult for the people writing the software as well because they are cut off from us just as we as are cut off from them they can't reply to us apparently they're not empowered to do that they can reply on the internal thread and they can all discuss it but it's like they're all discussing you know a thing a bug that you reported but you're not allowed to be in the room and it's i wonder if they talk to each other i was like man if only the person who reported this bug could tell us what they meant instead of us arguing back and forth about it i think they meant this and i think they meant that but why do they think they want this do they have discussion threads internally where they're like debating it's like debating what the founding fathers thought or something when like george washington is standing just outside a glass window saying i'm out here but you can't hear him because it's soundproof glass i'm out here just ask me i'm right here never mind that doesn't freaking matter what the founding fathers thought because that's stupid anyway that's the analogy i'm sorry um like we're here you're there like we should communicate uh and it has to be in some weird uh you know regimented secrecy preserving way so be it but that just means you need more staff and more people to do that type of thing oh that's too cumbersome for you well then get rid of that and and just trust your engineers to be able to hold their tongues when discussing things i i don't know like whatever the solutions this is in it but like but this documentation like this is good because if you ever uh you know encounter an apple person and discuss this it's difficult to pin this down because we don't know what's really going on and they always think they know what's really going on but they really don't because as we've talked about in the past, people within Apple don't have a full view of Apple either.

54:37They have a bigger view than we do on the outside for sure, but they can only kind of see their portion of the company, their portion of their, you know, the project or whatever. And we can only see the tiny portion of the bugs that we throw over the wall. But something like this, where some group is empowered to write documentation that describes some part of the bug process for the whole company, like this document is not just for like one framework for SwiftUI for, you know, This is not API, platform, anything specific. This is whole company. So whoever wrote this, the responsibility was describe what good feedback is supposed to be like for developers.

55:12And in that documentation, they said, we can't provide status update until it's available in a beta software update. So now you've got sort of like hard evidence proof. It says, well, in the official Apple documentation on the process that they follow, this is what it says. And we think this is bad. And it's harder for them to say, oh, that's not how it works in my group. I'm like, look, I'm just going to buy what Apple's own documentation said. It's easier to argue against this. Otherwise, we're just saying, well, I tried a thing and here was my personal experience. And I was like, oh, it's just an anecdote.

55:39On average, we do a really good job. Or within my group, it's good. And by the way, on the whole, like, oh, within my group, we do good on feedback. The problem is, obviously, we don't get to pick as developers which bugs we encounter. Like, we don't get to say, I want to make sure I encounter bugs in the group that's really responsive. We don't get to pick. Maybe I'm not even using that framework. Maybe that framework doesn't have any bugs. maybe i don't encounter any all that has bugs you know it doesn't have any bugs that i encounter right when you're a developer you can't choose which api will do something unexpected based on how good how responsive you think the group is inside apple so and again when you're inside apple all you can do is be responsive in your group you can't as a you know rank and file developer somehow fix this feedback system internally but somewhere in apple's org chart there are people who do have the power and responsibility to oversee this process and if i met one of those people i would have a little note card with this thing on it and say see this highlighted passage here this doesn't work for me for the following reasons and if they say oh that highlighted passage is not actually how it works i'll say well maybe you should find the person who wrote this documentation that's supposed to apply to the whole company because apparently it's not true right something is wrong here either this documentation is incorrect or you are incorrect about the policy that your company follows.

56:52Or the third thing is you can say, this is how it works, and we think this is the best way it works. And then we're just kind of, you know, we're at an impasse there because if they really think this is the best way it should work, I think they should talk to more developers. That's what Marco keeps saying when he does read the room. He's basically like, you know, have you talked to enough developers to understand how we feel about the process? Is it working for us as developers? Separate from, is it working for you, Apple, as a company? And as you know, the individual engineers, I think if you read the quote unquote room at WWC, if you had as many developers as possible in the room at the same time and you actually talk to them about how the feedback process is working, I think what you would get is a net negative sentiment.

57:36Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And again, the thing is, they're choosing this. You know, what is it? We can't provide status updates. Bullshit. You choose not to, but you could. That is something you are capable of doing. And the other thing that drives me nuts is I know a lot of people at Apple that have been third-party developers, and they justifiably, for a moment anyway, really truly understood what it was like to be on the outside. but then they get inside and they see how the sausage is made and suddenly excuses are made for this i don't care i am not on the inside i understand and i think it was marco going on about this earlier and he's he's exactly right i understand that they get an unfathomable amount of feedback more than i could possibly imagine and i understand that that is a very big burden but I don't care.

58:32Yeah, that's not on us. That's on them. That's not my problem. It's like, geez, it's so hard to make all this money all the time selling all these iPhones. Like, yeah, I'm sure there are challenges there. That's not our problem. Right, exactly. And part of being a platform vendor is vending the platform, including making a platform, not a pile of shit. And if you want us to help you not make it a pile of garbage, then we need to be able to do that. and it's just so obnoxious for them to say, oh, excuse me, we would like it if you did your free labor in a way that was better for us, please and thank you.

59:07We're not paying you for this time. I think the last time we spoke about this just a few weeks ago, a couple months ago, I feel like I should bill Apple at whatever the going rate for an iOS contractor is, which years ago was like$150 an hour. I have no idea what it is now, but I should bill them for the time I write filling out actually decent feedbacks. and then that's not how anything ever works no it is i know you're frustrated but that makes no sense no but like i i think it's frustrating that like you know even if you read this document and even if you give it the most charitable interpretation of like okay sure if apple insists that they can't tell me what's going on with my bug until a beta version has been released that that might fix it that's that's totally understandable it's not and they can change that on any time to a large degree they choose not to but let's set that aside for now even that process does not happen consistently i have so many bugs that go back years that actually were eventually fixed that actually did eventually the problem i was reporting did get fixed status open no response yeah so it's so yes some bugs make it into the system and and do get those like please verify if it's fixed in in this version of whatever they some bugs do get that most of them still don't most of them still just stay open forever so yes part of the process works that way but there are still substantially broken parts of the process that make it so that our view from the outside is so often that filing bugs is a waste of our time and it's not because we're trying to be lazy and it's not because we're trying to be negative and it's not because we're attacking your work personally dear apple engineer hearing me say this right now we'll get to that in a second.

1:01:01It's that the process has shown us actions speak louder than words. And Apple's actions as a whole towards developers in this area have been largely failing us, largely dismissing us, and largely telling us that we are wasting our time. Now I know you, you individual Apple engineer listening to this. you probably are very angry hearing this. Now, some of you will be like, yeah, you know, that's, yeah, they're right. You know, I wish we could fix it or I'm trying to fix it or whatever. But many of you Apple engineers listening to this right now are going to be angry at us. Now, I've been feeling for a while, actually, we have a larger cultural problem.

1:01:41You know, us podcasters and the commentary and the public versus you, the individual Apple engineer, you get mad at us a lot because you feel like we're attacking your work. And I want to be very, very clear. First of all, you don't work independently of the company. You, when we attack something that you work on, we are attacking the output of the company. And that is maybe partially your responsibility. But on the whole, that's not on you. And we're not attacking you because your work is being shown through the context of a giant multinational corporation that we don't have good access into.

1:02:24We're not talking to you. You're not talking to us. There's all this context around this. So I want to be very clear that I don't want to attack individual engineers. You're working within a system, and that system occasionally fails you and it occasionally fails me. Our job on the outside is to comment on the work as a whole as we see it, as it gets out of the company, in the context of the company. You, dear engineer or bug screener at Apple who's hearing this show, this isn't your problem. this is the problem of the system that is much larger than you within the company that you work for and the processes and incentives and realities of that system so you dear engineer please don't be mad at us we're not attacking you directly rather we're trying to empower you when we criticize the work of apple or something about apple we are trying to empower the individual people inside the company to be able to do their best work and get their best work out to us.

1:03:29And we're doing that by making a stink in public so the higher-ups might feel some kind of heat on this issue and that might help them decide, hey, this is worth looking into or changing some policy or making some decision differently or allocating resources differently. That's what we're doing here on the outside. So again, I want you individual employee engineers, not just on this topic, but on lots of topics, we hear about this here and there. We hear some really hurt feelings. And I understand. It hurts when people tell me my software sucks. I get it. And I really want to be clear here that we're talking about the company's processes and the company in general.

1:04:07The way to use us is to let our arguments speak in ways that you can't. Maybe you, for the good of your job, maybe you shouldn't be raising these concerns internally. I get that. You've probably you know there's a reason why i don't work in big companies they i wouldn't last very long but there you know chances are we we can say things that you can't we can reach people that you can't so use us use these arguments to help make your department or your division or your project better and help convince the higher-ups with all of our rage and especially casey's rage which there is much use this use this to to make things better for everyone rather than taking it as a personal attack because i i swear we don't mean it as a personal attack on any individual people or department there anytime we criticize anything about apple it's not meant to be like oh my god that was my project and you're directly insulting me no we are trying to make things better that are the output of a giant company and sometimes the best way to do that is for podcasters on the outside to make a big stink that's why you should wear your mac pro believe shirts too just oh here it is there it is one day a week maybe or like on special occasions or at certain times especially if you work anywhere near the pro mac hardware division just put that it's your wardrobe rotation i'm just saying do you do you know because you presumably have like shipment information forthcoming for the turnist shirt right you have you haven't seen if that's shipped have you i'm assuming that i just got uh my my son's mac pro believe shirt came today i know a bunch of people have gotten them i didn't actually look at the shipping i mean like because i sent it to apple park is it ever going to actually make it to him who knows oh of course not of course i was actually going to wwc i might deliver it in person but you know it's kind of a large building like it like do you think it's kind of like like are they going to like place it like in the middle of the ring just like here apple park boop like executives i'm assuming executives have people screening their mail so like people don't send them anthrax and stuff so i'm assuming some some uh when they see like a big name like oh mail to tim cook if you have a picture on the leadership page i'm assuming someone is going through the mail and so it's like sending something to just like the president white house it'll get to him will it i mean i in a functioning mail organization here is it not that we care at all about this but hey if you know how the mail process works inside apple feel free to send us some anonymous people like when people send you mail can you just send it to tim cook apple park i i'm almost certain if you sent an actual piece of snail mail to tim cook at apple park the main apple park address it would make its way into the giant hopper that contains tim cook stuff would tim cook ever look at it i don't know but it's not like they'd be like tim cook i don't know who this is throws the goat in the garbage it didn't have a doesn't have an office number on it we can't deliver this return to sender no they're going to figure it out and so i figured john turn is similar oh my word but no i would like to i i think we need to move on because it just makes me ragey i don't know if you noticed but i do want to echo what marco said like this is i i think a maybe i'm using the word wrong but i think it's a political problem you know and i think both marco and john have pointed out that clearly Apple is not incentivized to fix this in a way that's compatible with third parties.

1:07:18And that doesn't mean it's any one individual contributor's fault. While I take a lot of fault, or I have a lot of complaints with this whole thing, I don't mean to complain about any one individual person. And I know because I've exchanged emails with people on the inside that are desperately trying to change this and make it better. But unfortunately, rank and file can't really turn a ship this big. And arguably, even the Federighis of the world, it's hard for them to turn a ship this big. So I get it. It's hard. I also get that I don't get how hard it is. But golly, it's just so infuriating from the outside.

1:07:58It just hurts. It hurts. Because without third party developers, this platform is not what it is. I mean, yes, it is an amazing platform. iOS, iPadOS, MacOS are amazing platforms, but without third-party software, they ain't that great. And so I feel like, you know, it's just we keep turning another cheek. And at one point, I would love to not have to do that. We are brought to you this week by Rocket Money. These days, so many products and services and apps are subscription priced. But do you know how much your subscriptions really cost, how much it all adds up to? Most Americans, if you ask them, they think they're spending about 80 bucks a month on subscription products and services.

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1:10:09John, turn my frown upside down, even though I really don't care about video games very much. Tell me about the new developments and make me care. Ah, so, video games. This was an announcement that probably came as a surprise to people who aren't obsessively following the company Bungie, but I am obsessively following the company Bungie because they're the makers of Destiny. that game i play all the time except for now when i'm playing tears of the kingdom um but yeah so uh they have announced a new game the new game is marathon which is a name that may be vaguely familiar to you if you are an old school mac gamer uh i guess i have to start by explaining like was that that was the game like the mac game that was available i have i have a whole book full of game so it was a classic you know that big uh book about like shareware mac stuff anyway uh there's a lot of surprising number but it's a very small community so marathon why was marathon important way back in the day uh max that thing that marco just did that happened all the time pc users were like oh max don't have any games or whatever that wasn't actually true there was a lot of really cool games on max um it was a very small and weird community but the thing that was true was hey you know that big new game that you heard of almost all the time that big new game that everyone is talking about would not be available on the mac there were exceptions and marathon was one of them and so was mist for example which is you know made on the mac for the mac but also shipped on other platforms um but most of the time you couldn't play the big new game and nowhere was that felt more than in the early days of pc first person gaming when doom came out uh wolfenstein and then doom and you know if you were the right age of you know a teen preteen around the time that doom was coming out and you were a mac user you knew that doom existed you wanted to play it you couldn't play it because you had a mac and your friends had doom on their pc and first person shooters were the popular genre because there was like a genre defining set of games from id software uh and there's a reason that that genre still exists uh destiny is a first person shooter so it's still going strong it is a very appealing popular genre for a reason and that was the beginning of it and you felt left out of it as a mac user because all your friends had doom and you didn't part of that was like oh color on the macs was not as common as color on pcs because they could have you know disgusting ega screens with rectangular pixels and cga cga had rectangular pixels i forget which one anyway the pixels are really big and they're i don't know i joined at vga yeah cga was all purple and green ega looked a little better vga had a reasonable number of colors but still anyway um so there was the lack of color was one problem but the other one is that you know the mac was an entirely different api for doing stuff and there were very few macs and very few people had them they were really expensive so no there was no doom available the mac until much much later and it was a bad port um but what the macs did have a little bit later was a game called marathon which is a first person shooter that was only available on the mac made by a company called Bungie that was filled with Mac nerds that made games for the Mac.

1:13:13And they were not very well known. They had made a couple of games before that. They were also kind of first person, but with a bunch of other stuff around there. Even Marathon was not really the full Doom experience. I remember one of the things that Marathon did is because it had to run on a Mac, which had pixels that were not the size of boulders. If you just made like Doom, what was Doom's resolution? It was like 300 by something. Something like that. Probably 320 by 240. yeah like whatever like yeah 640 before already divided by two basically no mac screen ran at that resolution so so if you tried to make something fill like the smallest color screen available for the average mac which is probably around 640 before already although there was a little bit smaller one for the lc you would be slinging more pixels than doom was and of course that would destroy your performance this is before you know gpu acceleration it was all cpu stuff so what marathon did was shoved the the viewport of the first person game into a sub window surrounded by a bunch of chrome and crap that was cool and gamey looking chrome but the bottom line was like look we can't we can't do 30 frames per second at 640 by 480 we don't have the computing power neither can doom on most machines when the game first came out so we're just going to make a smaller window um but the things that had it going for it was did have small pixels you know ran it in quote unquote full color um it had really cool uh you know artwork and enemy design and gun design all the things that bungie is known for today for all of its games the halo series destiny all that stuff that started back then so it was it was a cool game it had an interesting and deep story which doom did not have and you would run around and shoot things oh and had it also had a physics engine which was incredible fun for the for the p the pvp experience when you're playing like on a land against other people it had rockets and other things with physics that could you know shoot and explosions would push things around that you know the pc didn't get that until quake when you could do rocket jumping and stuff like that so marathon was ahead of its time uh if you try people will say oh it was a better game than doom doom had it was more visceral doom had had higher frame rates it had that whole moving and shooting thing was better in doom oh and by the way you could look up and down at marathon as well and of course every mac had a mouse so you could use what they called mouse look which also didn't become particularly popular until quake right marathon way ahead of its time mac exclusive that's why marathon is loom so large in the memory of mac users because it was a time when the mac was really getting it rubbed in its face that it didn't have a lot of good games all your friends are playing doom you can't play it you had to say yeah but we have we eventually we have marathon uh and even though you had that time in the sun with doom now marathon is the best first person shooter it is better than doom in all the possible ways and you know even better than quake because quake still has no story and it's all brown and you know i'm just trying to remember like at the time like i was in the pc side of that gaming space, it's kind of like the Mad Men, like I don't think about you at all.

1:16:07There is this big perceived war going on by the Mac people with this game. As a PC person, I don't think I noticed at all because we just had all the other games and we were fine. We had games come out of our butts. We had too many. But that's why Mac users love this game all the more because they could know their secret little treasure. It's like, well, you may not know. You may think we have no games or whatever, but actually we have Marathon and actually Marathon is amazing and actually bungie is amazing and they made a sequel and then a third one uh i think bungie was the first one to do this i they so the second one was called marathon two and the third one was called marathon infinity which was the company's way of saying we're not making any more marathons right we're just going to increment the number to infinity to say can we be any more clear this is the last uh marathon game um yeah like it's it didn't it's not as if that changed anything think about the gaming market but it was it was a great thing it was kind of in line with the whole thing that mac had always had mac had always had the games were exclusive to mac were always weird and special in a particular way marathon was sort of the second generation of those the first generation of those was way more numerous and that's what the that book i was talking about i can't remember the title of it but it's like uh this guy who writes a bunch of books by interviewing authors of old classic software in in you know narrow genres and so he did a whole book on classic Mac games they were amazing I would always whenever someone came over to my house and they were a console gamer or a PC gamer I would show them my weird black and white Mac games and they would be blown away because they had never seen games like this because they were so weird and so distinctive and so interesting in the way that like Apple stuff is the whole surprise and delight and the type of person who makes games for the Mac type of person who is a Mac programmer is just a little bit different or weird and so were the games uh it's not like they were saying i'm going to give up my pc i can't believe how many colors you removed from this game yeah no but like even even the fact that they were black and white they were just you know they couldn't believe how finely detailed everything was and very often back in the dos days like how good the sound was because if they didn't have a sound card on their pc they just had the bleeps and boops or the big staticky text in that links game where they tried to make people talk it was you know it was impressive but it was also a weird little sub-genre so that's why marathon looms large in the minds of mac use and of course bungie would eventually go on to mchalo which was debuted at mac world and then microsoft bought bungie and that was a terrible blow to mac gamers everywhere and there's that whole history uh going going on through that eventually bungie broke away from microsoft and the halo ip stayed with microsoft and then another developer was it three four three industries i'm sorry i'm not remembering off the top of my head some other company developed the next few halo games and then bungie of course went on to make destiny which i love uh but bungie retained the marathon ip and a bunch of other ip i believe i i can't keep track of where all that is i don't think they have myth anymore i think take two has that i don't think they have only or maybe they do anyway they had the marathon ip um and destiny actually has references to marathon stuff buried in it as like easter eggs and a little bit of the story continuity or whatever so today as part of the playstation showcase oh by the way uh bungie split from microsoft but then sony bought them more recently so bungie's been passed around so far apple has never bought them and i hope they never do because apple has no idea what to do with bungie but microsoft was a pretty good steward to bungie and sony i think will be a pretty good steward to bungie because they're good with uh their game developers as well anyway bungie just announced marathon no not the original marathon game remade or something like that they are making a new game uh destiny fans have known that bungie has been making this new game for years and in fact what kind of game it was was also known and also the rumor was that they were going to reuse the marathon ip but it's not the same as the first marathon first marathon game was a first person shooter with the story it was a single player and had a multiplayer component um and it's set in a particular universe halo by the way also connects in that universe and has tons of references to marathon inside it or whatever um this is what's called known as an extraction shooter which i think is a phrase that both of you have probably never heard before nope never i have never played one uh the most popular one i sort of the the standard bearer for the genre is escape from tarkov which i have never played because it's a military style shooter i'm not into those uh but it's kind of like you've you've played fortnight both of you right nope nope i know of it but i've never played it i think it's some kind of dancing game right fortnight is what they call a battle royale thing neither one of you seen battle royale so that doesn't help you correct uh but it's like open world multiplayer game where you have a big map you chuck a bunch of human players into it and they have some kind of thing and the battle royale ones they all fight each other and there's one person left in an extraction type game uh you have a goal to get to some point for for extraction there's other players there uh if you kill someone they drop their stuff if you die you drop your stuff and lose it potentially permanently like it's you know it's it's just twists on that type of genre that does not sound like a first person game where there's a story where you go through this sci-fi story and like that's not like that at all halo was like that halo and marathon were very similar if you don't know what i'm talking about with marathon have you played halo the first person campaign marathon was like that marathon was the the first halo essentially same developer very similar storyline lots of crossover there so they're taking the marathon ip and the whole you know the universe the enemies if you look at the teaser trailer that will link in the thing you if you know marathon you see some enemies you see some text that you'll recognize from marathon like they're taking that world and that universe and putting it into an extraction shooter they said they're going to have a little bit more of a story type uh you know of experience to it than the average one and i'm sure they'll have the bungee twist on it or whatever um but yeah that's the when will it be ready there's no date there's just a teaser the teaser doesn't even show any gameplay the rumor was 2025 maybe they'll hit 2024 uh the game is coming out for ps5 the xbox series x and s and for pc no mac version uh wait are you serious the this thing that was the the king of mac gaming isn't going to be on the mac well after microsoft bought them the door kind of closed on bungie really being a mac game developer in any way shape or form oh my god halo was eventually released for the mac but it was a port by a third-party company not by bungie and it wasn't a particularly good port doom also came to the mac but it was not by id software and it wasn't a particularly good port um they're not they haven't been a mac gaming company ages despite the fact that some of the people including one of the founder at least one of the founders who like were there making marathon and it was four people in a little room on a bunch of macs are still at bungie and are still essentially running the company but you know the world moves on i think you know when they're owned by microsoft them not making mac games kind of makes perfect sense when they're independent still makes sense because nobody plays games on macs when they're owned by sony still makes sense because they're owned by sony and why would you make a mac version like the only reason they're making this on xbox and pc or whatever is the same reason everybody does because you want to hit most of the market and if you hit those platforms that's most of the market if apple was in any way competent at gaming understanding the gaming market they would be spending money throwing money at companies like bungie at company like sony yet like whoever to say hey you're gonna make a game that everyone's gonna hear about and everyone's gonna be playing i know we don't have a lot of macs but we do have reasonable gpus could you make that game for the mac and they're gonna say no and you say well what if we give you this many millions of dollars and then they'll say yes like yes that's what it takes apple but of course apple doesn't care about that so that's not gonna happen um but that was the announcement today and i'm excited by it i don't particularly care about extraction shooters uh but i do trust bungie to make a good one and i do like marathon so i will absolutely try this game destiny is not dead destiny is continuing uh i continue to play destiny i'll get back to it when i'm done with zelda i suppose but I will give Bungie the benefit of the doubt and try this game the trailer itself is pretty cool it looks very different from Destiny it looks very different from the original marathon but there is enough goodwill and memories of the old folks in the Mac community to make us interested enough to fire up our Xboxes or Playstations or gaming PCs that we might have and try this game out I don't think any of us are going to be particularly surprised or disappointed that it's not available the mac because honestly most people's macs don't have enough gpu grunt mine does haha don't have enough gpu grunt to play to play this game in even the lowest settings uh but you know that's that's just the way uh the world has gone in in recent years with the mac so i'm excited by this i'm ready to play the game but i'm also excited for the next destiny expansion and i'm also excited to continue playing zelda i guess i should finish breath of the wild at some point huh i mean you don't have to finish finish it but kidding you could you No, I really enjoyed Breath of the Wild, but I just put it down at some point.

1:25:16I think Michaela was a baby at this point, and so I was just completely overwhelmed, and I just never really picked it back up, and I would like to finish it at some point. I really enjoyed it. Have Declan eventually pick it up, and then you can play together with him. That's true. Once he gets old enough to be interested and coordinated enough to do it, then you can be, you know, and if he's not interested, wait for Michaela to get old enough and coordinated enough to, you know. Oh, no, he is interested, but we try to not park them in front of screens for hours a day. We're still in that stage of parenting.

1:25:45I know. And it's also a little bit of a complicated game for every kid to not just play with it as a sandbox, but to actually do things in it. But it's fine to play with just as a sandbox as well. Yeah. Sony had one more announcement. This is like a bunch of Sony news, and because Bungie is a Sony company, that's why I was tied up in it. uh they kind of pre-announced which is weird this thing they're they're calling playstation q which is not going to be the real name which is a handheld device for streaming ps5 games everyone's into like this this steam deck uh not steam deck yeah i got it right steam deck yeah not the stream deck the steam deck uh there's one from asus as well they're basically like handheld pcs for playing pc games uh on the go uh and they're really cool and interesting sony said hey we went on one in on that but what they what they're putting out is basically like a playstation 5 controller cracked in half with a screen wedged in the middle which ergonomically i think is good because i like the ps5 controller uh but it does it's not a game player all it is is a way to stream games from your ps5 i occasionally do this for my bed on my phone or my ipad when i forgot to get something in destiny i'll just do the remote play thing because it's like a ps app on an ios and you can just it will turn on your ps5 remotely start it up and then you've got little on-screen controls and i just you know swipe a little on-stream controls and go do some chore i forgot to do in destiny and then shut the thing down this is like that but it's not an ipad or a phone it has no smarts in it like other than the networking and stuff like that and you can only do it you can't do it to stream it i don't think it streams over the internet or anything but we wouldn't actually know because it's not a real product yet but i think it's really interesting that uh the switch and the steam deck and whatever that asus thing are are so have made this a big enough market that sony says we should have something in that space and you know what sony did lay all the groundwork for it with the streaming stuff and they should have something in this market and i'm vaguely interested in this if it works over the internet if it doesn't i probably am not interested in it but i just thought it was uh you know curious that that sony feels so much pressure in this area that they pre-announced a product that they don't even have a name for let alone a price or a date just to say hey we're doing this too so uh don't spend all your time on your switch playing zelda because we're going to have a way for you to play stuff in your bed too Awesome.

1:27:56All right, let's do some Ask ATP. It has been a while. I am sorry for that. But Jesse Stiller writes, if someone was looking over your shoulder and says to you, scroll down, what direction do you assume the person means? Are they asking to continue further down the page, perhaps reaching the bottom if you were to keep going? Or do they mean they want the contents of the page to move downward, meaning you're now seeing content that lies closer to the top of the page i don't think this is up for grabs this is 100 move the the contents of this of what you're looking at upward so you are approaching the bottom of the contents right yeah i think content i think that's the the common answer but the problem is context right um because this thing if someone is looking over your shoulder and says to you what if you're on an ipad and what if something is barely visible on the top of the screen but part of it is cut off by the top of the screen and they reach their hand out and point at the screen a little bit and they say scroll down then they want you to pull down on the screen it's and what what makes what makes the context different there because it's a touch device because there is something that is kind of cut off at the top of the screen because you know in the context of the conversation that that's probably the thing they want to see because whatever you said before that makes you understand oh they probably want to see the thing that they can't see all of right and because they reached out to the screen, maybe with their finger extended, all that would combine to let you as a regular human know without thinking what they mean is put your finger on the screen and slide it down with revealing more of the top of the document.

1:29:23But in the absence of all that context, yeah, when someone says scroll down and you're not on a touch device and they're not, if all those things aren't true or some combination of things aren't true, they mean I want to see more of the document that's lower down, eventually getting to the bottom up. Strays Nod 00 writes, why is it received wisdom? in the Apple opinion space, that it makes sense for Apple to skip a generation of Apple Silicon in desktop Macs to save on the cost of re-engineering the internals on lower volume products. Why is putting an M2 where the M1 used to be on an iMac any more complicated than a teenager slotting in a different CPU in a PC tower?

1:29:59What re-engineering do they need to do? Ah, see, this question, I think, presupposes a reality of the old slotting a new CPU into a PC tower game that was never really actually the case see all right tell me more you could swap cpus in a self-built pc you still can however uh at least in the days that i was doing this the socket would change and what a motherboard like what processors a motherboard could support would change every so often. And so generally speaking, you could generally swap in any processor you wanted from a given family that was available at one time. So for instance, like when the, you know, the Pentium 7 comes out and it has four different clock speeds, you can put any of those four clock speeds generally into most motherboards that would support the Pentium 7 or whatever.

1:30:56But when the Pentium 8 or the Pentium 9 would come out, oftentimes those same motherboards would not support those new chips. And there were lots of reasons for this. You know, simple physical stuff like the socket would change or the thermal requirements or the power needs would change. But one of the key things that would change oftentimes is what used to be called the North Bridge. The North Bridge was the chip on the motherboard back forever ago. I know things are different now, but they're not that different. The North Bridge was the chip on the motherboard forever ago that would include a lot of the high-speed interconnect components.

1:31:33So things like the AGP or graphics slot interface, oftentimes the memory controller, any kind of high bandwidth stuff, stuff that was faster than USB or old slow ports, faster stuff than that. And over time, the way computer design went was we started more and more integrating that kind of functionality into the chip. and so the chip started including things like the memory controllers and the high-speed interconnects like Thunderbolt interfaces, stuff like that, PCI Express. You put more and more of that stuff on the chip over time. So what ends up happening is, back then even, a motherboard would only last maybe one or two generations of processors.

1:32:19Now, so much of that stuff is on the chip itself that we've gone even further in that direction. So when you talk about the M1 or M2, whatever, chips, so much is on that chip that if you update the chip, you do actually often need to do a decent amount of reengineering of the surrounding board, the surrounding I.O. ports, the components, maybe the display driver if it's a laptop. There are actually significant differences that come along with whatever new generation of memory controller, I-O controllers, display controllers, whatever new combination of all that stuff exists. That actually changes a decent amount.

1:33:05The thermal characteristics will change. The power characteristics will change. Maybe the number of ports it can support will change. Or the abilities of those ports will change. the displays it can support, how fast it can drive those displays, over what interfaces it can drive those displays. So much of that actually does change when they do a new SoC. So there actually is a surprising amount of re-engineering that has to happen to take advantage of all that. Now, if you want, they could just slow down a lot of those advancements. They could just say, all right, you know what? We're going to have the M1 supports X displays and X amount of RAM and all that stuff.

1:33:44And the M2 is going to support the exact same thing. And it'll just be 5 % faster. We could do that. But stuff moves faster these days. And people's expectations are high. And whenever there's a new version of HDMI 17 point whatever, NQ, that you will never use and that will only support half of what it claims to support anyway. Whenever there's a new version of all these standards, we expect Apple to be there on day one with support. Or to be competitive at least with the market as soon as they can be. so all that stuff like they're they're building on quicksand here just like software like everything around them is changing all the requirements are changing they always want to try to just try to deliver the highest end stuff they can meanwhile the both physical reality and largely the market for upgradable components and and more modular stuff like motherboards that you could just drop in a new chip in that market is mostly gone you know there there is still some of it in like you know a little bit of server not even barely even there a little bit in like the desktop enthusiast and gaming gamer spaces but like most computers sold these days are phones tablets and laptops none of which are upgradable none of which the market really demands to be very upgradable so it's that kind of is it's it's largely a thing of the past where you could update just the processor and change nothing else around it and it's we're better off this way overall because things move a lot faster now things are a lot faster now and our hardware is generally better this way and apple's actually pretty awful about doing the things you described not so awful that they don't do it at all but like what ideally what you hope is if you're going from m1 to m2 even if everything about the soc was identical uh would be like well but the m1 had supported this standard of wi-fi and now there's a new version so the whatever machine we put the m2 in should support the new version of wi-fi which means a new chip from broadcom which means new antenna machine blah blah blah whatever you know the new version of usb a new version of thunderbolt like you said new version of hdmi and when we say new version apple was shipping hdmi 2.0 for years and years and years after 2.1 was out so every time they put out a new mac we're like you know if you're updating the soc don't you want to update all the parts to be the newer version of the stuff and apple would say nope we're going to ship hdmi 2.0 again so apple is slow about doing that but eventually they do it they're not still shipping usb 1.0 like even apple has always lagged like how how soon do they get usb 2.0 how soon do they get usb 3.3 super speed whatever but you know we do want we wish apple would be even better about that but they do upgrade those components eventually so every time there's a new one we want them to upgrade the reason it's it's we we talk about it on desktop mac so much so like marco said there's such a small market um when it comes time to do this again if the m2 was a drop in replacement and they didn't want to change anything else the first question you have is okay it's drop in replacement but and we're not changing anything else so we can do it real quick like anytime you put out any new product there is a minimum amount of overhead that you have to do with like certifying with the fcc certifying that your cooling solution still works for it because the m2 probably has different thermal characteristics than the m1 even if it is exactly the same quote-unquote drop-in replacement you know making the new product new skew all the things that support it any new parts you might need you know like just there's a minimum amount of that that goes with every product and then you have to say okay if we just don't only change the soc don't change anything else how compelling of a product is this versus the m1 one that we're selling all right so it's five to ten percent faster and has like you know a different video decode unit is this differentiated enough in the market such that we're ever going to make back the money that we spend this like the minimum overhead it requires to make a sort of a no-op new product that has no changes in it right like say you just wanted to make the m1 and change literally nothing about it but you change the name and it's an all-new product and you get it need to get it recertified with the fcc or something like can we make that money back is someone going to see this and say oh i now i want that one either i was i skipped the m1 and now when the m2 comes out a real one or is it going to make m1 people upgrade an upgrade like that is so minimal it's not particularly compelling it may not be able to make out make back enough profit for apple to pay for the overhead required to make the new product which is why apple tends not to do things like that sometimes they do especially if a product has been like languishing on the m1 for ages and ages and ages and like oh oh, we should eventually make an M2 version of this.

1:38:16But the reason we think they're not in a big hurry to do it with, say, the Mac Studio or something is if it's a newish machine and it has a processor in it that is currently actually pretty good and there isn't like, you know, we look at the new one that would replace it just came out, you can squint and say, what would it be like to have, you know, M2 Mac Studio? Would it be that compelling of a product over this one? And would it be compelling enough to sell enough units to make up for its cost? And we on the outside look at that and say, i can understand why financially within apple they may do the math and say this doesn't actually make financial sense and the customers for this product uh can wait for the m3 version or something like that we don't like it we wish they would you know essentially even if it loses money you just got to do it because when you my argument has been if you're going to make pro products you just you have to keep up with the times you have to actually update to the new version hdmi You actually have to put a faster SD card slot in there.

1:39:12You can't just keep using the old standards forever and ever and ever, especially on the pro lines because the pros care about that. But Apple does the math on that and says, I'm sorry, but the market is just so small, so, so small compared to our other products that we cannot justify the expenses. Even on the iPad, we talked about it. Why didn't the iPads get updated to have like the camera in the new place and stuff like that? Oh, the pencil's in the way. Why didn't they re-engineer the iPad Pro? even the ipad pro the volumes are not enough for them to do a quote-unquote total redesign of internals and you know this really would be a redesign because you got to move the stuff all around and do all like even that product could not justify the redesign cost uh and so the the lesser ipad got a bunch of new stuff that the ipad pros didn't the mac studio sells way fewer units i imagine than the ipad pros do so yeah that's why that's why we think uh that it is why we understand why Apple does it, even if we disagree with it, and even if it was a drop-in replacement, which it almost certainly isn't, because getting back to reality here, the M2 is not the same as the M1.

1:40:14It does not have the same thermal characteristics. And we do want them to fix all the stuff. Fix the stupid fan that's noisy. Do a better cooling system. Update all of the ports and components and Wi-Fi things. Then we wait to see what they actually do, and they do like 50 % of that. Well, you know, we didn't change the cooling, but it does have the better Wi-Fi. The USB is the same. The SD card is the same. the SSD is a little bit faster. What do you think? I'm like, yeah, we'll take it.

1:40:40Indeed. Saurab writes, how often do you reboot your Macs? Also, given John's exotic window arrangement, how does he maintain window arrangement continuity after a reboot? I would guess I reboot mine every two to four weeks, generally speaking, but there's no hard and fast rule. We'll come back to John to talk about his window arrangements. Marco, how often do you reboot your stuff? whenever either there's a software update that requires it or if Xcode really gets wedged in a really weird way. Yep. Sometimes there are some problems with launching stuff in the simulator or just debugging or just source kit or whatever in the background.

1:41:22There are some problems that just seem to require a reboot. So typically it'll be maybe every few weeks. All right, John, what's your story? so i'm not rebooting uh without any reason and the reason usually doesn't have anything to do with stability um to give an example of a time when i'm rebooting a lot frequently is when i was trying to debug that weird bug i have with the window moving around and stuff every time i would like hunt down a piece of third-party software and remove it i would reboot for a good measure if i'm about to reproduce it and do another like sample or spin dump or assist diagnose like when i made two test accounts that are just fresh accounts to try to reproduce the bug i would reboot after i did that like i want it to be fresh like that's obviously not a normal scenario i'm rebooting there for the purpose of rebooting because i want to say i made a change to the system that will only take effect on reboot so time to reboot and i want to clean slate and i want to just you know reboot reboot like tons and tons of reboots to try to reproduce this bug that apple is never going to fix um but that that is an anomaly but that's an example of like i reboot with reason i don't reboot on a regular schedule i don't reboot for the hell of it it's only software updates or things that require reboot like hey i just removed some third-party extensions something i want to be sure they're not loaded i want to reboot and have a clean system um i can't remember the last time i rebooted for any kind of software problem back back when i didn't know what caused my weird window thing i would reboot to get rid of that and of course that would work because when i when i logged back in there'd be only one user logged in i didn't know that at the time but that would that was the last example i can think of when i reboot to avoid a situation that i you know a bug that was i was encountering that i found annoying and i knew rebooting would quote-unquote fix it um as for windows any well-behaved mac app should respect your window arrangement most of the apps i use on a daily basis do that uh some of them by using the official apple apis all of apple's frameworks have some way for you to on the mac have some way for you to restore state so you can you know when someone selects shutdown or restart and the app is told to quit it can save the state of all the windows and where they are and when you log back in you mac os itself there's even a checkbox you can check this is hey when i log back in uh i want you to reopen all the applications i had running before and then each of those applications the responsibility for restoring state is delegated to them so mac os just said okay i know you're running apps a b c and d and it launches apps a b c and d and then each of those apps when it's launched is responsible for restoring its state such that you can restart and come back to your computer and the screen should look exactly the same if everything goes well obviously that can't always be the case because say you had a web page loaded like the you know the front page of the new york times when you come back in the new front page of the new york times will be there doesn't remember the old front page because it reloaded the page right even apps like chrome which i'm assuming do not use apple's apis to do this have a thing that says hey uh chrome on startup what do you want me to do and my answer is i want you to restore all the windows the same way they were before so if any app has an option to do that that's the option i pick and that's how i do my window ranging and if an app doesn't do that i tend not to use it or not to like it or seek out an alternative that does support it you know my text editor supports it text edit the default text editor supports that bb edit supports that uh all the other apps like the the irc app that i'm in to be in the chat room it remembers its window position it remembers what channel i'm in when i launched the app it goes back to right where it was and you know i don't actually have the check box check to relaunch all the apps because if I reboot I don't want it to do that I just I can launch them myself when I rather have a clean slate but that's just a choice if I had that checkbox check and I rebooted right now everything would come back exactly where it is except for audio hijack would not be recording uh and I think zoom would not restore state I think every other app I'm running would fair enough and then finally for tonight uh Brian Coffey writes I just went on a Disney cruise and took hundreds of pictures and many videos and want to share with my tech lazy family.

1:45:18iOS shared albums are too many steps for them to do. How can I send hundreds of photos to them privately over iCloud where all they need to do is click one link in iMessage? Create iCloud link appears to have a limit. I have no idea what the answer to this question is. iOS shared albums are the easiest. It seems like the problem is not that they have a bunch of Android users. If everyone has iPhones, iOS shared albums are the easiest way for people to see pictures that you want to share with them. They don't have to do anything. They just magically appear on their phones. Usually there's a notification.

1:45:50They tap the notification and they can see the pictures. That's it. That is the best way for, you know, you know, tech lazy people to just deal with photos. But if you're trying to send them photos, how can I send hundreds of photos to them privately? So on and so forth. It sounds kind of like you want them to have the photos and not just like the reduced resolution ios shared albums thing uh and by the way ios do have a limit and i think it's like 5 000 photos so you'd have to make a new shared album every once in a while but but if if your family doesn't like ios shared albums because it's too complicated i don't know what to say that's the simplest solution i've ever found if the problem is that that ios shared albums don't work because you want to give them the photos like they have copies of the files i'm like well how tech lazy could they be that they're willing to accept 500 full resolution photos from you.

1:46:38But the answer to that is look outside of Apple. There are tons of services that do this in a cross-platform way. I don't use any of them, but I have relatives who do. What are some of them? Smug Mug or there's not Shutterfly. There's a bunch of services, websites essentially, where you upload your pictures to the website and then you can click a button and it'll send out an email to a bunch of people and no matter what platform they're on, they'll be able to click that link in the email it'll open a web browser where they'll be able to see all your photos and download the full resolution ones if they want to in a web browser on any platform on any device on a phone on a tablet on a pc on a mac that most of those services you have to pay for but that will solve your problem but within the apple ecosystem if you're just trying to let people see stuff get them signed up for iowa shared albums and if the problem is they can't figure out how to sort of subscribe to your shared album because that can be weird just grab their devices like send the invitation they grab their devices and say accept accept accept accept and then you're done.

1:47:34This is the ultimate sort of parent grandparent type thing for like pictures of kids and stuff. You just chuck them in the album and then grandma gets a notification on her phone and she taps it and she sees baby pictures. It's the best system. Sorted. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Rocket Money and Lickability. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join and we will talk to you next week. Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A.

1:48:50It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech Podcast. So long. So Casey, what's going on with your pricing? I don't know. I don't know. you have analysis paralysis you have too many different people with too many different opinions and you just can't decide honestly that is 100 % accurate my current theory which I don't want to go on for another 20 minutes discussing this we can talk about it next week if we're still interested my current theory which I would like you guys to comment on but I just don't want to go on forever about it but my current theory is

1:49:36when I spend money on things, be that media, be that experiences, be that whatever, when I spend money on things, I am most happy to do that when I am being met where I am. So if I wanted to, I don't know, get takeout, it is easy to do so. It is easy and not hilariously overpriced to do so. You know, like DoorDash makes it reasonably easy to have food magically appear at my house. But the app is OK. There's markups, which are understandable. Like I'm not here to debate the, you know, whether or not DoorDash is good or bad. But, you know, it's all right. If I want to buy a piece of media, I don't have to think about how I get it.

1:50:23How do I watch it? Where does it arrive? Am I renting it? Am I buying it? You know, I want to be met where I am. um and with that in mind there are people who would have no problem paying a subscription and would like to and certainly selfishly i would like people to pay for a subscription to call sheet um but there are people that maybe don't want a subscription are quote-unquote allergic to subscriptions or understandably have you know fatigue with subscriptions uh and so as we discussed last week. You know, there's an argument to be made, and don't jump on me yet, just hold on. There's an argument to be made for something that's a one-time purchase.

1:51:05You know, maybe I can phrase it as, this is not a lifetime unlock. There's no guarantee here. I'm offering this to you only because you might want it, but there's no implied guarantee, or there's no explicit or implied guarantee that this will last for any amount of time. But if you're really that allergic to subscriptions, fine, power to you. But the other thing I got thinking about was, all right, If I'm going to offer that one-time thing, which I'm not sure I will, but let's suppose for the sake of conversation, I will offer subscription for probably monthly and yearly. Let's suppose for the sake of discussion, I offer a hilariously expensive one-time thing.

1:51:40Would it make sense? And my current thinking is yes, but this is a weak opinion held loosely. Would it make sense to do consumables as well? So you can buy a 10-pack of searches or maybe a 100-pack. I don't know what the number is. I don't know how much it would cost. you're gradually approaching the casino games for children business model and i know how you're getting there but i feel like every time you go up people are used to it and they understand it but it's like really consumables for an app like what what kind of app do you want to be vending out there in the world do you want people to feel like they're putting quarters into your thing to look up where an actor is from i i give that a big thumbs down i i agree with you i i agree with wholeheartedly, but if you are not the kind of person that watches stuff often, but you want to be able to use a nicely made app to occasionally do that, do you really want a subscription or are you going to want to pay?

1:52:32And I genuinely don't know what I would. You're not going to get all the customers. You're not going to have a business model that is going to appeal to everybody who sees your app and finds it useful. That's just impossible, right? You can't cover all the bases. So you have to just decide which are the customers that you want to get. Hopefully you pick the group that has the most people in it. Right. Right. Like that. But I don't think you can get all of them. So if you're like you're fretting over like what people are allergic to subscriptions. If you think you have to have a subscription app because you're using a third party API with unknown financial things, which as we've discussed in the past thing, then anyone who doesn't like subscription is out of your market.

1:53:11And I don't think there's anything you can do for those people. You want to revisit that decision and say, well, really, do I really need a subscription? because right now it's free and I want to take the risk, then you can revisit. But that changes everything. But if you're deciding you want a subscription, don't spend a second worrying about the people who don't want to pay for subscriptions because they're not in your market anymore. Yeah, I would even go further than that. I don't want to pay a subscription is really code for I don't want to pay. That's interesting. Now, yes, you listener out there who are screaming, but, but, but, I will pay money, but I don't like subscriptions.

1:53:45in today's modern software world that really just means i don't want to pay it's simple as that because look there is an alternative here you're not going to like it there is an alternative here however software that is on modern platforms that is expected and required to have some kind of regular maintenance updates at least needs recurring revenue to do it that's why most apps are moving to this kind of model. There's other factors too, like the app store's non-existent handling of upgrade pricing and stuff like that if you were doing things that way. But really, subscription pricing is a very clean, clear, mostly consumer-friendly option of pricing software.

1:54:31Now, there are apps that do it badly. There are apps that charge significantly more with subscription pricing than what might be warranted for what they're doing. There are apps that use deceptive techniques to trick people into paying more than they might think they're paying or more than they might expect to pay or take advantage of the fact that they're going to forget to cancel or whatever else. But the concept of a subscription payment for an app that has ongoing use that will require ongoing maintenance is not only sound but is fair. And it's actually consumer friendly when done right. when you think about all the dysfunction of the old model of like well i'm gonna pay this one time chunk and then it turns out next week i don't use this app anymore or i buy it and it's it's not really what i wanted it to be you know a lot of times customers just get screwed or you you know you buy some giant app and then like three months later they unveil the next big version and you got to pay an upgrade fee that was way bigger than if you would have been paying like five bucks a month for the whole time like so the old model has its dysfunctions the new model has its potential abuses however this model of subscription price software this is just paid software this is just how paid software is paid these days because the entire ecosystem of software development has shifted over time to a make this easier and actually make this the easiest option but b as i mentioned before like customer customer expectations and the ecosystem and environments are moving so much customers expect so much ongoing now and and i can't blame them that you need a way to fund it you need ongoing revenue for each customer so there's two options for that you can either have subscriptions in some form and the details we can talk about but subscriptions in some form, or ads.

1:56:31those are your options yeah so if you really want there to if you really want to satisfy the I don't want to pay a subscription, but I would pay you for a lifetime unlock. Okay, first of all, those people are hilarious because whenever they offer, like I get emails like this, and it'll be like, I don't want to pay your$10 a month, or sorry,$10 a year subscription, which is comically cheap for what I'm offering, but fine. I don't want to pay your$10 a year subscription. I want a lifetime unlock. How about I give you$15? dollars like if you actually like the the prices they have in mind when they say i don't want to pay your subscription it's not it's never that long of a time span worth of the subscription price it's maybe two years at most like it's never a lot so if you actually get to the model the third model that you didn't mention speaking of the lifetime not being that long uh the third model is the one that people hate even more but it all adds up to the same thing which is okay I'll give you a lifetime unlock for$15 but every 18 months I come up with a new version of my program and I abandon the old one.

1:57:36Right. And then you can lifetime unlock that one for$15. Right? So you just go every 18 months. And by the way, next time you update your iPhone and you're required to update the OS with the new phone, that old version of the app might break. And then you're out of luck. You totally abandoned it. Pull it from the store and just like when that breaks it's like, well, there's no... And every 18 months you come up with a brand new version. There's no upgrade pricing in the app store and that's on apple but every is a brand new version and then you get to pay for it and own it for the lifetime of that program but every 18 months you come up with version two version three version four that is it also a model that works and it is not subscription and you won't get recurring bills that you don't understand where they come from but you're still paying 15 every 18 months right it doesn't matter how we break it up like it's the same amount of money and by the way the people like boom the good old days of those in the good old days casey's app would cost an inflation adjusted 80 and it would only work for three years before we came out with the next major version that you'd have to charge a$40 upgrade fee for like people don't understand how expensive software was like go look at how much like the original version of like you know mac write version 2.0 costs like and inflation and do the inflation adjustment calculation it will make your eyes bleed software used to be so expensive you'd buy some weird thing like now menus or something that would make like an icon in your menu bar and like inflation adjusted it's like 120 right for a little utility that appears in your menu bar i'm not charging 120 for my my little utilities appearing on your bar, by the way.

1:58:59And they would have major new versions every 18 months to two years. And the major new versions, maybe you would have to upgrade pricing, but maybe they'd want another$120 from you. It was so much more expensive. So in absolute real dollars, like inflation adjusted dollars, it was so much more expensive to do that thing. So it's like, do you want to just be a now utilities user for the entire life of that product? You're going to pay way more than if they were somehow transported to modern times and charged you$10 a year. Yep. And I mean, to be clear, I haven't come up with an answer if I do offer not a like, like a single unlock.

1:59:35Again, I would never praise it as lifetime. But first of all, like if I were to offer it, it would be like a lot of money. I'm thinking like somewhere in the order of 50-ish dollars to really make it like, look, I don't want to do this and you probably don't want to do this. But if you are really that allergic to subscriptions, fine okay sure yeah but see but see then you have a problem anybody who actually does buy that you have 50 of their dollars asterisk apples cut but whatever you know yeah yeah yeah they in their mind you have i gave you 50 and then you have the nerve in three years to discontinue the product because the api got shut down you don't want someone to have 50 of their like your dot like You don't want that.

2:00:25You don't want anyone to have that over you because they will abuse it. You're much better off. Let's keep this very, very simple. This app exists now. For the time period it exists, you pay me X dollars per month or year to use it. And at some point in the future, this arrangement may change in some way. And that's cool because you didn't pay for the future. You paid for now. That's the model. That is the healthiest model for everyone involved. there is nothing wrong with that model. If you ship with that model and only that model, you will have a good business. As long as you don't screw up the pricing, but you won't because we'll guide you.

2:01:06You will have a good business. And yes, there will be people who say, I just don't like subscriptions on principle. But you know what? There's also way more people who say, I just don't like paying for any apps on principle. It's the same thing. It is. It's the same. It's like, it's like when we, it's like, you know, like it's the same flag when you see that flag that just has like the police blue stripe. And it's like, it's the same flag from a few flags we've had before. Yeah, this, it's the same argument. What they're saying is, I don't want to pay. That's what they're saying. Or, hey, could I maybe pay a lot less?

2:01:45I don't want to pay you over and over again for this thing I'm going to use all the time. Like, that's what they're saying. You got to translate. anything that says I don't want to pay you your$10 a year is really saying I don't want to pay you. And that's fine if you had something like ads where you could monetize non-paying users, but you don't, and you don't want that. So you have to be okay losing those people. You're never going to satisfy them with any purchase option you create that is fair to you. So don't even bother. Have a subscription app, and that's it. You are hardly alone in the marketplace if you make that choice.

2:02:23Yeah. So with that in mind, and I'm still kicking all this around, I think it was Marco that said earlier, you know, I am getting feedback from everyone. And while I do appreciate and enjoy that, every single person is 100 % devoutly convinced that they are the most correct and not a single one of them agrees with anyone else. So ultimately, I'm going to have to put a line in the sand and say this is the way. And additionally, a lot of people are saying, including in the chat room earlier, well, you can change it. And that's true. You can. Well, asterisk. Well, so here's the thing. I'm really worried.

2:03:00So I think if I were to start with just one approach, it would be what you're describing, what both of you are describing, which is subscription. Probably monthly and yearly. That is my approach. I think that's my bare minimum. I'm going to do that no matter what. The thing I worry about is, okay, so somebody downloads the app, they really enjoy it, but they see the subscription and they don't want to pay it and they bounce. How can I get to them again if I change the model or if I lower the price or whatever? You're discovering the world of marketing. How do you find customers? How about a push notification for marketing spam?

2:03:39Yeah, I mean, I could do push notification for marketing spam, but you know what I mean? I feel like, yes, I can. They will have deleted your app. You're not even going to send a push. You actually have to acquire customers, Casey. How much do you pay to acquire them? Deleting apps is hard now because now they go directly to the app library. So they will abandon your app very quickly and easily. Even if they like it, they'll abandon it because they just lose it. But they won't delete it. Is that the default? Is it a default to the app library now? No, I think it gives you a prompt that says go to the library, which is considered to be the default, or they give the destructive or delete.

2:04:12that's in red or what have you. Oh, no, not when you delete. I get it where you say it. Yeah, yeah. I was saying like if you don't, if you get a fresh iPhone out of the box and you buy an app from the App Store, it doesn't go to the library, right? Oh, no, I don't think so. No, no, no. I don't believe. Hold on, I got more in here. Keep talking. I'll tell you in a minute. So in any case, so I think I will do, you know, a trickle, I will probably do a trickle out like we had discussed last week, a trickle out of free searches. A lot of people, or I shouldn't say a lot, a handful of people have written me on Mastodon being like, no, no, no, no, no.

2:04:44Just do the free trial. Screw the trickle out of searches. Just do a free trial, which I get. I really do. But I don't feel like it's a good first run experience to say, hi, here's this app. You must sign up for a free trial that will obligate you to, I mean, yes, you can cancel it, but will obligate you to pay me soon before you can really do anything. You know what I mean? Like it just seems very off-putting to me for basically the onboarding screen to be, hey, screw you, pay me. Like, I don't even know what this thing does. This might be garbage, you know? I'm not in a position that I want to pay you.

2:05:20I don't even want to sign up for the possibility of paying you yet. And that's why I think that that's not the right approach. But I understand, like in a perfect world, yes, I would do that. But I just don't think that that's realistic. By the way, real-time follow-up, it does not go directly to the app library by default. I just tested it on my test phone. That's what I thought. I looked up what MacWrite, and MacWrite shipped free with the Mac for a while, but eventually Claris got it and it became a commercial product. That's why I was thinking of it because my parents did buy like a boxed copy of MacWrite from Claris or whatever.

2:05:49In this MacWorld 1994 review, the inflation adjusted price of MacWrite Pro 1.5, if you bought it as a separate product from Claris, was, drum roll, anybody? $1 ,000? $150. Remember, this is not like Microsoft Word. It's MacWrite. It's fairly simple text errors from Claris. Actually, maybe Marco's more right than I gave him credit for. I would say between$100 and$300, but I'm worried that Marco is much closer to correct than I realize. $498.67. For a fairly simple, not particularly full-featured, not leader in its market, word processor. The text edit that comes free with your Mac does substantially more than its program.

2:06:36substantially more and way faster and it's free with your mac uh yeah software used to go a lot more i want a subscription great okay and by the way this when the next version of the mac right comes out there may be upgrade pricing uh but you're not going to get it for free you're going to have to pay some amount of money probably some substantial portion of that 498 for the next version software used to be way more expensive and like marco said people never talk about the the the bad sides of pay up front where you you buy it and it turns out you don't like the program or you know whatever like you you've spent all that money and now you basically have to use it for some period of time to make it worthwhile uh because if you don't and you can't return it then you're stuck with it or if you buy it and a new version comes out and the upgrade pricing is 200 for for upgrading users it's you know it's there's downsides to every pricing model the current pricing model is actually pretty good for consumers minus the part where they don't realize money is slowly draining out of their bank account which is why most of the people who hate subscriptions say they hate them it's like i don't want to forget about it it's a way if you just sneakily drain money out of my bank account like a little leech and i don't want to have a thing that i have to remember to do and to those people i say i know this is annoying but you can get into the habit of every single time you subscribe immediately unsubscribe because the way the apple does subscriptions is you'll get the app for the full month or year that you used it but when it's over it just basically won't renew it's annoying that apple that doesn't make that easier and you can complain to apple and try to make that easier you could you know it would be nice if apple said oh by default when i subscribe like basically never do auto renewing always immediately cancel the subscription um but people do do that manually but it's kind of annoying that apple doesn't let you do that but that would save you the mental anguish of not understanding that's why people keep suggesting can i buy buckets of things can i buy a one-time thing for 100 searches or whatever they just don't want to have to remember oh there's something i have to remember to do otherwise money will slowly drain from me that's what they want and apple could help fix that.

2:08:29And so that's, I feel like a lot of time, they're not saying I don't want to pay. The other thing is I don't want, some people are saying, I don't want to have to remember to unsubscribe from a thing because I know I'll forget and then you'll be secretly getting money from me and that feels bad. Well, and this is, and first of all, by the way, we do have literally a sponsor of this episode that addresses this rocket money. But also this is part of, part of the niceness of being in Apple's in-app purchase system is that the customers know how easy it is to cancel an in-app purchase subscription, and we know how they work.

2:09:01So there are some services out there. The developers know, you mean? No, no, the customers know. I'm not sure how many do know, because I think most customers feel menaced by the subscription system, and they can't find the place where they look at their subscriptions on their phone. I mean, yes, that is true, and Apple has, that used to be horrendous. Now it is a little bit less horrendous. It should be way easier, and it should be more user surfaced. However, people learn pretty quickly about that trick of canceling immediately. and that you still get your free month or whatever. People learn that.

2:09:31And not everything on the web and everything works that way, but every in-app purchase subscription works that way. Now, developers do get a server-side callback if you turn off auto-renewing. So apps can tell if they want to, and maybe they'll do annoying things if you do that. I'm not sure. It's probably against Apple's policies, but I'm sure people do it anyway, just like the push notifications where they just kind of create new categories, notifications that have you automatically subscribe to that you definitely did not opt into. Even Apple does this with their own stuff because their own services team just throws away any possible goodwill that people have with user experience on their platforms.

2:10:12Anyway, back to the topic at hand. So number two, the one thing that I think the feedback has convinced me of is that I do think a free trial is a good idea because it does seem like they do convert a lot better to real purchases than something without a free trial. So here's what I'm going to propose. Last week, we didn't really come to a consensus, but where we kind of stopped talking about it was... Well, now that you've come around on free trials, we're close. Hold on, hold on. So it was some generously sized bucket of searches, say 20, that you would get. and then after that you would only get like one per day unless you subscribe right now i'm gonna say based on the feedback and kind of a week of thinking about it i'm going to suggest something even simpler you get your bucket of 20 searches or whatever and then you have to start a free trial to begin to proceed after that no more one a day no you got your 20 searches after that you got to start a free trial to continue and just leave it at that and just implement that and then you can just ship this goddamn app and get it out there in the store and stop spending so much time on the business model because while the business model is important the product is more important and getting it out the door before our audience is tired of hearing about it is even more important so that i i think you know figure out something stop the waffling and i think that's a pretty good, pretty simple system that pleases me and probably to whatever extent possible, a little bit of John.

2:11:55And I think overall, that's a pretty decent system. My thinking on pricing when I've been thinking about it since is, yes, I still think free trials are the way you should go. But I was thinking about the total opposite end of this rectum. I talked last time about pricing it for listeners to the show versus pricing for people who have no idea who you are. If you really wanted to go totally on the pricing it for like the mass market and people have no idea who you are um a you might have to do a little bit of marketing to sort of get traction going but the the the pricing the business model that would work best i think if if we told you hey guess what casey you're gonna have lots of people who are going to at least give this app a shot which is hard to do but if but if you could somehow make that happen the pricing model that would convert those people the most is the pricing model you see everybody else has and it's going to make you cry and it's i think probably not the right pricing model for you specifically casey list because you are not the average consumer who no average developer that nobody has any idea who they are but if you were uh free trial for seven days uh annual subscription for three bucks and you're like what that's not enough money that's not enough money to cover my api cost that'll never work blah blah and a free trial on top of that blah blah that stuff like that is what you see on the app store and that converts like crazy why because it seems cheap it seems like a cup of coffee for a whole year three dollars and it has a free trial that converts people but to actually make money with that kind of model you need a lot of people to download your app and that's the tricky part i've never seen a yearly subscription that low i've seen like you know three dollars a week no i see it i see it all the time i get low-balled all the time on these apps they're like and you're like yeah sure why not five bucks for a year why not i mean think of what's that what's the what's jelly's app called gift wrapped right how much is that 350 if memory serves a year a year that's way too cheap it is i know but it converts like crazy i don't even use that app and i pay for it like just why because like that three bucks a year i'll try it and i see when it renews i'm like i have three bucks for another year i'll try it i mean granted i know jelly and i'm paying for his app to because whatever but it's just like apps like that that it seemed like they're underpriced you can make it up in volume if your volumes are really big uh the trick is you don't know if your volumes are really big so i don't to be clear i don't think that's the model for you but if you were looking for a simple for a simple pricing model that everybody understands that converts like crazy and is vaguely sustainable that's it like single single annual there's just just annual it's such a low price that it's not a barrier and there's a free trial so people like i can always cancel if i forget the free trial and then they forget and they pay three dollars a year and when it renews they see the three dollars like it was three bucks whatever i'll remember to cancel it next year that is the mass market model for an app with a single developer that is sustainable with a with a large number of customers.

2:14:37Yeah, but that's predicated on a large number of customers. If you want to go all that direction, it's like, you know,$100 a year, you know,$100 universal unlock, and you abandon the app after two years, that probably maximize your money, but people do this. So let me ask one. I know I told you I didn't want to go on long, but here we are. Now I'm prolonging it, story of my life. I have an opinion about this, but I'd be curious to revisit, even if only briefly, and I will start with Marco since John was the most recent to talk. Should I just hold my nose and put in ads? Well, first of all, the question would be, what ads?

2:15:12Like, are you just going to throw like a Google ad box in there? Because that's garbage. Those are garbage ads. They pay garbage prices and they make your app look like garbage. No argument, which is why I don't want to do it because I agree with everything you just said. I don't think I have the, I don't know the word I'm looking for, but I don't think I, I think the overcast ads are just fine for Marco. And I don't mean that to be a turd. I would love to do that sort of thing, but I don't think it'll, I don't, I don't think that would work for me. No, it's not like an easily replicable system to any problem domain.

2:15:41Like, you know, it works in a podcast app for, for an app that has a good size audience. You know, it's, it's very, that's a very, those are two very big ifs, you know? No, I, here, here's the thing. Your competitor is IMDB. Like your competitor is already an ad filled experience people come to you to have not fewer ads they come to you to have no ads and so yeah obviously you know if you're going for big mass market there has to be a free plan to use it in some way and so that will probably be ads but you see in the app store what that means you can try to have like a little tasteful ad banner i have i've done that it pays nothing you will make nothing from a tasteful ad implementation the way to make money with generic like you know Google or whatever ads on iOS is you load in as many ad SDKs as you can into the app which by the way say goodbye to your nice privacy label so you have tons of ad SDKs because you have to bundle multiple SDKs so that if one ad network doesn't have a good fill for you for that inventory some other one will fill in so you gotta bundle a bunch of SDKs You got to take the worst privacy approach you can because you won't make any money if you keep things private.

2:17:05And then what you end up getting is a crapped up app that pays you surprisingly little money for each use. And also keep in mind the usage pattern of your app really matters. In this case, your app is not something people are spending tons of time in. It's something they're consulting quickly and then leaving. So, again, you're not going to make a ton of money from ads unless you really crap up the experience. Then, if you can make it so that people are constantly having to view interstitial video ads, or if you can arrange them in such a way that you generate a lot of accidental input and make people click on them, you're basically committing fraud, but you will make a few more pennies.

2:17:46But that's a terrible way to make a living. And ideally, you don't do any of those things. ideally you can be comfortable with the fact that you're going to have a you know subscription priced app only really you know with a generous free trial situation but you know it will be a subscription priced app only after that and you're going to get the people who are not going to pay there will be lots of them and yes if you had a totally free usage pattern you could get way more people but you also would make way less money and you know so i i think it's fine to be in this category of i'm just basically paid only because the alternative would be pretty crappy i think john any other thoughts yeah no your whole selling proposition is supposed to be like imd but not sucky and filled with ads so like what's the hell the hell's the point of throwing ads in there yeah yeah the only way you could actually make money on ads and not crap it up entirely is uh step one get vc money and fund the development of this app to make the best movie lookup app that is for free and has no business plan whatsoever that is free to everybody and develop it so it is amazing and do that for two years and when you have literally millions of users and everybody knows the name of this app and every celebrity mentions it when they're on their talk show if they even still do that, talking to people and they say, oh I was looking up in call sheet and blah blah blah then you roll out one tasteful little ad and you hire a company to sell that one tasteful ad slot to your millions of people and now you have an app that is funded by one tasteful ad but that is a long road to go with a lot of things that can happen in between mean it's probably not going to happen for you so and so i would say stick to your original plan which is let's make a version of imdb that doesn't suck and doesn't have ads all over and also and and you're going to be offering a premium experience in other ways so for instance you can do things that most apps can't or won't do because they are less motivated or they don't know the platform as well or they don't have the discipline or they hire consultants to make the app and they don't want to bring them back it's too expensive so when there's a new ios 17 feature that your app could take advantage of, you can be there with it.

2:19:49You can be there at release in September with support for that feature. If they launch new Siri abilities, God help them, if they launch a series of Siri abilities, you can be there integrating with it on day one. They launch some kind of cool widget thing that might make sense for you, some kind of search integration maybe, you can be there on day one. Those are things that your premium app can do because you're an enthusiast in this area and you care about stuff that power users care about and people will pay for that. That's a premium thing. Whereas the rest of the market, like the mass market, they're just going to use IMDb and have their wall of ads.

2:20:23And if you provide your own wall of ads trying to attract them, not only does it dilute the value of your app to the people who want the premium experience, but it also largely – like you're going to lose that battle. They're not going to find your app. You don't have the brand recognition of IMDb. Yeah. Like they're not going to find your app. And if they do, they're going to be like, why am I doing this instead of IMDb? so your app should be only premium it should be like this is a premium experience for people who are aware that imdb exists and want something better and the way you serve them is with a premium experience with a subscription price