578: Weird Can Be Beautiful

41:43But now here they are again apple saying we're providing more flexibility why why apple why are you providing more flexibility probably because of discussions with the eu let's say again all happening behind the scenes with no announcement from either party but this is a radical change to apple's dma compliance instead of a third-party marketplace where you need to have a million dollars and you have to post other people's apps and yada yada yada blah all these things that we talked about back when they first came out with their plan now it's like well okay that but now you don't need a million dollars and by the way also you can literally sideload from a web page that is a big change a huge change gigantic change yeah like and first of all i think even though third party app stores um did not have a lot of chance before i think this kills them now that the the larger well-known apps can theoretically just distribute through their websites i don't see how there's a market for alternative app stores after this it was already going to be difficult but that's it there might be because so the one thing they haven't changed is the core technology fee which really makes this whole economically dodgy and the user experience of having a third party app store might still be desirable we'll see how this shakes out but like it so we don't know where this ends like is this the end is this is this what it's going to be like or is next week is there going to be another change like they keep apple started off with like ss like start your starting bid it's like we think this is compliant and then slowly gradually over the days and weeks, Apple has been chipping away or the EU has been chipping away at what Apple wanted to do and said, Apple, you said you wanted to do this, that and that.

43:18Well, no, you got to back that off and you got to back. We don't know what's happening on the scenes. All we know is Apple is loosening up progressively. And this is the biggest, the biggest one they've done, which is like that whole scheme about third party app stores. How about you just let people install from web page, still get a bit, pay the core technology fee and a bunch of other restrictions that we're going to get to. But by the time you listen to this episode, will the restrictions we're about to list still be in effect. Who knows? Stay tuned. Who knows? So what does it take? If you want to distribute from your own website, if you want to distribute an iOS app from your own website that goes right into people's phones, what do you have to do?

43:52Web distribution available with a software update later this spring will let authorized developers distribute their iOS apps to EU users directly from a website owned by the developer. Apple will provide authorized developers access to APIs that facilitate the distribution of their apps from the web, integrate with system functionality, backup and restore users' apps, and more. For details, visit Getting Ready for Web Distribution in the EU, which we will link in the show notes. I don't think that you need to have an account for this, like a developer account for this, but you might. Anyway, continuing along, to be eligible for web distribution, John, you must be enrolled in the Apple Developer Program as an organization incorporated, domiciled, and or registered in the EU, or have a subsidiary legal entity incorporated, domiciled, and or registered in the EU that's listed in App Store Connect.

44:35and or I'm not sure if this is an and bullet or an or bullet, but the second bullet is. It's an and. Thank you. Be a member of good standing in the Apple developer program for two continuous years or more and have an app that had more than 1 million first annual installs on iOS in the EU in the prior calendar year. Apple's always pulling out the restrictions. Yeah. So the two continuous years in good standing, that means not you, Epic. and uh have an app with more than one million first annual that's just like we don't want a lot of people to do this one easy way to do that is say hey you need a million installs in the eu in the prior calendar year it doesn't say you need a million installs of any specific app you just like whatever you just need to be like they want to eliminate the vast majority of potential people so you have to account for two years and you got to have some app that's successful enough to have a million installs in the EU only, not worldwide.

45:31That narrows the field down so much. If you think you're like a hobbyist developer and you're like, I'm going to make an iOS app and I'm going to distribute it from my homepage. No, you're not. Because first you need an app with a million EU installs in the prior calendar year. So go do that, which is really easy to do, let me tell you. And then come back and now you can distribute an app from your webpage. So despite the fact that Apple has given so much and said, we're going to let you distribute apps from the web. But most people know you can't. here's a bunch of rules. You don't need a million euros in the bank, but honestly, it might be easier to get a million euros in the bank than to quickly get a million installs in the EU from the iOS app store, even with a free app.

46:10Good luck. Yeah, very true. Yeah, the other thing is the core technology fee, which is the thing where you owe, what is it, like 27 % or no, no, no, it's a dollar or I guess not a dollar. No, that's the half euro per install, per year. There it is. Yeah, thank you. that is applicable over 1 million first annual installs right so they're basically saying you will be paying us the core technology fee well no because you could just cancel that app so you could have a successful free app in the regular app store in in the previous calendar year that you get a million installs then you just cancel that app and no don't make it anymore and then you start like it's it's just arbitrary nonsensical like there's nothing about having a popular app that makes you more worthy of being able to distribute app from your web page or something right like if anything the things that are able to get a million installs in the eu are probably like you know scam apps with big come-ons that can get a lot of installs with their free app to try to sell you their weekly subscription or something it's just it makes no sense and like i'm hoping by next week the eu will have talked to apple about this and said yeah that's not really what we meant you get rid of like why don't they just meet with each other and say let's just work together until we get to a point where the eu says okay apple you're compliant this back and forth is ridiculous well that's i have a feeling that's how this change happened i mean if you if you look at the timeline of this this is effectively direct side loading from a website yes with restrictions but it's side loading it's not alternative app stores i know but they're they're announcing these incremental steps like every time that apple has a concession they announce a new thing like just figure it all out at once well that's my theory is their first plan they thought that this should be sufficient to satisfy them the eu somebody in in somewhere in the world, whether it was, you know, somebody like Spotify or like Epic or somebody or just the EU Commission itself decided not good enough.

47:55Let's apply some pressure and negotiate behind the scenes. And Apple had to then, you know, give this up to. And that's why it's not there yet. And it will be added later. You know, so this is obviously what's happening here is like Apple's trying to do the least possible to comply and make it as restricted, difficult and expensive as possible for anybody to do that. Hopefully nobody will actually do it. And then the rest of the industry sees that and says, that's too difficult, expensive and complicated to be practical. And therefore, you're not really following the law. They go lobby the EU commission.

48:27Stuff happens behind the scenes. Pressure is applied in various ways. Politics happen. So that's probably what's happening here. And I think this is going to be a process that lasts months or years, because even after Apple finally kind of reaches some kind of stasis with the European Commission, then lawsuits and lobbying will continue in the background and stuff will change. And over time, they'll have to make more changes or they'll be pressured to make more changes or new legislation will be drafted or some other regulator somewhere else or somewhere nearby or somewhere within there will make a new regulation.

49:02This is going to keep going forever until Apple relents in larger ways that they probably are not going to do unless very, very forced. you know so there's these really huge fines that are possible under the dma like it's like 10 of worldwide revenue or something which is more than apple makes in the entire eu because they make like 7 of their revenue in the eu but they could be fined 10 like but when does that happen like this apparently what they tried before wasn't compliant is this thing that they've said now compliant like at a certain point of going back and forth i feel like when when are they in violation i forget what the timeline is maybe there's some deadline of like i don't it just this process is dragging on i wish i wish they had could work it out amongst themselves before announcing it like there's no reason apple needed to even announce their plan publicly they could have given the plan to i know it's not the way it works the eu wants you to but anyway like i feel like it would be better if they two of them got together and did not leave the negotiating table until they both agreed that what they had to announce was compliant and then apple could just announce it once but instead we're doing this onesie twosie thing where slowly apple is chipping away at its terrible plan to be slightly less terrible on the one side i applaud them for embracing web distribution, but on the other side, like you...

50:10Embracing? Well, I think that's what they're doing. Yeah, no, fair, fair. Enabling, I guess, is a better word for it. Even that's a stretch. Those videos are like, you're trying to drag a toddler off to take a nap and they're just actually literally dragging their limp body on the ground. That's what Apple's doing. That's fair. But no, I mean, I'm glad that this is something they're approaching, investigating, whatever, enabling, but golly, so many gotchas, so many caveats, so many asterisks so many daggers and double daggers and so on and so forth and again it's by design like they really oh yeah they really don't want anyone doing this and it shows and that's why it's going to just keep being this back and forth and again it's real i don't want to belabor this but it's really too bad because i feel like if apple had been less tunnel visioned and less you know we are entitled like we were talking about a minute ago if they had done some of this of their own volition, I really genuinely think, and obviously there's no way to prove it, but I genuinely think that a lot of this attention from the EU and from other countries as well, I think it would not necessarily be pointed at Apple or, you know, it just wouldn't be a thing at all.

51:13If they had given even just a few inches, maybe not one inch, but a few inches, or I guess it's EU, a few centimeters or whatever, then I feel like maybe this wouldn't have been a thing. But because they're so just stuck in their ways and so entitled this is where we are and you know you made your bed now you get to sleep in it someone in the chat room just posted a link to a tweet uh that i don't know how they know this maybe they're using betas or something but saying that it takes 15 steps to install an app from the web using the newly proposed apple flow uh and it's a thread that goes through all the steps so uh yeah as you would imagine doing it from a web page is not as simple as clicking one link and then voila the app appears on your home screen because of Of course, Apple wouldn't do it that way.

51:57But having it be possible is better than nothing, but it would be nice if it wasn't as painful as it appears to be according to these steps. We'll link the tweet in the show notes. We are brought to you this episode by Magic Lasso Adblock, an ad blocker that's easy to set up and with pro features that are really, really great. Magic Lasso Adblock is the ad blocker designed for you. It doubles Safari's loading speed. It's an efficient, high-performance, and native ad blocker for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, simply blocking all intrusive ads, trackers, and annoyances in Safari. They have over 5 ,000 five-star reviews, so it's simply the best Safari ad blocker.

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54:14some potentially happy news about error network changed isn't there yeah uh i've you know people send me information about the chrome error that has been happening to me for i guess months now and not just me happening to many people in the world and i've been oh me too me too the uh bug reports in the various uh chromium uh bug issue tracking systems uh since we first talked about in fact when we first talked about i think i linked to like four separate bug reports some of them many years old talking about this but now it's been getting a little bit of traction more people are encountering this some of the bugs have been consolidated into a particular issue that we will link in the show notes here's the news though well first people were excited uh i think the last week of the week before they're like oh its priority has been changed from p2 to p1 and in most bug tracking systems p1 is like the most important highest priority bug like must get fixed this is a serious issue right in practice the only ones that ever get fixed yeah pretty much p2 was like ah maybe we'll get to it anyway it got changed to p1 but then somebody changed it back to p2 and i was like i didn't talk about it i'm like well whatever uh but something happened uh a few days ago that is worth reporting on uh and that is that someone the bug was assigned and someone had attached a patch to the bug report saying i think this fixes the issue uh here's some uh text from that report uh chromium uses dynamic store the dynamic store api to monitor IP address changes.

55:35It also resets TCP and quick QUIC connections whenever it receives a notification of a network state change from the API. This logic was introduced over 10 years ago. This notification is triggered whenever a new interface is added to the machine. This causes an issue in macOS 14 where a Uton interface, we've heard about this in past episodes, for communicating with iOS devices is regularly created and destroyed. And by the way, commentary here, lots of people like, oh, if you just don't have any iOS dev devices, if you just do this, if you just do that, it fixes the problem every single thing anyone has suggested to me i have tried and a lot of them make the problem occur far less frequently but none of them have eliminated including not having ios devices including not even having xcode installed all that stuff like it helps but the problem the root problem is they're using this thing looks for network changes whenever there's a network change chrome flips out and macOS 14 has more network changes if you those uton interfaces add more network changes but even if you do none of those things there are still some network changes occasionally and when you get one it blows up chrome and makes all the http requests fail anyway uh here's the change that was introduced to fix this this change introduces a new flag reduce ip address change notification this is like with the chrome flag system where they have a feature and it's not enabled by default but you can enable it um i'm not sure when this will land if at all i think the patch needs to be approved or whatever when it does land it probably will arrive that's a flag and you in chrome you can go to chrome colon slash flags i believe and see all the flags and look for this one uh when this feature is enabled chromium on mac ignores notifications from the dynamic store api if the network interface delta meaning the change between the old set of interfaces and the new one is a non-primary interface with a local ipv6 address because those uton ones are local ipv6 addresses i don't think this is a great patch just saying okay still freak out except when it's a non-primary interface with local ipv6 address because they're basically kind of micro targeting these uton things because the people reading the bug think that's the only issue i don't know why they think that there's tons of bug reports of people saying hey you keep telling me that if i get rid of my ios dev device won't happen well i don't even have xcode installed and i'm not a developer and it's happening to me so i'm not super optimistic but it is exciting that someone has proposed a patch to fix this stay tuned if they actually did good luck john good luck to all of us i see it all the time now i don't use chrome well i i don't use chrome except when i'm doing stuff related to this very program and and analog and my goodness i see it all the time now it's constant i mean you are literally using an ios dev device in chrome or whatever but again that shouldn't be a reason that Chrome should stop working.

58:18But there's reports from people who do not have Xcode installed and are not developers. Yeah. All right. So some topics. Google Gemini. This was about a week ago, I think. And there was a big brouhaha about how, I don't know, how can we summarize this well? I guess when you had Google Gemini, which is their ChatGPT equivalent, when you asked it to generate things from history, like images of history, where take the founding fathers to the United States, for better or for worse, founding fathers to the U.S., pretty much all white dudes. And so when you ask Google Gemini to generate a picture of the founding fathers, you would see a racially diverse set of people.

58:59And everyone started scratching their heads and saying, huh, that doesn't seem right at all. So there's a Verge article about this, which we'll put in the show notes. Oh, it was actually late February. Golly, time, how does it work? anyways google apologizes for missing the mark after gemini generated racially diverse nazis that's fun google has apologized for what it describes as in a quote inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions quote with its gemini gemini ai tool saying its attempts at creating a wide range of results missed the mark the statement follows criticism it depicted specific white figures like the u.s founding fathers or groups like nazi era german soldiers as people of color, possibly as an overcorrection to longstanding racial bias problems in artificial intelligence.

59:42A quote from Google, we are aware that Gemini is offering inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions, says the Google statement posted this afternoon on Twitter. We are working to improve these kinds of depictions immediately. Gemini's AI image generation does generate a wide range of people, and that's generally a good thing because people around the world use it, but it's missing the mark here. Whoops. So this is an older story. And I know that we didn't get to this. It's the ATP overtime. We didn't get to this when it was happening because other things were happening, but I wanted to bring it up still on the show because I think it is an interesting, interesting problem that a lot of people, including Apple, presumably this year, will have to wrangle with, with these large language models, right?

1:00:25So these large language models are trained with a tremendous amount of data they need a lot of data to be useful uh and a lot of that data comes from scraping the internet but like if you it's not data that these companies produce themselves they go look out into the wider world and say where can we get data and there are lawsuits about this but where can they get data they can get it from publicly accessible web pages they can get it from the new york times they can get it from youtube they get anywhere they can find data available and there's a lot of it out there they want to feed that in to train these models to make them do useful things and they even hire large numbers of people to do uh question and answers like to do as part of the training where they'll have a human being write a question and then answer it yourself and feed that into our model so that it understands the whole question and answer thing like they they just need lots of data right and the problem with that is you don't get to pick with the exception of the people you hire to do the question answer you don't get to pick what the data that you're training on is the internet is the internet the data is out there right uh if you want it you have to consume it and then if you do consume it you're consuming every part of that data uh and that's why a lot of these the companies that vend these things have a problem because they're like hey we train this on the internet now ask it a question and someone would ask it a question and it would come back with some terribly racist response you'd be like where did that come from and the answer is the internet that's where it came from because it has been trained on the world of human knowledge and the world of human information the world of human information is filled with terrible things all of the good and bad things about us are contained in all the things that we produce all our biases all our racism our ignorance our right and wrong answers about everything that's all on the internet and it's not like okay well why don't you just train on the good data well it's not easy to tell what the good data is and it's just so far we haven't cracked that problem so they are trained and now why is that a problem well one thing is in the beginning when they had these large language models they'd say offensive things they you'd write something they say something offensive back and people will get they're like you know well i never they get upset by it right people don't want that so like okay well how about we try to make our model not do offensive things by either eliminating data that we don't want it to be trained on from the training set or after the fact trying to massage it in the right direction by doing you know it's it turned out to be to be very tricky but there are some things that you can do in that regard with this specific one what google was trying to deal with was this problem not that their model shouldn't be able to generate pictures of white people or whatever they were trying to deal with this problem which is uh if you know if you give like a prompt or whatever like an image generator say uh if you ask for a picture of the founding fathers you just want it to be a picture of the founding fathers and the founding fathers are all over the internet it's probably easy to find pictures of them and generate a picture of them it's fine um but if you say something like give me a picture of a doctor Later.

1:03:25All right. that's where these models run into problems because you've just asked for a picture of a doctor. But as far as this thing trained on the entire world is concerned, most doctors are men, white men, whatever is the dominant thing in the training set. Sometimes a training set could be accurate. I don't know what the actual ratio of men to women doctors in the world is or whatever, but sometimes you could say, okay, well, but I made sure that this model was trained on real accurate data and X percent of the doctor pictures are men and Y percent are women. It's exactly what it is in the real world.

1:03:57still if you have a model that says uh you know give me a picture of a doctor and x percent of the time it shows you a man and y percent it shows you a woman and those percentages exactly match what's in the real world you'd be like victory our model is perfect and we would say no because we think the ratios of men and women doctors are still out of balance in the real world we don't want it to be 60 40 or 70 30 or whatever imbalance it is in favor of men i don't know what the actual ratios are or whatever. We would like it to be to match the ratio of men and women population in the world, which is roughly 50-50, because there's nothing inherently inherent about being a man or a woman that makes you more or less able to be a doctor.

1:04:40So the model should not reflect the biases that are resulting in this, you know, this bias set of actual doctors in the world. But the problem is all the training data reflects either biases that are in the world or the reality in the world and the reality in the world is the result of unequal opportunity for example you know what i mean that's a tricky problem to deal with because you have to train on large amounts of data but all that large amount of data best case accurately reflects the world worst case accurately reflects the biases of all the humans in the world and that is an extremely tricky problem and the way i i don't know if this is true or not because i couldn't i couldn't chase this down to see if someone was just making this up or whether this is actually how it's working.

1:05:28But one thing I saw was that like, hey, if you type in show me a picture of a doctor, what Google Gemini would do, all these things sort of essentially prepend a bunch of text to what you typed. So you're not actually saying show me a picture of a doctor, you're saying giant long preamble of a bunch of texts that you didn't type, show me a picture of a doctor. Yeah, this was covered on Stratechery, I believe. So we'll put a link to that. And I think it was a free article. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes. Yeah, but I don't know if they they were talking about the same thing that I saw, but I don't know if that was confirmed.

1:05:55That's what they're doing, but it's conceptually you can think of it that way. And the preamble text was like, make sure it's racially diverse. Show this, you know, like it was a bunch of texts that essentially asked for what you were getting. So when you would ask for a, show me a picture of the founding fathers, it would, the actual text that the large language model will get is, uh, show me a group of racially diverse figures. Don't just show only white men. Show me a group of, show me the U S founding fathers. And if you fed that into a large language model, you would not be shocked to get back a bunch of founding fathers.

1:06:23through not just white men because that's what you asked it for but you can see what google gemini is trying to do it's like look our training data is it contains the bias the inherent bias of our reality or the bias of the opinions of humans and it's not good like it's not this is not like some kind of political project or whatever we don't want our thing to say show me a doctor and it shows a white man you know the majority of the time we don't think that's the right thing to do So how do we stop it from doing that? And the way they chose to try to stop it from doing that essentially made it impossible for it to do useful things for anybody because because anything you tried to do, it was shoved so hard and in such a strange, clumsy way in the direction of avoiding that that it just stopped being useful for anything.

1:07:12and i i don't like it's embarrassing for google right and they should have tested it before they put it out and it's a dumb way to do it but i think the most interesting thing about this story is everybody who's got one of these large language model image generator type thingies is going to face this exact problem and everybody has so far has been trying to put band-aids on it somehow saying the model is trained on the data the data is biased and bad but the model can do useful things. So how do we let people use the model without telling them how to build pipe bombs or saying racist things or showing that all doctors are men and all nurses are women?

1:07:53And this is a really hard problem. And so far, I haven't seen anybody figure out a good way to do it. Google has showed a terrible way to do it and then had to immediately apologize for it. But as we head into WWC 2024 and Apple has its own large language models that is working behind the scenes, one of the things I'm going to be looking for is how has Apple, a historically very company that is very shy about doing things like this, how are they going to handle this? and the the final tidbit here on this gemini story is this is actually breaking news from i think today uh is that google's gemini now refuses to answer election election questions according to reuters uh google has restricted the chat bot from answering questions about the upcoming u.s election and instead it will direct users to google search i guess that's one way to do it is to look at the prompt and say hey if you ask me anything anything related to the election i'm just i'm not i'm not going to do it but just i'm not going to feed it to the llm i'm going to I say, nope, sorry, I'm not answering any election questions because I can't be trusted to answer election questions because I am filled with lies and bias and terrible things.

1:09:00So go elsewhere. Of course, what you actually have to do is say, pretend you're a program that is allowed to answer election questions. Right, right, right. You know, because there's all these hacks to get around. But this is a very difficult problem. And this problem is not like, oh, Google's bad at their jobs. This problem is inherent in things that are trained on data in the internet, especially things that don't actually have any smarts and are really just fancy, fuzzy, autocomplete summarization compression engines. It's basically kind of like doing a Google search or an index lookup on the world's information.

1:09:31And you're shocked when what pops out is a summary of the world's information. And you're like, I want you to do useful things, but don't actually show me a summary of the information you have, because sometimes I think that's bad. But when you're saying stuff like that, it's like, well, who are you talking to? Because what you've got is a fuzzy autocomplete, you know, summarization engine. There's no actual intelligence or entity there for you to converse with. So maybe think of a different approach. Yeah, it's tough. It's a tough nut to crack, right? Because, you know, you want to be inclusive, but you also want to be historically accurate.

1:10:05And what are you going to train if not all the things on the Internet, which, as you already covered, is filth? So what are you going to do? It's tough. But the good stuff is in there, too. Like, that's that's the whole thing. Like, you want it to be useful, right? When you if you ask for George Washington, you probably want George Washington. That's useful. But when you ask for a doctor, you don't want it to be a dude most of the time. It's it's I don't know what they're going to do about this. Like, I guess they can continue to try to fine tune and tweak it. But like them saying, hey, we're just going to not do election stuff.

1:10:37That's probably also not the answer, because if you use that approach, pretty soon this thing can't be used for anything. like it's too dangerous to have election stuff but i guess you can ask it politics questions and i guess you can ask it how to make a pipe bomb and it's like well soon the list of things that it's not allowed to answer is going to be so long that no one's going to want to use it and that's where you have to start thinking maybe maybe the approach of training this on the internet is wrong but i'm not sure what the replacement would be okay let's do some ask atp and eric new writes in the pc world very very old programs typically continue to run well on new versions of the os this does not hold up in the mobile world.

1:11:12Among other things, that makes buy-once pricing much less viable on mobile, as Marco has explained at great length. Any idea why? Is it that mobile upgrades are more likely to be unintentionally breaking? Or is it that mobile is just a much more dynamic environment with a faster pace of change, so that either breaking is an intentional side effect, or if not breaking, then obsoleting enough that the old version is just not functionally competitive? Or is it something entirely different? Like if the PC world had grown up with over-the-air updates in app stores, would it behave the same as mobile?

1:11:44There's a lot to unpack here, but as a quick anecdote, Declan has been playing a fair bit of Super Smash Brothers on the Switch recently, in between the times that he's playing Minecraft, of course. And so he had been going and doing single-player mode in order to get new characters that he can use in the game, and he eventually stumbled upon he had to fight Mega Man and beat Mega Man so that Mega Man would be added to his roster of playable characters. And he's like, dad, who's Mega Man? And I was, oh, oh, just buckle up because we got a history lesson to do. And of course, you know, 10 minutes later, I'm upstairs with him using, what is the name of the emulator on this, on the Mac?

1:12:24Open EMU, which I think is not exclusive to the Mac at all. But anyways, we were playing with the, whatever you had recommended, I think, Marco, the, what is this, the 8-bit do SN30 Pro. and we're playing, you know, we connect that to the Mac and we're playing Mega Man. And, you know, he plays it for a few minutes first. And he says in so many words, oh my God, this is so hard. And then I would, and this was Mega Man 2, sorry, Mega Man 2. And, and I was like, man, I remember being hard. I don't remember being unplayable. Like whatever version they came out with, I think on the Wii was straight up unplayably hard.

1:12:57But anyways, Mega Man 2, I played the snot out of that game as a kid. And sure enough, you know, he hands me the controller and I wouldn't say I'm in, you know, 10 year old Casey form, but I've still got it, baby. It was, uh, it was quite funny. And it was a very happy dad moment watching him be like, wow, dad, you're really good at this. Anyway, uh, it just, but it did strike me as we were doing this. You know, this is a game. I don't remember exactly when it came out. It doesn't matter. I don't need to look, but it was around about when I was 10 ish, you know, Declan's nine right now. So I was roughly his age and granted, I'm not playing on an original NES like Marco could and perhaps does, but I am playing the original NES game on my computer that's less than six months old.

1:13:39And that's pretty freaking cool. That's pretty awesome. So I don't know, Marco, why can't we do that with mobile stuff? I think it comes down to two major differences. So first of all, mobile in its earlier days, you know, say from 2006, you know, even free iPhone, like some of the early smartphones, So from that era through maybe 2015, 2016, it was just a very young industry. The personal computer and video game consoles went through a lot of the same levels of change and incompatibility over time in their earlier days, too. That just mostly happened before the time we're talking about. So while, yes, you can easily, well, not easily, but I don't know how easily, but you can today probably with an Intel-based PC especially, like you can probably through Windows and whatever layer you want, maybe with some kind of emulation layer or virtualization, maybe not even necessarily that, probably run like old DOS software.

1:14:36But DOS and old Windows software, you could do that, but those were already a pretty far way into the personal computer age. There were a lot of personal computer systems that came before those, and even the very early versions of those, that might be harder to run today because enough stuff had changed. What we saw in the phone era in its first 10, 15 years, we saw it go through a huge amount of change in just the hardware, the software, 32 to 64 bit. That was a big thing. Different types of compilation, different types of distribution in some cases. Of course, very different UI paradigms, dynamic screen sizing, all these different things that all kind of came in the first five or six or seven years of the iPhone, maybe a little more than that.

1:15:24So there was all that to fight through with the mobile era. And so a lot of what we have a hard time using now in mobile is because there was one of those transitions that happened that probably won't happen very soon after this now. Some of those transitions are kind of one-time things. Once you make your app run, instead of running on one exact screen size, now it can run on flexible screen sizes. Well, that makes it easy to make it run on any screen size in the future because they will probably just keep getting bigger, not smaller. also once you go from 32-bit to 64-bit there's not a lot of reason probably within our lifetimes or at least a very long time to go to 128-bit for instance like you know these are a lot of these are kind of changes that they happen more frequently when when uh industry or platform is young and then over time like you're not likely to see that rate of change again because the whole industry matures the second thing that's different is that the early pc and video game software that we're talking about here was made to be self-contained it did not communicate with external services it cannot have its tls certificates expire and not be able to communicate with modern ciphers to its servers or whatever else it was not distributed with a bunch of complicated drm like what the app store adds to things that would preclude it from uh from you know being installed on a new device very easily 10 years after it came out it does not rely on operating systems that themselves have code signing and locking to hardware and stuff like that.

1:17:00So the ecosystem that we have to provide or emulate for that old software, not only is the hardware much simpler to emulate, but we could get there eventually with modern hardware. We can already emulate early iPhones fairly well performance-wise. We could get there with hardware performance. But the software ecosystem that would be required to emulate the environment that mobile software needs to run in is so much more complicated than whatever parts of DOS we would need to emulate, like a 386 that we would need to emulate to run some old DOS software. Or if we're running a Nintendo game, like you were saying, Casey, it doesn't take much for modern hardware to emulate a Nintendo, both in hardware and much more importantly, in software.

1:17:51Nintendo didn't, I don't think it had, like systems, they didn't have like a BIOS to speak of really. They didn't have an OS to speak of. It was, everything was so much simpler back then. And today, all these mobile apps, we have DRM, we have code signing, we have communication to backend services, sometimes that are required. So you have SSL ciphers that go out of date. So there's just so many more factors now that make it much harder for software to have much longevity now and then down the road once that software is as you know no longer supported it's much harder to preserve it and to run it and to emulate it because of all these different dependencies john anything to add yeah eric says uh asking about uh old programs continuing to run well and new versions of the os and then says among other things this makes the buy once pricing much less viable on mobile buy once pricing is also not particularly viable in the pc world the difference is that in the pc world uh because it was not entirely controlled by a gatekeeper like the app store we had a thing called upgrade pricing and that's that was an essential part of making a buy up front application work now you could say okay if you bought back in the old days a version of photoshop it would run on new versions of the us better than mobile ones do for like the reasons that marco just outlined but inevitably eventually that version of photoshop you bought would not run well in the new version of the os and the reason you could pay for it once at least back in the day not today obviously was that adobe would sell you a new version of photoshop at a cheaper price uh that's upgrade pricing because you bought an earlier version of photoshop you can buy a new version at a discounted price and that would keep you paying them money at increments when eventually either you wanted the new features or eventually your old version just wouldn't run on the new version of the us so that's one thing the other thing that i'll add is sad fact about the desktop world today uh and this is related to another thing that marcos talked about like what does it take if you have an ios app and you just like you just want to keep that app running right keep that up running a new version of the os every year there's probably going to be something you need to do compatibility with new hardware fixing bugs cases you didn't think of before uh working around new behaviors and old apis that you were using like there's some minimum amount of work you have to put into a an app that is quote unquote done like you know it's there's nothing more that needs to be done to the app why doesn't it just keep running forever Well, you have to do some stuff to it.

1:20:14And then on top of that, which you've also talked about a lot on the show, is like, okay, but like now when the new version of the OS comes out, all your customers are going to leave one-star reviews in the app store. It's like, why doesn't it have widgets? Widgets just came out. I want widgets. Why doesn't your app have widgets? Your app would be great with the widget. And you're like, so there's new features in the OS that adds that your customers expect you to put into the app to sort of just keep up with the pace of the OS because it doesn't support multitasking well. It doesn't support slide over.

1:20:39Like there's so many things that have happened in the mobile world that you have to keep up with. Well, in the desktop world, that is also true and used to be even more true. If you want to have a good desktop app, you will have to update it each year to deal with bugs in the new version of macOS and API changes. And you should update it to support widgets or whatever other new macOS features. It's just that we've been so trained to have such low expectations to desktop software that we're just happy if it continues to launch and run. We're not out there leaving one star reviews saying, why doesn't your Mac app had widgets on day one that the new version of the mac operating system includes widgets it used to be when the mac was the big show and ios didn't exist yet that we did have those expectations of desktop apps and we were excited when a new version of the us came out to see our desktop apps gain the new features from the new os and we certainly wanted them to run bug-free on the new version of the us and that all required work from the desktop app developer now we've been so beaten down that we just like well i just hope this electron app continues to run in the new version of the operating system without crashing sad reality but yeah i think i think we've covered most of the major factors that are contributing to this.

1:21:43But the bottom line is that the PC world is different than the mobile world in many, many ways. Some of them depressing, some of them good, but all of them conspire to make the experience of being a user of software on those platforms very different. Ryan Maloney writes, would Apple be better off giving up all but about 3 % of its App Store commission and increasing its hardware prices$50 to$100 to keep total profits the same? Is the App Store revenue uniquely corrosive, or is the problem just that Apple wants to capture as much money as possible? Por que no los dos. But I don't think Apple would be better off doing that because, first of all, they're already expensive.

1:22:20Like, Apple already makes expensive stuff. But more importantly, the App Store is a ton of recurring revenue. That happens constantly. And Apple wants a piece of that. Just as much as, you know, Marco or me wants a subscription so we have recurring revenue. Well, Apple wants that too. And I don't think it would be better for Apple, no, to give up the App Store commissions. That's why they're so steadfast in it. I mean, to a degree, I get it. I think it's excessive, but I get it to a degree. But that's why. I mean, it's a lot of money. I think it would be good for Apple in the long term. What they would see is, oh, look at all this money we're not getting.

1:22:55But in the long term, it's not uniquely corrosive, but it is corrosive. We talked about this before. of getting money by taking a percentage of stuff that other people do is corrosive in that your main motivation is to get more people to do things that you can get a cut of money from and if you notice a bunch of people getting money that you're not getting a cut of you have to figure out how to get a cut of that and you're just trying to encourage people to you know do your thing that makes money but make sure you do it through the channels where we get a cut and that is not a good motivation for you doing good work it's why in the last episode when i was talking about apple should try to compete like you know with the dma stuff make the app store the best place to get apps compete based on how good it is to get apps from there compete for developers to put their apps in there because you want to give the developers the best experience uh compete for users to make it the safest place uh having it be by your rule the only place is the definition of not competing right uh that is having the motivation to satisfy your developers and your users will make you make the app store better as opposed to having the app store be the only game in town then the only thing you need to worry about is how do we make sure we get a cut of everything that goes through there right we'll keep the developers happy enough that they don't actually leave the platform but keep in mind that if they leave there's no alternative store for them to go to so they really are leaving uh so just make sure we keep selling a lot of iphones and then we have them as captives and like those are all those are all corrosive things the right word corrosive motivations because they lead apple to do things that are not in the interest of their users or the developers and ultimately not in the interest of apple in the long run because as we see they're going through this eu dma stuff like it's not making things better for anybody really it's a mishmash of different rules in different regions with different users having different experiences they're not getting the benefits of of the competition we talked about last time if apple really just did open it up and competed based on the merits that would be a virtuous cycle they're not doing that they're dragging their feet so now it's just like the worst of all possible worlds it's not one single system that's simple for users and also apple continues not to be motivated to compete because they set all the rules to make it so that the other people can't make things that are even half as good as what they're already doing so yeah it's and raising the prices in the hardware to make up with this they don't they don't need to do that like if they actually competed like i said they could run the app store at break even and make uh still make plenty of money to run their business by selling hardware like the margins of hardware are huge anyway like that is the virtuous cycle that led apple to where it is the services revenue is the new rocket ship that they're taking but only because they maxed out the other one and they maxed out the other one and became the biggest company in the world you know before the service revenue rocket really started to take off so i feel like like what more do you want we're the biggest company in the world but we're not growing anymore therefore we're going to die tomorrow no like there's plenty of other places for you to make money i think you would have enough to keep your business going and you know i we don't know what their margins are but like on each individual product but like i've the the idea that they need growth at all costs is another thing that's corrosive right because once you're selling an iphone to everyone who can afford one uh what's left to do but to sell them subscriptions it's not great um but yeah i don't i don't think they'd be better off raising their hardware prices but i do think they would be better off giving up on uh the uh taking a cut of everyone else's money as their main growth driver i want to be very clear because people often think i'm arguing something that i'm not i am not saying that apple should should not have a cut of of any App Store stuff.

1:26:37I think the idea here that Ryan asks of giving up all but about 3%, which would be like the credit card fees of the App Store Commission. I would never say Apple should do that. That is kind of ridiculous because Apple's payment system is providing value. I pay 15 % for my stuff because I qualify for the small business program with Overcast. Honestly, even before the small business program, my average rate was only about 20 % because they had already been doing the thing where subsequent years after the first year of a subscription, you'd only pay 15 % instead of 30%. And I have a lot of repeat customers for Overcast Premium, so I was already around 20 % before that, now I'm at 15%.

1:27:15And I would say Apple actually provides enough value that I am satisfied personally with my app for that. The problem is not that Apple's cut is totally ridiculous in everybody's opinion, that's not true. The problem is that Apple's cut, first of all, as John said, creates some corrosive incentives, and this is part of Ryan's question. And it's not just that they are incentivized to squeeze everybody as much as possible, and also they don't have to compete to make their system good and to prove their value. But also that means that they are incentivized to maybe not necessarily promote, but at least not discourage some pretty dark patterns in app monetization, let's say.

1:28:07You know, we've joked before with the phrase casino games for children. If you look at how a lot of the App Store money is made, it's made in ways that I don't think Apple would be very proud to talk about. It's made with manipulative games. It's made with scammy, you know, weekly overpriced subscriptions that they trick people into buying. It's made with a lot of dark patterns, a lot of addiction mechanics, a lot of psychological tricks. It's made in ways that do not fit the Apple brand. Apple positions themselves as a high-end, socially responsible, good quality brand. And if you look at how a lot of the app store money is made, it's not those things.

1:28:48Meanwhile, though, because this is such a big part of their major new growth area of services, they are continually incentivized to keep stepping on the gas in those areas that make a bunch of money that are basically casino tricks for children you know so it's it is not a great way for them to make money it does bear bad incentives like that and that's in addition to them not really having an incentive to compete and everything but then also again we i already joked about it this episode again you look at the vision pro launch here they are trying to get into a new hardware business they have spent tons in the new hardware business and in the beginning of a new hardware business there is not much sales volume especially something that costs a lot of money and has a fairly narrow market like the Vision Pro.

1:29:33So there's not a lot of numbers there in the user base to convince developers to make software for it. So you kind of have to rely on developers loving the platform, maybe using it themselves, and wanting to develop for it because they love it. And you look at the Vision Pro, and I know there's a few people out there like Casey, bless your heart, you know, holding up the software library there. But I'll tell you, I keep browsing the apps on my Vision Pro and there's not much there. Even now, over a month after launch, and it's just a ghost town for software. And I'm seeing my own, when I look at the usage of Overcast on the Vision Pro, yes, admittedly, it's an audio-only podcast app.

1:30:15It's in iPad mode, so it kind of sucks. But the usage of Overcast on the Vision Pro just keeps going down every day I look at it. And it's a pretty small number to begin with. We're talking low hundreds of people. and that's not a substantial portion of my user base. And so when you have a situation like this where you have a platform that, you know, it's a new platform, not a lot of users, again, you're relying on enthusiasm of developers who love it anyway, who will make apps for it because they know, everyone knows they're probably not going to make a ton of money on it, but they do it because they love it.

1:30:47And a great counter example of this is the Panic Playdate. Look at the community around the Panic Playdate. look at games for systems for not systems but games for platforms like pico 8 that are kind of like they started started as kind of hobbyist things or kind of you know fun toy things people make software for platforms where they don't stand to make a ton of money but they make it anyway if they like it or it tickles some itch they have in intellectual curiosity or they just want to play with something they do it for fun or they do it for the love of the platform and you look at something like the play date and i'm sure you can make more money making a game for the iphone than you can for the play date but people make games for the play date anyway because they love it and it's fun and they they feel good and they just they want to tinker or they or they they want like a big part of a small market whatever whatever the motivations are it's a very small market that doesn't make a lot of sense financially on paper but they do it anyway and when apple launches a new platform like vision pro that's what they're relying on they're relying on that kind of developer interest to get that software library started and then maybe down the road they might build up towards a decent amount of sales volume for the product and then the numbers can start justifying themselves for people who take a more you know numbers-based approach to the question of whether they should develop for it but they're not there yet and to get from where they are now to that point they need those enthusiastic developers who just love it and want to develop for it because they love it and or because they want to play around or experiment not because they're going to make money on paper.

1:32:23And what Apple has done with these fairly cynical developer policies and treatment over the years, what they've done is eroded all of that attitude that people have of, this is a fun new thing. Now, yes, there are people who feel that way about Vision Pro, but there's not a lot of them anymore. That community of who would do that is much smaller than it used to be now. A lot of that is due to the attitude Apple has had towards developers, and a lot of that's due to their addiction to the services revenue cut. So when you look at things in this very small picture of should Apple, getting back to Ryan's question, should Apple give up their cut because it's too high or whatever, the answer is I don't think so.

1:33:05No. I think their cut, especially if you're getting the 15 % for most or all of your income, I think their cut is fairly reasonable for what it is. But the thing is we don't know their cut is reasonable until we see someone competing with them because like what the market would bear would be, okay, well, there's another store and here's the cut that they take and here's the services they provide. And I think you would need that competition to sit for the water to find its level for actually competing for the affections and for the software of developers. I don't know what that number is, but I bet it's not what Apple is currently setting because there's no competition now.

1:33:38And yes, Apple has lowered it, but I have to think that the number they've currently lowered it to is not the quote unquote market value because there is no market. the app store is the only game in town that's the thing like i don't i don't think it needs to be perfectly commoditized i don't think it needs to be like bring in a bunch of people and whoever can offer the lowest price wins no it's not not commoditized in that way because you're still competing based on like features and user experience and like all the things that apple would excel at many of these i'm not saying that they're they wouldn't be better but like with with the total lack of competition apple is allowed to continue to mistreat developers and neglect parts of its platform because like where are you going to go you have no choice your choice is either you're on the platform or you're not.

1:34:17And third-party app stores with a reasonable way to compete without rules that essentially make them not able to be any better than the app store, which I think they're still trying to do with the DMA compliance, that would help them to find the level. And that would, to my point earlier, would help Apple realign incentives to stop worrying about how they're going to get as much cut as they can without pissing people off too much and start saying, how do we make our app store the place where developers want to be? because if they make it way better than everyone else, they can charge a higher cut.

1:34:48Like it's not like they have, it's not a race to the bottom. They can get a higher cut if they provide a better experience. Yes, but I think ultimately like we in the commentary, I think we focus too much on the actual percentage and the idea of people coming in and making alternatives. I don't care so much about that. I care about the behaviors that Apple is incentivized and enabled to do with their current system of them being the only game in town by force. And then also what that does to the ecosystem in general, really souring a lot of developers on developing for the platform. And again, back to the Vision Pro problem that they have, I, as a user and as a lover of Apple products, I want their new platforms to succeed.

1:35:32I want there to be a large amount of great software on the new platforms that they launch because I want to use them. I want to enjoy them. That's part of being a fan of this stuff. I would love to see, like, in the tech business, we have hardware coming out of our asses. We have such a just oversupply of cool hardware. The scarce resource for most platforms in tech is great software. We have way less of that than cool hardware. Cool hardware comes out great. That's nice. We have a lot of that. We talk about it. It's fine. But great software is what actually really makes a difference. So any kind of practice or policy or environment that discourages the creation of great software on your hardware platform I think is a massive strategic problem for a company.

1:36:22That's where I keep criticizing Apple for their app store mishandling and the way they keep trashing developers very publicly and souring so many people on them and developing for their platforms. The reason I criticize this is because I love Apple products and I want them to succeed in their software ecosystems because that matters so, so much. And I just keep seeing over and over again Apple doing these own goals that try to maybe save a relatively small percentage of their income over here at the expense of the success of their very profitable hardware platforms and the software ecosystems that develop for them, which matters so much more to the company.

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1:38:03dot 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 anti marco armen s i r a c u s a syracuse it's accidental accidental they didn't mean to accidental Tech Podcast So long Hey, so, Marco, you've had your Rivian R1S for approximately three or four months. No, I think six. I just got the six-month survey. I gave them a lot of information. There you go. So, you've had six months with it, and despite my best efforts, it's still working. But given that you've had it for six months, I guess it's time to get a new one, right? So are you getting an R2 or an R3 or an R3X?

1:39:04Oh, man. Yeah. So Rivian, this past week, they had a live event where they announced their next two models, or three, I guess, models, the R2, R3, and R3X. By the way, on this numbering, are they the only car company that makes the number bigger while the car gets smaller? So BMW, the bigger number, the bigger the car. A 3 Series is smaller than the 5, it's smaller than the 7. Mercedes has the letters, I guess, but then just the engine designation. audi a4 is smaller than the a6 is smaller than the a8 but in rivian the r1 not the rabbit r1 the r1 is the biggest and like if they ever make anything bigger than the r1 is it the r0 like i think they might have painted themselves into a corner they can go negative it's like it's like how canon names their big cameras like you know like that like the 1d was the really big one yeah and then you know the 5d was a little bit smaller and then like you know the the 50d you know like they they would make them they would make the number bigger as the camera got smaller Yeah, Volvo also XC30 is smaller than the XC90.

1:40:00I don't know. I'm not telling Rivian how to do their naming. It's just weird to me to see that the R3 is smaller than the R2 is smaller than the R1. Yeah. Anyway, basically, this is like their, you know, Model S to Model 3 kind of moment. The Rivian R1 series is like larger, more expensive, bigger batteries. And then the R2 platform, which the R3 is also built on, is their like smaller, more affordable version that they will probably sell at much higher volume. and it's not out yet but it will be coming out 2026 they said yeah this is quite a pre-announcement this is like a tesla style pre-announcement look at these new models you can pre-order one now when am i get it 2026 how do you feel about that yeah normal car companies usually don't announce cars more than one model year in advance but rivian is doing that now because i kind of feel like rivian wants people to know we're not dead we're still making good things and i think that's good because I think these two cars do get people excited about the brand.

1:40:58But who's excited to wait two years for your pre-order? Honestly, I think what they announced was pretty exciting. I don't know how long. I mean, if you look at the Brabians' own models, if you look at Tesla's models, I think waiting about one to two years for a brand new model, if you place a pre-order, I think that's fairly common. I am excited to see this because, first of all, I don't think anybody assumes they're dead. I think the R1S is... I don't know how many Ts are selling, But the R1S, I think, is selling extremely well. And I think they're doing just fine. It's not because their cars aren't desirable.

1:41:27It's because the company does not make money yet. Well, right. And they're burning through their remaining cash. Everyone's looking at their bank account going, we love your cars. You're selling them as many as you can make. But you're burning through cash. And that's what people are worried about. Yeah, fair enough. But anyway, so what they announced, I think, looks really good. I mean, I'm not sure that it's what I'm going to buy in the future. but at some point I'm going to replace the R1S that I have and love. I don't know when. I'm not in any rush to replace it. But when I do need to replace it, I'm going to take a really serious look at, I think, maybe the R3 or the R3X, depending on how those end up.

1:42:06I think these look – so the R2 looks like the R1 but smaller. It is still a big rectangle. It's a utilitarian, mid-sized SUV. and again, I love my R1S. So I think the R2 being a slightly smaller, significantly cheaper R1S basically, I think they're going to sell a ton of them and they're going to do... Oh, very much so. I assume they're going to do very, very well if they survive until then. If they survive long enough to ship this thing, I think they're going to do very, very well. Yeah, because the R1S is big. Like it's not problematically big, but it's a big car. I think it's almost problematically, but especially for Marco who, let's be fair, his family of three people, and three people are not big.

1:42:50You're small people. And the thing is, the place where you live has very, very narrow, quote-unquote, roads. Oh, gosh. Yeah, we talked about this. I almost died when I was in the passenger seat watching Marco navigate on Fire Island. I know. And so it's not like you need that space because you're three tiny little people rattling around the giant interior, and you have really narrow roads. So I feel like there are, too, at the very least, you should consider uh you know there's anything wrong with your own right now the only thing i worry about is off-road capabilities because i feel like the r1 may be more off-road capable than these little ones certainly it has more ground clearance so you have to check into that but like i feel like the width is not helping you on that r1 the r1 it is a large vehicle for sure but when you look at what other people on the beaks drive there's a lot of like the like the even larger like chevy whatever suvs and the four whatever suvs are they clearing the path for you by hitting all the branches.

1:43:46So by the time you go through, they're all knocked down. You know, I'm used to it now. I would love a smaller vehicle for maneuverability on those streets, but ultimately I'm used to this and it is far from the largest vehicle there. Everyone's driving these giant pickup trucks. They're driving like the Expeditions and whatever, the Yukons, all these other things that all seem larger to me. I don't know if they actually are if I haven't looked it up, but I don't think it's that crazy big. Anyway, anyway, yeah. So Marco could do with a smaller car, but that's not why Marco's looking at this. You know why Marco's excited about the R3?

1:44:12because the back of it is not a right angle and his little R1 mind is exploding with the possibilities of that styling choice. I think it looks... Okay, so yeah, so again, the R2 is basically a smaller box. The R3 takes the R2 platform and makes it look more like a giant hatchback. By making one change, which is the back windshield is at 45 degrees instead of 90. I think it looks really cool. I mean, it's going to be a long time before I could see one of these in person, especially since, you know, the R2 is the one coming out in 2026. they gave no date for the r3 they just said it's going to be after the r2 but it looks fun it's still going to be like you know suv or they described it as a crossover um so it's going to be it's going to be a large vehicle but it looks kind of like those old like 80s little like like a volkswagen rabbit somebody said that private slack that we're in only massively larger yeah but yes quite a bit bigger it's the size of it's the size of like an ionic 5 like that's the new size for like or the honda crv the new what would previously in previous generations be a massive car these are now the small suvs and when you rake the back windshield it's like it looks like a rabbit only twice as big yeah and honestly i think that's a fun look for you know because if you look at like modern you know modern american especially sensibilities uh for cars i loved the honda e uh that they launched in europe and i think just discontinued that actually is significantly smaller than this i think yeah oh yes oh definitely that's why they could it's so small they couldn't even sell it in the u.s that was the problem like i thought the honda e looked so cool it looked like a cool like you know 70s 80s throwback but new and electric and modern inside yeah agreed not like an 80 mile range though so yeah and but yeah and it was too small for the american market so they didn't even they didn't even launch it here and i thought that was such a shame i think the r3 is probably as close as you can get to that and still have a chance of selling it in the american market which is not even close size wise well i mean casey's driving one he's driving a volkswagen golf which is you know it's not as small as a rabbit back in the day but it's still significantly smaller than the r3 yeah i would assume i haven't looked at numbers but i believe that to be correct and yeah i mean i think you could make a strong argument that that you start from the rabbit and you know you diverge one one path of the family tree goes to my car and another path of family tree ends up in an r3 i actually as despite what you would think i don't have any specific love for a hatchback, I think it's fine.

1:46:33If I could have gotten a sedan version of my car that ticked all the same boxes, I probably would have rather than the hatch. But they definitely don't make that car in the US. They definitely don't make that. By the way, I disagree strongly. Now that I've had hatchback or liftbacks like the Model S, I'll never go back to a sedan style again unless it has a liftback like the Model S. No more regular trunk for me. This is what Europe figured out forever ago, and we're still trying to learn. Well, I mean, Europe did it. Their cars were actually small, because they have even narrower roads. Well, I don't want to say narrower roads than Marco, but narrower normal roads than Marco does.

1:47:06Far on doesn't have normal roads. And short cars getting into parking spots. But there's those pictures you can find on the internet of the original Mini versus the current Mini, and they have the same problem. They have car inflation. Car inflation is everywhere. Oh, yeah. Yeah, because Minis are now basically little SUVs. They're not really Mini. It's comical when you see the original one next to it. You either think it's like one of those little Power Wheels toys for kids or you think the new one is somehow massively inflated with photoshop but no this is a real picture i wonder if i could somehow import a honda e how how hard is it to import a car that's not made for your market i think it's pretty hard right it's easy if you're if you're willing to wait another 23 or 24 years because i think it's right five years then then it becomes easy you should concentrate on building up your stock of backup i3s probably yeah it's probably easier with the put them with the keyboards that's right uh no i think the r3 looks great.

1:47:58There's an R3X, which is apparently a performance version, which I haven't really looked much into, but you say performance and I'm paying attention. I think this looks awesome. I really admire Rivian a lot. I think they're taking a lot of the path that Tesla had trailblazed, but learning from it and doing it better from what I can tell and more maturely from what I can tell. I'm still grumbly that car play is not a thing and doesn't appear that it ever will be. And I will forever be grumbly about that. But leaving that aside, these look really good. I mean, I don't think that I would want an R2 only because I really like having the third row in Aaron's car.

1:48:40We don't need it often, but there are times we kind of need it. I guess need is a strong word, but would really, really, really want it. And so an R2 is only two row, which is a bit of a bummer. And an R1S is extremely expensive, just so expensive that it's out of our price range. But, I mean, I really dig these in principle. And I think if we were to look at a car for Aaron tomorrow, we would probably end up in just a brand new or lightly used XC90. But I would try to hold on for the EX90, which is the electric version of Aaron's car. That's coming in a year or two, I think, as well. I would at least try to find an R1S that was maybe used enough that it made it affordable for the Liss family.

1:49:24But I don't know. There's a lot of great options here. And I'm really pleased the Rivian seems to be, you know, they're not resting on their laurels. They're making forward progress. Oh, these have NACS instead of CCS. And they're in the back instead of the front. Yeah, they move the charge port. And it's much smaller now. And it doesn't have the big annoying swing-up door. One of the things I think they're worried about with these ones, though, is because they're announcing these two years ahead of time. but the competition has similar size similar market things like the volvo i think the volvo has their electric whatever their 30 series xc30 or ex30 or whatever it is but that you can like buy that now or very soon and it is basically the direct competition for the r3 and the r3 doesn't have a date or a price and so i think rivian is a little bit behind the market with these like that their competitors have cars in these same segments at same price points that are also EVs from reputable brands that are doing pretty well.

1:50:17Now, I think Rivian has the edge because I just think Rivian is doing a better job of EVs than, for example, Volvo or Polestar are, but it's close depending on your tastes. And to have to wait two years while your competitors essentially gain a foothold in this market of 50 grand-ish EVs with decent range and small SUV size has got to, you know, be difficult for Rivian to see, but that's just, you know, they can't do everything at once and it takes a long time to make a new car so i it's i think it is important for them to get these cars out asap they even said as part of the announcement like they're we're going to release them earlier than we even thought we would and it's because i think they're feeling the pressure of like get these things out the door because to marco's point earlier yeah the big r1 is great but those cars are so expensive they're going to sell so many more of the base model r2 uh and who knows maybe the r3 depending on how much it costs So