541: Make a Little Maze

48:17And apparently Apollo is following in the footsteps of our other beloved apps, Tweetbot and Twitterific, and is doing the, you know, hey, you can choose to get your refund, but would you like to not get your refund? Which is what I actually went and updated Apollo earlier with the expectation that I would see that prompt and would immediately say, no, I do not need my money back. But it didn't prompt me. So I don't know if maybe I didn't grab it. Yeah, I did the same thing. Yeah, maybe I think expired. I don't know, but I updated for the same reason. Or maybe you weren't on an annual plan? That's what it was.

48:51I think I did a one-time purchase. You're right, because I think I did the$70 super mega one-time purchasing. I think that's what it is. Good call, Marco. A few things to know here. So first of all, we didn't talk about the Reddit thing yet, because none of us are super into that community, so we don't really know much about it besides... Wait, I thought we... Didn't we talk about it? I thought we talked about it. No, we never actually did. Oh. That's why I kind of object to Casey's summary, which is not particularly accurate. But go on. All right, no. All right, fine. Screw it. Let's dig into it, man.

49:17Yeah, all right. Let's go back. All right. So Reddit's being a jerk. No, so looking at the Reddit situation, again, huge disclaimer that none of us are heavy Reddit users. So we're not really in that community. So it's hard to judge the nitty-gritty specifics of it. But if you look at the behavior of Reddit's CEO, Steve Huffman, is his name? I believe that's right. Yeah. again, this is not part of my world really so I didn't really know him but it's hard for me to think less of him than I think right now because the way he has conducted it so what they've chosen to do in broad strokes is Reddit has decided fairly recently, like in the last few months they decided we're going to start charging money for API access and look, it's their company that is their prerogative to do they can choose to have an API or not, they can choose the terms with which that API is used.

50:15So it is their prerogative, just like it is Twitter's prerogative, to set pricing or limitations on their API or to say, you know what, we don't even want this kind of app to use our API at all. Or they can say, hey, we're not even going to have an API. I run an app with a web service, and I choose specifically not to have a public API for lots of reasons. So that is their prerogative to choose that and to operate it as they see fit for their business and whatever what makes this needlessly hostile and horrible are multiple factors you know number one as as casey said like the the pricing that they chose to set was pretty high and basically makes third-party apps impossible now again that is their prerogative they can do that but there's like with many things with twitter's horrible new owner there's a good way to do things and then there's a jerk way to do things and you can you can make these exact same decisions and do them in a better way with more notice better transitional opportunities or terms or you know just warning or something like there are better ways to do it and at every step of the way reddit ceo has chosen seemingly the most hostile and worst option for both the company and for him personally like when you look at the dynamic here you have a large company reddit um you know this billion dollar company that's trying to ipo apparently uh that's been around forever and you know it's a it's a big thing it's a big entity you know lots of power lots of lots of money behind that going to battle with this one independent app developer this individual guy christian selig who's like just the one there's like a handful of them they're doing battle with all the people who make the popular third-party clients well yes that's true but in particular see but in particular like he has lobbed personal attacks in public against this against christian selig as a person like he's he has attacked his integrity he's lobbed accusations like serious accusations he did the same thing about the a couple of the other developers too as soon as the other developers popped their heads to whoever does the riff app he said a bunch of stuff about him that also wasn't true so he's equal opportunity jerk.

52:26But the best part of this, though, is that it turns out that Christian in... And you should watch or listen to... I think... Did he do it on video? He did a video. Christian did a video with somebody and he did an episode... That's who it was. Thank you. He was also on the talk show recently. That was the other thing I was going to bring up. Both of them are excellent. Quinn did a fantastic job. Gruber did a fantastic job. They're both worth watching, despite the fact that they cover similar territory or listening or whatever. But the best part is, in Canada, my limited understanding is, which is where Christian is based, it is single-party consent to record a phone call.

52:59So if Christian says you can record this phone call, you can record that phone call. And he recorded all these phone calls with Reddit where they claimed that he did a bunch of really sleazy, Christian did a bunch of really sleazy, gross stuff. Well, guess what, baby? He has receipts. And so he posted little snippets where it clearly debunks these just utter bullshit claims that that reddit is making it's just gross i don't know how christian is as kind and upbeat as he is i guess hashtag canada uh but it's i would be so mad i am mad and it doesn't even happen to me like i am of the three of us i am the heaviest user of reddit and i am at best a light reddit user and i am furious about all this and i can't believe how gross reddit has been through the whole thing Yeah.

53:45And like if you look at, you know, obviously we're much closer with Apple. We follow Apple. We comment on all our stuff. So we've seen over time there have been many stories in the press about some dispute between Apple and an app developer often, you know, over maybe some kind of app rejection or something or some kind of terms thing or some kind of, you know, alleged problem. and Apple never punches down. Apple almost never comments publicly about these reports and if they do, they never punch down. Now, I have heard through various back channels occasionally that a version of the story that's in the public is not the full story and that Apple actually had good reasons to do what they do.

54:36Like, this has happened before and yet even in that case even in the case where a developer is trashing them all over the press and apple could kind of you know exonerate themselves in some way by saying something publicly even then they don't because they are run by adults who and and they're a big company and they know like that would be like punching down and that would that would not be good for multiple reasons and not just yeah not just the punching down thing it's bad pr like yes they're they're the way you do it is they're they're consistent and so their consistent wall of not saying anything as much as it frustrates us doesn't allow you to interpret their saying nothing as an admission of guilt or not and so again if you have if you have a third-party developer who's lying about apple saying apple did this to me and they did that to me and apple knows for a fact that that's not true apple will continue to say nothing because they have nothing to gain by refuting part of it is because they have all the power if they don't want your thing on the store it's not going to be on the store maybe if you're super big and important like you're epic and you're in a big lawsuit about them then you know people get on on the witness stand and get deposed for legal proceedings and maybe even tim cook would comment in public but that is like the last resort but for an individual dinky developer who wants to lie through their teeth that apple did this that and the other thing and apple knows it's not true they're never going to say anything because that's called discipline pr uh but you know the human inclination of course is oh but i know that's not true and i'm gonna go back out and whatever toddlers are running reddit like cannot resist the urge to do that and so they do yeah and frankly like again i don't follow reddit i don't know anything about steve huffman but the way he has handled this in in the pr sense again setting aside the business question whether they should charge for their api and how much they should charge and there's a whole other thing with like how they treat moderators which is horrendous like there's so much there's such a mess on their plate right now entirely of their own doing um But just seeing how Steve Huffman has handled public comments about the situation and about actually lobbying accusations against these individual developers, he is not fit to run a company of that size.

56:39That is – it's so grossly unprofessional. In addition to him clearly being a huge jerk, I mean that's obvious. He's definitely a huge jerk and definitely, I mean I would say a liar. Like it's hard to candy coat that like when you see like he's literally just blatantly lying. But just his handling of the PR just shows he is totally unqualified and incapable and inappropriate to run a company of that size. Yeah, I tend to agree with you. And the funny thing is, I think some of this was just, ooh, let's get angry about something. But I think it started from a good place. And a lot of subreddits, basically communities within Reddit, decided, oh, we're going to protest all these charges.

57:19And I think that was in no small part because the unpaid labor of Reddit, the moderators of all these communities, use these third-party apps to continue to moderate these communities. And this is unpaid work that benefits the communities, but also benefits Reddit. And the moderators are losing these tools as part of the collateral damage of these decisions. So a lot of subreddits decided to shut down effectively for a few days. And I haven't kept my thumb on the pulse as to what ended up coming of that, but it sounds like nothing. Yeah, I think nothing. then some of them decided to be funny and or snarky.

57:55I think the F1 subreddit decided to mark themselves as not safe for work, which isn't really true. And they came up with a somewhat cockamamie, but also believable excuse that, oh, racing is dangerous, blah, blah, blah. But the reason they did that was because Reddit doesn't put advertising on not safe for work subreddits. So now they're, they're seemingly cutting off, you know, some of Reddit's revenue. A lot of these communities are still dark. They're, they're basically not public at all. You'll know this if you try to Google for something and get a Reddit result, which happened to me many, many, many times in the past week.

58:27Google still has the cache versions of them, but it just shows you how many times you don't realize that one of the results you click on is Reddit. Exactly. And so a lot of these subreddits are still dark as far as I know. And actually breaking news that I noticed literally as we're recording. um so reddit has come in and basically said which we did know already said to some um some of these communities look if your moderators are going to keep this community dark we will put in new moderators we will ask for volunteers to be new moderators which i get why they're doing it but that's super sleazy super gross and so then breaking today also again just unwise like i i know i think what one thing that has that has been become very clear uh with this whole drama is that reddit thinks they are much more important than their community is yeah and the community showed them otherwise and by the way good for them like the amount of like the the strength of the reddit community and the reddit moderators that they've shown during all this is impressive like it is really quite something and reddit the company i i think was caught totally off guard and again like If they had a capable leader in place, this never would have even gotten to this point.

59:38Again, even if they decided we should charge for our API and this is what we should charge for our API. They could achieve the same result on not that different of a timeline with the same terms, the same pricing, even with having apps probably shut down. They could have achieved the same result in such a better way if they just handled it better. And if they just weren't flaming, you know, flaming the fire at every step they could rather than taking the easy, you know, nicer approach or the better PR approach or just the more mature adult approach. Yeah, on that topic in terms of the actual terms of the deal, this is actually something that we've talked about a lot on the show over the years, mostly in the context of Apple.

1:00:22Often I end up comparing it to the gaming industry, but like when we talk about the App Store, right? and the deposition and what the various people who are on the stand for Apple would say about the App store and how they view the value proposition this is a little bit of an epidemic even among the best companies where uh there'll be some company that we usually talk about in terms of a platform like gaming companies have platforms so the game console apple has platforms right but also in reddit you know they have a community a a relationship with a bunch of other people or entities that are not the company that forms the whole so apple makes a platform third-party developers make apps for it that forms the whole of the product you get a phone apple puts a bunch of stuff on the phone you can get third-party apps game consoles somebody makes them they're first-party games but they're also third-party games reddit they put up a website they run the servers but then it's a system where other people can come in and make communities and run their communities they're using reddit software they're using reddit server um they're both getting benefits from that thing right and the the problem a lot of these big companies have been having lately is the people who are in charge of them have started to miscalculate the what that relationship is really like always in the same way the way they always do it is they think that they are more important than they really are so if you're apple what you think is basically you should just even be lucky that we're letting you put apps on our thing uh you know you your app wouldn't even exist if we didn't make this platform therefore we are clearly entitled to all of the money not all the money but like a big part of it and what we're entitled to what we think we're entitled and if you're going to come here and say that we shouldn't get that much money you're wrong because you don't understand the value we're bringing right not only that how dare you question our our value how how dare you think that our customers are your customers how dare you think that you that you bring anything at this table at all practically speaking apple does have all the power they can just kick you out of the app store right and because they have that power it starts to convince them that they have more that they are responsible for more of the value than they actually are or whether you think it's they actually are basically what it ends up with the companies that run these things end up in a situation where their picture of their participation in the value thing stops matching the other people's picture of their participation the value so apple thinks it's worth x and the app developers thinks apple is worth x minus two and they have a disagreement and as they start to spread from each other they have different different conceptions of what the value deal is here they get farther and farther apart and that causes tension and unhappiness on both sides right reddit twitter same type of deal like you can go through it all people will list off all the things like well you know you wouldn't have a subreddit if reddit didn't exist but reddit wouldn't exist if people didn't add content and all those moderators are working free and reddit the website that nobody uses has nothing no value whatsoever and every piece of value the reddit have is because people went there but people wouldn't have gone there reddit and make it and you go back and forth and back and forth here's the deal all all that matters is is there agreement is there some kind even if it's just like uh you know an agreement where everybody's a little bit dissatisfied between how the value is divided and this gets to things like oh okay we want to start charging for an api right all right so you have to come to you have to make sure that when you enter into that thing that your idea of how much value that you're providing and how much value the third parties are providing match each other and they have to match in all the ways they have to match in sort of like what we feel but they also have to match in like what we can afford like we talked about this with apple like the e bookstore right the the ebook industry publishers authors that whole cluster over there that existed before the internet doesn't have room to give 30 of a book sale to apple there the percentages of sales for books are like where they go to the author the publisher but that's already all divided up there is not another 30 hanging around to give to apple apple doesn't have to pay itself 30 % for its iBook store.

1:04:18But if Amazon wanted to sell Kindle books through, you know, according to Apple's rules through the App Store and their app, they would have to give Apple 30%. That 30 % just doesn't exist. So that's why you can't buy Kindle books inside the Kindle app on the thing. Apple refuses to change the rules. But like that, those things aren't compatible, right? So with Reddit, they're saying, Okay, we can charge this much through API. And they're probably thinking, well all the app developer has to do is increase the price of its app by the amount that we say and this is an economic situation we're like they're like but we don't have that flexibility if we raise our prices like that the number of people who pay for our app will drop to one percent of what it was and it doesn't really matter what would actually happen all that matters is what people think would happen so apollo is shutting down rather than raising its prices 10 times right because he is calculating whether correctly or incorrectly that he can't sustain that price if you charge me this much and i pass that on to my customers my customers are going to flee and i'm not going to have a business so i'm preemptively saying that i don't have a viable business and that shows that reddit in making this decision of how like the value is going to be a portion in their community miscalculated it has produced it has offered something here is our api pricing and that is not palatable or acceptable or reasonable to the people who make the apps and if if reddit wants third-party applications they should have rethought that if they don't want 30 third-party applications good job you did it right you scared them all away well not even that it's like like bad job it's like i think clearly they don't want their party applications well you can do it in a way you're saving face you're like we didn't say you're banned we just set the prices and if you didn't like the prices so like they they they executed this so poorly on every level but but they think they think their api is worth that much their calculation was we this is how valuable we think we are previously we were giving this away for free because we were so magnanimous but now when we look at the overall picture of the ecosystem here's what we think our value is as the api provider therefore that's how much we're charging and you can say whether they're right or wrong about that their right or wrongness depends entirely on well what does the other side of this think like did the third parties agree with you that you're worth that much if they agreed they would pay it but if they disagree they're not going to pay it and you've failed to come to an agreement and we talked about this with apple and app developers and game developers because the game console makers are incredibly evil and cutthroat and draconian and just have like a reputation that would make apple blush right they are not nice to people they want control of everything nintendo used to make you pay them to manufacture your cartridges you couldn't manufacture themselves you had to pay nintendo to do it and they would charge an arm and a leg they're just insane deals but through all of this the game consoles always knew that for us to be continuing to be in this industry, we have to make nice with the game helpers somehow.

1:07:07We can be bitter enemies, but we have to find a way to come to an agreement. Whatever that deal is, you'll be a launch thing. We'll make a special version of the Xbox with your game branded on it. You'll be a bundle tie in. If you make this game for us, we'll give you this many millions of extra dollars. It's a business, right? And they figure out business deals and they and more importantly they try not to miscalculate what their value is can we go to this game company and say hey if you want to be in the next playstation not only are we not going to pay you anything but you have to pay us 100 million dollars and then we're going to let you put your game there and they go oh sup see you later and suddenly be like whoa we miscalculated right what's happening is the people who run these companies apple to a lesser degree because it is sort of a more of a slow motion disaster but like twitter and reddit in particular twitter and Reddit in particular are run by people who massively miscalculate their value portion of the of the whole and then act based on that miscalculation with disastrous results.

1:08:03Right. Again, it doesn't even matter if they're right or wrong. All that matters is what the other side of this equation thinks if you're right or wrong, because you need to get agreement with them. And this is what frustrates me so much. It's like business 101. Right. It doesn't actually matter if your product is worth or not worth this it only matters if people are willing to buy it and you could say oh it's dumb that they're not willing to buy it but if they're not willing to buy it you have to do something different and just the red thing i mean you know elon musk is just a jerk who cares whatever but but the red thing it seems like they truly believe that if we just hold strong and and you know don't and you know do strike breaking i'm gonna be like reagan and i'm gonna fire all the air traffic controllers and it's like you're taking the wrong lessons from history here people like and they're just doubling down on it because they're like this is how we want it to be it's like if you want to have a business with no third-party clients and all the people who traditionally use reddit scared away like what i don't know what you're gonna have left after that but if you wanted to like not totally destroy the value that you had established in reddit you're doing a lousy job of it and i i find it incredibly frustrating this is slightly different than the you have to believe this the certification thing which i'll try to find a link for i think that's subtly different this is much more of just the simple case of of thinking you are of misreading the room as we would say of thinking that you are your relationship with your third parties in your communities is different than it is and maybe you don't realize over the years your opinions have drifted apart or maybe this guy became ceo because his pitch to everyone else in the company was like we've been giving this api away for free do you realize how much value we're giving away we just got to turn on this money spigot and we'll all be rich boys and they miscalculate it and it's just and also their jerk on top of that and everything right but like i still feel like even if they did it in the nice way one year sun setting period uh you know easy ease people out uh give people some like people established clients like apollo would have two years to do it and you know even if they did the nicest way possible the bottom line is at the end of that kind of twitter style when they you know before they killed the api twitter before elon basically stopped allowing third-party clients but allowed existing ones to continue you to sell a fixed number of things still they changed the shape of their business they changed it in a way that was worse for a lot of people and a lot of people didn't like and that is either an intentional plan that they didn't want a service for people have third-party clients or they didn't realize what they were doing they thought oh it'll just be like it is now except we won't have this problem you know there'll be no downsides the upsides will be we don't have to worry about that and we can show ads to everybody and there's no downsides and there absolutely are downsides and like reddit's doing the same thing where they feel like we can start changes the api everything else will be the same everybody will love us all reds will have lots of activity we'll just make more money and that's not they shouldn't have thought that's how it's going to work and that's not how it has worked and i really just wish all these people well with the exception of elon because there's no helping him could just sit down and like learn to share like kindergarten style and learn how like in any kind of relationship or negotiation you have to come to some kind of consensus or agreement to find a mutually beneficial solution you can't win by stamping your foot and saying this is what i want i'm never changing it i'm doubling tripling quadrupling down even those aren't things uh and if you defy me i will kick you all out and replace you with i guess people who want to uh be moderators in a situation uh where the company's going on tubes like this very frustrating and i'm not i'm not a ready heavy reddit user either but it frustrates me to see people making such obviously bad decisions and it reminds me a lot of Apple where they miscalculate their value proposition with their third parties.

1:11:35And it has led to like years at this point, we're up to a decade of just unfortunate, unnecessary tension between Apple and developers where there should be, you know, a more mutually beneficial arrangement where people aren't quite as unhappy as they are right now. It's just too bad. And my limited understanding, or I might have this wrong, but if Christian and the other third-party app developers had time to work with, they might have been able to make this a tenable situation. But the problem is, is that Reddit is going to crank up the fees from, I think, either literally or effectively zero to literally millions of dollars in the span of just a couple weeks.

1:12:19And, you know, three, four weeks ago, Christian was still accepting, you know, reasonably priced subscriptions for a price point of free and so now he can't float this literally hundreds of thousands if not millions i guess millions of dollars until he can start ratcheting up the prices on his existing customers it's not the customer's fault they didn't do anything wrong it's just that reddit has spontaneously decided to charge you know a 10x or whatever or effectively infinite more if it was free more money and they didn't give christian and the other app developers the time to work with that.

1:12:55And Christian has been pretty clear in any of the communications that I've read or listened to or what have you, that if he was given the time and if the fees were reasonable, he thinks he could have made this work. But because he was given no time and the fees are astronomical, he has no chance or excuse me, no choice but to basically sunset the app. And so that's actually why we were brought here originally was to talk about the plan for sunsetting the app because there's multiple problems with how that like so the the main problem is that reddit gave like a month notice for this massive change but apollo like many apps sells annual subscriptions and the way apple the same problem hit tweet button twitterific when twitter cut them off with very little notice but no notice actually they just cut them off like so you know so same problem here um almost as bad as that uh we at least at least christian at a few weeks notice but anyway so the problem is when you buy a subscription from the app store when you buy a year subscription apple will pay that out to the developer in full at their next payment which is usually about a month a month and a half away so you basically are being paid the in advance for the whole subscription or at least from for all but like one month of it if the value of the subscription disappears apple has to refund those customers money they don't have it it isn't necessarily always a policy choice there are certain like legal requirements where like in many countries and states they have to do that so in this case apple basically has to refund the money and then will you know debit the developer's account by whatever the value is of any unclaimed uh refunds now if you explicitly opt out as the customer then apple does not need to refund your money but by default they will refund your money for that subscription or whatever time was left on it and that's going to put christian in the red by hundreds of thousands of dollars yeah his his back of the envelope math says it's a quarter million dollars that he's going to basically owe apple yeah and apple will have to collect it from him like it's they just they kind of have to do this and so again this is why a better way to do this by reddit would have been give him six months or a year notice and then then he could like you know stop selling those subs immediately and then figure out do i want to sell a more expensive plan or do i want to shut down the app either way that gives a lot more time to not be on the hook for so many refunds all of a sudden so anyway uh and again exact same problem happened to tap bots and uh and we and and twitter that's why apple has a plan for this because they basically got to figure out how this is going to be handled with the twitter clients and now they're just rerunning that same playbook i mean to the point where i think the uh like apollo devs and other are talking to like the developers of the twitter apps to say hey how did you handle this and how did it go for you and everything yeah so two things number one if you have apollo and if you have ever paid for for a subscription in apollo there is an update that christian issued today in the app store right now um go check and see if you have this latest update and it will offer you if you have one of these subscriptions active that will be automatically refunded it will offer you an opt-out screen we suggest you opt out uh that's it's the nice thing to do and it'll help out a developer secondly um as a final farewell christian has added uh this this like wallpaper pack that you know he's had all these relationships with great designers that have made icons for apollo over the years so you know these awesome design resources you can buy as like a fun little thing in the app so i suggest it might help him out he didn't you know he didn't ask us to say this but you know you know in this community i like to think we help each other out and i mean certainly you know we did we did whatever we could for icon factory and tap bots and i want to do the same thing here please decline your refund if you have one and please consider buying the wallpaper pack or the tip jar is still in the app you can leave you can just it's a simple in-app purchase tip jar those don't have to be refunded so if you go buy something in the tip jar whatever amount you feel comfortable with you know that could really help a really good developer get out of a really crappy situation.

1:17:06And finally, I would urge Apple to consider either an option or a requirement that annual subscriptions don't get paid out all at once in advance. Now, you could say that all of us who are getting paid these annual subs, all of our individual businesses and developers out there who are getting paid this, you could argue that we should properly account for that and account for it over the time, and say, all right, well, we're going to kind of keep this money in a reserve and just like take it out of this reserve and pay ourselves, you know, one month portion at a time for the duration of the subscription or whatever.

1:17:44Yes, we should be doing that. And I think that's a kind of a wake up call for all of us who have annual subs in our apps that, oh, crap, we need to start accounting for this. But that's that's a lot to expect a lot of people to even think of, let alone to do. So ideally, Apple would not pay us anything that has to be refunded. See, what normally happens with App Store payments is the delay between when somebody buys something in your app or buys your app and when Apple pays you out, it's like a month and a half, which I believe is long enough that they can be reasonably sure they're not going to have to refund it by that point.

1:18:19so they know that whatever money they pay out to developers on that month and a half timescale if it's not for something longer than that time like if it's just you know for a quick in-app purchase or like a one month or month-to-month subscription they know they're not going to have to issue mass refunds for any of that stuff so that's why i think i think the twitter thing caught them by surprise that i don't think they even had a mechanism in place to get money back from developers oh i don't know about that my uh my app figures reports are often negative numbers i mean obviously i'm sorry my daily total will be a negative number because obviously i'm not selling copies of my dinky applications and sometimes the only thing that happens on a day is someone asks for a refund and then after the negative number which is not a great feeling but still apple apparently does have a mechanism for that well but you probably have never had a negative payout like well we'll see you know give me time well anyway so the point is i think i think this caught apple off guard as well like i think they didn't expect to have to all of a sudden have a way for developers to pay them back a large sum of money um and also you know i i think i hope that this has kind of woken them up to this being a problem as they allow purchases that have durations beyond their payout window by a large by a large margin and you think about how long the app store has been around like it's been around since 2008 it's not a new phenomenon and here in fairly short order we have multiple instances of this because it's not the type of thing that would normally happen you normally competently run sort of platforms and communities are run by people who understand you know the delicate balance and work to maintain it and recently a bunch of people have not been working to maintain it and i feel like apple was caught by surprise because it doesn't seem like like in in any kind of sort of you know expected business scenario stuff like this wouldn't happen except for like maybe extenuating circumstances or like a family-run business where somebody important dies and and people are fighting over it succession style or whatever but in general like the fact that we made it from 2008 until now without this being a big issue and then all of a sudden it i feel like this is an industry's trend and i want to reiterate the same point i made 50 times people in the chat room are saying well like oh you know uh he doesn't have to worry he doesn't have to worry about that with apollo because he could just start charging the new rate and that big refund he would make that up in new customers anyway so it's not a big deal again it doesn't actually matter if the api pricing actually is tenable or untenable with no notice all that matters is what christian thinks it is that's what business deals are like you can argue all you want with somebody but if he thinks this is not going to work for his business and he thinks his only option is to shut down he's going to shut down and reddit that is your problem if you thought it was a good idea to have apollo if you didn't then fine good but if you did think it was no amount of arguing to saying christian could support this like that's that's the you know the reality of business it only matters what other people think and what you can convince them of it doesn't matter what the reality is maybe this this pricing would work perfectly and so anyone arguing that he's doing this and he's silly he should just start charging and he would be fine you could be totally right but it doesn't matter doesn't matter also you know i would venture to say chances are christian knows more about his business than you random commenter do again i'm not i'm not arguing one way or the other it's just that the people the people always want to argue the point of like they think they they think they know and they think that the christian is wrong to to do this and it's like it doesn't actually matter who's right or wrong in in a business relationship you have to come to a agreement that you think is mutually beneficial you may be totally wrong one or both parties may be totally wrong and ends up not being mutually beneficial and somebody ends up getting screwed but they have to think it's okay to agree to it my favorite one is what uh was it spyglass who like licensed the browser engine to microsoft or internet explorer um and their deal was they get a percentage of all the sales and then microsoft gave away internet explorer for free so whatever their percentage was of zero they got zero and microsoft is pretty good at making deals but the thing is when they made that deal they thought it was good they were wrong but they made the deal and then it's a signed contract anyway just you know that's that's the reality of the world and i do think this trend is worrying the fact that it's happening a lot more recently yeah well and and i think you know this the reason why this exploded in this way you know there's obviously many factors here like a you know obviously you know reddit's run by jerks and they're apparently trying to IPO, whatever.

1:22:30But, you know, B, we're in an area of, like, the economy has gotten tougher for tech companies. You know, money is no longer free to borrow. Everyone is starting to look for returns and look for profitability and everything. And so in that kind of environment, people start tightening their belts and people start looking for different, you know, hey, where can we, where can we, you know, scrounge up some more money out of our, out of whatever our resources are? Because, you know, maybe we're having trouble hitting our quarterly numbers or whatever, because it's hard economically right now. So you see companies like, hey, whatever we were giving away for free, yeah, we're going to stop doing that.

1:23:04Or, hey, this thing that you pay money for, we're going to increase the price on that now. You know, because that's just part of what goes on when you have economic conditions like we have right now. And so the combination of that, along with, you know, Reddit apparently wanted to IPO or whatever, I don't follow that too closely. And also the trend of increasing use of subscriptions to pay for apps. and I think that all has come together. That's why the app store hasn't seen this like this, you know, that's why this hasn't come up in all this time because 20 years ago, 10 years ago, five years ago, we didn't have a lot of apps monetizing by paying, you know, 10 bucks a year or whatever.

1:23:40Like that wasn't as common of a thing back then and has become much more common in recent years. And now you have these, and also, you know, these apps were built on services that at the time that they were built and first used, the services were generally friendly towards the concept of third-party apps that's why many of them have apis and and then that whole culture has shifted over time and that you know very few companies are offering apis anymore those that are are very restricted and tend to be like you can't just make a third-party client you can like you can add value to our platform but you can't take any or whatever you know so it's much more like that but anyway so all this is to say please everyone if you have apollo go get it or you know open it up get the update decline your refund if you if you at all can and i hope you can and consider putting some money in the tip jar.

1:24:26And secondly, I really urge Apple to consider a change to how subscriptions that are longer than a month are paid out. I would love if Apple would take that accounting burden on themselves at their level and say any subscription that's priced longer than a month, we will dole out your payments in monthly increments. And whether you have to have an opt out for that for like big companies, if they want to do their own thing, fine. But that should be the default the default should be you are paid only one month worth of each subscription every month until it expires and and the bar for the bar for that not happening to you should be somewhat burdensome some kind of paperwork or accounting requirement or maybe they're required to be an a corporation rather than an llc or individual or something like some other kind of you know paperwork barrier so that developers like me and christian and icon factory and soon possibly casey um aren't all of a sudden thrust into hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to apple if something we depend on all of a sudden goes away yeah i mean here's the thing apple we pay you between 15 and 30 percent earn it like this is why we pay you 15 to 30 percent so this attitude is exactly the type of thing that i was describing where apple would have to take this new account because you may be listening to this and disagree with casey saying that they are earning it or they aren't or whatever and you may hear marco saying well why don't you just do the counter like you said marco you should just do it or whatever here's the deal if you're apple and you run the platform what you have to do the math on is okay we know there are people who are individuals selling apps like christian selling apollo like marco selling overcast they're just one person they're not big companies right we could ask them to you know require you ask them to do the accounting on their end they really should they really should account for it this way they'll make money they can make money on the float in the meantime i'm saying like we could we could say hey you should really do that but will they do it and if they if If we think that we can scold them and tell them and have WBC sessions that teach you how to do basic accounting to spread the money out or whatever, will that actually work?

1:26:24And if it doesn't work and those developers end up shuttering their app, if that's a result Apple doesn't want, what Apple has to say is like, look, we know developers could avoid this by acting in a different way. But if they're not going to act in a different way and we can't convince them to act in a different way and we don't want Overcast to be shuttered or Casey's app to get canned because all of a sudden they start changing for his API. eye. Is there something we as Apple could do to help our platform be successful as a whole? Like, say, giving out the money a month at a time, which is more annoying for us, although we do get to keep the money on the foot, like Marco said or whatever, but it has upsides for us.

1:26:58But it is a change on our end that someone looking at this might say, why does Apple have to do that? Why don't you just learn how to count for your stuff? It doesn't matter who is right or who is wrong. It only matters what thing can you do as a platform owner that will lead to more future success and fewer things you don't want to happen and if you don't want developers apps to get snuffed out of existence because the platform they were running on did something jerky if you can do something to make that less likely and you're apple you should do it and instead of spending all your time saying we shouldn't have to do that marco should just learn how to do basic accounting if you want to have that attitude you better hope that marco learns to do basic accounting but if he doesn't and marco's app goes away and that's not what you want it like it's it's it's so it's so frustrating it's it's the same thing in politics same things in relationships is do you want to be right or Do you want to be happy?

1:27:43Like all the arguments I see around the Reddit things are people who just absolutely want to be right and don't care anything about people being happy. As a final note before we move on, if you are interested in supporting Christian, you can do all the things that Marco was talking about. But also Christian makes Pixel Pals, which is sort of kind of like a Tamagotchi-ish sort of thing. And I mean that in a good way. It's pretty slick. It started as like a little thing in the blank area. Well, not blank. You know what I mean? The kind of no man's land in the area above the dynamic island. And now it's its own app and it's very cute.

1:28:18And you can pick up Pixel Pals and put a link to the app store in the show notes. And you can check that out as well. We are brought to you this week by you, ATP members. Actually, probably not you, listener, who's hearing this right now, because members don't hear the ads in the show. And this is going to be marked as an ad. So members get an ad free version of the show. so look we love either way you listen to the show if you want to support us by listening to our ads that's a great way to support us if you want to support us by membership that's another great way to support us maybe even greater because membership gets you some fun stuff too for just eight bucks a month you get the ad free version of the show you get the bootleg feed which i'll explain more later and you get occasional fun bonus content and maybe occasional discounts here and there merchandise discounting here and there um you know right now you're currently getting access to Casey's app, Betalink, and TestFlight.

1:29:07So there's all sorts of little fun stuff we throw in throughout the year for members. The main thing, though, is that ad-free version of the show. That's what most people sign up for, and we find it's very well-liked. We get good feedback on that and on the bootleg in particular. So the bootleg is our unedited live stream. So if you want to listen to this instead or as well, this is the unedited raw version of the show. It has nothing taken out. It has also no ads added in, and it's kind of everything we record during the live stream. So it includes beating an end kind of discussion, side discussion here and there.

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1:30:23All right, let's do some Ask ATP. David Hadley writes, I'm curious what you think about the framework laptop, which claims to be a modular, upgradable, repairable and e-waste reducing in contrast to basically every other laptop on the market uh it is it looks super interesting and it really appeals to the nerd me the big problem is no mac os this is something that we one day is this something one day we might see apple do or maybe forced to do by regulators so if you're not following what the framework laptop is it's basically a laptop shell that you plug a bunch of components into and you can change the motherboard reasonably easily certainly a lot more easily than most laptops.

1:31:01It has a series of ports on the side that whatever port is being exposed to the outside world, it seems like basically internally, all of them are just USB-C devices. So there's like a USB-C socket on the motherboard that you would plug maybe HDMI, maybe USB-C, maybe one or two USB-As. And so you can kind of configure these laptops to be whatever you want them to be. I think this is super cool. I would never in a million years actually want one though because it's one of those things where part of what makes a laptop, any laptop, not just an Apple laptop, but part of what makes a laptop so great and allows them to be thin and light and whatnot is because there are no affordances for changing those thin light internals.

1:31:48And I totally get what the framework laptop is after. I think it's a very clever idea and it seems, having never handled one, to be implemented well. but this is fixing problems that i don't personally have i think if it ran mac os you know we might have a different discussion uh but ultimately the there is a cost of modularity uh and and it's it tends to come in in bulk and physical complexity um and and so at the same time there are costs to apple's current approach of being almost entirely non-modular like you know a typical modern Apple laptop, you can replace nothing. Like you have no options.

1:32:31Uh, you, you can't even do basic service, uh, uh, you know, to replace like, you know, a dead, you know, SSD or RAM stick or whatever, like those things are all out of the question with, with any modern Apple stuff. Um, but you know, first of all, I think the market has spoken that largely the market prefers things to be, you know, nicer, you know, pre-made, you know, sealed up and less service ability over time if that means they can get something like thinner and lighter and and you know nicer looking uh and everything like that but also you know if you if you were to actually add all the all the capability and complexity the physical complexity to make these things more modular i think what you'd end up with is a laptop that nobody buys and that's why that's why these tend to be these kind of like you know specialty enthusiast products and even then i think they have a hard time computing and lasting very long but if i was you know more in the pc world and not the mac world i would consider something like this maybe if i if i had these kind of needs but but again like it seems like the companies like this give you lots of different options to put together a laptop you don't want but ultimately i'd rather just get the one i do want and i think too many people think the same way to let these companies last very long.

1:33:53I hear you. However, they have an expansion card that's an Ethernet jack or Ethernet port. How nice is that? And leave aside the fact that it's a bulbous thing like it used to be in our college days. It sticks out the side of the laptop. Does it have an X jack connector? No, I wish it did. I know we've talked about that so many times on the show, but I wish it did. But I mean, it looks kind of gross, but you can have onboard Ethernet. And I tell you what, if there's one thing I wish my laptop had, and I'm not kidding, I really do wish it had Ethernet. I understand why it doesn't. I get it. I'm not here to litigate it.

1:34:24I'm just saying I wish I had it. But you can get a microSD expansion card. You can get DisplayPort. You can get an audio expansion card, which basically looks like a headphone jack. You can get USB-C, USB-A. You know, there's all sorts of stuff you can plug in here, which, again, I love the idea of this. I agree with what Marco said. You're creating a laptop that no one will ever buy. John, I think I cut you off. What was your opinion on this? Yeah, the economics of these things are pretty tricky because the reason why it is appealing for customers, whether they're old fogies who remember the way things used to be or whether they're young people who can just understand the like the concepts is like, OK, well, I spend a lot of money for the laptop.

1:35:03But if I decide I want to, you know, it doesn't have enough memory. Wouldn't it be great if I could add more memory to my existing laptop instead of buying an entirely new laptop? Because adding memory costs less than buying a new laptop. So that is giving me by buying your product, I'm getting more value out of it because I'm not forced to buy an entirely new laptop when something about this laptop doesn't satisfy my needs. Whether it's a lateral move, like swapping these set of ports for that set of ports or an upgrade, faster CPU, more RAM, whatever, you know, better screen, whatever thing you want to replace.

1:35:37Me as a customer says, I like that. I like not having to buy a new laptop. So the product is more valuable to you, right? to the person selling you the product though that's worse for them because when you buy a new laptop you give them much more money than if you just upgrade the ram that is assuming you even buy the ram from them which is a whole other issue of like hey can i buy third party things into this or can i only buy the proprietary modules in this company but either way the company says well okay but if we can't sell you a new laptop in three years we're just going to sell you like a you know a hundred dollar ram stick or something that's not good for us because we have to pay our employees and design the next one of these laptops or whatever so the way companies like this square this and there are lots of companies like this in the world is if you're going to buy something that basically lasts longer in this case we're saying it lasts longer because you can upgrade it with technology marches on but anything a blender a bicycle you know whatever you can buy one that will last you longer because it's more durable because it's more modular both it will cost you more money and the reason it costs you more money is because you're not going to buy another blender from this company because this one's not going to break in two years so they have to get the money from you now and they're selling you what you agree is a more valuable blender or more valuable bicycle because it will last you longer and you won't have to buy a new bicycle and in exchange for the value you give them more money and that chases you up the price scale until all of a sudden you're like i wanted to get this so i didn't have to buy a new laptop but now this one costs twice as much as a new macbook pro i know that isn't true of this this framework thing but i'm just saying just in general when you make something modular and longer lasting you're either going to go out of business or you need to charge people more money for it and you run up against these these barriers pretty quickly now when technology fits with modularity like when we're using rams on sticks marco just said ram sticks there are no ram sticks in max of course we all know this right there used to be ram sticks even in laptops little tiny so dims right when that was already part of the product because that was the best and only way we had to make the product it's already modular and so why not take advantage of that apple used to sell ram upgrades for their laptops and used to be able to upgrade the storage or whatever but as technology marches on and you and that is not an inherent part of the product but you'd have to add it in yourself companies have to run the experiment hey if we seal the battery into the bottom of the 17 inch laptop will people still buy it or will they be like hell no i need to be able to replace the battery on a flight and my battery runs out i want to swap in a second battery apple ran the experiment with whatever it was the 17 inch power book whatever it was the answer was customers were fine with it you know it's more annoying and they wish they could change the battery but did they stop buying laptops no they did not and then soon that happened everything else same thing with phones used to be able to swap the phones in the back of your cell phones and people love to do i ran out of battery i can put a new one or whatever cell phones stopped doing that first they made it harder to do it then they just stopped doing entirely just like apple did people stop buying cell phones did some company that made a cell phone with a changeable battery did they come and sweep through the market and dominate no they did not so people are voting with their wallets and with their feet and they're saying we like the advantages of simplicity no grit that gets in there uh you know no snapping little shell that keeps coming off no connector that gets wonky or whatever to seal the battery in no i can't replace it yes it'll eventually go bad and then i'll buy a new phone customers are choosing that so the only people who won't choose that are the people who value the longevity and flexibility and the only way to make money from those people is to charge a lot and then you get into a smaller smaller market.

1:38:59The only thing that will change this is change in the incentives. One example would be a dystopian sci-fi scenario where we don't have the resources for you to buy a new laptop every three years. So the only way that we can economically make laptops is to sell you one and you have to use it for 15 years with every component being modular. And then all of a sudden the math works out differently because you can't buy a new laptop every three years because there's not enough beryllium or whatever the hell element ends that we end up running out of in this dystopian sci-fi scenario. Or we've polluted the planet to the point where there are laws in place.

1:39:27that's what the person says like where regulators make this no regulators would never make them do this we can't even stop global warming but anyway in a hypothetical scenario where the external incentives change suddenly the value proposition of this product changes entirely because the other thing isn't an option anymore but i think what we've learned is when the other thing is an option that's what people prefer uh and the only way to stop it is to is for you and several billion of your friends to stop buying cell phones with sealed in batteries then they'll get changeable batteries. But if you don't think you can convince people to do that, that's why cell phones don't have changeable batteries.

1:39:59Zach Rochette writes, I've started to limit what apps I grant full photo library access to, but it comes at a cost. It's quite annoying to have to manually select new photos to include every time I want to. Say, share a recent picture in Slack. When an app requests permission to access my photo library, what does it actually mean? Does it mean an employee at that company could browse my photos at will? Does it mean the app could scan my library for any information that's in there? Or is full access less permissive than it seems? So it's been a year-ish since I've looked at this closely, but I ran into this for both Peek of View and for Masquerade.

1:40:32My recollection, which check my work on this because it's fuzzy, is that full photo access basically means that you have mostly unfettered access to the user's photo library. Now, presumably, you would know one way or another if your entire photo library was being uploaded because your internet usage would go up, your phone would probably get hot, etc., etc. But strictly speaking, that app can look at whatever photo it wants whenever it wants. The advantage, though, and it's in most apps' best interest not to go that approach because you have to do a whole bunch of things and ask for permission in very, very scary ways to get full photo access, where if you just do the, you know, this app can see the seven photos dance, an app can actually use that technique and this is what i do in masquerade you can ask the system i would like one photo one photo only please and then you don't have to do any of the scary permissions dialogues because you are doing a what is it xpc a call a cross process whatever call that basically says to apple system look i don't care what you do or how you do it just give me a photo back please and then apple is the one in charge of like browsing through your photo library representing the whole user interface and letting you pick which one you want.

1:41:50And you have, as an app developer, you have no sight into that whatsoever. All you know is you get an image coming out the other end. And for most apps, that's actually preferred. And I hear what Stephen's saying, that that's kind of a pain in the butt. I know what Instagram does is the middle of the road thing, which is what I was describing, where it says, okay, you can have access to just these 12 photos. But the most convenient thing as an app developer and as a user, in my opinion, is to do that one shot. And again, this is what Masquerade does if you want to check it out. Just, hey, the user would like a photo.

1:42:22Go get me a photo, please. So that's, honestly, if you have an app that loads users' photos, I would really look into that API because it's pretty good. But yeah, if you could do full access, that app developer could be super shady and you'd be none the wiser. I don't know. Marco, you haven't run into this any, have you? No, I don't really work with photos. So in the regular photo access, do you get the location info or does your app have to request location permission? Because I think the most sensitive data in your photo library that would be the easiest to exploit in creepy ways would be the embedded location history.

1:42:56Because not only would you have a good idea of where their current location probably is, but you would have their entire location history, which is obviously extremely sensitive data that you know would be exploited by ad companies as much as possible. Yeah, I understand what you're asking, and I don't know. and part of the reason I don't know is because it's never even crossed my mind to look because I'm not a sleazeball. I would guess that with full access, you almost certainly get that data. Again, just a guess. I don't know. I'm not really sure what would happen if I were to wager a guess for the other modes.

1:43:31I would think maybe you do get that location data, but I cannot stress enough that I really don't know. This reminds me more old man stuff of how far are the computer industry come from the early days of not naivete, but just like it was so much smaller. So many fewer people even had computers, even before the internet, computer security, the things we're just talking about just didn't exist. Like even in the early Unix systems that were networked across the entire country with universities, you know, Telnet sent your passwords in plain text, TTIs, TTYs were world writable by like, sometimes you could have accounts without passwords, and people would do it routinely, because it was just the honor system.

1:44:10And everyone just be careful, right? And you just had to trust everybody because everyone was that's literally like the first version of instapaper you could just you could set no password you could just have it be blank and i didn't care and nothing bad happened you could do that on mac os i think you can still do it on mac os like but but like the defaults were just everything was open right and over the years as the internet has become a thing and as the world has gone on the internet everything computing platform has added things like this photo permissions that we're talking about but it all gets back to the same thing this question is about what an app could do if you give it full photo access that app could upload every single one of your photos to its database have an ai crawl through it to look for naked pictures of you and you know do whatever with them like and obviously what could you do to stop that well if the country you're in says it's illegal you could try to prove in a court of law that they did a thing that broke the law and then sue them or get them arrested or whatever but you also have to first know that they're doing it because maybe they're doing it behind your back and you have no idea and it all gets down to the same thing back in the olden days which is you have to trust the person who develops your application because every application if it does something useful could also do something nefarious that is the the nature of power it is easier for it to have access to all your photos but then you have to trust that the person who makes this app isn't uploading all your photos looking for naked pictures of you or stealing your location data or whatever right and yes the os has it's good the os has these barriers you're saying you have to give it permission give maybe give it location permission allow it to use the camera allow it to record your screen allow it to use the microphone but you have to say yes to that for lots of apps to do their job.

1:45:36And at that point, you're in exactly the same situation you were in the 60s where people are logging into Unix things and everything's running over the internet in plain text. You have to trust the person or company that made this application that it is not doing something nefarious. And that will never go away because in the end, you want it to do useful work for you with your data. So you must give it access to your data. And we don't want to give it more access than it needs, but sometimes the amount of access that it needs could be used in a terrible manner. and that's why you know people and companies reputations matter that's why apple's reputation matters that's why if a company does something bad it hurts its reputation and people will trust it less if apple was stealing all your photos and doing something you know selling your location data to some ad company or whatever that would make us like and trust apple less and if some you know we've had store apps in the ios app store that were like stealing all your contacts was like path was doing that or something um before it was you know forbidden by the u.s before you had to asked for permission and people found out about it and they thought less of that application and stopped using it and that is you know that in the end that is the system so yes lots of people get scared when when they realize what this application quote-unquote could do but you have to think then but is the application doing that and if you think the application is stealing your photos don't use that app yeah this is why i used to be pretty cavalier about it for facebook properties including Instagram, I immediately went to limited access because I have zero faith that they're not doing something gross.

1:47:04But generally speaking, ever since the whole limited library thing became a thing, I basically have chosen that whenever I can. Stephen Collins writes, with all the discussions about cameras the past few weeks, this was written several weeks ago, I was wondering how you carry these cameras around. I realize that most normal people don't need a bag for three cameras, six lenses, and other assorted bits like cards and cables, but I was curious as to how you guys handle all of this. I know John is taking a bunch of stuff to the beach. Are you all just using the standard one camera bags that I see everywhere and also own two of, or is it something different?

1:47:37For me, this is going to infuriate my co-hosts. I just chuck the camera and the lens in a lens bag. Just chuck it right into your windshield. You put it on the dashboard. That's exactly it. That's exactly what I do. Yeah. I just sit on mine immediately. Right. I just chuck it into whatever bag I'm taking to the beach and call it good it's and i haven't yet had an issue knock on wood uh what is the correct answer john i mean i don't know like i don't have a lot of experience with these things i've tried to get a bunch of bags that are better than doing what you're doing which is not hard um i think i talked about this when i got it on some episode that i'll never be able to find again but i did get like a essentially it's a backpack for holding camera junk and it comes with a bunch of these little velcro dividers so you can sort of like if you're looking top down on it you can make a little maze that exactly fits your cameras and your lenses in some scenario it's kind of like uh i was gonna say like paying tetris which people are more familiar with but it's actually more like the inventory system in resident evil 4 or something anyway finding a way where these things fit in with a little velcro you think it wouldn't work you think velcro wouldn't work you think it's kind of janky it works surprisingly well it's kind of like a cheap version of making a custom bag where you have like foam inserts or whatever anyway i use that instead of an actual backpack i use this camera backpack uh and i endorse it it could be better but it's pretty good for the price i paid for i put a link to my backpack and the show notes i think it's called the hex ranger or something or other i also have this holster thing for a single camera it's like a single kind of like holster style bag where like camera and its long lens go into it kind of like a gun in a holster and it goes like a shoulder strap and that's good for a single camera you can put a single camera in there with varying size lenses because the lens part is like an accordion that gets longer and shorter depending how big you want it to be um i have one of those as well and it's pretty okay but it's a ringing endorsement look i mean from john you know how many camera bags camera bags are like backpacks like non-camera back like there's a million of them out there lots of companies make them and it's really just what your personal preference is i would say try to find one that you think you'll like you're probably going to have to make more than one try unfortunately because you may think you like something until you get it and you find out you're wrong but i would say get something something is better than nothing i would say that like the amount of protection that you need is probably less than you think like when i first got this backpack i was like all those little divider things like they don't seem too thick and the walls of this like that's just you know a centimeter of this foam stuff unless you're going to be first don't take your backpack and like throw it across the room onto the hard floor don't drop it from three feet in the air but if you just treat your thing gently anything better than like the thin single layer of canvas of like a Jansport backpack like any amount of padding goes a long way and especially if things are packed in there you know again Tetris or Resident Evil style where there's not a lot of room for them to move and they're all up against something squishy that's pretty much all you need just be careful with your stuff but I don't have any specific recommendations for things that I think are amazing I think these things that I have are better than what I was using before and I'm also not looking to replace them but I'm also not a professional photographer who's constantly running around with my equipment so if you just and want to go on vacation once a year, something like these things will do fine for you.

1:50:38That's the thing. I've had both, quote, camera backpacks, which is similar to what John was describing, where you had little inserts that you velcro around to wrap around exactly the stuff you used and be exactly the size you want. I've had both that and regular backpacks. I'm currently kind of in the middle of those. My current main backpack is the Peak Design Every Day, which has been around for a few years now. I have the first version, the large size of it. and I love it because one of the reasons why I'm always frustrated with backpacks is that most backpacks you have like some number of side pockets, inside pockets, outside pockets, but there's like the main compartment in most backpacks that is just one tall compartment.

1:51:21And what happens is you lay it all out. You get, oh, I'm going to solve this problem. I'm going to have these different arranged things in here. Maybe I'll have a sub bag inside my bag. Then you put it on. And as soon as you put it on, all the stuff in the main compartment sinks to the bottom of the main compartment. Everything is disorganized. And then you have all this wasted space up top in this gap. And then everything's down below. And what I like about the Peak Design every day, I think it's key innovation, is that in the main inside compartment of the bag is three of those Velcro things that form little shelves that you can move up and down anywhere you want in the bag.

1:51:59and they have little foldy ends that you can like fold up one end of one to make like a long vertical compartment if you want to but then have these little like you know velcro shelves at different heights in it so it actually divides the main compartment height wise into different levels and and you can move those around and make them bigger or smaller so i usually operate with like one big top level and then a couple of small ones at the bottom where i could stash stuff and i think it was actually i think i think it was designed to be a camera bag and i just use it as a regular backpack that occasionally holds cameras, but because it was made to be a camera bag, it is a little thicker and a little more padded and a little more structured than most thin backpacks are.

1:52:38So I would actually say not only is a camera bag a good option for carrying cameras, I think camera bags are the superior backpacks in general. Camera backpacks tend to be the best backpacks, in my opinion, for my preferences and my needs, just because it's carrying. maybe it isn't always carrying a camera per se but it's usually carrying electronics of other kinds at least you know it's at least carrying like a laptop or an ipad or both it's it's probably carrying other like a little electronic gear maybe it's carrying like a little portable game system or something or whatever i'm bringing on whatever trip or carrying for the family or whatever it is so chances are if you have any kind of electronics that you're carrying in a bag a camera bag is a good choice because they are made they're designed to be padded and protective of electronics and as john said you don't need a ton of protection but it does help to have some i i'm a big fan of using camera bags in general even when they often don't contain a camera um and i and again i can't say enough good things about the peak design every day um and and its system of these these movable and removable um you know horizontal when you're holding up the bag horizontal shelf pieces that you can divide up the main compartment into no other bag that i've ever seen and i i bought a lot of backpacks over the years no other bag i've ever seen has has kept me happy for as long as this one has and through as many different varied conditions as this one has and it's and it's almost entirely down to those wonderful divider shelf things that you can move up and down that way i don't i don't just have one giant main compartment where everything's going to the bottom so anyway that being said when i do carry my camera to answer steven's question here when i do carry my camera it is in this bag like everything else that i carry everywhere else and if you have a big bag or something you can do it like you don't i think you only need to graduate to the thing that i have with all the little dividers and everything if you're in my situation where i have two cameras and multiple lenses so i have two cameras both of which have lenses on them but then there are also multiple other lenses that's just too much stuff to be rattling around even with multiple compartments even with three compartments there's more than three things and you don't want to put things next to each other where they can bump into each other right so that's when you know you've graduated to that but before i was in that situation where i had two cameras and multiple lenses i had a single camera bag where my camera would fit in there and like the one or two lenses would fit in there and i would put that bag inside my boring regular laptop because the single camera bag had padding in it and the items were packed in there tetra style like with padding between all of them and i would close that bag and i would put that bag inside my backpack and same thing with the holster thing the holster thing can fit inside another bag because the holster is somewhat padded or whatever you know so i you know don't run out and buy this backpack that's going to fit all this gear because you put your one lonely camera in there especially if you don't even have any lenses for it or it's not even interchangeable lens camera it's a waste right that's where you can even if you have a single big camera like marco does with a big lens if you have you know two or three of them and you have two or three compartments in your peak design everyday backpack you're fine but once you're like okay well whatever with this lens and this lens is this lens then you're into tetris land and that's when you have to get the other thing so i wouldn't you know don't run out and buy something that fits way more equipment than you need you'll know when you can't do it anymore but in the meantime like especially if your camera comes with a bag, as a bunch of mine did, if your camera comes with a bag and your camera fits in there with its charger, with its lenses, with its thing, seal that bag up and then stick it inside another bag.

1:55:57Bag in a bag. Bag in a bag. Thank you so much to our sponsor this week, Meh.com, and thank you to our members, especially who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. We have wonderful new member special out where we tier-ranked all the iPhones to date, and that is it is so much fun you should really check it out thank you so much again to members you're really um you're helping us out a lot these days so thank you so much for that and we will talk to you all next week now the show is over they didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental oh it was accidental john didn't do any research marco and casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental 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 And T-Marco-R-M-N S-I-R-A-C USA Syracuse It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech podcast so long John, tell me what's going on with your AirPods They did me dirty?

1:57:33I don't know what the right phrase is here Yikes AirPods AirPods Sometimes you put them in your ears and one of them doesn't make any sound. And then sometimes you've got to put that one back in the case for a few seconds to make it happy. Are you familiar with this phenomenon? Yeah, I don't feel like I've run into it too frequently recently, but yes, I'm familiar with it. Oh, I have. AirPods are like the French chefs of electronics. Like, God, they're so good most of the time, but man, are they unreliable. Sorry, French people. That's probably mean. Yeah, yeah. Like, I just, I cannot, like, between the last generation airpods pro and this generation airpods pro they are so buggy the new ones are less buggy than the old ones but they're still really buggy yeah and so because they're like you know what airpods like they're the tiny little plastic thing like you don't know what's going on inside there what is the problem is it a software problem is it a hardware problem there's such tiny little components is some tiny little component like poorly soldered and or like coming loose over time or is it everything in the hardware is working perfectly and it's actually a software bug with a stupid bluetooth stack and the connectivity like you can never tell there's no way for you to debug this because it's just they're two tiny little computers in your ears and you don't control anything about them and it's just like like you know people will ask you if you're a tech nerd in your life they'll say one of my i put my airpods in and one of them's not making sound what can i do about this and like you have to tell them like nothing like you can do here are these steps that you can do to make it work again why did it work again i don't know i've just learned through trial and error that if you do these things sometimes you can bring them back to life but sometimes you can't sometimes you got the airpods pro that make the crackling noise sometimes they just flat out die right it's just a thing that happens it's not great but airpods are such an important part of my life that i'm you know i i have to have airpods and that leads me to you know more recently the other thing that happens sometimes is you'll take them out of the case you realize one of them just didn't charge in the case for some reason even though it's been there overnight one of them is oh yes i've had that yeah and one of them is at two percent and it goes in your ear or whatever oh mine usually it's just dead like you take it out like oh why am i only hearing it on one ear that's weird and one of them's just yeah one's just dead yeah so anyway um i have airpods 3 that i bought when i think when they first came out um and they've been pretty good for me but a couple of days ago i took them out of the case and uh one of them wasn't making any noise uh and um but the other one was and i remember someone came up to ask me something just as i put them in and i i reached for the right my right ear and i pinched it with the little pinchy thing and you know it's like that uh it's kind of like the feeling of walking onto an escalator that's not running you pinch you pinch the air pod and it's so freaking dead that it doesn't do the haptic feedback yep and it feels just so wrong like you pinch it you're like what the hell like when i pinch this i'm supposed to hear a little chick in my ear and the little hat you know and it doesn't do that that's how dead it was right i'm like i'll put it back in the case or whatever charge it and you know whatever go back to what i'm doing try to pick them up because i had to have my airpods in so i can listen to podcasts while i'm doing dishes and cleaning the kitchen right obviously it's not like i'm gonna leave them and come back and i listened in one ear for a while but that's unsatisfying so we went back and i'm like and then i'm looking then i'm opening up the the bluetooth thing and look at the charge level where it shows you it's like left ear at 100 right ear doesn't exist no icon underneath it at all it didn't even show the little battery icon anyway um to shorten this up i spent three days trying to resurrect this sucker did all the things you do oh forget this device try a different device try a different charger try a different airpods case try a different wire try this try that try hard resetting them try hard resetting the case try repairing with a different device just like i'm because i have you know this is not my first rodeo i've messed with airpods before i tried it i tried it every night they were always on a charger on a different charger making sure they you know come back to life i'll resurrect you charge you 100 like whatever your problem is come back to me come back to me three days three days which both of which involved overnights in a different new ideal charging situation to really just resurrect this sucker for a good 12 hours overnight right and the right one was just well and truly dead just nothing like you when you when you looked in the battery thing it wouldn't even show the little battery icon underneath it like not a peep from it no noise no sound no haptic feedback absolutely nothing then i go to the little apple sport app and like are these still under warranty and of course they're not because i think i just didn't get apple care plus or whatever for them right because i had generally pretty good luck my son has the same airpods 3 he's on his third pair oh his his like the first one's like totally lost base the second one that one of the ears went super low volume and his were all under warranty repairs but like just luck of the draw and i got unlucky right so i can't not have airpods so i ordered a new pair of airpods 3 and of course i had to get my name on them because you have too many freaking airpods in the house i need to know which ones are mine did you get your memoji that's so cool when you do that i did not i just got my name i wish it wasn't all caps but it is oh that's so boring well it's easy to tell and it makes it less desirable theft target i suppose anyway see i i i have my face on mine that i think that does the same thing yeah i don't know but a lot of people look like you all those emojis have the same face shape anyway um so i ordered new airpods 3 and you know rather they couldn't they didn't come and meet i could have got them immediately i just got into an apple store i could have had them like that nine dollar like you know same day delivery or whatever but you can't do that when you want them monogrammed and i did want the monogram so i i'm like i'm gonna have to go with that airpods i pulled out one of the kids old pair of airpods because the last one my daughter was using like the original airpods and they were flaking out on her and for like for christmas she got a new pair right of airpods three but her old ones still work so i was using them in the house okay uh so i ordered the new airpods and you know the weight and they got the onogram and they're shipping they're on their way as soon as this thing ships the old airpods start working again of course of course why did they start working again i have no idea i did nothing to them i had written them off for dead they weren't even on a charger for crying out loud they were just sitting in the case three days i spent doing everything i could think of and just it never it was not a peep the thing gets shipped i pick up the old ones put them in my ear to see like they but no they work neat so can you return the monogrammed ones no oh so here's what i'm gonna do first i can learn my lesson i put a little reminder that's gonna go off probably tomorrow buy apple care press for you for your new airpods and like i hope they'll let me do like the annual thing where it never expires because basically i'm just on a subscription plan for airpods i'm never i can never not have i just have i'll just keep paying apple and every time they die i'm just gonna bring them back to the apple store and say yep they died again give me a new pair yep the dot again give me a new pair whatever i have to pay to make that happen if it's a reasonable like annual fee i will pay that

2:04:42I hope that's the case. I'm terrified something's gonna get wrong anyway by the way I cannot see any uh monthly option for the apple care for airpods pro yeah but anyway two years is better than that because like I don't have faith that they're gonna last the two years and it's a shame and I don't know what the problem is but like and I don't know why these came back to life so my plan now I guess is to just spread my usage across these two and one set will be my bedroom uh airpods and one set will be my everywhere that's not the bedroom airpods and then at least my usage will be spread out between them i don't know if that will make them both die faster or will that make them last twice as long but i'm not returning them i'm disappointed in airpod reliability but this is just you know just an fyi for airpods i mean maybe look into third-party ones like sony and other companies make other things that go in your ears but i like the apple ones i like the integration i like how they feel in my ears i like how they sound i like the battery life i like pretty much everything about them although i do miss still miss the tapping right um but reliability has been hit or miss and i've had airpods continuously since the very first pair uh and my luck has been pretty good but my kid's luck has not been great so that's where i'm at double airpods honestly i've i've been a double airpods pro person since the airpods pro came out um because i i again i also use them very heavily uh i use them every time i leave the house for like a dog walk or something um i stopped buying those big full-size noise canceling headphones for planes and i use only airpods pros on planes now um and you kind of need two pairs sometimes to get through a very long flight uh but i i i have two for various reasons and i i basically like one stays in the backpack all the time and one is like the regular usage one and occasionally the regular usage one i will have forgotten to charge it and so i'll go to the backpack one for that dog walk or whatever but um i can tell you it's it's kind of a nice life it is stupid it is unnecessary but it does come in handy sometimes like again maybe my main ones are dead or what happens sometimes maybe i am you know on i'm on a trip and one of my other family members forgot their airpods at home i have spare one i can get i can let them use this one like that that happened you know this kind of stuff happens so it's not having having an extra pair of airpods in your life is uh is not as ridiculous as it sounds and you will find ways to use it surprising opinion from marco yeah very surprising my airpods are uh are never like the battery never runs out of my airpods like i am maybe because i'm just very good about charging things but like i use them so much it would be as unheard of as me picking up my phone and not realizing the batteries that that just literally never happens so i don't i don't know i don't have that hole in my life but i do i'm still trying to decide what to do i mean they're sitting here at desk they're in the box i literally haven't opened them but they have my name on them and i'm not returning them you might be able to return them you might want to look into it i don't know i'm sure i could but i'm just not going to just like i i now it's kind of i'm not like cheese graters like i don't need to have 50 of these but i i i had to for for three days i was without airpods using my daughter's old janky pair and the new what the airpods 3 do sound better than the airpods one we said this when they came out they still do and uh i didn't like it i just it's an important part of my life like like marco said i i wear them anytime i'm doing something where i'm just like mindless you know not mindless like walking the dog uh cleaning the kitchen doing dishes surprising amount of my time it's even when doing like workouts and stuff i have the airpods in and i'm listening to like podcasts or music and stuff uh they're a really important part of my life and being without them uh is frustrating and so one way i can mitigate that is apparently to have more than one pair yeah like i i can't tell you like how how much i use airpods and and like how just how incredibly good like i The regular ones never fit me, but the AirPods Pros fit me great.

2:08:28And just how incredibly good of a product the AirPods Pros, Pro, I guess, how good of a product they are. Oh my god. Every time this comes up, I'm never going to stop singing the praise of this product. I am such a headphone nerd. And I have gone through so many over the years, so many portable headphones, Bluetooth headphones, wired portable headphones. And the AirPods Pro made me forget about all of them. and it made me totally stop looking at any kind of headphone that's for anything other than at my desk they are just that good they are not only extremely convenient and practical and small and easy to bring anywhere they also just sound really good like for their for what they are for their size for what they are i mean they blow the category out of the water like in in how good they sound for you know compared to their peers um so they are it's just a fantastic product despite all the bugs and despite that i've also had occasionally to have to replace one under warranty and like despite all of that we tolerate all that because they're just so good so i when i dropped off aaron's car at safe flight for the replacement we had a first thing in the morning replacement i didn't want to sit down there for the two or three hours it took them to the to replace the windshield so we dropped it off the night before and for uninteresting reasons i I accidentally left my AirPods Pro in the passenger side, like door handle grab area.

2:09:57There's like a little gully there. And so I was without for an evening, which I could have handled. But like John, you know, I do the dishes. I occasionally go for walks with either the dog or just as exercise. And I didn't want to be without any sort of AirPods. So I resurrected my AirPods. I guess this is maybe two, whatever. It was the first time you could get them with a Qi charging case, I believe. So it's not the AirPods Pro. It was the original AirPods, or again, maybe the second generation, in a Qi charging case. And I resurrected them, and I put them in. And I only used them a couple of times, and it was for podcasts.

2:10:33And I didn't do any sort of real A-B testing or back-to-back testing, I should say. But maybe I just forgot how to get a good fit with the original AirPods because I'm used to the more rubbery tips of the AirPods Pro. But oh, my word, did they sound like garbage compared to the AirPods Pro. and I should probably, had I known we were going to talk about this, I should have done a test again, but they sounded not great. And the AirPods Pro, like Marco just said, and I'm on the original AirPods Pro, I really want to get an AirPods Pro 2 or whatever they are, you know, the ones with the improved ANC and all that.

2:11:08And I feel so guilty about it when I have AirPods Pro whatever one that work just fine right now. Now, then again, I didn't go to California, this month, so maybe I could or should repurpose some of it. I'm going to just give you an excuse for all frivolous purchases for the rest of the year. I absolutely am. You don't want to save it until early next year? Yeah, well, we'll see. But nonetheless, I cannot believe how much better the AirPods Pro sound. Again, this could be user error. It may be that I just didn't have a good seal. No, it's not. It's not user error. The AirPods Pros truly embarrass many other headphones that are both larger and more expensive than they are yeah like not it look it's not going to replace a full-size pair of desktop wired headphones it's not that good but it is surprising for little earbuds that are little wireless things that stick in your ear and have noise cancellation like they they truly embarrass all of their peers it like that are directly comparable and then even even headphones above their class they embarrass many of them as well.

2:12:16They're really an incredible product.