566: Using It Is Wearing It Out

35:49Pat on the back for me. Well, all sorts of broke stuff broke today. And so I'm shooting from the hip a little bit at this point, but here we go. And let's start with what happened at something like nine o 'clock in the morning, Eastern time. It was broken, I think specifically to nine to five Mac, or at least in part to nine to five Mac, but nine to five Mac wrote that Apple is pausing sales of the Apple watch series nine and Apple watch ultra two in the United States due to a patent dispute. And there had been rumblings about this in the past. I don't think we ever talked about it on the show, but in short, there is a company whose name I don't have in front of me, but I believe begins with an M that has patents on, uh, on how to do blood oxygen detection.

36:31And they have claimed that Apple is infringing on those patents. And I guess it's going through the courts and that's not going as quick as this company wants. So they appealed to some other jurisdiction or organization, the international trade commission there you go that has said okay yeah we agree with you other companies so we're going to tell apple they have to pause sales of the devices that infringe on these patents which is basically the series 9 and ultra 2 for now as we sit here on monday the 18th they can still sell them through other retailers so like amazon and best buy for example um they they can still sell these devices but it is possible that around christmas time they will also not be able to sell these devices.

37:14So it's a big mess. And I'm surprised it's gotten this far. So I don't even know what to make of this. I mean, this is why we really haven't covered it on the show yet, as far as I am concerned, is like there's weird patent claims against companies all the time. And then they settle and then it goes nowhere and it's fine. Like someone pays some money and the lawyers make most of it. And it's in, you know, like all use of patents, it's just a tax on everybody and it doesn't really protect anybody from anything um and the lawyers make out with all the money the end congratulations that's the u.s patent system um so a lot of good there the promoting innovation good job everyone so normally these cases you know they breeze through the news and they don't go anywhere because they get settled out and you never hear about them again so when this stuff started with uh massimo as the company when it started you know them making claims against the apple watch i think they've been making claims against the apple for years now.

38:08Again, we just thought, at least I just thought, well, it's going to fizzle out and get settled or something. That's what's going to happen. And that's it. And so to have us be at the point now where Apple has announced that possibly as early as next week, they might have to stop selling their two flagship models of Apple Watch, leaving only the Apple Watch SE in the current lineup, that's substantially different news than we usually hear. That's a big deal. I'm guessing it won't actually get that far, or if it does get that far, it will be a fairly brief shutdown of sales. You've got to figure Apple is pulling out all the stops to try to get this resolved in some way.

38:55um but you also know that apple is i don't think apple is super willing to give on you know threats of patent litigation like this like i don't think they're going to just say all right massimo here's a whole bunch of money we're going to license your patents and give you whatever you want like i don't see it ending that way necessarily uh what's probably going to happen is they're going to try to get around it with some kind of technicality and then there will be more lawsuits and it'll prolong stuff and it'll it'll just kick the can down the road further that kind of thing can be successful for years so that's probably what's going to happen here but in the meantime if they actually go through with this because what they all they said so far is basically that they think they'll have to go through with this if they actually have to go through with this and actually have to stop selling most apple watches uh in the u.s for a while whatever that And, you know, and look, it could be a week.

39:51I'm guessing if it happens at all, it's going to be very brief. It would surprise me if it was more than a week. But we'll see what happens. You know, stranger stuff has happened, I guess, in tech. But it will kind of be interesting as a, you know, as tech enthusiasts and as a tech podcast, it will be interesting to see if it does happen. Because this kind of thing pretty much never happens in our world. It doesn't make it up to the level of being visible to consumers like this. So this could be interesting. Yeah, so Apple released a statement about this, and you can see a glimmer of Apple's potential strategy because you would think Apple's statement about this would be all about how, you know, usually Apple's statements are, here's the thing we're doing.

40:33So first of all, this one's weird because it says, here's a thing that we might have to do in the future if everything continues the way it's going, which is weird, right? You know, so they're like, but the very first sentence of the statement kind of hints at what they're going for uh it says this is from apple's statement first sentence a presidential review period is in progress regarding an order from the international trade commission blah blah blah blah right so it starts by saying hey there's there's a thing that's under review by the president and if nothing changes and if their review period goes through and we have to do all this stuff we're going to do these things right it's like you know Apple says, Apple is preemptively taking steps to comply should the ruling stand.

41:17Right? So what does that even mean? I mean, I guess you could like, well, get ready to stop selling stuff. You know, I guess there may be there's something they need to do. But why issue a statement about, just so you guys know, there is a presidential review period. And unless things go our way, unless someone changes their mind, we're going to have to stop selling Apple Watches. It's convenient for Apple, by the way, that they have to stop selling them essentially on December 24th and 25th. So they get all their holiday sales, but they don't really get any post-holiday sales. And, of course, you know, Amazon and Best Buy and stuff can sell through their inventory or whatever.

41:50So the interpretation of the statement is basically Apple announcing to the world-slash-president saying, you wouldn't want us to stop selling Apple watches, would you? Because it's kind of a popular product, and we're kind of a popular company. And if you don't do something, Mr. President, we're going to have to stop selling Apple Watches. Doesn't that sound terrible for you? So just we're putting out this public statement. I mean, everybody involved knows this, right? But Apple puts out a public statement that says to the world, and, you know, we're talking about it on this podcast, something that everyone involved in this, you know, issue, the review board, the two companies, everyone already knows that.

42:29but apple is kind of putting it out in the world to put pressure on the president to you know overturn this or to you know whatever whatever they have the ability to this review period of saying because either you let it stand or you like counteracted in some way and i think apple is hoping that the president will say oh don't stop apple from selling the apple watch they're a big important company and they make a lot of money um i'm not quite sure how the system works i don't pay too much attention to patent law i'm not a lawyer i hate patents with a passion um I'm not sure that gambit is going to work, especially because Apple put out the statement.

43:00If Apple wanted to do this, they should be working back channels, not running to the press because that never helps. I mean, you can assume they probably have tried that already. Right, but this is like the last ditch thing of like saying, hey world, we're going to have to stop selling Apple watches for dumb patent reasons. And this kind of is related to yesterday's last episode where we're saying that Apple is a U.S. company and they are subject to U.S. laws. And sometimes there are those laws that they don't like. like laws about handing things over to the government, or in this case, patent laws.

43:28Apple patents everything because as a big company, they have to. The system we have is you have to participate in it. You don't get to be the size of Apple if you don't patent everything under the sun. A lot of the times you're patenting all this bogus stuff so you can use it as defense against other people using their bogus patents against you. And this war of mutually assured destruction, which is totally pointless and stifles innovation, and the only people it makes happy are lawyers. It's terrible, but it is the system that we currently have and apple sure as hell participates in that system it's kind of you know a bummer for apple in this case it seems like they don't have enough patents to retaliate against massimo and massimo's playing hardball and it's not being bought off at the price apple thinks is reasonable so it's a game of chicken now it's like do you do you people and government of the u.s really want apple to stop selling its two flagship apple watches indefinitely because of some company you've never heard up with some super dumb patent you don't want that to happen, do you?

44:23And Apple is not currently lobbying for reforming patent law. And I'm not sure if they even would, because again, Apple participates so much in the system that it's hard to know whether they like it or not, but they have to participate in the system. It would be great if they lobbied for, you know, reform on software patents and reform on patents in general, but that is an uphill battle with lots of forces going in the other direction. It doesn't seem like Apple has much appetite for that. So here we are. They're just out there saying, I know we have a stupid system and we tried to settle our way out of this uh now we're doing making a last ditch sort of plea to the anyone who can overturn this to say how about just let's not do it in this case i don't know how that's gonna work i one thing i i think is for pretty sure apple will not stop selling its flagship apple watches for very long i mean worst case scenario apple just buys the company like apple like apple can solve this problem with money they just don't want to right They don't want whatever Amasimo wants.

45:20They don't want to pay it. But believe me, Apple can pay it. Whatever the amount is, Apple can pay it and will eventually pay it if this goes on long enough. So Amasimo is, you know, betting that they can just drag this out to get a little bit more money. But in the end, Apple's not going to spend a year not selling its two flagship watches. They're going to pay whatever it takes to make this go away eventually. But they're going to try everything else first. And this is one of those things. Yeah. I mean, that's kind of that. That's the racket of patents. It's just extortion. I mean, that's like, that's, again, promoting innovation with patents.

45:53What you're really doing is, you know, creating legal methods of extortion. And that's, again, it's one of the many reasons. And it makes it so that only the richest companies can even participate because it's impossible, as we've discussed in the past shows. It's impossible to make any technology product without infringing tons and tons of patents that you can't afford to license. like that is not you know the purpose of the patents is supposed to be for whatever the whatever the quote is from the relevant law of like the the encouragement of the whatever arts or whatever and it does the exact opposite it makes it it makes it so the only way that you as a small company can have a tech product is if you get lucky and hide because and the big companies violate so many patents but they also acquire tons of patents to retaliate against and against anyone and then you have patent trolls we're like haha we don't make anything so you can't retaliate against us and it's just it is the worst system and here we have hopefully this will motivate some patent reform or maybe give apple an appetite for it because again apple participates so heavily in the system that i can imagine within apple there are sections of the company that think oh patents are great we just you know our patents are super important remember when steve job was up there with the iphone oh boy have we patented it right they always sound great when you're on the side of like using your patents to beat down other people it's not so great when it goes the other direction the whole point and look at how well that worked for them like it didn't even work that well for them in the end no it doesn't work it'll never work it's because everything is stupid and everyone all the big companies acquire tons of these patents and they make it like apple licensed the one click patent you remember that amazon had for kids don't know apple uh amazon.com the place that used to sell books online now sells everything patented the ability to buy something with a single click yeah which if that sounds dumb to you welcome to patents uh and i believe apple licensed it for like for the itunes store or whatever right because that's the way it works it's like how many dumb patents do you have how many bun times that's why patent cross-licensing agreements happen like i think apple did a big cross-licensing agree with microsoft was like look we have tons of dumb patents and so do you how about we just agree that i can use all your patents and you can use all mine so at least we can ignore each other and just worry about the other people who are constantly suing us for patents and stuff um and we don't have time for an entire show about why patents are dumb i'm sure people disagree with us see many past episodes where this has been discussed including a couple on my old hypercritical podcast our position has not changed since then uh and especially i think the entire apple ecosystem got a taste of it with the what was the the round that came through and swiped a bunch of developers we know some stupid thing about audio playing or something oh that well that was a different one that was um something like home was something home audio something like that that would the eff struck that one down i think um no lodsis was it was some kind of i think it was an in-app purchase thing i forget what the details were i thank god it actually never hit me but it hit a bunch of people close to me like a whole a whole bunch of people you you all know and the small developers like had to pay for it and it really is like extortion because they they they come to you and they say look we can destroy your company with this so uh pay us all the money you can afford to pass because they want to get money they don't want to destroy the company because they destroy a company to get nothing so they basically say how much can you afford to pay us like how much money do you have in your wallet just give us all that right and so for smaller developers who don't have a lot of their money they'll say okay well just tell us how much is in your bank account and we won't charge you any more than that that's the shakedown of these things like for the big company obviously they can't do the apple because apple has billions of dollars they're not going to get all of that right but for the small developers it's not like there's a flat fee like everyone has to pay two million dollars no because they know no small developers can pay that but if you're a small individual developer they still want your money so like can you pay us 30 000 you know and and people would do it just to make you can't afford to fight it yeah because the alternative is like all right then you can try to hire a lawyer for a hundred thousand dollars like that's that's the that's again it's extortion it's just the mob but legal like it's it's exactly like you know hey it'd be a shame if that building burned down you pay us for protection money it's that it's just that but legal like that's what i mean the it's so we're getting all mad but like that is so dysfunctional and proud it's one of those it's one of those wonderful stories that we tell people oh yeah well there's you can be an individual inventor in your garage and come up with a great million dollar idea and patent it.

49:55And the reality is so far from that. That is not how it works at all. Like the only people who have patents are fools and a**holes. That's it. Because to get a patent, if you are an individual, to get a patent that is actually like properly written, properly filed, and has any chance of at all maybe being enforceable, it costs tens of thousands of dollars just to file a patent like that. So how many individual inventors in their garage are going to have tens of thousands of dollars to pay a lawyer and file everything and get it all written up and get it done? And then once you actually, if you actually get that patent granted to you, that doesn't prevent everyone from using it.

50:36That just gives you a tool that you can use to sue people who use it. Guess what? That takes more money. so the only people who can actually get a patent and then afford to try to enforce it against somebody are people with tons of money already and chances are it won't really stop a big company from stealing the idea and using it because big companies guess what they have more money and more lawyers and more time than you and i know this is kind of making the case for massimo but but like but that's the reality so like if you are a small inventor and you think a patent is going to protect you it won't it just will cost you tons of money and then at the end of the day it still won't protect you so that's the fool side of it and then there's the asshole side of it it's people who who you know actually intend to you know deploy this thing against unsuspecting people because here's the thing like patents are allegedly required to be novel and to be not some kind of solution that a lay person would have just kind of come up with on their own in the field so this is this is the argument against many software patents is like many people end up allegedly violating patents accidentally because the thing that is patented just became kind of common sense to anybody who is in that field like so if you're writing an app and you're you have a certain problem you're trying to solve with some algorithm or some technique you might just come up with that on your own the reality is that's how most invention works and simultaneous invention is a real thing kind of destroys the whole myth the patent system is based on but anyway uh second all that aside for the moment, most patent infringement in most of tech is done accidentally and unknowingly because so much has been patented by people who are just opportunistic thieves and vultures who want to be parasites on the world and want to shake people down for money because they think, well, I'm going to stake out my claim and get these patents and these things, and then everyone has to pay me when they do them.

52:35There are many ways to go through this life, and I try very, very hard to be the total opposite of that kind of asshole. And I hope most of you out there make the same choice. Anyway, so the patent system doesn't work the way anyone thinks it does. The only people who benefit are lawyers and giant companies. And here's a patent fight that is, you know, between two giant companies who, you know, are both trying to extract as much money out of the other as possible. And these views that I hold on patents and that John holds on patents are not super rare views in the tech business, especially most of most of the tech business doesn't like patents.

53:11And so there is there is no way that Apple is going to be amenable to any solution that requires them to pay Mossimo for every Apple watch they make, which is probably what Mossimo is asking them to do. And probably a lot because Apple doesn't want to be stuck with that forever. Patents last a very long time. I believe it's something like 20 or 30 years, depending on whatever it's in. Patents last a long time. So Apple does not want to be paying this company for every single Apple Watch they make, some dollar amount, for an idea that Apple thinks they don't deserve to have exclusivity on. Apple is very, very principled.

53:46We know that. We saw how hard they fought against Epic, which maybe we'll get to that a little bit. But we saw the principled stand they take about protecting what they believe is theirs in the App Store and the taxes they charge to developers in the App Store and the gatekeeper fees they charge. they feel so strongly that a lot of times to Apple they're a very opinionated company, a very principled company and usually that is a very good thing you know with stuff like this they're not going to just say fine we'll give you five bucks per Apple watch or whatever, they're not going to say that because they are probably so mad that this company even thinks they deserve five bucks from each Apple watch because Apple probably thinks they invented this stuff or this stuff is common sense or it shouldn't have been patented or whatever because again that's how patents work they're all bs so i don't see apple like being necessarily willing to solve this problem with money if the solution with money involves we'll give you five bucks for every apple watch we sell for the next 15 years no they would never do that they would just buy they would just buy the company at that point maybe but then but what what does the company want them to pay like because apple probably hates this company and they would rather probably bury this company in lawsuits for years than to actually buy them.

55:09Because again, they're a principled company. I'm saying buy the company jokingly because they wouldn't actually sell and Apple wouldn't offer to buy them. But what I'm saying is that money can solve this problem in many ways. Oh, it can. But they won't. There's no way they would sign up for that protection racket where they'd pay that. If they licensed the patent, they would do it the way they license all their patents, which is like we just want to be done with you we never want to see you again kind of like what they did with arm not that it's adversarial but like getting the architecture license whatever that license is it seems like they can now can do what they want with arm without worrying about that anymore same thing with the cross license patent agreements like they just want this to be over and go away and whatever reason mossimo is playing hard ball and they haven't agreed on a price but i feel like they have to because there's no way they're going to stop selling the apple watch right they're going to figure it out i mean not for a long time i mean Maybe they'll do it for a week or a month or whatever to put political pressure on, but they're not going to forego an entire year worth of Apple Watch Ultra sales.

56:03So what do you think about patents, gentlemen? Not a fan. Not a big fan. All right. I think we have time to keep on keeping on. So let's talk about the next breaking piece of news from earlier today. Adobe is giving up on their$20 billion with a B-B-B-B-B-B-A acquisition of Figma. The two of them have decided that there is no chance this is going to get through regulators in the UK and the US. So the heck with it. We're going to part ways. Oh, and apparently Adobe owes Figma a billion dollars in termination fees. Whoopsie-dupsies. I can't say this is terribly surprising to me. And I honestly don't know a whole bunch about either company because I've never really used Adobe stuff and I've never had the occasion to use Figma.

56:46You've never used Adobe stuff? Not really. Not in any regularity. I never touched Photoshop with any of them. acrobat back in your pc oh okay well that's fair i didn't think about that yeah that's true um but anyways yeah so apparently they're breaking up and a billion dollars to figma you know you may pass go and you may collect a billion dollars it seems so weird that they had such a big breakup fee in what would always look like a risky thing because adobe despite casey not using it is a pretty well-known company with a couple of products you might have heard of like photoshop they are the big dog in the in the markets that they participate in adobe has gobbled up a bunch of its competitors in the past either gobbled up or defeated or both its competitors being the bigger and bigger dog and figma was the first company in a long time to start giving adobe a run for its money so adobe trying to acquire them you have to you know that everyone involved has to know boy this might be tough to get past regulators because in general if a company like adobe started out as you know being an important uh you know company in their market and just grew and grew and ate their competitors and grew and ate and defeated their competitors and grew and defeated their competitors and then wants to buy some the the one company that has challenged them in ages for 20 billion you're going to look askance at that and say this probably doesn't seem like it would uh make for a healthier market and so they put a one billion dollar breakup fee in there uh and i said daniel jock had pointed out earlier today like i think figma has like a thousand employees so that one billion dollar breakup fee in theory you could give a million dollars to every figure of an employee, which of course is not what's going to happen, right?

58:22Because that's not how capitalism works. Can you imagine, though? That would be unreal. I know it will never happen. I'm not arguing it will never happen, but can you imagine if any one of these, what did you say, thousand people? Rank and file employees. Can you imagine if just they snap their fingers Thanos-style, but then all of a sudden everyone's a billionaire, excuse me, a millionaire? That would be unreal. What a cool story that would be. Unfortunately, it'll never happen. I think they all stood to make a lot more in their adobe stock or whatever they're going to get as part of the deal so this is you know obviously yeah all this money is going to go it's a few people are going to make a lot of money with this breakup fee and most of the employees are going to make nothing i would assume uh because that's the way capitalism works but yeah that's a big breakup fee for a deal that if you had to place odds on it would be difficult to know which side to bet i'm glad they went against not knowing the details, but my general inclination is...

59:12competition is good and the market that Adobe's in needs more competition not less and i have used adobe and i have used figma and i do see how they compete with each other they also are slightly complementary because they come at things in a different way and the places where adobe is strong is not where figma is strong but the whole point is people were using figma instead of the equivalent or you know non-equivalent non-existing adobe tools and that's why the the market was shifting a little bit it was like hey figma has something that adobe doesn't it's a competition they weren't making a photoshop replacement that was better than photoshop they were coming at it from a different angle really focusing on collaboration and focusing on the use cases that for the modern world that were you know lots of adobe products were created before the web existed so that really colors their uh their lineage and their feature set and figma is totally focused on a you know world where we're all connected and collaborating on things so yeah my my instinctual inclination when any of these huge mergers come is let's not do that let's just let them go on their own and and figma is not i think figma can exist on its own people like who's going to buy figma now i don't like the idea that the only reason a company exists is to get bought by a larger company i know that's a big thing and there's some there's some hemming hawing about this like oh if they don't let this deal come through how are startups going to get funded because the only way startups get funded is they assume they'll eventually get bought by the bigger company it's like that's not healthy if the whole purpose of making a startup is to be eventually be acquired by the bigger company all you do is feeding people and ideas into the bigger company that just keeps getting bigger and bigger you can actually make a competing company that makes a profit and pays employees and makes a product and improves it like lots of the companies that are around today started that way right if they weren't like every every single company that we talk about on the show would all be owned by ibm or something and there'd just be one company that's called ibm and it owns the former microsoft and it owns the former apple and it owns the former atari and owns the former everybody because they just buy everything like hey what's wrong with that i feel like that's the current environment i bet they would make really great products yeah which is like the uh like whatever the big companies are that exist now it's like well no other companies can exist except for these ones and from now on the only thing you can do is make a startup that you hope will be acquired by one of them i think the last big one that appeared i would assume we would say like facebook and google were the last two big ones to appear and now it's like this is it this is the set uh and your company is just going to get acquired by this the stupid uh you know abbreviations they have for it i forget what it is like famp or whatever it was like you know amazon apple google microsoft you know adobe like just like there's just these big companies in each of their markets that are so dominant they stop them from buying everybody right and if figma can't make it on its own it's like oh where we invested so much money the only reason we've been able to make this good product is because we we're not viable as a standalone business our only purpose is to be acquired well that's a bad business plan don't do that being acquired fine maybe that can happen that's a fine way to exit for certain companies but if you grow to the size of figma where where the biggest company wants to buy you for 20 billion you probably have a viable business on your own at least i hope you do you've got a thousand employees someone wants to buy you for 20 billion you can't make money you can't figure out how to be a profitable standalone company you have to be acquired or is it because your investors are like well the only way we get our big payday is if you get acquired oh it's more more uh distasteful side effects of our economic system so i don't again i'm not being gleeful saying because they get these figma employees you know that they're working within the system we have and part of the system we have is one of the big payoffs you might get from working at this company is you might get acquired and you might make out like a bandit right uh and i just don't begrudge them that i don't i think they they deserve that as much as anyone deserves anything but it's another example of working within a system that i think is bad and we all have to work within it because the system that we have but i really wish we would work to change that system and part of the system like it or not are regulators that sometimes say that a big company can't buy some other company.

1:03:04And in this case, it was the UK and the EU instead of the US. But, you know, that's that's also part of the system. It's also part of the risk of being an employee and hoping you're going to get bought out by a bigger company. That merger may be stopped by regulators. And in this case, I'm not sad that it was stopped. All right. Then the last piece of breaking news from earlier today is that data from test flight servers from 2012 to 2015. So this is This is before Apple certainly took ownership. I think it was before Apple even said they were going to buy TestFlight. It was before all that happened, I believe.

1:03:41Yeah, TestFlight used to be a separate company, like a little startup. It was much more limited and much harder to use, but it was pretty useful at the time. Yeah, very well put. Anyways, there's a bunch of data that maybe has been leaked. I'm not sure that leak is really the right classification here. Maybe we'll think about that in a second. Uh, uncover might be a better word for it. Thank you. But anyways, a bunch of data, like terabytes worth of data has, has been exposed or uncovered. Like Marco had said from search, from test flight servers back in the 2012 to 2015 era. And so, uh, we're not entirely sure how this came to be.

1:04:17We're not even entirely sure if this was recent, but certainly it's become a bit of a brouhaha over the, over the last 24 hours. Uh, yeah, a lot of old builds, a lot of old data come into light. it appears that this may relate to uh amazon s3 buckets that were not properly protected maybe that's the fourth hard problem in computer science uh is protect properly protecting s3 buckets right right um i think the deal with this again this story just broke this morning i think the deal with this is that this data dump has existed for like a decade and people are just rediscovering it because people have short memories um and it's like it's in archive.org right uh regardless of when this leaked how old the leak it is how how much we forgot about it and are rediscovering it 10 years later because we all have short memories it's not great it's out there right it's not the source code for these things it's binary so what you upload to test flight is is a uh you know a build of your app that you're testing on people's devices it's not the final one probably that you're gonna send the app store or maybe you know it might be if you if they decide that build works but it's all the in-between builds that you send and so they're binaries or maybe in some cases bitcode if apple watch was around back then um for tons of stuff and people are sort of digging through this giant archive of binaries trying to see if there's any useful uh the link we'll put in the show notes is from euro gamer it's because it's like look at these prototypes of games that never shipped because you know they they developed them they put them out on test flight they decided they're never going to ship them so if you want to find some weird unreleased game including some unreleased flappy bird variant because that's what people at Eurogram are excited about, I guess, uh, you could dig through this, but this is the difficulty of, uh, you know, leaving stuff unprotected on the internet.

1:05:58And then when it makes its way into archive.org, apparently it's hard to get rid of it. Even 10 years later, if this really is a leak from, or a, people say it's not a leak. It's, it was, they just crawled it, but either way, uh, test flight didn't intend for this to be in archive.org. And yet it is an archive.org because archive.org crawled the test flight site and followed links and eventually found all this stuff and slurped it all up and now it's there it would be great if apple slash test flight could say hey archive.org can you remove all that because uh we don't own all that intellectual property and neither do you so it probably shouldn't be an archive.org because it's basically it's builds of did you use test flight in that year range did you upload an app you're probably in this this data dump right uh and you probably don't want it there i mean maybe it's irrelevant maybe you don't care maybe it's a build of an app that's long dead or it's useless to everybody because it only runs on all the OSs or whatever.

1:06:51It's weird, but it's also a cautionary tale. Check your S3 bucket permissions. This sounds dumb, but Amazon doesn't make this that easy, and they've worked on it over the years to try to make it more obvious when you screw this up. There are whole companies, part of their product is they will go over your stuff in AWS and make sure you haven't done something boneheaded, and yet it happens all the time. Someone has an S3 bucket, which for people to know is just a place on the internet where you can store files There's lots of imitators And they accidentally make it accessible to everybody and it's like how would they not notice this?

1:07:29You don't notice it because you can't really get anything out of it unless you sort of know the file name So it's security through obscurity, especially if they don't allow it like essentially directory listing to use web parlance Like you can't it you know, you can set the permission. So oh nobody can iterate over the contents You can't list what's here, but if you know the file name, you can make a request for it and you'll get it. Right. And the file names are really big and obscure. And it's like, well, you know, you wouldn't notice that it's publicly accessible because no one would be making those requests.

1:07:56But if you have a crawler, especially if that crawler is seated with like it knows that you use like the app ID as the file name and it has a bunch of app IDs from elsewhere, then the crawler can just go through and try all those app IDs. The whole point is your S3 bucket shouldn't be publicly accessible. it shouldn't at random person on the internet should not be able to pull a file from it if it's not supposed to be publicly accessible there should be some authentication where you have to be allowed to get that file like because you're the developer of the file and that's how you can get it but doing that can be a little bit annoying and especially with the efficiencies of s3 where you really don't want them to go through your server to bounce off your server you want to go directly to s3 because that's one of the wonderful things about s3 is that it's available everywhere and it's close by and blah blah blah people uh take a shortcut and they say well no one's going to guess this url anyway we'll just make the bucket publicly accessible or they accidentally make a public accessible but again they never realize it's publicly accessible because it seems like you can't get anything from it without knowing how to get to it but especially automated computer crawlers they'll just follow links they don't know which ones they're quote unquote supposed to or not supposed to follow so if they find an in they'll just go and crawl and scrape and pull everything out of there and it ends up in archive.org i mean in all fairness um if you set up a new s3 bucket today they make you jump through many hoops to make it publicly accessible like they they've like amazon has learned like wow people mess this up a lot uh you know so they like you have to it is now so complicated and convoluted to make any part of an s3 bucket publicly accessible so it it's better now people are motivated to do it because like Like, my app's not working.

1:09:33I keep getting an error on S3, and they're like, they just bash AWS until the error stops. Like, oh, done. Now the error's done. I'm not sure what I did, but now I'm not getting any more errors pulling from S3. So I guess everything's fine. And then, you know, fast forward 10 years, and someone has scraped everything out of their bucket, and it's an archive.org. As mentioned earlier, we are supported exclusively this episode by ATP members. Please consider becoming a member today at ATP.fm slash join. So to recap, here's what you get. You get the ad-free version of the show in a special RSS feed that you can add to any podcast app that you want that supports RSS feeds, which is most of them.

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1:11:52All right, let's do some Ask ATP. And Tom Bullock writes, what's the best way in 2023 to run an old version of OS X? For example, Tiger. I don't know, to be honest with you. I know that Apple has a bit of sample code and I think Guy Rambo might've put something together where you can like use whatever the hypervisor is. Yeah, virtualization framework. Yeah, yeah. And you can very, very cheaply and reasonably easily create and run a virtual machine. I dabbled with this briefly like six months or a year ago, and it was pretty good. I would assume that the right answer is something like VMware Fusion or Parallels, but I honestly don't know.

1:12:33I think, John, you might be the best person to answer this question. Best is the trickiest part here. Yeah, best for what? What is the best way in 2023? Well, getting back to our discussion about Palm devices, the best way is to use an old Mac because that will give you the authentic experience of what it was really like. If that's your definition of best, that's going to be the best. You need like a CRT. You need a blue and white G3. That's one definition of best, but I'm assuming that's not what this person wants to know. um people want to run it without getting an old computer or dealing with all that hassle here's the problem though all of the virtualization stuff that apple offers so far doesn't let you sign into an apple id which maybe back in tiger isn't that big of a deal but as the versions advance not being able to sign into an apple id put really cramps your ability to do stuff with it like if you want if you're there because you i want to try all the old apps and see how they work and it's like oh i can't do this because i have to sign up an apple id or i can't use this sync thing or whatever if you don't care about that then yeah any virtualization thing will work there the reason people have made these uh virtualization apps is because apple has a framework for virtualization and if you can put a fairly thin app wrapper around that the framework does all the virtualization stuff you just have to deal with like making an icy y letting people set things up and install or whatever right so that's why you see a lot of these hanging around VMware I think still uses its own virtualization framework from way back in the day that will probably be more straightforward and more supported even with VMware there are limitations I have VMware and I have old versions of macOS 10 here hanging around for some old software and some curiosity and it's not not everything works like if you expect it to be just like if you had pulled out that old mac it's not going to be I'm not sure if it has the same app ID and limitations but definitely the graphics acceleration especially on old versions super jank either doesn't exist at all or it exists but it doesn't work the way you expect it to or it seems slow and if if you like sometimes they're all they all click they're in safe mode where there's like no transparency and everything's really slow you have to figure out how to enable the gpu acceleration it's not straightforward so the reason i mentioned the hardware thing is that really is the best you'll get as much as you can possibly get and even then referencing what marco was talking about last episode there may be issues with uh you know tls and ssl versions which mean that you can't use the web browsers you know like you you won't be able to really use it like it was back in the day because the world has moved on but the closest you can get it with hardware everything else is going to be in compromise so it really depends on what specifically you want to do if you just want to run some specific app and it doesn't need your apple id and doesn't need to do any weird networking that's not going to work because of tls upgrades then yeah any vm solution will work i liked vmware i still use it i think they're going into a subscription model soon so if you want to get the last sort of licensed version that you can buy and use until it breaks uh run and get vm mirror fusion now uh or otherwise look at all the various virtualization projects but realize you're always going to be taking some kind of hit in functionality which is a shame until fast forward a decade or two kind of like we run uh classic mac os you'll be able to run tiger in like a web browser using some javascript thing right but we're not there yet also i mean do the the virtualization um apps to the best of my knowledge none of them will provide architecture emulation right so like the idea is like you know for for an old enough version of mac os uh if you if you are say you know running on a apple silicon macbook pro or whatever you're not going to be able to run something that could only run on intel or power pc so you're going to need something that can emulate those processors in addition to virtualization of the underlying OS.

1:16:28Yeah, I was trying to think of VMware would do that for you. Does anything do that on Apple Silicon? I don't think we have that yet. I could be wrong. But most of the big solutions, including anything that uses Apple's virtualization framework, they don't virtualize x86 emulation on Apple Silicon Macs. So you can't run an Intel OS using Apple's virtualization framework on Apple Silicon. Yeah. yeah so vmware is i mean i'm i guess i'm still stuck in the intel world thinking all vmware will just run natively on your intel thing but if you don't have an intel mac yeah and the virtualization thing does not exist for intel max it's an arm only thing but that doesn't stop you there's tons of before apple came up with their virtualization framework there there are free ones what is the virtual box is another free one there's one other free one i'm forgetting vmware is just a fancy oh there's parallels which is another uh commercial one but like i said like all those options have some i've used all of them at one point or another on intel max and they all have weirdness about them every single one there's no one of them that's going to be like running it on hardware yeah licensing is weird too like a lot of a lot of the old os's you legally aren't supposed to virtualize them or aren't allowed to virtualize them or you have to like find some pirate installer or whatever yeah that could be you know both a pain in the butt and you know not entirely legal if you need that for like some kind of you know compliance reason so again like old hardware as john said the only the only um major downside of old hardware besides like having to have this physical thing that you're running uh which can be you know physically cumbersome um i i wouldn't say it's expensive it's not because old pc hardware is very inexpensive because nobody wants it um but uh it can be a pain in the butt to like get stuff on and off of it like you know the advantage of virtualizing on your own computer is that usually the virtualization uh intermediate be it software, we'll have some convenient ways to like share files back and forth between the two, between like your computer and the emulated computer or whatever.

1:18:22When you're dealing with physical hardware, it becomes a lot more manual of a process. You have to do things like, you know, maybe transfer stuff with USB drives and deal with, you know, the realities of that situation and stuff like that. Networking can, as John said, networking can be tricky, especially if it involves any kind of modern security requirements like browsing the web at all. can be very difficult on old computers. So it is a bit of a pain in the butt to kind of integrate an old computer into your environment for whatever reason you need to be running it. But you kind of save a whole bunch of possible butt pains by not dealing with virtualization or emulation or anything like that.

1:19:04So you're kind of trading some butt pain for different butt pain. Well, I mean, it's not like a classic Mac OS. It's like anything that can run Mac OS X has USB. right and so thumb drives that'll like the you can an hfs plus thumb drive will work in and even you run mac os 10 it'll also run in any modern mac so it's way better than classic where you're like what the hell is this apple talk thing and how do i deal with that or like you have to install an extension to get tcp ip and you know you got to figure out how to connect to the internet yeah or you have to figure out like floppy disk formats somehow good luck yeah get a usb floppy drive, plug it into your Mac, see how that works.

1:19:39Oh, yeah. All right. Rancari Anand writes, I was looking at the current set of EVs and they all seem very unappealing for one reason or another. So I decided to put together a list of my requirements. I will read these. This is a lot. And I don't think you should be surprised that you can't find anything that fits all of these. But anyway, the requirements are as follows. No full glass roof, a sunroof that can open, physical button HVAC controls while you're you're out. At this point, you might as well give up. Physical buttons or lever for the gear selector and no motorized controls for the gear selector.

1:20:15I'm not sure what that means, but I'll go with it. Physical button seat adjustment controls, radar adaptive cruise control, car play, preferably have a speedometer in front of the driver, not in a center screen. And the center screen must not be safety critical. In other words, the car should be fully operational, even if the center screen dies. How is this the future? How is this the future that we have built ourselves i mean first of all this all sounds very reasonable in theory but second of all like even even if you just say not even just evs what new cars satisfy this not that many of them i don't think yeah yeah i mean the new the new golf r for example which i know is i believe no it's the manual transmission that's dying but anyways the new golf r doesn't meet all of these if i'm not mistaken um it's tough to find a car that would meet all these you know even not an ev but especially in ev the reason i put this in here is because we'll get to his final question is what requirements do you have for your next cars you can have a list like this but you've kind of got to sort it by priority and decide where you're going to accept because you're never going to get all of them like i think i'm pretty sure there are if there's any car that satisfies all these you don't want it it's probably not a good car it's probably a car that you because you didn't list things like how many people fit in it yeah i feel like that is a bigger requirement do you need to fit six people or do you need two they're like if you say okay we got a car that fits a lot of space for luggage yeah we got a car that fits this but it has a driver's seat a passenger sheet and no backseat of any kind does that work for you like it's like no i've got five people in my family right that should probably be a higher priority than no full glass roof i'm just saying so you've got to prioritize but the reason i think this is a fascinating question there was a story we had that's probably buried in the show notes maybe we'll come up again at some point um about how customer satisfaction with their new cars has been declining, mostly blaming infotainment.

1:22:05And we've talked about this in the past, how everyone who's making an electric vehicle feels the need to do stupid things that are appealing in the showroom, but that people hate once they get the car home. And I was hoping that would be like something that would only happen in the beginning of the age of EVs. Like we've talked about, you know, how and why it was probably a good idea for Tesla to do these things in the beginning because you want the car to seem cool and futurey. But we're well past that now. EVs are not entirely mainstream, but the only things keeping them out of the mainstream is their price, right?

1:22:42They are not exotic and weird. I see EVs all the time. Most of the ones I see are not Teslas. So there's no reason that every single company that makes an EV needs to do this. But they do do it. And I think the reason they do it is like, well, EVs aren't new, but this is our first EV. It's like, I don't care if it's your first EV. EVs have been out for, what, a decade or whatever? Like, they're very common now. I know you're super proud of your first EV, but think twice before you, for example, decide to make the door handles crappy. Every single EV company is doing that. We've got an EV. The door handles better be annoying and harder to use and break more often.

1:23:21Why? Because EV. and if you say anything about aerodynamics i will hit you with my little cartoon hammer and say no no that's not why you're doing this admit it you can make flush door handles that are not stupid but but they don't they make them all stupid it's like it's okay for tesla to do that only tesla tesla is the only company that gets to buy to do that because they were first and they had to be cool and computery and that's their brand that shouldn't be your brand volkswagen just make door handles that work people just want to pull the handle and open the door and they want it to happen every time and it would be nice if it still worked when it was like an ice storm or something stop making them electronic stop making them stupid same thing goes for everything else inside the car with the hvac controls oh you want to address your side view mirrors have fun navigating the touch screen no stop it removing stalks from the steering wheel stop all of that but people who are making evs are doing this and the let it's kind of like the apple silicon things like how many years does it take from conception to the shipping of things like seven years or whatever right the cars that we're seeing now what i hope is that every one of these car companies has learned a no more piano black plastic and b stop putting everything on screens but the problem is there's a countervailing force here because the countervailing force is part of the reason that tesla continues to do this it's cheaper to put them on the screens and so despite how much people hate them it's basically like look if we all do this if we all make our cars worse what are they going to do they're not going to go to a competitor so let's all just do it let's all reap the savings let's just have one screen and no buttons and it sucks for everybody but if all cars are like this we'll be fine and it's not that all cars are like this but evs among evs there is a lot of sameness outside of evs there are still a few companies that now are bragging in their press things saying if you'll notice we have physical controls for hvac right and that's a selling point to them they're using it as a selling point can you imagine in our childhood saying so you're telling me you have buttons to change the fan speed that's great that's is that a bullet point in your brochure because every car has that it's like well in the in the dark future not every car will have that and we'll make you use a touch screen oh and the other thing i'll throw in under the bus is because like and mercedes is doing stuff like that thing we've explained about before um oh don't worry we don't have touch controls that would be uh that's not good we need physical feedback so what we have instead is like on the steering wheel instead of having touch controls because you'll swipe those accidentally and you'll activate stuff no our things our buttons you press them and they physically move in it's not even haptic they physically move in and out but what they do is they make a giant piano black plastic panel with six glyphs on it for six different functions and when you press any one of those buttons the entire panel moves in with a creek and a plastic creek and some tilt and the entire panel moves out rather than making six individual buttons is essentially one big button with capacitive sensors to know where on the big giant button your finger was when you pressed it and they think this is better than making six buttons but land river did that on my defender it's not better everyone is doing it because it's cheaper to make one giant button with capacitive controls than to make six individual buttons and it is so so bad so we all just have to hang in there and yell and scream as much about this is possible and try to find the one car company that you that like pick one of these things that's the most important to you like my thing is like i don't think i can buy a car with stupid door handles and i think physical hvac those would may be my top two priorities but you can only do what you can do if in the end there's no car that has those two things that i just have to buy what i have to buy but we just have to make it through this terrible phase and come out the other side or we just need some brave car company to say no we're going to design their interior of our cars to be useful and not to be inexpensive and look let's see in the showroom but we were in a dark dark period for cars and i i thought we'd be out of it by now right i thought this is going to happen the first few generations of easy v's going to be like this people are going to snap out of they're not snapping out of it or if they have we haven't seen the fruits of that labor yet they're getting worse brand new cars like volvo's new line of cars here's our new evs we made evs before like we have polestar and everything we're experienced we've done this before this isn't even our first radio our new evie no rear windscreen like no rear window at all we'll just put a camera there no volvo stop what are you doing what maybe that's the pole star i forget which one it is uh no screen in front of you just a center screen like the model 3 it's like have we learned nothing where are you going what you're like it's so terrible so i i feel for this person i understand the frustration but the pickings out there are so slim and there are so many bad ideas and i would have more confidence they would go away if they weren't all less expensive that's the real less expensive in your eighty thousand dollar car we got to save the five cents we can't have six individual buttons on your steering wheel that's i think that's one of the most profound and and impactful changes that technology has seen in my lifetime that we you It used to be, not that long ago, maybe 15 years ago, screens were very expensive, just in general.

1:28:33Any kind of screen technology. Growing up, screens were very expensive. That's why you'd have early computers that plugged into your TV. Because most people would have a TV, but you wouldn't necessarily have the money to buy a separate computer monitor. So you'd plug everything into your TV or whatever. and then you know later on you know cars for for most of cars existence couldn't have like bitmap screens they had you know dials and lights and occasionally at the you know in like once you got into like you know the 80s and 90s and stuff you could have like little lcd segment displays and stuff but remember the buick that had a little i think it was a buick that had a crt in the dashboard i think we've talked about it before yeah that someone did put a crt in a car in case you're wondering if that ever happened it was a monochrome crt i believe but it was there terrible super terrible yeah but so like you know screens were expensive and so there was always so much effort put into trying to do whatever you could without a screen like without having a screen like when like even my first bmw that i got in like 2009 or 10 or whatever that was the screen that would have given me the navigation system was like a five thousand dollar option so i didn't take it so it just had like you know the little like lcd segment display on the radio and that was it the reason it didn't have all these features was because screens were expensive only and only in like the last again like 15 years maybe that has flipped over so that now screens cost nothing relatively speaking like screens are so cheap now that yes a screen is still more expensive than a button but a screen it might actually be less expensive than 25 buttons and all of their associated wiring and all of their service over the course of the vehicle's warranty period.

1:30:22Like if one of those buttons flakes out, then they got to replace it. Like once you factor in the total cost of having all these buttons and stocks and everything that need to be like, you know, manufactured, assembled, installed, maintained, wired, you know, tested, all that stuff. It actually is now cheaper in a lot of cases to just put everything in software on the touchscreen. And the idea of that to tell someone 15 years ago that it's cheaper for cars to have a giant screen, a giant color, high resolution touchscreen, that's cheaper than having 15 buttons? Yes, actually. In some cases, when you factor in certain things, yes, it actually is.

1:31:05um but anyway going back to the actual question i would i would suggest despite everything we just said you can get used to a lot of things that you that you might not think um so you know things that are important about a car are things like can it fit my family can it fit the stuff we have to do can it fit in my garage or whatever like you know physical like large physical characteristics of it are important. Is it physically capable of fitting in my life and handling the tasks that I want it to handle? Is it, you know, is it an EV or not? Is it fuel efficient or not? Like the big questions like that, those all matter a lot.

1:31:50Stuff like whether you have to move your seat with physical controls or things on a touchscreen, that matters a lot less. So what I would suggest is, you know shift your priority list you know these a lot of these are like nice to haves but maybe not requirements um because what you what you will find is that if you're willing to bend on a few of these kind of more superficial or less less important things like you know how often do you move your seat if you move it every day well then how often how often you move it or how you move it matters a lot. If you are mostly the only driver of your car and you don't move your seat that often, it matters a lot less.

1:32:32And by the way, with all this technology, speaking of moving your seats and stuff, memory seats, the feature has been around since the late 70s, early 80s. Still, still car companies are stingy about doing that. And sometimes when they do it, they only have two positions because they can't store the extra three kilobytes of memory. It's insane. And if, you know, you mentioned seat movement, if you move the seat, you're probably also moving the mirrors if you get one of these evs where to adjust the side view mirrors and the seat you have to use the touch screen and it doesn't have seat memory or it has enough seat memory for two people but not three and you have three people using the car if every time you get in the car you are swiping around on a touch screen to adjust both your mirrors and the seat you are going to be hating life right and so when i say prioritizing features figure out like if you had if i had to prioritize them it would be like what things do you do most often and changing seats you know again like mark said it may be something you never do or something you do almost every time you get in the car because it's a shared car for example among two or three people so think more about turn signals and less about the hood release yeah so like stuff you use a lot yeah turn signals turn signals changing gears those are things you use a lot i would weight them way more heavily and door handles every time you get in the car use door handles or maybe you don't maybe you have your phone in your pocket and the door automatically pops open but like you know because that's you know things you can get used to but think about the thing you're gonna be doing every time because as annoying as it is to use the touch screen to open the glove box on a tesla you're going to open the glove box way less often than you're going to signal turns unless you're bmw driver yeah but also like to play a little bit of devil's advocate here like you know some some of some of these requirements are things that you could get used to if they weren't satisfied and some of them you can't so for instance if you really want a sunroof and the car doesn't have a sunroof you're never going to get used to that yep can can confirm because that's where i am right now or if you don't want a sunroof and your head hits the headliner it's always going to hit the headliner you're not going to shrink that fast yeah like if you you know you want radar adaptive cruise control and if you if your car doesn't have that you're never going to get used to it not having it like you'll just always not have it whereas like if you say you want physical hvac control buttons you could actually get used to the screen just fine you know it wouldn't it might not be as ideal but like so that's like a little bit of a squishy requirement what i would suggest is if there's an ev that you think you want or i might like but it fails one of those like preferential things like physical buttons for hvac controls or something like that like i would suggest go test drive it or even if you can rent one for like a few days because a lot of that stuff you'd be surprised how quickly you get used to it and it isn't a big deal this is what tesla people have been telling everyone else forever just try it like rent one for a weekend or something like try it and you'll see a lot of the stuff you think is a big deal is not a big deal whereas a lot of the stuff that you might not have thought of might be a bigger deal of new things.

1:35:35Like, I hate most Tesla door handles. Like, as John was saying, the door handles on Teslas are really annoying. All of them. Every model Tesla has differently annoying door handles. Even the new Cybertruck, which we haven't talked about and probably won't. They found another way to have annoying, stupid door handles. That is, if anything, Tesla's most innovative department might be the department that makes annoyingly bad door handles. It's really important for the Cybertruck to be aerodynamic, Marco. You don't understand. like they just keep finding new creative ways to make bad annoying door handles but anyway um you know that like to me the the door handles are worse on teslas than the lack of certain physical controls like because the lack of physical controls like a lot a lot of that you just get used to within the first day or two of driving the car and it just isn't as big of a deal as you you think beforehand?

1:36:27Yes, but no. So let's take an example. Aaron's XC90, that has the HVAC controls on the center screen. I am used to it. So you are correct, but it is objectively crappier not to have physical controls. You know what I mean? So it's not that you're wrong because you do get used to it, but just because you're used to it doesn't mean it's superior. Not having a gauge cluster in a Model 3 is crappy. Like, I'm sorry, Tesla people, it's crappy. It's not an improvement. Oh, but you can see the two inches above your hood, but I don't care. It's worse. You're totally right on that. Actually, although on that front, a lot of the recent trend of a couple of car makers has been to still have the instrument cluster in front of you, but to make it a very slim, low profile one, You get the benefit of, oh, you have better visibility over the hood, but we've shrunk the thing down.

1:37:25Didn't the Prius do that a thousand years ago? Oh, the Prius also had the offset one, I believe. It had like the, Toyota used to say, oh, it's better for your eyes because they're focusing farther away. It's like, yeah, it's six inches farther away. Didn't the Civic do one of those too, like around 2004 or so? I don't think so. Civic has always had an instrument cluster, I believe. I can tell you for sure the Mustang Mach-E does that. It has a very small display that's your gauge cluster that has the bare minimum of useful and usable information. But that's all you really need. And it's a little slimline display right where you expect it to be.

1:37:59And it's, I was going to say it's perfect. That may be a bit dramatic, but it's really good. And then they have the hilariously large center touchscreen thing where you would expect it to be. But at least you have some amount of gauges in the center. Like, I know you can get used to it. And I heard you say, Marco, that you're on Team Casey for this gauge cluster thing. But to talk to the Tesla zealots, you can get used to the center screen. I'm not saying you can't get used to it. But it's objectively worse. It's just worse. The mirror adjustments is another example. Yes. I think of this every time I adjust it because we do have shared cars in my family.

1:38:35Every time I adjust the side mirrors, they're powered because we have the luxury of powered side mirrors because they used to not be. You used to have to reach over and do them. It was really annoying. Kids, ask your parents. but I adjust them without looking anywhere with my eyes, except for at the mirrors. You can't do that with a touchscreen. You have to look at the touchscreen to navigate, and then maybe if you're lucky, you have swipe controls on your steering wheel to do the adjustments once you navigate it, but literally, because they're physical controls and they're always in the same place and I can feel them in the dark, I don't have to look at them at all.

1:39:05I can and do routinely adjust the mirrors without looking anywhere except for at the mirrors. That is a better experience than using a touchscreen, and I don't want them to save the$5 that it would take to save on all the wiring or whatever. I'd rather have those controls there. So when I saw like the latest Volvo coming out with nothing on the door panel, including no window up down switches, no mirror adjustment switches, like no, no Volvo. There should be something on that door. There's a reason people put controls on the door because it's a convenient place for your left hand to be when you're adjusting the mirrors.

1:39:33And if you, you know, just, I don't, I want to take those people and shake them. Like there's no excuse to be doing this for a 2024 model to have a door card with literally nothing on it except for an electronic door release to get out. Bad. Yeah, so I think you guys are broadly correct, though, that you need to have some amount of prioritization here. And I think that some things will be must-haves and some things are want-to-haves. And, you know, you're never going to get used to, as you had said, Marco, or maybe it was John, one of you said you're never going to get used to not having a sunroof.

1:40:06I can confirm because that's where I am. But you can get used to having on-screen HVAC controls. They still suck, but you can get used to it. They're not that bad. And eventually, you're going to have to compromise. That being said, I haven't driven my parents' Chevy, was it Bolt or Volt? I always get a wrong Bolt, in a couple of months now. But I think it may actually meet all of these requirements. Now, the problem, though, is that most people who buy an EV want to look fancy and cool and hip. And a Chevy Bolt does not look fancy, nor cool, nor hip. But it is a stunningly good EV, given the price that it costs.

1:40:47Like, I'm grading on a curve here. I'll be the first to tell you. But it is stunningly good for what it is. And I think it might actually meet all of these requirements. For me, we haven't bought cars since 2018. And I have no current plan to replace either of our cars. But for me, I absolutely will not buy a car without CarPlay. And basically everything else is malleable. I vastly prefer cars with a sunroof, but I bought one without because all told, it was the best option I had. Like, I am a devout sunroof person. As much as John hates sunroofs or sunroofs, whatever, I love them. It kills me that my car does not have a sunroof.

1:41:33But eventually, you're going to have to compromise. That's the way this works. And so for me, the only thing I can think of that I literally will not compromise on is CarPlay, with a close second probably being I really dislike front-wheel drive a lot. A lot, a lot. And so it would take a lot for me to get into a front-wheel drive car. I would probably cave on that if I absolutely had to, but it would take a lot. If I were to buy a car today, I would probably buy the Kia EV6 GT preferably, which is very odd looking. I've heard very crummy things about Hyundai and Kia dealers. So I might hate that car if I were to buy it today, but that's probably what I would get.

1:42:13Or they just came out with, what is it, the Ioniq 5? No, Ioniq 6. There's a Hyundai version of the Kia EV6. I forget what it is. There's something that was just announced. Is that the one with the square lights everywhere? It looks like pixels? Yes, but there was... Honestly, I think they look really cool. They just announced a new one that's like a direct competitor to the EV6. And for the life of me, I can't remember what exactly it's called. But nonetheless, I would probably buy one of those because it seems to fit all of my preferences. Note, I did not say requirements. It seems to fit all my preferences the best.

1:42:46The chat room is saying the Ioniq 6. That's probably... No, the Ioniq 6 is ugly as sin. I don't know. It's something else. They have like an N-line, I think they call it, which is like their hot rod version of their, maybe it is the, the Ionic five. I don't recall. It doesn't really matter, but anyways, I'd buy one of those. And again, you're just going to have to compromise. That's the way this works. You're going to have, or, or in some cases spend like a quarter billion dollars on, you know, a Porsche take on or take in or whatever. That's what I was saying. If you, how about your seating situations?

1:43:15Cause maybe the only one that fits your requirements is$200 ,000 Porsche. I mean, honestly, I'm pretty sure TIFFs I three fits this requirement list perfectly. Yeah. People don't know what their requirements are until they see the i3 and say, oh, I didn't have not but ugly on my list. There you go. No, I mean, but Marco, you make a good point that if you want an EV that actually works reasonably well for regular people, you're probably going to want to look at, I know BMW and budget probably don't belong in the same sentence, but you're probably going to want to look at a budget EV like the i3, which was not exactly budget, but kind of in that spirit, or the Chevy Bolt or something along those lines, because they are not fancy or trendy or hip or cool or whatever.

1:43:57but they do cross off or they do check all the check boxes so what's more important to you getting all of these things on your very long list or looking cool and that's for you to decide well and not even just necessarily looking cool but like when you when you think i want to buy an ev what you what you typically think of is the big names in ev so you think tesla you know you you think like the the the models that you've seen either where the whole company is only an EV company like Tesla and Rivian or Lucid or whatever, or you think of the car models that were launched as electric models conceptually from their makers, and all of those are electric.

1:44:35And when you look at either the all-electric tech-forward companies or those EV statement models from other companies, those tend to be the most aggressive in their efforts to be futuristic to get away from a lot of the stuff that we're saying we actually tend to want um you know because a lot a lot of the you know the clean minimal design and that takes away all the buttons that we like a lot of that is like you know an effort to be futuristic and to be a statement what will probably give you better luck is not only necessarily going with budget models but going with models of cars that were not always electric so from companies that have made gas cars forever like you know get like the the electric you know bmw three series or whatever like you know like the the electric versions of cars that car makers are now like reluctantly making they keep being drag kicking screaming into evs those actually will probably give you more of your list if what you're looking for is basically an old style car which is what this basically is that will give you more of that than the like cool concept car from from the tech company yeah mercedes really screwed that up by not going to be into europe but instead deciding to make an entire parallel line of cars for their evs bmw said we're gonna make a five series you can get an electric and not electric right mercedes says you can get s class or we have this whole other line over here the eq s not the same car you want an e class or do you want an eq e not confusing at all let me tell you the eq line the interiors of the cars is way dumber way dumber the the bad the bad thing about bmw is yes it's true that the interiors will be similar between the electronic and regular but the regular cars have gotten dumber too so yeah it's it's tough uh but at least the door handle should be semi-normal and by the way i was just looking at a picture of the ionic 6 which i do think is the one you were thinking of casey stupid door handles what a surprise yes it does no the the ionic 6 is ugly as sin if you ask me it's that's what you're talking about four-door sedan right no it's not i'm talking about their hatch i know i know the EV6 is not really a sedan.

1:46:41It's a short squat crossover with bad headroom. Great. Love it. Oh, and the one that I said looks cool is the Ioniq 5. Yeah, it's the Ioniq 5N. I guess the one with the fake EV gear shifts. People are loving that. They basically make the EV engine go... for no friggin' reason. It's so stupid. They interrupt power when you do the fake shifts. This is great. This is a car with, I believe, one fixed gear ratio and when you hit the little floppy paddle they were intentionally interrupt power to the electric engine to make you feel like you're shifting people love it apparently uh talk about skeuomorphism i'm guessing that lasts two model years and then discontinued well it'll last it'll last until everybody who remembers what that's imitating is dead no it'll last until everyone tries it and realizes oh actually it's just better to turn this off no people try it and they love it they love it because they're people who know what that is like they because it doesn't really you can do a convincing job of pretending to be an internal combustion engine when you have like all the torque all the time you just interrupt it in ways that you know they make the sounds they do all the things and everybody who tries it they're like i thought this would be so dumb but i'm having so much fun but those people will eventually die and then we'll be rid of this but unfortunately we are also those people so we'll also be dead i'm not you are you know what that's imitating you know about gear shift well i know what it's imitating but i i ran away screaming from it once i found electric vehicles because they're better yeah but if you try it you'd be like this i admit this is fun it's basically a video game it's a dumb video game i will say one other thing though like you know in the in like the trade-off between you know old style controls in in like a car that was started out as a gas car and was later made electric versus a car that was like electric from the start or a company that made electric cars from the start what you are losing by sticking with like the old classic car model from the old car company even after it has become an ev you don't usually get some of the really nice interesting like techie features of the pure ev companies like tesla and rivian for all of their shortcomings especially in not supporting carplay but anyway for all those shortcomings like one of the like i i mentioned um a few months back i really missed dog mode when i i had teslas for a while and then i had to get the land river for my sand permit and i really missed dog mode which is a thing where you could like leave your car and tap two buttons in the screen and it keeps the climate control running so if you have to leave your dog in the car and go into a store your dog doesn't freeze or overheat uh and and it shows on the screen like my dog is fine here's the temperature so nobody like breaks into your car to free your dog either this is a feature that i assumed would be on any ev and it's just not it's it's on almost none of them there's a whole bunch of those features where yeah it seems like kind of goofy stuff that you know usually tesla will be the first ones to come up with a lot of this stuff and it seems goofy and it seems like why anybody ever use that and then you use it like oh that's actually really nice all cars should have this feature and a lot of the like you know the the newer companies that are tech focused and very you know ev you know native like it's mostly tesla and rivian they tend to have way nicer features like that and way more of them and the old car companies that have you know more old style approaches you know less integration less software control over their own vehicles less ability to run over-the-air updates because they're tying together a million different things from a million different providers, stuff like that.

1:50:04The older companies tend not to have many of those tech-forward or clever new features. So it's a trade-off you're making. If you want to stick with the old-style controls and physicality and everything, that's great. But you will be missing out on a lot of that new fun tech stuff that EVs do offer from the overly minimalist companies. All right. Moving on. Josiah Katz writes, how's Call Sheet going? Well, breaking news, as of today, doing really freaking great because our friends at Upgrade, spoiler alert, have awarded Call Sheet an Upgrade-y, which I was very, very excited to hear. Oh, congratulations.

1:50:44Well, thank you. Look at that timing. Yeah, I know. Perfect, right? I didn't even put this in the show notes. I think this was John that put the topic in there. But yeah, Jason had sent me a message saying, in so many words, you really need to listen to the beginning of Upgrade, which I did with the family, actually. We all listened to it together for the very first time. And the kids were extremely excited, which was very cool. So yeah, that was very kind of them. So check out Upgrade this week. But no, Call Shots doing well. I'm very honored. I'm genuinely quite honored to have received an Upgrade.

1:51:15And as Mike had said on the show, you know, there were other opportunities where if this was just, I'm going to give this to my friend, they could have done this before. but it seems like I genuinely earned this one, which I'm quite happy about. But it's been going well. Development has slowed a little bit because life has been getting quite busy as it has for basically everyone in this time of year. But releases are still happening. In fact, just a couple hours ago, a release just finished a one-week rollout earlier this evening. There's definitely a lot of stuff I want to do, which is in contrast to most of my other apps, where there were things I wanted to do, but, you know, if I get to it, I get to it.

1:51:54If I don't, I don't. I have a laundry list of things that I desire to do, um, to call two and four call sheet. My first priority list, as I call it, is only one item, but let's see the, there are 44 other items that I have noted as things I would like to do. Now, a lot of these, you know, some of these are small. Some of these are investigations, but you know, a lot of these are features. And I feel like for the most part, I think I've gotten most of the low hanging fruit. There's a couple of exceptions there. Um, but I've gotten most of the low hanging fruit. So I'm pretty happy with that. Um, and I feel like the app is in a pretty good spot.

1:52:35There's definitely ways I want to enhance and expand, but it's in a pretty good state. And, um, with regard to money, it's done pretty well. It's not, it is not done as I've tried. I just tried to start seven sentences all at the same time. So if, if you look at how much time it took me to write call sheet, which was around about six months as a broad estimate, if this was the only income I had, I don't think I earned six months worth of income from it. If that makes sense. Like if, if I hadn't been doing call sheet and instead was like doing independent consulting at, you know, roughly independent consulting rates, I, I would have been, I would have lost money, but it's in the ballpark now, which is really freaking great.

1:53:23And what's incredibly great is that in theory, I'll be getting another payment of a lot of this money. You know, hopefully a large portion of this money will come again next year. And that, that my friends is incredibly empowering and incredibly cool. So, you know, my hope is, as I continue to add features and fix bugs and so on and so forth, hopefully that will encourage people not to abandon their subscriptions. It will hopefully encourage people to go ahead and tell, tell their friends about it. And hopefully their friends and family and whatnot will subscribe. And, you know, hopefully over time, this becomes another item in the, you know, financial quiver, if you will, which is really important to me because as much as I am so lucky for what I do, and I'm so lucky that I'm able to put a roof over our heads and food on the table doing it, you know, it's still scary.

1:54:14You know, if Marco or John drop dead tomorrow, God help us and God help me, that would be a really big financial issue for me. I mean, leaving aside the fact that I'd be devastated that one of my dearest friends has had something happen, it would be a real financial problem. And so hopefully over time, you know, all three of us, and I think Marco has done a very good job of this, but he had a pretty big head start. But we all diversify and have other means of income. And so now this has moved the needle on the family income, which is exactly what I had hoped and what I had dreamed would happen.

1:54:47So yeah, I mean, if there's anything you two want to ask, I'm happy to entertain questions. But in short, it's been going really well, and I'm riding a real big high right now on account of the Upgrade-y. So I'm in a good spot. yeah that's awesome first of all the upgrade is a huge deal that is awesome i've been around long enough i've had you know enough success in my app career that i've gotten a decent number of like awards from blogs and podcasts and everything it matters every single time it never stops feeling cool it's it never stops being a huge honor i absolutely love it i'm secretly hoping that when I release my big rewrite in next year sometime, I'm hoping to get awards for that as well.

1:55:30That matters a lot, and it's always a big deal. You're not going to end up upgrading, though. Well, I have a lifetime achievement, so I can't. You have a lifetime achievement award, so you are ineligible. Yeah, I think I can get a Mac Stories award for the rewrite, I think. I don't know. There's going to be a lot of competition. What I would really want is an ADA, but we'll see. Yeah, I hear that. that's my white whale I want an ADA so badly I feel like the idea don't you feel like the ADA has been devalued through no fault of the people who've awarded congratulations to all of them but I feel like sometimes it's kind of like the Oscars sometimes you question the judgment of the academy you know what I mean I wouldn't say they've been devalued but they have shifted over time with different priorities and that's first of all I think that actually gives me a chance because in the original definition of the ADA I stood no chance because I'm not that great of a designer You just got to hope you're using whatever API Apple is promoting that year.

1:56:23Yeah, but I think I'm leaning so heavily into Apple's new stuff, like with SF Symbols and SwiftUI. I think I have a better chance than ever. That might not be enough of a chance, but it's certainly a better chance than ever. So we'll see. It's an honor just to be nominated. It actually, it genuinely is. It really honestly is. Yeah, it is. If you think, especially on iOS, how many iOS apps are released every year? it's worse than the Oscars it's just like you get like a one in two million chance but also like the kind of app that used to win ADAs doesn't really exist anymore nobody makes that kind of app anymore so if they were trying to give out ADAs for just that style of app they wouldn't have enough candidates every year at least enough good ones so it had to shift over time and the app market is constantly shifting but yeah honestly that is my white whale i i am going to keep trying until i win one and it might never happen but that like if i ever do just know that will mean a tremendous amount to me like that that will be like that will make my year that will make my decade i want one so badly and but we'll see i i never again i never think i have that great a chance but you just probably buy an old one on ebay it's not the i could totally but that's not it's not the same you know we're just talking about uh people were selling eddie awards you guys don't remember this but back in the day when uh the was a mac user yeah the magazine would sell the little stat or maybe it's mac no it's mac i have one yeah uh the uh the big statues with the person holding up the mac se over their head which by the way that is the coolest award i've gotten i think i got one i got one for instapaper yeah but anyway like those those are available on ebay now for going for a lot of money apparently so you may be able to get an ada cube uh eventually when someone dies in their estate puts it up on ebay yeah but i don't want someone else's ada cube on my desk i want i want one that i was issued that i that i take what you can get we'll see if i get desperate enough maybe but no the old ones had batteries in them right to light up or whatever so i wonder if that battery will still be good in 20 years i think i think that was actually user replaceable and now we've come full circle baby yeah it wasn't or wasn't there an i fix it taren somebody actually did like a like a battery replacement guide on those.

1:58:38I think half is a joke, but it was actually real. Yeah. Anyway, so all this is to say, Casey, winning an upgrade is a huge deal, and that's awesome. No, it really is. And, you know, for me, I don't know if you and I have ever met, Marco, but I have a wee bout of imposter syndrome. You? Yeah, I know, right? And so, for me, all kidding aside, for me to have won an award for my work And, you know, I absolutely had help on the app, but it's still my work. And that is a tremendous compliment. It's a tremendous honor. And it's a little bit of, it's a way for me to convince the nastier subconscious, or the nastier subconscious part of my brain that no, when you really do try hard, you actually can make this work, you know.

1:59:32And even though I do believe that for the most part, as with everyone, but especially with me, a lot of times I feel like I'm faking it and I'm going to be found out tomorrow that I'm a big dummy and so on and so forth. And I mean, hell, listen to the first two years of this program. And I think my confidence to the degree that it existed at all was not what it is now. And so for me to have this tangible to a degree, you know, evidence that when I try hard and I do something difficult, I can succeed. Like that's a really incredible compliment and a really incredible feeling. And it really helps me feel better about doing the thing, you know, the job that I do.

2:00:13And so I'm extremely thankful for it. And yeah, I didn't put this topic in the show notes, but it was extremely fortuitous timing. So thank you, John. I'm not out here doing it for the awards I do it for the money and I get neither I'm sorry thank you so much to our members who were the exclusive supporters of this episode you can join us at atp.fm join and we will talk to you next week now the show is over they didn't even mean to begin cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm And if you're into Twitter You can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O, A-R-M, D-I-N-T, Marco Arman, S-I-R-A-C, U-S-A, Syracuse.

2:01:29It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech Podcast. So long. What was your Eddie Award for? Was it Overcast? Instapaper. Instapaper. yeah i gotta it well instapaper was early enough in the app store that i got a whole bunch of awards for things that don't exist anymore yeah that's the other thing unlike the oscars the eddy the eddy award the uh the the uh ada categories have really changed from year to year just depending on whatever apple feels like doing of course yeah because again like you know the app market is so different like right now like they're how many like indie developers are there that are like crafting pixel perfect UI today.

2:02:18Like there's not that many left. I mean, there are still ones out there. That's why it's kind of fun when somebody wins and you're like, not only does that app show off the API Apple wants you to use and does all the things right, but it also is like pixel perfect and beautiful. They do exist. They're just more rare than they used to be. Yeah, exactly. But the thing is like there are so few of them left that like Apple probably doesn't have a lot to choose from for the ADAs each year for that kind of thing. that's why how many years went by with this i think they did like no mac apps got ada's for a bunch of years yeah exactly because like how many awesome new mac apps are being released every year that aren't web views yeah like it's not it's not a huge number unfortunately and so i like i wonder too like how you know it's always a question of like you know what they're going to try to promote with the ada's and like you know so this year i'm sure anything good on vision os is going to be you know substantially looked at yeah but uh you know but you know it's it's always you know they talk about other stuff like there's always like you know diversity and inclusion metrics there's like fun metrics there's games yeah all the game categories they have do you see all the game categories this past year or whatever no that were that was like the app store that was the like best of the app store right which is different yeah but even those like it's i look at those awards and it's so i can't figure out how they pick how apple picks like game of the year because it's not the same way that for example a gaming website would pick its game of the year I feel like gaming websites are picking, like, which they think is the best game.

2:03:44And Apple is using something else. Not that the games that win aren't good games. They're all good games, right? There's a lot of good games out there. But, like...

2:04:21why this game? this game was made exclusively for iOS and uses all of Apple's APIs and isn't available on other platforms and it gets the award. It's the platform tax in their awards. It's kind of hard to take them seriously when it comes to games. Well, but again, I think they're looking for different things too. Like what you look for in a game for – if you're like a gaming website that covers the major AAA games of the world, that's a very different audience with very different priorities and very different games than what succeeds on iPhones for people like it's it's a it's so different it's a radically different market you know and and Apple has different incentives of course as well you know because they are like you know you don't usually get a whole bunch of like you know game of the year awards like from Nintendo or from Sony in this case Apple is the platform so of course they're going to have not only different priorities but different incentives you know so that yeah yeah, of course they're going to prefer games that are exclusive to them and show off their stuff really well and take advantage of any initiative they want to push.

2:05:23Games that are in Apple Arcade or games that are cross-platform that work on your Apple TV also or whatever, of course they're going to push that stuff harder. That's the nature of them being the platform owner and also issuing awards.