572: Cryptofarts and Copyright Infringement

34:29There's a lot to digest here. And they're going to make sure that they don't give away a cent more than they have to. And so that's, again, why some of this is complicated. But, again, I don't think it's artificially so. I think they just didn't do a good job communicating, though. Because, like, go ahead. Starting Gruber summary. Because Gruber summary makes sense. And you say, oh, that's what all that stuff you just read means. Now I get it. And this summary we have in here, and it's linked on his website, is longer than his original summary. When he was, you know, working on this, it started off being 14 lines of text.

35:01Like 14 not complete lines. 14 bullet point lines of text. It was less than a quarter of a page of text. and Apple released pages upon pages upon pages in text and all of us scratching our heads for an entire day trying to figure out what the heck they were talking about. All right, so Gruber's summary. Number one, these are your choices. This is the business terms. You're like, wait, but if I have an app, like what's the deal? I have an app in the EU. What is the deal? What are the choices? And this is essentially the flow chart, the choose your own adventure. So you want to sell an app in the EU.

35:32Here are your choices. Number one, you can stay in the app store under the current pre-DMA rules exclusively. Developers that take this option are not permitted to use any of the new business terms available in the EU, but new iOS platform options for the EU, such as alternative browser engines, are allowed, because they are required to be allowed. Again, not at the goodness of Apple's heart. Right. Because nothing business-related changes under this option, the existing worldwide rules apply for paid apps, subscriptions, and app purchases, including the 30 % or 15 % commission to Apple, and a requirement that apps exclusively use Apple's App Store payment system.

36:08The core technology fee, that's that half euro thing that we keep dancing around, is not collected because the business terms haven't changed. Well, and just so that's that's choice number one. Choice number one is whatever the pill color that I always forget, like take this pill and you'll stay in the matrix and nothing changes, right? It's like it's the easiest to understand option. Even though Apple is doing all this stuff, they're still saying, hey, all the stuff that we're doing, if you don't understand it or don't want it or don't like it, you can keep things exactly as they are, which is the option that Apple would prefer that you take.

36:41Indeed. So that's number one. Option two, you can opt into the new EU rules and all sub options which we'll go through available under this choice require paying the core technology fee, that's the half euro thing, for each app with over a million downloads in the EU. So sub bullet number one, after opting into the new EU rules, developers can choose to remain in the App Store and use Apple's App Store payment system at 20 and 13 % or 13 % commission plus the core technology fee paid to Apple automatically. Or they can use a custom in-app payment system like Stripe at 17 and 10%. So that's a decrease of 3 % both ways, percent commission and the CTF is paid, the core technology fee is paid to Apple by hand, if you will.

37:28Or they can use external links from inside apps to the web for payments and subscriptions, which is still 17 % or 10%, and they still have to pay the core technology fee to Apple by hand. The latter two options, using your own payment system or linking out to the web, those are similar to the things that happened in the U.S. last week, the announced last week external payment link entitlement policy regarding the developer's obligation to track these payments, report sales to Apple monthly, and submit to audits by Apple to ensure compliance. The fork that we took in the road was keep everything the same as they are, And then the other the other choice, the other major fork you can take is you get the new EU rules.

38:06Now, once you have the new EU rules, what Casey just read is, OK, OK, so you've got the new EU rules. Next choice is under the new EU rules. Do you want to still be in the App Store? And that's what he read here. It's like, OK, if you're still in the App Store, you have a choice. Stay in the App Store. Use Apple stuff. Stay in the App Store as use a different payment process. Stay in the App Store to just link out to a payment thing. Those are the rules. And notice, if you choose the new EU rules and you want to stay in the app store, every option under staying in the app store under the new EU rules is different than if you had not chosen the new EU rules and stayed under the app store.

38:39Right. So if you're like, well, I've just decided I'm going to stay in the app store. That's not your top level choice. Your top level choice is keep everything the same as it was or take these new EU rules. And if you take the new EU rules, you can still be in the app store. but the deal is different in particular as rupert notes every single one of the options under the new rules adds the core technology fee to all the different things you can do and of course you have new options because under the eu rules if you stay in the app store you can do things like use an entirely different payment processor and there's also a couple of you know asterisk on that too like for instance if you choose to opt into the new eu rules for an app you can never change back for that app yep so that's that's a big thing but that's that's the the that's down at the bottom of the thing.

39:22So anyway, that was if you take the new year rules, you stay in the app store. Now it's you take the new year rules and what's the next option, Casey? So then you can distribute apps in one or more third-party marketplaces. No option to you, you have no option to use the Apple app store payment processing because the apps aren't coming from the app store. The only money due to Apple is the core technology fee. There's no commission percentage on in-app transactions or links to the web. It isn't, you're on your own, it's the wild west. You just got to pay us a half euro for the million and first and so on user and install and so on and so forth.

39:55This is actually I think pretty surprising. So yes, if you totally bail out of the app store and if you are only distributing your app in a third party app store I'm not going to say app marketplaces so third party app store then you only pay the core technology fee you only pay that half euro per user after a million. So that's actually, I think, surprisingly reasonable in context of like what Apple even would consider doing. I would have guessed that they would have done that whole like, you know, submit to us your financial reports and pay us a commission kind of thing on this. I don't think that was allowed in the text of the DMA, essentially.

40:39Probably not. I think that they were forced to – that's kind of – we'll talk about it in a little bit. That's kind of the reason the CDF exists is I think the option that you're describing, even apple didn't think they could pretend that that's complying yeah so yeah so uh that's basically the story and now you forgot the exclusivity part options one option one or two are exclusive options one and two being do you want to stay in the app store and do everything the same the way it is now or do you want to opt into the new eu rules and that's what marco was talking about before uh once you make that choice it's irrevocable apple says developers who adopt the new business terms at any time will not be able to switch back to apple's existing business terms for the EU apps.

41:17So say you opt into the new EU rules and you're like, oh, turns out it was a mistake. Well, we don't like this new system. We want to go back. Apple says, nope. It's a one-way door. If you decide you want to use the new EU rules, whether you're under the new EU rules in the app store or whether you're under the new EU rules outside the app store, there's no going back. That is that. So I don't know. When I first read all this, it seemed super reasonable to me, surprisingly reasonable to me. And then some people started doing the mathematics on... Wait, this is Europe. I believe you mean the maths.

41:50I'm sorry, yes. This is the EU after all, so they did the maths. Actually, I guess the UK is not in the EU anymore, so you can say whatever you want. I don't know if they say maths in any other countries. See, this is why I said mathematics, you big jerks. Yeah, so let it slide. Go ahead. There's one more minor point of the things that Apple described. This is the flowchart that Apple didn't provide that I have drawn here in the notes that isn't really in Gruber summary, but it's implied by Gruber summary. And there's a little bit more to know here. What is the flow? What is the process diagram of like, you got all these rules, you can opt into this rule, opt into that rule, but say you are a developer, regardless of which path you chose on this little choose your own adventure, option one, option two, you rules, not you rules, app store, not app store, whatever.

42:32How does this all work? And the way it works, if you just have an app is you're a developer and you have an app, everybody, no matter what rule you choose, you take your app and you send it to Apple, but you don't send it directly to the people who review apps right now for the app store. Instead, you send it to this new process, which I don't know what Apple calls it. I just call it Apple review in this diagram, but this is a new process that is a very tiny subset of app review. Apple, you will send your app to Apple, presumably through xcode and apple will look at your app and they will do a bunch of checks and this is the list from apple for the checks uh this is they're calling a notarization for ios although i feel like it's a little bit more than that because they've used it yes anyway um they will check for accuracy apps must accurately represent the developer capabilities and cost to users functionalities binaries must be reviewable free from serious bugs and crashes blah blah blah like you know does it work uh the apps cannot manipulate software or hardware in ways that negatively impact the user experience safety apps cannot promote physical harm of the user or public security apps cannot enable distribution of malware or suspicious unwanted software that cannot download executable code read outside the container or direct users to lower the security of their system or device apps must also provide transparency to allow user consent to enable any party to access the system or device or reconfigure the system or software and privacy apps cannot collect transmit or transmit private sensitive data without a user's knowledge in a manner contrary to the stated purpose of the software right um and it kind of implied in all this is you can't use private apis right so this is way less than app you know the app store review this is like just does your app work is it not a super obvious scam does it not use private apis every single app under these rules goes through this phase this very limited very strict phase importantly they don't care what's in your app does your is your app filled with porn is it a nintendo emulator does it have pictures of star wars characters all over that you didn't license this phase does not care it just wants to know does it crash does it run does it do what it say it does does not use private apis which i think is a pretty big one does it not steal people's data does it not direct them to lower the security of their iphone that's all they're checking for every single app will go through this presumably the ones that go to the app store as well because the app review is doing this stuff anyway then after you clear that phase then there's a fork in the road and says okay well were you submitting this to the app store or were you submitting this to a third-party marketplace and if you submitted to a third-party marketplace the third-party marketplace receives the apps that are in it from apple developers don't submit their apps directly to a third-party marketplace and we'll get to like you know who would make a third-party marketplace and why it still goes through apple so if you're making a third-party marketplace you're getting a funnel of app submissions from apple because by the time you get them apple has done all these checks to make sure it's not super duper terrible so if you're wondering like this takes apple out of the equation and now they're no longer a bottleneck for there's still everything still has to go through apple yeah which which is interesting i mean that this again is not how i would have guessed this would be done and again like you know part of this probably a big part of this is you know apple still wants to have some form of app review obviously the dma and whatever related legislation there might be in europe the dma is going to limit what they can review and what they can prohibit in this way so yes they're allowed to interfere basically with their party app stores and say well you still can't have like a virus in there or you still can't have you know stuff that's misleading users but they can't say things like you can't have porn or you know as John was saying, certain copyright issues.

46:19I was thinking, too, all the cryptocurrency scam apps and scam companies, because they're all scams. I was going to say, cryptocurrency scam, that's redundant, isn't it? I mean, I think a lot of crypto stuff would go through, because it doesn't technically violate any of these things. That's what I'm saying. That's somebody else who might want to use this, because Apple's had a lot of rules around certain types of content that they found either objectionable or just too dangerous are messy to to deal with things like porn you know crypto stuff or real money gambling yeah real money gambling certain political uh apps like there are certain things that apple just has not allowed in the app store um just kind of you know content-based decisions and it seems like under the dma there it through the third-party marketplace process they don't seem like they're either allowed or even interested in policing that kind of thing because it's kind of out of their hands at that point.

47:16But they are allowed to, at least so far, you know, we'll see what the European Commission says, you know, if they go back on any of this stuff, but they see, it seems like they are allowed to at least do basic functionality checks of, you know, basic, you know, representation and security matters. Yeah, that's, that's written right into the DMA. The DMA essentially has language that says, you're, you know, just because we're telling you, you have to have third party app stores, that doesn't mean you, you, you can't check for like very basic, you know, there's a whole bunch of language i think it might be lower than it so we'll get to eventually it's like to ensure the integrity of the platform like you don't want someone to download an app that's going to fry their phone or steal all their data like that is written into the because remember this is the eu the same uh body that uh added all those annoying cookie restrictions like so they they all they're on board with trying to do these safety things and they explicitly say apple's on to do it um and at the top when i said like what is the dma it's you know it's the european union thinking there's insufficient competition in the market for digital goods and apps in the app store and they think there should be more of it i think that is the when looking at this giant list of rules before you get into the nitty-gritty details it's worth considering uh does the dma accomplish that goal assuming what apple has you know put forward here is compliant which remains to be seen um i think in one way it does and we were just touching on that with this with this uh the apple review process that they do that minimal number of checks right because uh previously before the dma there were certain kinds of apps that you just could not get on your iphone unless you were like a developer did some weird enterprise thing or whatever right because apple didn't want them right under the dma even under apple's rules there are kinds of apps that can now get on your phone through a regular third-party app store that couldn't get there before whether that's porn apps or gambling apps or nintendo emulators or just you know there's so many kinds of apps that apple just doesn't want oh that's too much like an apple app i don't like that because it looks too much like springboard the number of different kinds of apps that apple does not allow on the app store is vast you might not know about them or think about them because they don't get through right and if you don't see some story about it you don't know that someone was thinking of making an app like X and it got rejected for some reason.

49:32It doesn't make any sense to you. All we know is there are apps that previously couldn't get through that under this new plan will be able to. So that is one thing the DMA was trying to do, which is like, hey, it seems unfair that Apple gets to decide what kinds of apps are even allowed. And it's not just porn, bad things like that. It's like I said, it's apps that like Apple decides, you know, have a picture of an iPhone in them or mention iOS or look too much like Springboard or like or look too much like an app store or just so many things that Apple doesn't allow. It's all just going to be like crypto farts and copyright infringement.

50:08I mean, it's going to be a lot of that. But anyway, this provides that. The second thing of like, OK, well, we don't think there's enough competition in the marketplace. The complaint that we often talk about in the show is developers feel like Apple takes too big of a cut of the money that is made through the App Store. They feel like Apple deserves maybe some, but they don't think the amount that they're giving to Apple seems like too much for what they're getting in return. And we've discussed this a million times, whether they're right or wrong about that. That's how they feel. And that is the second leg of this thing.

50:39Does the DMA and these rules complying with it address that in any way? And I think, to spoil my opinion that we'll get into the degree details of i think that it doesn't i think that apple has cleverly designed these rules such that it is not a clear-cut financial win to do this and if that was one of the goals of like there should be a way where you can get apps on the iphone and pay apple a lot less money i don't think overall this provides that in some cases yes in some cases massively no right and we'll talk about who's going to even run a third-party marketplace because if Nobody runs their party marketplace.

51:17This is moot, right? For both of these things. And I think Apple has done a pretty good job of making sure that financially speaking, it's not a clear win to go with the EU rules. And that I think is the biggest knock against their compliance. Because you can say, okay, well, they are allowing apps that they weren't allowed before, right? You can see a path for them to get through to users. I see that happening here. But that is only one complaint that people had. one aspect of competition the other aspect is apple's taking too much money and apple's like no matter what you do no matter where you go you will always be paying us the same amount of money you are now or more and no matter what laws you pass we're smarter than you and we will make sure that we get the same amount of money we're getting now or more and that i think is the absolute worst part of this thing and you may be reading and you say what do you mean their cuts are lower and yeah another ctf thing but it's only over a million how are they paying more money and you know from the week that the story hasn't been going on people have been starting to do the math and in some cases yeah you can make more money in other cases you will be paying apple literally billions of dollars a year for the privilege of distributing a free app yeah and that's that i think is what i think will ultimately happen with this is not a lot because again apple as john said Apple's very good at making sure they keep making money.

52:42They are very good at that. The same amount of money or more. Exactly. And yeah, there might be certain apps where that won't be the case for, where they can figure out if they can squeeze a bit more money out by doing these new terms. Yeah, that's the one, speaking of that, that's the one loophole that Apple left here. And it's not really a loophole, but I think it's weird and perverse, and it's strange to me that Apple didn't think of it. If you look at the rules, Gruber's rules, not the fee calculator, it may occur to you that if you sell a paid upfront app through a third-party app store you pay apple nothing you also earn nothing but right that's the apple is so sure that paid upfront apps are just a dud like a relic of the past that no one will ever do that they left it open but so say you do a paid upfront app that costs 20 that 50 ctf fee you're like i'm making $20 pure profit minus 3 % for my payment processor minus 50 cents for apple who cares and apple's minus whatever the third-party app marketplace is going to charge you which is not nothing right but like whatever like the whole point of the third-party ad marketplace is like in theory they'd be competitive with apple or whatever but like but that's a loophole and the reason that's there i have to assume is like marco said nobody buys paid up front apps and i do wonder if if this is compliant and goes through in any way if this will be like a perverse incentive to say everything old is new again pay up front apps for ten dollars and you'd be like why why is this happening it's like well the rules that apple laid out allow that to be a way to safely make money it always has been a way to safely make money just no one ever wants to do it that's why it has essentially become almost extinct on the app store not extinct i mean i know there are apps that are out there that do that but it's so much less popular than it was in the beginning everything is you know free within app purchase and the ctf makes free within app purchase a potentially bankrupting thing it's just just to to be clear why everyone is against the ctf for the ctf after your million and first user you pay 50 cents for every you know install per year no matter what that person does with your app and if your app is free to download and that person never make it makes a purchase you're paying 50 for them year after year if they leave it on their home screen and if you do more than one software update per year that update counts it as an install and you are just paying 50 euro cents per user per install year after year after year.

55:01So you better hope the value of your customer is more than 50 cents per year. And if you have a free app where you don't sell anything or you have a free app with a conversion rate of in-app purchase that is too low to provide that, you are just bleeding money left and right. So all these big companies that have hundreds of millions of customers in the EU for a free app, that adds up to millions or billions of dollars which may be worth it for these big rich companies but if you are a small developer and you have a you know say you're widget smith and your app goes viral and millions of people download your app and you get like a one percent conversion rate and you're like oh now i have to is that one percent conversion rate equal average out to 50 euro cents per user because if it doesn't i am now in the red for my incredibly successful app which is just such a poison pill and i'm not the first to use the term poison pill but it is such a poison pill and on the one side you gotta give apple credit like it's slimy but they made it work and they presented it in a reasonably not slimy way insofar as it seemed like a good deal for which i guess it's even more slimy right but it seemed like a good deal at first and then the more you eat into it the more you're like oh oh oh if i have a more than a million users surely i'm making money it's like right by the way that's not users that's installs like how many apps do you have on your phone that you install exactly not install it's like if someone installed it and left it on their home screen or or just or if it installed directly to the app library like you'll never see it again have like i'm just thinking like on my own phone i probably have over a hundred apps on there that i installed at some point in the past and don't actively use And auto updates is on by default every year.

56:41Again, if those developers release at least one update per year, which let's be honest, if your app is actively maintained, you're releasing at least one update per year every year. You're costing that person 50 euro cents year after year and you never use their app. You're never going to buy anything in it. It was a free download. like that the current model of the app store or the popular apps are free to download and they have in-app purchase that that model the ctf makes that model incredibly dangerous or incredibly known incredibly costly for the big apps facebook spotify you know all these apps that are free to download and have a free way to use them and they they have they you know are distributed in the millions that's going to cost those companies so much money if they want to be at third-party app store.

57:25And one of the things I'm not entirely clear about is, let's say Facebook decides they want to accept the EU rules. and distribute to a third party marketplace and pay 50 per cent per install. well, Facebook can eat that cost because they have, you know, they'll pay$500 million per year every year to Apple. It's, you know, whatever. They'll do it because in exchange they get more information about the user or they own the customer or whatever they want to do. But if they do that, do they have to remove Facebook from the regular app store? We already know they can't go back to the old rules. Can they have the app in both places?

57:59Do they have to start a new subsidiary to do this, to isolate the actual meta from this thing? and in that case they could they not use the is there just like a new like facebook eu app like yeah like is there can they use the facebook name like can you have all these people are talking about like well i'll just make a new legal entity to do this so i don't have to worry about it or is apple going to frown upon that uh this gets back to the whole idea that apple is the bottleneck for all this stuff and although they've said they're not going to stop certain kinds of apps what they might stop is oh i can see that you incorporated a new legal entity to try to skirt our rules about you not being able to have your cake and eat it too.

58:34Remains to be seen if that will work. Also, as I've talked about in the past before we knew what Apple was going to do here, I've mentioned how there was this kind of doomsday scenario I really hoped wouldn't happen as a developer, which is I was really hoping that Facebook wouldn't say, you know what, once we have third-party app stores or sideloading, I was thinking Facebook would say, all right, we're going to pull our apps from the app store. you know these apps that have billions of users around the world that everyone has to have on their phone you know the actual facebook app instagram whatsapp facebook messenger like these are like their core apps that have just billions of users and i was afraid facebook would say all right we're going to make our own app store our apps will be exclusive to our app store therefore everybody will install our app store and then all of a sudden you have a very very powerful third-party app store that would start interfering with the market in ways that would you know kind of force me as a developer probably to play ball with them so that's like that was my doom day scenario i really didn't want that to happen it seems like the way apple has one of this so first of all i can strongly recommend speaking of casey saying poison pill um the episode of upgrade that came out a couple days ago which i believe was titled poison pill um jason went through a lot of these details on there and and there were some details that he had that i didn't know uh so for instance on this point on the third party app store point what jason reported was that there's a clause in here which i haven't had time to verify um but there's a clause that if you run a third-party app store you can't just run it for your own company's apps yeah which is a pretty huge you know clause so what that means is facebook can't run their own app store that just has their apps now i have no doubt if facebook is going to you know do something do a move here i have no doubt that they could do something because you know what maybe a lot of you know non-developers might not know is that Facebook is a huge source of app install ads.

1:00:26Many apps that get installed on many phones across the world get installed through Facebook ads in some form. So Facebook would have a pretty strong incentive to build some kind of integrated system where you can have, you know, you pay Facebook to advertise your app, Facebook hosts your app, or, you know, through the third party marketplace system here. Facebook then can directly install your app directly from a user tapping an ad or whatever else. So there are reasons why Facebook might want to build a larger store system here. Fortunately for my goal of having that not happen, I think the core technology fee will mostly kill that just because the economics of it are so rough.

1:01:09Because first of all, the store itself, if you make a third-party app store, that is an app that pays the ctf on every install even below a million so and and how much money does your third-party app store make right so you have to you have to make 50 per installed instance of your app store for every single user who has it i love that none of us know what 50 euro cents are called like we just keep saying different things we'll just say half euro we say 50 cents it's fine but it's not 50 cents it's 50 euro cents do they call it that probably not i don't know but that's what i'm calling anyway like so so suppose facebook did this they're gonna pay 50 euro cents euro cents it's fine they're gonna pay a half euro for every installation of the facebook app store then they're also because they have so many users they're also going to be way past a million so they have a half euro for the app store app itself then another half euro for each of their installed apps on everyone's phone that's going to add up to quite a bit and and all of this would only be usable in the eu so it's not that it's not like they could do this worldwide and pull their apps from all of the app store stuff like they would they would do all this and jump through all these hoops and pay all these fees only for something that works in the eu so that's I can't imagine this is going to be used by pretty much anybody huge.

1:02:37The big tech companies, the big worldwide tech companies, I can't really see doing this. What I foresee happening here is the EU will have a couple of third-party app stores that are going to be filled mostly with porn and crypto and stuff like that that is just not allowed in the regular app store. and you know the economics of it won't be that beneficial to almost anyone except apple and and that'll be fine and i don't even know if those app stores will be sustainable though like i'm trying to think of who's like we asked about who's going to run the third who's going to use that linking third-party linking payment thing we talked about before the dma and it was like the only benefit was ownership to the customer and some flexibility there but this one's even worse because like lots of people may think i want to run a third-party app store in the eu but then you look at what's involved.

1:03:24First of all, you need a million euro line of credit, which is no problem for any big company. But if you're just an individual user who thinks you want to have your own app store, that's an immediate barrier to entry. And then what you just said before, Margaret, like Apple's rules say, you can't just have an app store and like, okay, but the only apps allowed in the app store are my apps. You can't do that. You essentially have to make an app store that allows submissions from anybody who wants to submit. Now, I'm sure there are loopholes in there because you could say okay well i'll be just like the apple app store and i'll allow submissions from anybody but have you seen my set of rules it's even more byzantine than the real app store and i can reject things for any reason because i decide that you've included a rectangle that is shaped like my grandma's house and oh there's clause 13.3.1 if any rectangle is shaped like her grandma's house i'm rejecting your app like i don't think apple can police the rules that each app store provides.

1:04:16But you can't say like from day one, sorry, we're not accepting submissions. You have to accept and process a submission. So now you are opening the doors to accept and process submissions, even if you're rejecting them based on lots of stuff. So if you think you're like an individual developer who goes around a store, are you ready to accept and review app submissions? Maybe no one will submit to you. Maybe a million people will submit to you. Now you're on the hook to do a lot of complicated stuff. And of course you have to pay 50 euro cents for every single person who installs your app. And then you have to decide how much of a cut am I going to take?

1:04:47Am I going to take 30 % like Apple does? Am I going to demand 70 %? Am I going to demand 1 %? Like, what are the rules of your app store? Oh, now you have to hold all the accounting for dealing with those rules. And are you going to have your own payment processing as part of like, building a third party app store, a third party marketplace in Apple's parlance is non-trivial and it's very expensive to do, to have one at all. So it eliminates a lot of people from doing it, right? And then if you want your app store to be attractive, I feel like the whole point of this is you have to offer something better than what the Apple's app store does.

1:05:23Because otherwise, why would people go to you? Maybe the better thing is, hey, I'll let you have porn apps. But presumably one of the better things is I'll take less money than Apple. That's the whole point of one big aspect of the competition. If you have third party app stores, A, they'll allow apps that Apple wouldn't. And B, they'll take less money from you. And so now you have to do that. So now you're already in a financially disadvantageous situation. You're following the rules set by Apple, who runs their own app store, and they set the rules up so that they know it's going to be really hard for you to compete with them.

1:05:52But you have to compete with them. Otherwise, your store isn't attractive at all. Good luck making money there. And that's why, you know, the only people this probably makes sense for are companies that can eat this. Like, you know, Facebook will say, all right, so we're going to pay half a billion dollars to Apple every year in perpetuity. uh, to have our own app store, but it's worth it to us because we have those click through ads. And now we can track who bought the thing, or it's more important for us to own the customer, like whatever they have some strategic reason where it makes sense.

1:06:23But the reason is not, boy, we're going to make so much money off this meta app store in the EU. You're probably like directly, you're probably not, it's probably going to be a cost center and you're going to make it up in other parts of your business. And it's strategic to you. Uh, and it's still not entirely clear to me whether if meta did that whether they could no longer have any of their apps in the plain old app store in the eu i don't think that's the case like i think they're allowed to have both but they might have to be separate apps but they but they have to pay the ctf on the ones that are in the plain app store because once they accept the eu rules this is another thing in case it wasn't clear from before once you accept the eu rules even your apps that are in the apple app store are subject to the core technology fee oh wait a minute i don't think i knew so it isn't per app well basically if you have an app in the app store and you accept the eu rules you pay the ctf oh i well let's clarify that because i i was right right up here so you know option number two you accept the eu rules and you remain in the app store all the options have ctf oh yeah no i'm saying like like could facebook have the facebook app for the rest of the world that stays the same but then facebook eu over here oh yeah no this is just within the i'm saying within the eu could you're living in the EU and you launch the Apple App Store.

1:07:33You see the Facebook app. You're living in the EU and you launch the Meta App Store. You see the Facebook app. Can the Facebook app be in both places as viewed by somebody in the EU? No, I believe it has to be a different bundle ID even, but we'll see. What I expect to happen here, and by the way, too, your breakdown of the economics of the third-party app stores, two points on that. First of all, the CTF kills those economics for for everybody, for the app store owner itself, and for each individual developer. If I wanted to submit my app to a third-party app store in the EU, first of all, again, I know they're going to charge me something, because the only reason people want to run app stores is to make the same cut themselves.

1:08:16Why do you think Epic is pushing so hard against Apple? Epic runs their own game store, and they take a percentage of all the sales in it. So, of course, they just want it for themselves. that's what well it's not that they want the cut of other people's they just don't want to have to pay apple so for example when apple distributes its own apps through the app store it doesn't pay itself 30 percent you know or if it did it wouldn't make it doesn't make any sense right that's why the idea of an epic app store that only sells epic apps epic loves that because like sure we'll pay ourselves 90 percent we'll pay ourselves 100 like it doesn't matter they're their own apps it's their own company and that's why apple has in the rules oh so you want to have an app store you can't just have your own apps in there essentially as a way to avoid paying anything because like we run the app store so we don't have to pay ourselves that's the advantage that apple has they run the app store they don't have to pay 30 of all their you know so apple has made it so that that is not an attractive thing to do like no you have to accept submissions you're like do i really want an app run an app store to deal with other people's apps i don't want other people's apps i just want to pay less and then if you just want to pay less you may be out there saying okay i'm not going to run my own app store i'll just wait to see the sea of third-party app stores that pop up and I'll pick the one that has the lowest rate.

1:09:23And what we're trying to say is there's not going to be a C if they're running app stores because running a third-party app store is not a great deal. And if any do exist, they're probably going to be similar or worse deals than Apple for everybody involved, which I feel like is not in the spirit of the DMA, which is trying to increase competition. And again, the only thing I feel like the DMA is successfully accomplishing, if this is deemed to be compliant, is apps that you couldn't get before. Now you can get in the EU. everything else is just such a mess that it is not helping anybody yeah that's that's the key is like because even again as a developer like why would i submit my app to a third-party app store because again like that that means i'm going to start eating the ctf for my app that's you know that's that ruins economics forever and ever yeah it ruins economics in in the eu for me because it's a it's a free app you can't change back yeah so that's the economics of it are terrible the only reason you're right the only reason is if my app type or business model or whatever if something inherent about my app is just not allowed in apple's app store and you somehow think you can get 50 cents per value per customer per year more than 50 percent of value per customer because you have to you have to be pretty plus whatever you're paying the app store yeah you have to be pretty confident that you can do that or you're just so confident that you're never going to be above a million users or whatever yeah so that's that's why i think like this is apple has crafted this ingeniously so that no one will use it basically like it's going to be a very like you know specialized thing that almost no one's going to use and you're not going to hear because then the other thing too is like suppose you suppose somebody makes a third-party app store they go they jump through the hoops they actually create one then they actually get developers to put their apps in it and and everyone somehow pays for the ctf and everything else going along with this you still have no users for that app store how does that get off the ground and the more users you get it's 50 cents for every single one of those users starting from user number one so your idea of like i really need i'm running a third-party app store i need every single person on earth to install my oh no i don't i really don't want that yeah exactly like it the economics of it make no sense for any party involved except apple apple's going to keep making their money of of course, and no developer, again, barring apps that are just not allowed, no developer would or should enter this agreement, and no one's going to want to run the stores either.

1:11:50I do think it is significant that Apple, everything still goes through Apple, even though what they've said they're going to do is, you know, like, okay, well, they said they'll essentially allow things through except for safety or whatever. The fact that there is a decision point, the fact that everything still flows through Apple opens the door to so much abuse of Apple just deciding, oh, we're not sure when we're going to get to that app. We're really backed up right now. Oh, yeah, we found something we think is a safety concern. Like, you know, the spirit of the DMA, the idea that there shouldn't be this small number of companies with such outsized control.

1:12:24Apple still has all that control. They're just saying, we won't use it in the same way as we did before. We'll only do the things that you allow in the DMA. We're just checking for safety and stuff. And sometimes you might get a little backed up. and oh we might have a concern oh because what what's the recourse if you if apple rejects it that app review phase before it gets to the third-party app store apple's gonna be like oh we thought there was a safety concern or it falls under this letter of thing how long does it take to get that resolved what is the mechanism to get that resolved it is like you're not cutting out apple out of this you're just basically scolding them and saying no you let through more apps than you did before and apple says okay i guess we will and if we don't something will happen and that's speaking of all this like does this comply we keep referring to that this is the somewhat delicious irony although not so delicious if it turns out that they're compliant uh apple has to submit this and say okay we saw your dma here's what we're going to do to comply with it and apple did all this development and made all these frameworks and wrote up all this documentation and did all this stuff uh but apple doesn't know whether the thing they're proposing is actually going to be deemed compliant they only find that out after submitting it which is exactly how every developer feels when they spend a year developing an application and they have no idea if it's going to get on the app store until they submit it i was reminded of this today when i was looking at the the tapestry kickstarter from the folks at icon factory sort of like a grand unified timeline of all things accessible on the the net we should put a link to it in the show notes in the risk section on the kickstarter page their number one risk i believe is we don't know if apple will allow this on the app store that is everybody's number one risk how we talked about before how many people just do choose not to develop an application because they were afraid that apple won't accept it and is there a way to get pre-clearance from apple can you talk to apple and say hey before we spend a year and millions of dollars developing this app can you just tell us whether you'll accept it on the app store and apple's answer is develop it submit it to us and we'll see and that's kind of the eu's thing here too it's like here's the rules uh comply with them and submit to us and we'll tell you whether you complied or not i don't know what the consequences are if they're not compliant do they just send it back to apple and they keep going back and forth uh but anyway apple is in the same situation as developers they're not sure if this is going to comply if the eu says this does comply i think they're not doing a good job because i feel like this does not comply with the spirit of what the dma is trying to accomplish in the way that it does but if it doesn't comply i don't know what the rest of the process is but it's it is i do enjoy the fact that Apple is in the same situation as we are.

1:14:57Of course, the difference is that they have a whole jillion dollars, and we don't. Honestly, again, because I really don't want third-party app stores or sideloading on iOS for lots of reasons, I'm actually, on one level, kind of glad that Apple has found a way to cheat their way into this so that they maintain all the control. Some of the things I was worried about with, for instance, Facebook having less controlled access to the hardware and software on so many people's phones the way apple has wedged themselves into this kind of like half app review process even for apps that do this i think that's that's good to try to help prevent you know bad actors like facebook from from doing the bad things that they do in the dma it says that platform builders are allowed to do these minimum things to essentially protect the integrity of the platform i'm glad overall i'm glad that apple has found a way to seemingly still do a pretty thorough job of protecting the basics of the platform and and you know user experience and security and things like that uh one kind of downside to that to this though is like now i feel like they will be able to keep their current anti-competitive behavior everywhere including in the EU and maybe even get worse get more severe at it because now they can point to this and say look if you don't like it we we gave you an escape hatch yeah if you don't like it try one of these third party things oh there aren't any i don't know why that happened there aren't any except for the porn store exactly i mean this this is why regulation is so difficult because yeah they identified a real problem i you know i think the the eu was right to look into this as a problem but the regulation they created i you know has a lot of loophole potential as evidenced by what apple was able to do here and as a result the customer outcome i don't think will be that much better and in some ways it could get worse because now they can even ramp up the abuses in their store that everybody will still be using so it's just it's tough to get regulation right and in this case like it's hard to point to this and call this a victory well we'll see we'll see if it's compliant because i pulled out some i was trying to look at the dma text to see if there's anything that is clearly not compliant and the dma tries in a wishy-washy kind of way to avoid a situation where someone complies with the letter but then essentially the the outcome is that no one would ever want to have a third-party marketplace for example so here's some text from the dma we'll put a link in the show notes to this exact passage the gatekeeper apple is the gatekeeper here because they run the app store in this example right the gatekeeper shall apply fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory general conditions of access for business users to its software application stores, online search engines, and online social networking services listed in the designated decision pursuant to blah, blah, blah, blah, right?

1:17:52So they try to basically say, like, look, you can't just say, oh, you can have a third-party app store, but, you know, if you want to get a third-party app store, you have to pay us$100 billion. Like, that doesn't pass the DMA, right? So they say fair, reasonable, non-discriminatory conditions, blah, blah, blah. the question is uh are the financial terms set out by apple fair reasonable and non-discriminatory they're probably pretty much non-discriminatory although you might say the million dollar line of credit is slightly discriminatory right but by carefully calibrating the terms to look more or less like the same deal as apple you could say well it's fair and reasonable because it's kind of the same deal that we have but if your goal with the dma is to foster competition if the only way anyone can have an app store is to essentially match apple's terms in terms of the finances that's not an option developers it's like i want to you know you what you want is competition to say hey here's somebody offering to take less of my money than apple i'm going to go with them and apple set out the rules to say yeah it's going to be pretty much impossible for you to take less money than we do in fact you'll probably have to take more but it's fair and reasonable because it's kind of like what we're doing right it's not it's not a hundred billion dollars it's not like you know like for example to to have a third-party app store there is an entitlement you need to get and apple gives that entitlement presumably in a fair reasonable non-discriminatory manner and you just need a million euro line of credit and so on and so forth i think they probably passed this bar but that's the fault of the dma again if the goal of dma was let apps exist that couldn't exist before and allow there to be financial competition allow people to compete by saying we're going to give you a better deal than apple that is the only form of financial competition that is valid or reasonable is we're going to give you a better deal better terms different financial arrangement we'll take a smaller cut we'll have a different way that we make money from you like that is competition and apple is trying so hard to say we will not allow competition along that axis at all and i kind of blame the dma if they decide this is compliant, then the DMA was very poorly written because it's not accomplishing its goal.

1:19:59Yeah, it's interesting. I read a blog post from, what was it, Stephen Sanofsky, and it was very long. It made some interesting points, and we'll put a link in the show notes, but some of the stuff that was said was, look, this is like in Marco since, you know, it's been so long since you've had a real job, you probably don't remember this, but if you go to a boss, and you say, hey, I've got option A, and it sucks because of one, two, and three. And I've got option B, and that sucks because of four, five, and six. You're the boss. What do you want me to do? Which one of these do you want me to do?

1:20:40And most bosses will say, oh, well, let's do option C, which eliminates bad thing one and two and bad thing five and six. And it's, No, that's not how this works. And that's what the DMA is kind of requesting is, you know, I want something that's open, but it still needs to be super secure and you need to consider users' privacy. Well, like, that might be possible, but it's not easy. and in sanofsky's post in large part was saying look i think i think this is a very american point of view and i mostly share it to be honest with you but you know steven's point was look this is kind of already a solved problem apple is trading on we have a very uh discriminant you know approach to doing things we we don't allow everything in the store we are very up front i mean whether or not you agree with the terms or if you think the terms are fair is i guess what I should say.

1:21:39They're very upfront about the terms, and I don't think anyone can really debate that. Apple has said from the beginning these are the terms, this is how you play in our playground, and that is the Apple way. If you don't like those terms, or you don't want to play in that playground, that's fine. That's why Android exists, and you can play in their playground, and they counterbalance each other in the same way that Windows and macOS did years ago. DMA applies to Android as well, obviously. Yeah, yes, yes, yes, but I mean just in terms of like the stereotypical open versus closed. And I know it's much more complicated than that.

1:22:10There's a lot of asterisks on that open. There is. But nevertheless, the idea is, look, it is comparatively easier to do the things that you want to do in Google world where you can sideload than it is in the Apple world where you can't sideload. And it's just, it's tough. And Apple's kind of in everyone, but Apple's in a no-win scenario. And so, to quote from his blog post, in the over 60 pages of the DMA, there's a little mention of privacy, seven times, security, nine times, performance, three times, reliability, once, battery life, none, or accessibility, just three times. So that is where Apple finds itself today.

1:22:46It was told essentially to create a new iPhone release that is as good as your old one for your existing customers, but do all these things that run counter to every lesson and experience that you've had over decades. Everything you've designed and architected, everything you promised customers you would deliver, that truly sucks. I agree with him a little bit, here in that the way the dma written puts them in a difficult situation but two things that one the whole point is the eu decided that uh unlike the u.s they decided we want there to be more competition we're going to force you to do it and it seems unfair to us especially if you don't think there's a thing that but they've already decided that so that whole idea of like but like we are it's already fine like you can always pick android the eu said yeah that's not fine with us right so you can disagree with them but they already decided that once they have decided that that have made the dma uh them trying to decide along what access they'll allow competition it's almost i almost wish they had reversed it where right now yeah you can get new kinds of apps which potentially induces all the problems that marco doesn't want and all the points that sanofsky is making of like what about battery life performance reliability like you're essentially compromising the iphone platform by allowing other people to get their apps on it apps that wouldn't fly on the app store that could make the iphone a worse platform right and the flip side of that is okay but what about the financial terms and i kind of wish they had said um the financial terms are the more important thing to us allow apple to maintain similar level of control over you know better life performance security all that stuff or whatever but just structure it such that there's a way for for competing app stores to exist that take a lower cut of the money right Because the brand promise of the iPhone has nothing to do with how much developers pay.

1:24:30That is not the brand promise of the iPhone. It has entirely to do with the safety of the apps, how much you can trust them, all that things. That level of trust does not require Apple to take any specific percentage from developers. When Steve Jobs rolled out the iPhone, he was like, we're just trying to break, or the App Store, rather, a year after the iPhone or whatever it was. He was like, we're just trying to break even on the App Store. he actually said that on stage or something to that effect of like it's not it's not getting that do you think he believed it i don't i'm guessing even he knew it was a profit center but yeah but but either way the whole point is um that's not part of the brand promise that financial arrangement between apple and developers that specific cut how much money apple makes from is not part of the brand promise or the user experience of the iphone it is a background thing that is financially important to developers and apple but but users users don't even know that apple doesn't make all the apps right like is that's not part of the promise everything else is part of the promise what kind of apps are available how secure are there has someone checked them for something arguably apple has not been fulfilling that brand promise in the app store itself with all the casino games for children and the scam apps that's a separate argument but like if the d you can imagine a different version of the dma that essentially would make sanofsky happy to say we're not apple we're not going to force you to break the brand promise of your phone what we are going to force you to do is allow competition on the business terms that developers get and the dma is does not do that does not do that at all instead it says we'll allow a bunch of porn and copyright violations but don't worry apple you'll still get your cut and that is not to marco's point it's not satisfactory to anybody because even if you're in favor of third-party app stores you'd be like no not like that like we want like i want the iPhone to continue to be good.

1:26:13I just want there to be financial competition about, you know, in the marketplaces. And that's not what the DMA is doing. And it's really sucky. Like, Sanofsky spent so long essentially being angry about the fact that Microsoft was forced to make their operating system worse to satisfy the EU. And Apple is now being forced to make their platform worse to satisfy the EU. But it's all because of this fight over Apple, like, you know, Apple and And the EU said, you know, it's so important to us that we continue to make money off the app store. It's like, it's not. You make money off the phones. Apple could break even, could actually literally break even on the app store and still be making tons of money on the iPhone.

1:26:52It is a profitable platform without any app store income whatsoever. But they will not give that up. Yep. I don't know. I don't have too much to add. I don't want to be. I don't I feel like the spirit to a degree of what the EU is trying to do and you know make it better for their citizens like you know I think that they come to it from a decent place but just like you said John I think the execution from the EU has been subpar or naive maybe that they're just they're they're barking up the wrong trees I couldn't agree more with what you said about let's change the business agreements. Let's leave the platform alone.

1:27:36And I don't know. I don't know a lot of people. Maybe I'm living in a bubble, but I don't know a lot of people that are like, man, all I want in the world is to be able to use Blink on my iPhone. Like, that's not a problem I feel like a lot of people have. And I don't know. It just, this seems like a whole, much ado about nothing to me. And I, it's just unnecessary in so many ways. I kind of do like the browser engine and stuff like that and um and by the way there's a point down lower that's i don't think part of the dma thing but it's like uh it's it's essentially a hedge to appease some other companies of them allowing like streaming games like previously apple had said hey you can't put an app on the app store that when you launch it has a bunch of streaming games that you like sell or give access to or whatever right and apple's changing the rules around that for worldwide not just the eu that now you can have a single app and inside of that can be a whole library of streaming games because before Apple said that's too much like an app store.

1:28:28We wanted to allow that. But now they're doing it specifically for streaming apps, mostly to satisfy Microsoft and other companies that they want on their side during all this. Stuff like that. Stuff like allowing browser engines and allowing streaming games and other stuff. Like there are things that Apple could give on that I don't think will hurt Apple. And they're just so, they drag their feet on it so much, right? The browser engine thing, especially what they've done with BrowserKit, technically impressive because you may not be aware, but like to allow a different browser engine, Safari on iOS, does things so that ios apps are not allowed to do spawning multiple processes having multiple threads doing all like they do all sorts of stuff with just the process architecture and what the app is doing in the background and how many things are running and are allowed to remain alive and not get killed off like to to implement all the various web standards that regular apps are not allowed to do and they're you know sandbox in the right way so they're not security holes whatever it's called browser engine kit or whatever the thing is that allows third-party engines is a complicated framework that allows third parties to implement a web rendering engine quote unquote the right way the way apple does it the safe way i think that's great i think that's a thing they could have done at any time uh they just never had any motivation to do it until they were essentially forced to do it but things like that i i give a thumbs up that doesn't break the brand promise that that preserves the brand promise because apple's saying we found a way to safely have browser engines on ios and you can do it too in fact blink is based on webkit anyway so it's not that different right stuff like that i give a thumbs up the streaming game thing it's like apple just it's not it's no skin off your back if they do that i don't honestly i don't you know it's like let it happen take your cut of it like let let it's not that's again not breaking the brand promise i don't think people are going to be confused like what is this a game store inside a game like people will people will figure it out it's like roblox is allowed to do it because they have quote-unquote experiences not games like no one is fooled everyone can figure it out stuff like that should have been happening forever and it getting tied up and all this is basically like i don't know it's it's a happy accident it's it's a nice that they're being forced to do it but almost everything else having to do with this is unrelated to that and is like essentially asking to synopsis point apple to break their brand promise by making the iphone a more dangerous and worse platform uh in the hopes of providing a more competitive marketplace but don't worry apple's gonna make sure that doesn't happen it's a lot we should also mention that the official release like the very broad uh i think it was like on the apple home page or whatever release about this was the crankiest piece of pr or news release from a company that i have seen in a long time it was probably crankier that's true but this was close man this was angry and i thought i thought they did a pretty good job people people i mean it could have been worse like because i think what they were saying was true they're like look we're being forced to do this we're doing it in the best way we can and all their their language was like here's how we're doing it to minimize the damage to our brand promise i know i keep saying brand promise it's a marketing term essentially saying the iphone it's a place where it's safe to install apps and the apps probably aren't scams again see all the asterisks about how apple does that in the app store like and there's one place to get everything everything's simple and it all goes through apple and you get refunds from app like that is the brand promise of the iphone and the eu is saying you must right now break that promise And Apple's like, here's how we're minimizing the damage.

1:32:06We've decided to do it this way because this was the best possible way we figured out to do this while still being compliant. Everything they say is like, this is bad, but we're trying to make it as less bad as we possibly can. And that's why it sounds cranky because they don't sound happy about any of this. They're not bragging about any of it. The only thing they're bragging about is we think this is the least bad option. and just paragraph after paragraph of like and here's how we're trying to mitigate this damage and again they never actually address the the actual point which is like hey how about allowing competition along the axis of business terms like no that's not a thing we're rest assured we're not doing that but within these other realms here's how we're minimizing the damage we are sponsored this week by green chef a ccof certified meal kit company green chef makes eating well easy with plans to fit every lifestyle.

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1:34:51Darren Kelkoff writes, with AirPods Pro or Amateur, very well done, as John still prefers, do you guys wear them in both, always wear them in both ears or do you ever do a single ear? If you go single ears, it's always the same side, or do you alternate? I suppose that for some folks, charge level could play a role here, but I find myself to never be low on AirPod charge, probably because the super sad noise they play when they do get low is conditioned to never let it happen. I was actually talking to a friend of mine, Sam, about this recently. And Sam has kids who are a bit older than mine. Actually, roughly your kids' age, John, just a little bit younger than yours, I believe.

1:35:27And he was saying that both of his kids, they pretty much always have one AirPod in. May or may not be playing anything, but it's almost like an aesthetic choice at this point, which I found very fascinating. But to actually answer the question, for me, I will use two AirPods when I am either by myself or doing something where I'm not expected to be talked to. You know, nobody's going to be talking to me, like maybe I'm exercising or something like that. But if there's ever a situation where I think someone might be talking to me, even though the transparency mode does work pretty well, I typically will go one AirPod only.

1:36:03And I alternate which side depending on, you know, is the TV that the kids are watching on my left hand side, then I'll put the left one in. Am I in bed? Well, I sleep on the right-hand side of the bed if I'm on my back, and so I'll put my right AirPod in if I'm listening to something, but I want to leave the left ear available for Aaron to talk to me or whatever the case may be. So I do all of the above, and I will do it all situationally. Marco, let's talk about how you use your AirPods, and then John, you can wrap us up, please. I use both of my AirPods Pros or neither of them. I don't do the one-in, one-out thing.

1:36:38All right, John. the only time i do one ear is uh as was alluded to in the question if the battery in one of them is bad and this happens to me a surprising amount why does it happen i don't know sometimes i put both my airpods in the case and one of them doesn't charge and oh you've got uh grit or dirt in your case make sure the contacts are clean i've i've tried so many things it's just sometimes sometimes i take my airpods out one of them is 100 and one of them goes the super sad sound they play when they don't have battery and when that happens to me i put the sad one back in the case where for some reason it charges in the exact same case now it's charging um and i use the one until the other one is charged up a little bit um and when i do it i well you don't have a choice if the battery is low on one that's the one i have to put back in the charging case but if i did have a choice uh i would put the right one in uh but yeah but i i want both of them in most of the time fair enough aaron thomas writes are there any types of apps that you would have considered creating if not for an oversaturation in the app store market for example camera app with manual controls to do checklists journals etc sub question if you were to develop a game what type of game would you make uh for me i have thought about doing a to-do app and or shopping app both of these i feel like even though i found options for both that i like there are things that i would have maybe done differently but a the things that i found that i like uh any list for shopping apps and uh due for to-do lists uh those are close enough to what i want that it's not like compelling me to do something different and even if i wanted to do something different it's such a saturated market that i don't think i would touch it since we started with marco first let's go john first wait case you don't have a game idea oh no i don't know like maybe uh i don't want to spoil it for people who haven't heard it but there's a members only special episode where i talked about an app i was considering making and one of the reasons i have not made that app is due to oversaturation in the app store market uh i think a lot of the ideas i have for apps are rejected not because of oversaturation in the market but just because what i said before either fear that it wouldn't be accepted or sure knowledge that it would not be accepted um that i think is my personal biggest turn especially since one of my passions is uh system extension type applications on the mac uh and i don't sell enough copies of anything to uh sell outside the uh the app store just to deal with like the hassle of accepting payments on my own or whatever so i'm kind of stuck in the mac app store for any of my small apps right and the mac app store disallows private api usage for example and tons of useful kinds of applications uh that exist already and sometimes they're in saturated markets uh are the door is closed to me because if i wanted to make them i'd either have to make them free or i would have to sell them outside the mac app store which is a uh you know a a fixed cost hurdle that I must overcome to get a system up that does that.

1:39:44And I don't think I would ever sell enough copies to make it worthwhile. And as for developing a game, I know enough about game development to know that I should never do it because game development is a lot harder than you think it is. If you're a programmer, you think game development is writing a cool game engine when game development is actually like writing an essay. It's the creative content of the game that takes all the time, talent, energy, money. That's why AAA video games costs hundreds of millions of dollars that money is not spent on the people who are writing the game engine 20 people are writing the game engine or maybe 100 people but a thousand people are making content for the game and that's what makes the game good the content what happens in the game how does the gameplay work where are the different levels like that stuff takes so much longer than you think it does and it's so much harder than you think it is like great and now i have an engine all i gotta do is make some levels and i'll be done with my game you haven't even started making your game i'll just make some levels really will you making some levels if it was that easy everybody would be a millionaire game developer that is the hard part not the programming part of it and which is sad news for lots of developers who want to be who want to make a game and they think as long as i get a cool game engine i'll be ready to go you are not you're not ready to go you're not ready to go anymore then if you say i'm going to manufacture a film camera and you manufacture the world's greatest film cam you're like i now i'm ready for my oscar it's like no now you have to make your movie like i'll just shoot some stuff and then i'll have a movie that's the hard part making the movie is the hard part making the camera is not the hard part making the movie is lots of people have really good cameras not a lot of people win an oscar for the movie so no i have not considered making a game because i know i am not up to it but but marco has i'm not quite as as negative on the idea of making games john is maybe you're better at it than i am i just know it's a skill that i don't have i mean i guess technically i've already shipped a game in the overcast watch app but it's not much of one i i think i wouldn't shy away from making a game because i don't think i could do it i would shy away from a game because i don't i wouldn't think it would be very fun uh i one of the biggest challenges of game development from the very little bit of it that i understand is that you actually end up putting a decent amount of work into a game before you really know whether it's even fun or not and if it's not very fun it's kind of hard to recover from that um and and i i don't i don't like developing that way where there's so much up front before you even know is this concept even a good idea or not um but you know the bigger problem why i wouldn't make a game um i mean i have a couple of ideas here and there that i've had over the years i've never been super motivated to make them in part because i'm not that much of a gamer and so i'd be the worst person to try to make a game like believe me we know this from the world of podcasts because there are so many people who have tried to bring into the world of podcasts over the years who don't really like podcasts that much but they like smelled money or opportunity and like oh i hear a podcaster bait let's bring into that market and we see the result of that it's people who make crappy podcasts and crappy podcast apps like that's it's people who who are in it for the wrong reasons if i made a game i i think i would be in it for wrong reasons also because i'm just i'm not that much of a gamer and so no but if you made a game you'd be making a game that you had an interest in like that's the good thing about games like if you want to minimize all the things that i said let's say for example you want to bypass a lot of that make a solitaire game i don't know it's an oversaturated market but you don't have to come up with the game solitaire already exists you don't have to make levels you don't have to make content you just have to make the engine that runs solitaire and maybe do one or two vaguely innovative things and you've made a solitaire game and maybe you have an itch because you're like i've tried all the solitaire games but they never do this one thing that i'm interested in and so you make a solitaire game like there are ways to make a game without having to spend years making content or even have to make any kind of levels or anything like that and if that's your passion you know like you you have some idea for a game you're like oh i'm not much of a gamer but clearly there are some things you think this would be fun to do and i haven't seen anything else out there like that you could make that and if it's a if it is a game idea that either is based on something that already exists like solitaire or is simple enough that you don't have to be an excellent level designer and make enough content to satisfy users or whatever it is possible to as just a plain programmer who's not a game designer to come up with an idea that sort of hits that sweet spot and i think you would be interested in it even though you're not a gamer because you would have had like you had this idea for a game right and i you know i think you could be successful in that it's just you really have to be careful with what you pick and yeah that's a good point but plus i thought you were gonna say total annihilation or whatever it is i mean know i don't have the skill to make anything like that that is probably a game you should not try to make because that does have a lot of content yeah a lot of content and you know that i mean that's a whole rts like that's first of all the rts genre appears not to exist anymore which is very sad to me oh i'm sure it exists everything is out there in some sub community no they didn't they all become dotas or whatever those things are that it became all they basically turned into rpgs which is a it's the it's a totally fine game genre but it's not one that i'm interested in at all whereas rts's were wonderful anyway um so uh the other half of the question of like other any other types of apps i've considered creating if not for an oversaturation of the market i don't really have any massively strong ideas of things i want to create at the moment that are not just overcast um but one idea that i've been percolating in my head is basically a music listening app specifically optimized for jam band concerts i'm gonna say it's a fish app Basically, and the problem is, I have lots of ideas on how I could do this well in a way that would please me.

1:45:24And the problem is the market for it would just be so small. Because there already are lots of alternative music players on iOS. So that market is there. And that would be pretty crowded to try to break into. And what I would want to do with my app would be more optimized for how you select what to play and how it is displayed in the app and things like that. if you have a large collection of jam band concerts like I do. But again, the market for that is going to be like 10 people. So I don't know if I'm ever going to make it just because the amount of work it would take to make that is way higher than the value even I would probably get out of it.

1:46:01And there just is not enough of an audience for that. So it's actually not really a question of oversaturation as much as insufficient demand. What about audio editor? Do you consider that oversaturated or does that just seem like too much work? You know, breaking into people's professional workflows is very difficult. If it was the only thing I was working on, I think I could make that happen. And again, it wouldn't have a big market, but I could at least make a decent one. But it's so much work to make a decent one that I don't think I could do it while juggling almost anything else in my life.

1:46:34But do you think that market is oversaturated on the Mac specifically? Obviously, we're not talking about Windows. On the Mac specifically, there is like Adobe Audition. There's whatever that free one is. audacity i think yep um there's logic obviously uh reaper the one that snell uses what is that one called ferrite ferrite ferrite yeah i mean i don't think it's oversaturated but there are a lot of big competitors adobe is a big competitor apple is a big competitor and there's also like the ferrite there are some indie lower you know there's some competition kind of at your level as well so i wouldn't say it's oversaturated but it's not like it's clear there'd be like oh oh, finally, a Mac audio editor.

1:47:15I've been waiting for one of these. Yeah, and also what people want in an audio editor is all over the map, and there's lots of different directions that it's going. For instance, there's things like Descript, these text-based ones, where they transcribe the audio, and then you kind of edit the text. So there's all the, and some of them are web-based, some of them are native, some of them are iOS only, some of them are Mac. So it's kind of all over the place. There's a lot of options, and because you know professional tools one of the reasons why pro tools like logic and like pro tools um and and like photoshop and you know things like that one of the reasons why they tend to be large and bloated is that everyone has something some different need for their workflow or their situation that would happen with your jam ban app too by the way if you made that everyone would be like i love your app but can you end this feature can you add that and these would all be the same fish fans but the the union of all their feature requests like i'll buy your app as soon as you add my two features so many they would want so many features just the fish fans alone yeah exactly so it any anything that where you're serving like you know somebody's workflow needs like an audio editor you're gonna have very very strong pressure to make the app very broad to just to add a whole bunch of features to satisfy, oh, well, my company would buy, you know, 15 licenses of your app if only you added this one little change over here.

1:48:40I mean, digital watermarking for more efficient dynamic ad insertion, you'd be like, what? Even if you're making like a podcast-focused audio editor, what does the market for podcast-focused audio editors look like? It's not people with shows like ours. It's everybody else. And the things they want out of a podcast-focused audio editor, you are not going to be enthusiastic about giving them. Right. it's yeah because the people who would buy it would mostly be you know like the big podcast production studios and like they're not gonna buy my app has to work with avid or whatever like they have workflows that are alien yeah they're gonna use like all the highest end stuff with their staff of 60 people producing a podcast like they're they're not gonna use my little indie mac app that's optimized for making shows like this we need collaborative editing of the podcast by seven people simultaneously through the web yeah exactly so yeah so that's one of the many reasons why I'm still working on Overcast.

1:49:30First of all, I like working on Overcast, and I'm not really feeling any pressure to stop doing that. But also, I don't really have any other better ideas right now that I'd rather be doing. So I'm going to keep doing this for a while. I hear that. Christian Kent writes, what audio settings do you use on Apple Music? And it has a bunch of options here. And I'm happy to read them off, but where am I looking to answer this question because I genuinely have no idea. Go to the support article that's linked there. I did, but that didn't talk about, it talked about like EQ and I didn't see anything else.

1:50:06This is the music app on the Mac. You can see the equalizer thing. I think that's where a lot of these things are. I don't think so. This is like spatialized stereo. This is all iOS stuff, I thought. Yeah, I thought this was all iOS stuff. So anyway, so Christian writes, spatialized stereo, off or fixed or head tracked. Sound enhancer, off or 50 % or high 100%. sound equalizer, off or a preset, or a personal one. Dolby Atmos, automatic or always on or off, high quality 256 or ALAC 2448 or ALAC 24192, lossless via headphone cable or AirPod Pro slash max wireless. So, I mean, to the ones that I can answer because I know the answer, I do not spatialize stereo.

1:50:45I do use Dolby Atmos when possible. I don't even know where to look for the sound enhancer and equalizer. And I think I cranked up the Apple Music streaming quality and Spotify streaming quality to whatever the max was. And I typically use AirPod Pros. So those are my answers. I don't think that's going to be satisfying for Christian, but I don't know where to look for these. I think I'm even more boring than that. On iOS, I have everything set to the default except spatialized stereo, which I have set to off because I believe the default is kind of the automatic thing and I hated it very much.

1:51:17So I turn off all of these enhancements on iOS. And the main reasons why, first of all, my iOS listening setup is almost always either my car or AirPods Pro. And in both of those cases, we are not talking about audiophile grade setups. We're talking about decent consumer level stuff, but not audiophile grade setups. And that's what my phone is for. At my desk, I do have an audiophile grade setup. What I don't believe in, though, is all this lossless high bit rate or high sample stuff. I would challenge anybody out there, if you have any way to set up a blind test between your lossless option and decent compression, like 256k bits or higher, I would challenge you to be able to tell the difference.

1:52:06I really don't think you can. Now, if it makes you happy to turn on your lossless audio and crank all these settings up and be playing at 24, 192, which your ears cannot tell the difference, if it makes you happy to do that fine no harm done but you won't hear the difference between that and regular bit rate high you know high quality compressed stuff you you won't hear that difference so i don't turn that kind of stuff on um i i think what matters a lot in your sound quality is the mix of what you are listening to which you have very little control over because it typically comes from the record companies so you know the mix matters a lot the recording matters a lot and the transducers the headphones or speakers that you're listening on matter a lot and everything else matters very very little or not at all so you know some of these options things like dolby atmos that's actually selecting a different mix if available so it might sound better um it you know but it's not really because of the atmos it's because you're listening to a different mix uh spatialized stereo is messing with the mix like you know so it might sound better if it sounds better to you great it does not sound better to me same thing with sound enhancer and sound equalizer these are also just various ways to have the phone mess with the mix listen to what pleases you but for me what i generally like is less processing on the audio not more so i tend to listen to things as flat as possible no eq no processing no spatialization um and you know atmos if available maybe but most of what i listen to is not available so it's kind of a mood point so i do the spatialized stereo off because i also hate that i hate the head track one i hate the fixed one i hate it all um that's the john syracuse story right that's an example of um the the the phone or whatever taking the audio and changing it in a way that it hopes will be more pleasing to you all right so somebody you know made a song and they mixed it and they recorded it and they put it down and the phone is like on its way out we're gonna do something different with it and whatever it's doing with it i do not like i don't find it pleasing so always leave that off sound enhancer and equalizer um i think sound enhancer is off unless it's on by default uh but this brings me to like equalizer brings me to the next thing which is the the only thing that i do on my phone specifically to mess with the sound on its way out and it is based on a process that i performed on this show a year ago or two years ago or through whatever it was where we uh found these apps that you can find on the app store mostly not scammy but not particularly high quality apps that will play a series of tones for you and ask you if you heard them do you remember when we did this like the hearing test yeah yeah i i remember that this was a thing and i think i still have the app on one of my home screens because i've been meaning to do it for literally years uh where is i made one of these a long time ago yeah there's a bunch of apps on the app store that will do this but essentially what they'll do is they'll they'll they're not great apps i found they don't like you want it to be like a you know a good app that's like now you're playing a tone do you hear it do you not hear it anyway it's like a hearing test where they play a series of tones to test what kind of frequencies you can hear and if you're an older person as an older than 20 you should try this because as you as you age past your 20s you start losing uh hearing and uh in different frequencies right and the result of this is a profile of here are the frequencies you can hear and how well you can hear them and you can ios supports using that profile for all of its audio playback you can say i did i use this janky app and it came up with a profile for me now ios please use this profile it's essentially like an equalizer setting but it's based on how well each one of your ears hears certain frequencies so i enabled that way back then and it's still enabled all as far as i'm aware all audio that comes out of my phone to go to whatever gets passed through that and what that's trying to do is saying okay you have trouble in your left ear you can only hear like 95 % of this frequency.

1:56:17So I'm going to boost that frequency to hopefully get it to the level that it should be that hunt the hundred percent that everyone else hears. And I enabled that years ago. And I was surprised to see when I looked up to answer this question, that it is still enabled. And like what you want, it's kind of like doing like parametric EQ for like home theater setup. What you want is to like, okay, phone make it. So my old person ears hear closer to what a young person's ears. It can't solve everything. If you just can't hear the frequency because you're too old and it's too high, boosting the volume of like, you know, 18 ,000, you know, Hertz is not going to help you if you just literally can't hear it, right?

1:56:55It's only so much it can do. But I feel like when I did the before and after, I'm like, yeah, I think that that is an improvement. So that is the only thing that I'm aware of that my phone is doing to mess with the sound. uh within individual apps i will use marco's voice boost feature on podcasts that have bad audio mixes oh yeah like and i you know you can do it on it's a per podcast setting i could say this podcast they don't know how to mix their audio turn on voice boost but that's just within overcast voice boost doesn't apply when i'm playing songs at apple music right in terms of the quality i'm like marco as long as it is not like you know an ancient mp3 from the 90s it has a reasonable bit rate i don't care about lossless i don't care about 24 bit 192 kilohertz my ears are too old to hear that my audio equipment is not good enough half the time i'm listening on airpods third gen like forget it for you know 20 24 bit 192 kilo no my airpods it makes no it's pointless same thing with like lossless via cable and no i don't care about any of that so in general i don't want the phone missing with my audio with the one exception being that thing and i kind of wish apple would build that into ios like maybe it is maybe there's some accessibility setting where you where it will take you through the hearing test build your personal uh hearing profile and then just apply that because i when i tried to reproduce this a while ago i'm like what was that i was just like what casey what was that app called and i can never remember the names and you search on the app store mimi hearing test is the one that we had suggested years ago that i think a listener suggested to us yeah i downloaded a bunch of them i'm like was this the app that i use they're all not that great like they're sometimes they're even hard to use like you have to be in a really quiet place and you have to use uh you know whatever headphones you're going to be using you're like am i not hearing this because my airpods are too bad should i use better headphones or should i use the headphones i'm going to be listening on it is a fraught process that i think i did an okay job of many years ago so i'm keeping the profile enabled but i really wish i had more actionable advice for all the people who are again older than in their 20s listening to this who may be wondering what frequencies they can no longer hear as well and they want to build themselves a profile and my answer is that apple should add that in ios 18 to be something that everybody can do through an interface that's nice no argument here thank you to our sponsors this week green chef and adblock pro and thank you to our members who support us directly you can join us at atp.fm slash join and we will talk to you next week Now the show is over.

1:59:33They didn't even mean to begin. Because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Because 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 List M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-G Marco Armon S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech podcast So long. So I was watching all these video reviews and I am excited to get my vision pro on Friday and use it as a Mac monitor. Can you tell me about that?

2:00:45Can you tell me, I saw some of the reviews that were like, Oh, and you get a Mac monitor and they rattled off the resolution. I'm like, wait a second. Is that resolution? Do you know, like the, the virtual Mac screen? What is the resolution in both points and pixels? I think I understand this, but it's one of those things where my understanding is hazy, and I will probably not verbalize it well, but let me give it a shot. So let me set a little more context. So I was thinking about this a few days back before all the reviews had come out, and it occurred to me that, first of all, I think we had all been thinking the same thing, that it could be neat to have your laptop, and I presume this works with the desktop, although I don't know.

2:01:25I think MKBHD made passing mention that it does. But anyways, say you have a laptop because that's what I'm used to and because laptops are superior. Am I right, Marco? So anyways, you have a laptop and you're either at home, but you're not at your desk or perhaps you don't have a second monitor at your desk, whatever the case may be, or maybe you're remote and you would like to have a bigger screen. Well, what you can do is you can, using the Vision Pro, if you're all in the same iCloud ID and whatnot, you can literally just look at your laptop screen. And above your laptop screen in the virtual world, there'll be a connect button.

2:02:01And you cast your eyes onto the connect button, you pinch, and you wait for a few moments. And suddenly the physical real world laptop screen goes dark. And then there is, I think it's powered by the same like VNC++, if you will, that was new. And I think the most recent release of Mac OS. But anyways, one way or another, a virtual screen appears within the Vision Pro world. And then we'll talk about resolution and stuff in a second. But you can use your Mac, you know, with the Mac's keyboard, the Mac's mouse on this virtual screen in your Vision Pro world. And then presumably you can put the native Slack and the native messages and the native Safari and the native this and that in like an array all around your Mac screen.

2:02:47And additionally, you can make that Mac screen 50 feet tall if you want. And all of that is possible because you're living in this virtual space. And I wrote a blog post about this a few days back. And what occurred to me, which was, I think, the more interesting thing that obviously people at Apple seem to have thought about, but I hadn't thought about, is, okay, that's all well and good, but... I've understood that typing on the Vision Pro is challenging. And so it occurred to me, it would be nice if I could use Universal Control, which is the same technology where you can control an iPad that's sitting next to your computer.

2:03:23If I could use Universal Control to say, cast my eyes at the Vision OS Slack. So I'm not running Slack on my computer in this hypothetical. I'm running it within the Vision Pro adjacent to my computer screen, but it's the native Vision OS, Vision Pro Slack. Well, if I cast my eyes over there, can I clickety-clack and type on the physical Mac keyboard that is sitting in front of me and have it appear within Slack? And if I can, just chef's kiss, just perfect. That would be amazing. Yes, you can. You've seen the demos of it, right? Well, at the time I wrote the blog post, I hadn't. But now, and this is why I bring this up, is now we've seen the demos.

2:04:05and I don't recall any one video that did a particularly satisfying job of it, but most of them, at least in passing, said, oh, and you can slide your mouse over, which I actually... MKBHD's video did a good job of showing this. That's true. That's fair. And so, anyway, you can slide your mouse over if you so desire, and then you get like an iPad-style mouse. This is something we were thinking about a while back. We're like, well, surely you can't have a mouse cursor just floating in the middle of nowhere, and you can't. Like, the mouse cursor is never going to appear, like just randomly like floating in but it will appear within the windows of either obviously your mac where the mouse cursor lives but also within the i don't know what you call them the windows of a native vision os app that is the only place the cursor will appear and when it's there it looks like an ipad cursor with a little like translucent circle exactly when you pull it out of there it does not pop off and just be free floating it always has to go to okay it's on your mac screen it's in your vision os thing or whatever um and that i thought was a good way to solve this because you really do not want that cursor to be like where is it is it up on the ceiling is it down on the floor it's always going to be in one of the windows yeah and so in this theoretical world i could be at the line again leaving aside the oh my god this guy can you believe this guy leaving that aside that's a really big big asterisk but i could hypothetically be it a library or Wegmans or what have you, or on a plane.

2:05:28And I have my computer open, and I connect to the computer. And so now the computer screen goes black. Nobody can see what the computer's doing except me. And I have a 10-foot wide screen in front of me littered all around it with different Vision OS windows. And I can control all of them via either my eyes, the keyboard, the mouse, or a combination of the three of them. Now, John, coming all the way back to your question, well, what resolution is that? And what was interesting was I had heard in the keynote that it's a 4K screen. That's what Apple kept saying. And Apple's been consistent about that.

2:06:06But if you read, I'm pretty sure it was in Nile's written review on The Verge. Apparently what it is, is that the Mac is broadcasting, for lack of a better word, a 5K display. So the Mac thinks it's connected to a 5k display but what's actually getting sent to the vision pro is a down sampled 4k version of that 5k display and when you say 4k though what is the resolution in pixels that's what i'm getting at because wasn't i heard everyone banning around 2560 by 1440 which is which is the 1x version of 5k right that's that's what i was getting at like 2560 by 1440 pixels is not 4k 2560 by 1440 points is also not 4k it's bigger than 4k yeah that's 5k so i'm like okay but like but like the virtual screen like what you know essentially if you if you uh pull it real close to you like fat bits get it real close and like look at a single pixel and photo a single retina pixel in some app that lets you do that like like how many retina pixels across is that thing because obviously you can make it bigger and smaller but you're not adding pixels when you do that you're just literally making all the pixels bigger well and and by the way and i would argue that if you're doing pixel level work the vision pro is the wrong tool for that job because nothing about the vision pro is pixel perfect it's it is the whole thing is like free floating everything's fluid well but but the good thing about vision pro is you can literally shove it up to your face so the pixels get really big and then something like it's it's like fat bits but it's like putting you literally putting your face close to the monitor we don't want to do that because it's uncomfortable and you'll get nose grease on your monitor but with vision pro none of those things are a problem so you can shove the screen right at your rather than using like you know option scroll wheel and photoshop to zoom in photoshop you can zoom in vision os by literally pulling that window closer to you until the individual pixels are the size of tennis balls and then you you could if you wanted to look at them with your eyes or more likely you're just going to use your mouse or your trackpad and now your targets with your mouse to your trackpad are seven inches across for each pixel by the way do you not use the accessibility zoom thing where you're holding on control and scroll on your macs oh no i do i do all the time like that's i i enable that on all my macs and i use it constantly constantly right but like but within graphics apps like when i'm in photoshop i this drives me nuts in photoshop don't be if you're out there listening uh if for those that don't know if you're using photoshop one of the shortcuts they have is instead of control scroll wheel which is what i have the accessibility thing bound to which just takes the images on your screen and blows it up like it doesn't add any more pixels it gets blurry you know whatever that's great and everyone should enable that it's an amazing feature as your eyes get older right but in photoshop if you hold down the option key and hit your scroll wheel or swipe or whatever on your mouse or two finger swipe on a trackpad it will zoom within photoshop as in it will change the magnification of the pixel-based image that you're seeing so instead of being 100 it'll be 200 three percent right you know so the images on your screen aren't getting but you're just zooming in photoshop and i wish i wish so badly that when i did that it zooms centered on where my cursor is but it doesn't it just zooms based on how the uh the essentially the crop of your current view is showing like it's centered because often there's a little section i want to zoom in on and i'll put my cursor over and i'll hold on option and i'll swipe my scroll wheel and that part that i wanted to go will go flying off the edge of the crop area because it doesn't zoom where my cursor is but anyway all All right, so reading from The Verge, there's a lot of very complicated display scaling going on behind the scenes here, but the easiest way to think about it is that you're basically getting a 27-inch Retina display like you'd find on an iMac or a studio display.

2:09:43Well, an older iMac or a studio display. Your Mac thinks it's connected to a 5K display with a resolution of 5120 by 2880, and it runs macOS at a 2-to-1 logical resolution of 2560 by 1440, just like a 5K display. You can pick other resolutions, but the device warns you that they'll be lower quality. That virtual display is then streamed as a 4K, here you go, John, 3560 by 2880 video to the Vision Pro, where you can just make it as big as you want. The upshot of all this is that 4K content runs at native 4K resolution. It has all the pixels to do it, just like on an iMac, but you have a grand total of 2560 by 1440, I guess, points to place Windows in, regardless of how big you make the Mac display in space, and you're not seeing a pixel-perfect 5K image.

2:10:26So that says to me, the Mac, again, is rendering everything at a pixel-doubled 5K, but it's streaming, if you will, a video stream, I don't think that's literally how it works. Yeah, it's like the iPhone 6 Plus. Yes. I wonder if that's like an M2 limitation. I do wonder why they chose to do that. I mean, it could just be like the bandwidth of that stream. Because whatever they're doing to have super low latency screen sharing, I'm sure there is some kind of upper bound to what the resolution that they're sending can actually be while still keeping it that low latency and that reliable over whatever wireless connection it's using.

2:11:06Yeah, so I am super stoked for this. I genuinely think if I can get over myself, which is a humongous if, if I can get over myself, just today I went to Wegmans because I typically like to go somewhere on Wednesday mornings, as I think I've said before, to do my research for ATP and prep for it and whatnot. And I can do that just fine without having a silly thing strapped to my face. but it would be so much nicer if I had this silly thing strapped to my face. And so, yeah, I'm really excited to try this. And I hope I can build up the self-confidence to do this outside of the house, which I'm not sure if I can, but I'm so excited.

2:11:42If we don't mention this, people are going to send it to us. I'm hoping I'm saving us here. There is an app that someone put up, I think it's on GitHub, that will essentially allow you to take windows from your Mac, individual windows and make them appear as floating independent vision os windows in vision os i forget what that app is but we'll try to find it i have it i have it it's called ensemble i have no idea the mechanism by how by which this works but yes i'm aware of this as being a thing yeah and and like that's to getting we're getting to the point of like the resolution and and how this app works versus how apple's thing works i i think the limiting factor is going to end up being like or what is your bandwidth and latency between vision os which is not connected in any physical way to your mac like it's it's radios right um we know that trying to drive a very large number of pixels with low latency without any quality loss requires a very fast bus for years having external retina 5k display it was difficult because none of the display buses that were available were up to the task the one in the 5k iMac has was split into two right um obviously we have display stream compression and yeah you could do h264 encoding or h265 encoding to it but then you have problems with latency and quality and so that i feel like is the limiting factor here whatever ensemble is doing it's like well i just want it to be good enough but already the apple thing which is only one mac at a time and one screen on that one mac at a time even that is not the full resolution that is actually being rendered at presumably for bandwidth and you know latency related reasons would it be cool if you could hook up your mac with a wire to vision pro and essentially using vision pro as you know the world's fanciest display for your mac with less quality loss and more bandwidth to have more screens yes that would definitely be cool maybe a future version will do that wirelessly we'll see but right now i feel like that is that is one limitation to keep in mind and to marco's point if you're if you're doing something where it's really important for you to be able to see those retina with hairlines uh you're probably not going to be able to see them in vision os to start because you're not even seeing the the 5k resolution that the mac is rendering at you're seeing a squished down version of that and then on top of that whatever you know compression algorithm or latency you know like i i'm not sure entirely sure it is 100 quality all the time at least dynamically maybe it stabilizes to 100 quality but in motion i don't know how they can produce a zero latency pixel perfect image of even a 4k screen wirelessly but maybe i'm not doing the math right but anyway it's something considering but i do think the ability to pull the virtual window close to your real nose i guess without getting nose grease on it is a potential advantage for doing pixel precise work with an input method that is less precise than a mouse or with a mouse because again like to get your point casey you can use your mac trackpad or mouse and your mac keyboard as input devices in vision os apps it'll look like an ipad cursor but you do have that precision don't forget too by the way like you know for all that all that display you know compression of having the mac render itself to the 5k then having it compressed down to 4k then having it apply some kind of lossy compression algorithm to actually make it enough data to you know to work over the connection then being displayed in vision os window on 4k displays where the vision os window you're looking at is not taking up the full display well it is if you pull it close to your nose and if you pull it real close to your nose you're using more than 4k for an eighth of the display like that's no but but i'm saying like the physical displays inside the vision pro are themselves only about 4k each oh I know, but if the display is, if you're only seeing a tiny corner of the display, you're using all 4K pixels in that one eyeball to show one sixteenth of the virtual display.

2:15:36Anyway, regardless, there are so many layers of compression and loss here and interpolation and skewing potentially. There are so many layers of processing going on with these pixels. That's why I'm saying this is not a pixel precise device it is not designed for that in any way because it is it is just it is there's doing it's so many little tricks here and there of like well we're going to take this image here and blur it over here and composite it over here and render this over here and then project it onto your eyes at this thing through this lens and this angle like there's so much going on there this is not a pixel perfect work device and that's fine there's lots of other things that we'll be able to do but that's that's not one of them david chop is asking the chat room is it actually possible to pull the virtual Mac screen so close to you that you're only seeing a tiny portion of it?

2:16:22I assume so. I don't know. I've never tried it. And I didn't see anyone in any of the demo videos tried either because they always demonstrate, look, you just grab the thing on the bottom of the window and you move the window farther and closer. And what they end up doing is moving it from four feet to five feet to three feet to four feet, but they never go, I'm going to pull this thing up. So it's totally filling your field of view. It's got to be possible because you can leave the window. Like the idea, Gruber's talking about this in his review. I think if you arrange all your windows around you and you get up out of your seat and you walk to another room, the windows stay in the room where you were when you were sitting in the chair until and unless you hit that button to recenter them around yourself.

2:17:00So when that's when you get up from your desk and start walking forward, I assume you'll get closer and closer and closer to that one window that was in front of you or whatever. And eventually you'll walk right through it. And right before you walk right through it, if it is at eye level, it has to be filling your field of view, right? Yeah, because you can play with that in the simulator. Because you can take your PS5 controller with the simulator and kind of walk around the windows. They start to fade away as you get too close, though, I think. I haven't done it in a while. That may be the thing.

2:17:29Maybe you can't actually get that close to them because they become so transparent. You can't see anything anymore. I believe that. I think that happens. I can't pull it up right now, but I think that's what happened. That'll be an interesting thing to see. But yeah, the other thing that I have not actually got an inclusive answer is like, oh, it's more than 4K for each eyeball. and and people think they're going to see a 4k display it's like well not unless it fills every pixel of that display which it probably won't because it's not even the right aspect ratio to begin with right i don't even know if it can like i don't even know if the os allows like a window to project one-to-one onto the output pixels yeah yeah you know like i said because you maybe you can't zoom it that far because it comes translucent but the thing i never got the answer to is does having a more than 4k display for each eye offer you more effective resolution than having uh a single display in front of you not in a headset that has as many pixels as one of the eyeballs you know what i mean like do you get more resolution from each eye having 4k pixels than two eyes looking at a real 4k screen and i don't know i don't know there could be some weird interpolation tricks you could do maybe but i don't yeah i don't know i i mean it seems to me that you should especially when things are in motion because they're seeing two different images but maybe i'm wrong maybe i'm just not thinking it through but anyway yeah that limitations like the window fading are considerations that have to do with vision os that may prevent you from ever getting close enough ever ever being able to see the window in an opaque manner filling your field of view in that way