582: Can’t Render, Fog It

45:18They don't wear out as fast, so there would be less problems with image retention and potentially could get brighter, yada, yada, yada. It's also really hard to make because everything on it is really tiny. And Apple was apparently trying to make these displays itself rather than buying them from Samsung or Sony or whoever else they buy display stuff from. And rumor was that a little while ago they said, yeah, we're giving up on that for now, which is sad. I really want to see a micro LED based Apple Watch, but maybe Apple just found a supplier that can do it. But that's a small team. The car people, I would imagine, is the majority of this.

45:50You cancel the project. A lot of those people whose expertise has to do with car stuff probably don't have anything else they can do with Apple at this point. Except maybe robotics. Who knows? One way or another, Apple has struck a deal with Shutterstock to license millions of images for AI training. From 9to5Mac, Reuters reports that Apple struck a deal to license millions of images owned by Shutterstock, a stock image site. The value of the deal is likely in the$25 to$50 million range and was said to have been signed in the months following the release of ChatGPT in late 2022. Apparently, multiple other big tech firms have made similar deals with Shutterstock, including Meta, Google, and Amazon.

46:32We talked about this when the New York Times did something similar. this is just a smart thing to do if you are a big company with a lot to lose and you have a lot of money and you're not sure about the legal landscape in terms of training your ai models on like youtube videos that you scraped from google or images that you downloaded from the internet you can just pay somebody and say you you have the rights these images will you sell us the rights to train our ai models on them and they apparently gladly will for a handful of million which is pocket change to Apple, but it is priceless when it comes time to justify the legality of your AI model.

47:07Indeed. And then finally, for follow up this week, here's our first look at Apple's in the box iPhone updating machine. So for context, it's really crummy when you pick up an iPhone and you get it home or maybe you're in the store and you want to set it up and do a transfer and so on and so forth. And the iPhone comes out of the box and says, ah, nope, you're gonna have to update me first. No fun. And so we had heard a while ago that they were working on a mechanism by which they could update an iPhone in a sealed box. Well, apparently this thing is real. And so according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Presto, which is the name of it, uses MagSafe and other wireless technologies to turn the phone on, apply the update and turn it off again.

47:50An earlier report from iGeneration also mentions that the machines are connected to specific servers that can access software updates 24 hours ahead of their general release. Gurman says that Presto machines are in limited testing in the US with a wide deployment planned for April. So if you buy a new iPhone from Apple after April and it comes with the latest OS version installed in the box, you'll know you have Presto to thank. Marco, there is a very important image associated with this. Where will users be able to, or listeners be able to find this image? Directly on your podcast app right now is Chapter Art and also in the show notes.

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50:24I had a very interesting week over the last week. Everything's fine. That's a great way to start. Yeah, nobody's in trouble. Everybody's fine. Everything's fine. Last week, all three of us, to varying degrees, were very lause at best and kind of really grumpy at worst about the state of vision pro and vision os and i stand by everything that at least that i said last week and yet i kind of want to take it all back because over the last week i have had three different experiences one one is kind of related um that i wouldn't say have changed my mind about the vision pro but have really shaped or changed i guess changed my mind and certainly my opinions to a degree about what the Vision Pro is and what it's all about.

51:09So I, shortly after recording, I spent some time with our friend Mike Hurley of Upgrade and Connected and many other shows, including Analog for that matter. I spent some time with Mike doing a spatial persona FaceTime call, which was a little bit frustrating at first because I connected via FaceTime and I hadn't yet updated my persona for Vision OS 1.1 or whatever it is. And I couldn't do a FaceTime call with personas. And I don't recall the specifics, but it was like, it wouldn't, it, it, it real, it, the vision OS took away my old persona. Like, it's not that they just let it hang out. It just erased my original one, one Oh persona.

51:48And I needed to create a new one. But as with so many things, the error messaging about that was very vague and not very actionable, but eventually I figured it out. So I did spatial personas with Mike, as it turns out this past Monday, I was on upgrade because Jason was chasing waterfalls, eclipses. And so I stood in for Jason and we talked, Mike and I, about this. And so I'll refer you to that show if you want to hear the long version of this story. But the short-short version is, it's unreal. Leaving aside the fact that Mike's spatial persona, or Mike's persona, his mouth doesn't move when he talks because his mustache apparently is too bushy for the cameras to see when his mouth is moving.

52:26Has he ever considered the fact that maybe people can't see his mouth move because his mustache is too bushy like it's an accurate representation of reaction look in the he should look in the mirror and talk and see if he can see his mouth yeah that's something i'll i'm sure he'll try and take that on his homework but one way one way or another that is extremely disconcerting and never you never really get used to that but leaving that aside his persona visually you know when he's not talking is pretty darn good and he said mine was looking pretty good as well. But the spatial persona thing is incredibly cool and incredibly well done.

53:00When I did FaceTime calls in the past, just straight up regular FaceTime calls, it didn't take very long for me to think that I was talking to Mike or James Thompson or whoever. But it was still, it was never like really, really right. I felt like, oh yeah, that's James. But it was never like, that's freaking James. And of course, it's never going to be like 100%, but the spatial personas got us so much closer because there's a presence there that just isn't there when you're looking at a rectangle. And, you know, Mike was facing me and then he decided to share a freeform board. And next thing you know, we're on either side of the freeform board like, oh, look at this red rectangle over here.

53:47And I see his kind of ghostly kind of weird hand, but nevertheless, it looks like a hand. I see his hand with his pointer finger extended pointing at a red rectangle. And then I could do the same thing and he sees what I'm doing. It's like we were standing in front of a whiteboard. Now doing anything with free form was not a lot of fun because, you know, the gaze based manipulation and pinching and whatnot, maybe it's just user error, but I did not find it fun to try to manipulate the board. but in terms of looking at the board and talking about what was on the board it was very very cool and with spatial audio mike sounded you know i was on the left side of the board he was on the right side of the board and it sure is sure enough when i was looking at the board it sounds like he's over to my right if i turn my head to look at him then it sounds like he's right in front of me it was very well done then at one point i forget exactly what the circumstance was i believe we were facing each other i don't remember for sure but one way or another there was a situation in which he said, watch this.

54:42And I'm just looking at his spatial persona. And all of a sudden, I could tell that he stood up. Not only because his persona got higher and above my head, but just the way in which it moved, you could tell, holy s**t, Mike just stood up. That's what just happened. That's incredible. It's so silly. And as with so many things in the Vision Pro, you kind of have to experience it to truly and properly understand it. But it was so cool. And I had a set, a present, there was a presence there that I had not experienced with a regular FaceTime call that I really hadn't experienced in a lot of other ways.

55:22So if you are one of the people who has a Vision Pro, you need to find somebody else with a Vision Pro that you can FaceTime. Maybe I should offer this as like a cameo or something, but find somebody else that you can do a FaceTime call with and do the spatial persona thing. It's extremely cool. But then it got better. mike says to me go to the app store go to apple arcade and download download the game room app and I will put a link in the show notes. I believe it is only available in the Vision Pro. By the way, actually, I believe it's actually available on other VR platforms as well. Oh, sorry.

55:51Yes, I was just thinking Apple platforms. That very well could be true. So it's only available on Apple platforms in Vision Pro. And it's genericized versions of, I think, Yahtzee, Solitaire, one or two other things, and Battleship. And so Mike said, we're going to play a round of Battleship. And I'm like, okay, Mike, I'm really hungry. It's right before lunchtime. I want to go make my lunch. I'll play like a couple of shots or what have you, and then I'm going to go and I'm going to eat my lunch. Fast forward 15 minutes later and I couldn't resist playing the whole damn game because it was so freaking cool.

56:21So not only is the game board like 3D rendered and the art looks really, really good, but beyond all that, it was incredibly cool. The idea of Battleship is you have like a board in between you and your opponent and you place like pretend ships in a, in a square grid and you call out, you know, Oh, C five. And the person on the other side of the board either says hit or miss. And you have to deduce where their ships are based on this experience. And based on, you know, hits or misses or whatnot, and you try to sync all of their ships. And so we're doing this and the, The way this particular app works is that it's all 3D rendered.

57:09And so when I fire, a missile launches from a little missile launcher adjacent to my game board over the game board between us and flies into Mike's view and either hits or misses his thing. And if it lands in the water, the dead missile just kind of bobs around in the water where I had launched it to. and then he launches a missile and it flies over the game board toward me and hits one of my ships. And you can see the damage in the ship. You can see the 3D water flow into the damage within the ship. And then when he finally sank one of my ships, the ship sank into the 3D water. This sounds so bananas the way I'm describing it.

57:45I am quite confident. I probably sound like I am Looney Tunes. I cannot begin to tell you how freaking cool this experience was. And the other thing is, he could lean over to the side, like away from the game board, and then I could see his face again. And if I held up my hand above the game board, he could see my hand above the game board. The presence here was so unbelievably cool. Again, it's one of those things that for better and for worse, you really just kind of have to experience. And if you don't own a Vision Pro and you can't do the spatial persona thing or FaceTime thing, I don't know what to tell you.

58:19And I don't mean that to be flippant. I don't know what to tell you. You can't just go to an Apple store and try this. There's nothing you can do. And it is incredibly cool. It was a transformative moment for me to play freaking Battleship on the Fish and Fro. I know that sounds nuts, but it really was incredible. I think one of the things you left out for people who don't play Battleship is the reason such a good example of this, a good game example of this, is that the Battleship board is a vertical. There's a horizontal portion, but there's also a vertical portion. and the vertical portion has two sides to it.

58:54And the whole point of the game when you play in person in real life is that you can't see what's on the other side of that board. So the side that's facing you, you can see. And the side that's facing them, they can see, right? And so they render this in 3D space. So I would imagine, I don't know if you tried this, Casey, but I imagine what the game would let you do is could you peek around and cheat just like real life by looking at his board on his side? I could try, but it wouldn't let me because it clears his game board from my perspective. Oh, that's stinky. you anyway so the whole point is they're they're they're modeling a game that like that that when you play it in real life your physical presence is part of the game like it forms a blind between you it blocks you know you know your view is private to you and their view and this that's trivially easy to do in computer games oh i'm seeing my screen here you're seeing your screen you know over in the uk right of course we're not looking at each other's screens but when you're in the same virtual place with the whole presence thing is now we're back to like just like the real life thing where well there are two sides of this board and the reason i can see my side is because i'm sitting on this side of it and the reason you can see your side is because you're sitting on that side but we're all in the same shared space it's kind of annoying that doesn't let you cheat but at least it knows that you're trying to cheat and blanks it out right right it is so cool i am making no promises but i did record a little bit of this from my perspective and i recorded a video of it uh gentlemen for you it's in slack right now i'll see if i can like cut it down and i'll have to ask mike if he's okay with this because i didn't ask permission for him for me to make this public.

1:00:17If it's cool with Mike and if I can figure out a way to cut it down so it's a little bit slimmer and post it somewhere, then I'll put a link in the show notes. No promises. You don't have to tell me if it's not there. Again, I don't know if I'll be able to work it out or not, but I'll see what I can do. But it is incredibly cool. It's such a silly thing to play Battleship with somebody, but he is across a freaking ocean and it feels like we're there together playing Battleship. It was unreal. I cannot begin to tell you how cool it was. Then the final thing in Vision Pro Corner, I hope you two are sitting down because I got to tell you, Marco, whenever you get your Vision Pro back, if you ever take it back, you have to download the Gucci app.

1:00:59I'm sorry. What did I just say? As in like the fashion brand? You need to download the Gucci app, the fashion brand. I am not kidding. Somebody wrote to me and said, hey, why is nobody talking about this? gentlemen why is nobody talking about the gucci app i am not kidding so what this is is and i know nothing can i can i guess that a lot of tech maybe a lot of tech podcasters in the apple space aren't necessarily gucci shoppers it turns out that that seems to be accurate and so what this is is apparently and i'm sure i'm gonna get the details wrong but the broad strokes are all that really matter apparently what this is is that they have a new creative direct the gucci company has the new creative director, Sabato DeSarno.

1:01:42And they do this 20-minute video of who is, I think the title is literally, Who is Sabato DeSarno? And it starts as just a regular old video. I'm not talking 3D video, just a regular old video. But then, during the course of this 20-minute video, the app is free, the video is 20-ish minutes long. Try it. During the 20-minute video, and I'm going to spoil a little bit here, there are different things that happen, and it suddenly becomes immersive in a way that is so well done and so freaking cool and such a great example of look at what is possible with this device. So silly example. At one point, I forget the exact context, but at some point they talk about being on a tram or something like that.

1:02:27And so they're talking about this in the video. And again, this is a rectangle that you're seeing in your space. It is not 3D. I know John and I were going back and forth about this last week. It's just a regular 2D rectangle in your space. But then outside of this rectangle, suddenly you see like the tram tracks, like just silvery gray tracks extend out from this rectangle. And then a tram, a 3D tram rendered, but a 3D tram comes in along the tracks. And I think you can interact with it. I'm not 100 % sure, but I believe you can. And it's just so cool and so different. Later on, they show that there was a, Sabato walks into a room that there's a bunch of like Gucci red balloons inflated in it.

1:03:09And what they did during that moment is they have a gazillion rendered balloons. Again, it's not real, it's just renders, but there's a zillion rendered balloons between you and the video. Not in a way that's like, yeah, I guess you're obscuring the video a little bit, which is weird, but like in a, in a complimentary way, not in a, in a way that takes away from your viewing experience. And there's a lot of this. It is so cool. It's 20 minutes. It is so freaking cool. And if you have a Vision Pro, there is a link in the show notes to this app. I cannot tell you how cool this is. I love that this is what we're starting to get now.

1:03:46again i stand by just a week ago i hadn't seen anything like this doesn't mean it didn't exist because i'm pretty sure it did but i hadn't seen any anyway but now at least people are starting to let me know of cool and interesting takes and different things that people are doing now with vision pro does this does the gucci app justify a 3500 vision pro hell no it doesn't do gucci shoppers care well yeah gucci shoppers probably don't care but we're getting a glimpse now with game room with the Gucci app. And I'm sure some of you who have used the Oculus in the past are telling me or thinking to yourselves, of course, you moron, but this is where we've been for years.

1:04:23And that very well may be true, but this is not where I've been for years. And some of this stuff, the special personas, the presence there, the game room app, the freeform thing, this Gucci app, they are so incredibly cool and has made me so much more, what's the good one? Bullish? bearish is bad bullish is good i always get it wrong um so much more bullish about the vision pro because i'm starting to see a inkling that people are starting to experiment now it bums me out that apple doesn't seem to be doing much as we talked to ad nauseum last week but at least people are starting to do it and this stuff is so cool and marco whenever you get this thing back we've got to do a spatial persona call and maybe you'll say to me i hate this and it's awful but you know what it's worth trying so whenever you get that thing back let me know we'll get on FaceTime together.

1:05:12Something I had to mention last week about the spatial personas, uh, comparing them to other virtual representations of people, both VR and non-VR. So for example, the Miis and Nintendo's Wii, right? Where you can make a little, uh, you know, avatar, 3d avatar of yourself and the, uh, the meta ones where you're in a meeting with people and you got these little rendered versions of yourselves. Um, all of those have made a different choice than Apple has with the spatial personas both the current ones and the previous one that were inside a little rectangle and that the like the Mies and the Meta ones modeled you in 3D and yeah they mapped your face on there and you had your little cartoon hands and sometimes you didn't have legs or whatever but they model you entirely from all directions and the Apple ones the original ones and the current quote-unquote spatial ones basically just do your front and some of your sides and as you go towards the back they kind of go it's blurry like i just just blur that out and you can see a lot in a lot of the spatial persona videos like the the verge article that we linked in last week's episode where when somebody turns in profile you can see their profile and it looks like them like it's clear that their persona has mapped that so it's not just like you know generic but as you get back past like the ear the back half of the head the head doesn't exist right and they blur it artistically like before when you were in the little rectangle they had all sorts of artsy blurring around the edges there and now that you're out of the rectangle still the back half of you half of you doesn't exist which makes sense because you didn't scan the back half of you you just scanned the front half of you when you did the persona setup and it could like the mi's or the meta things extrapolate and sort of close off your head shape there and try to make it whatever but so far apple is doing the sort of i guess the nintendo 64 school of like can't render it fog it right just the wall of fog that's like we can't render past this distance but we need something that looks you know realistic in context so like everything is always foggy in the land of tarak for some reason and the personas are doing that with you they're like oh your head kind of fades into a mist as you go back on your way and it's fine because mostly you're looking at people from the front but like what casey was saying when if two people are collaborating on like a free forum board or whatever like uh you do have an occasion especially if it's like three people you might have an occasion to see them from the side and it is a little bit weird so i am wondering if eventually that the next step in this is that apple will be brave enough to try to do the back of your head of course the other thing that's the problem with the back of your head is there's even more hair back there for most people uh and not me these days yeah rendering hair is just tricky like they kind of get like your hairline is kind of fuzzed out anyway with the current personas like like oh you have hair and whatever we scanned but then it just fades into blurriness right but like i don't know ponytails would have to be rendered with physics or whatever and and the reason i'm drawing a distinction between the me's and the meta ones is those are all cartoonish like to varying degrees i know meta has ones that are not cartoonish and we've talked about those in past episodes as well but the cartoonish ones it's like like kind of like memoji it's like well we can just render that because the back of your head is just like the front you're all made of plastic right but they're trying to make them realistic and i think they're like we're not ready to do hair yet so hair equals blur and back of your head does not exist and i'll definitely be watching for for that to see how far back they can push the fog already i think it feel like it's farther obviously there's not the rectangle anymore that had all that weird fog in it but now the personas themselves have fog on the back of them and we'll see how far back that goes but that's going to be uh quite a challenge but as casey said most of the time you're facing the people and like it goes a long way having you feel like you're there in a physical space with a with a physical thing like the battleship board between you that you can interact with or whatever goes a long way towards making you feel like you're in a place even if the back half of your body doesn't exist yeah it's just it's so funny because again i stand by last week's episode and that was my perspective at the time and i stand by it but i feel so differently now after this one expel two experiences if you include the gucci thing it's just it's so could Did you play patty cake with Mike?

1:09:20Kind of. We did high five once. And obviously you kind of float through each other. Your hands float through each other because what's going to stop you? You know, it's not like you're. I just meant like the alignment. Like, could you, you, where you. I think we could. Was the spatialness good enough where you felt like it was pretty easy to high five, right? Although what's going to stop you reminds me of my window management thing where I was talking about how in Fitz's law, like the top of the screen stops your cursor, but nothing stops it in the 3D world. but a choice that Apple could have made, and I think some other VR people have made, is that virtual hand that you're waving around.

1:09:52There's no reason that the Vision Pro OS can't choose to stop your virtual hand when it encounters another virtual hand or a piece of scenery. Your actual hand will keep going, just like when you jam the mouse cursor against the top of the screen. Your mouse hand keeps going, but the cursor stops, right? And that disconnected, like, wait a second, my hand is still moving, but the cursor is not. we're familiar with that as like oh my cursor has hit the edge of a thing so apple could in the future choose to have you interact for example for window management interacting with window management with a virtual hand where you jam your hands turn to window and you don't have to get the depth exactly right because when your virtual hand hits the virtual window it will stop just like your cursor stops when it hits the top edge of the screen and then you'll grip and grab and move and i think that type of advice could be good because it would essentially be the equivalent of fits law in 3d space i will jam my hand cursor towards this window because i know just like you would in real life i know eventually it will hit it so i don't have to be exactly precise and when it does hit it the cursor will stop and then i'll grip um that would be cool so you could actually you know high five with mike and your hand actually stop and they'd have a little high five sound and it would sound spatially correct maybe in version two oh that was the other thing that reminds me the other thing that we did during this time is i don't i actually don't recall how you enable it, but one way or another, you can have, you can share play your perspective in your actual physical space.

1:11:15And so I, he took me on a tour of his studio office, whatever he calls it. I think studio, uh, he talked to me on a tour of mega studio and I could see this studio. I've seen photos of it, but it's different when you can see, and I, if memory serves, it wasn't 3d. It was like, I'm, I don't think it was rendered in 3d. I have to try it again at some point, but But it was very, you have this presence when you're getting whipped around a space from somebody's perspective. It was very, very, very cool. And I really enjoyed that as well. So, again, if you have two people, you know, if you know another person with a Vision Pro, you've got to try this.

1:11:53It's all so very impressive. And it really gives me hope that even if Apple is dropping the ball on immersive stuff, people are trying. People are trying and people are doing cool stuff. And we just got to give it time. Yeah, and I wanted to clarify what I actually said last episode about the Vision Pro. I feel like I need to defend myself a little bit against what sounded like Mike subtweeting me in the beginning of the podcast, subpotting me. I didn't say the Vision Pro has already failed or is a failure. My concern is that the Vision Pro will fail if it continues on the path it appears to be on so far in terms of support from developers and Apple.

1:12:33What I stand by is that they have a pretty significant challenge on their hands of there being a massive chicken and egg problem here. That there are not many users. There are not many apps. There is not almost any content. That's a big problem. In order to get more users, somebody has to be making the content or the apps or both to get them there. And right now it seems like the biggest chance of that support coming from somewhere is from Apple. because the other content makers and publishers out there are going to have a hard time justifying making content for Vision Pro if it's going to be for such a small number of people.

1:13:14Now, there's also obviously other VR platforms, but even they, like the MetaQuest series has been very popular, relatively speaking, for a VR platform for a number of years now. But even that has not been enough to get tons of custom content made for it. So really, Apple needs to seed this ecosystem with a whole bunch of content that they are making, even though it appears as though it's probably not going to be, like, quote, worth it yet for a while. And what you're saying, Casey, is not wrong. Like, you know, I haven't tried the 3D personas yet, but I've heard everyone else's takes that they're amazing and everything.

1:13:50And you're describing experiences that I've had on the Vision Pro of just like being blown away, really feeling something different, feeling like you're having an experience or being able to do something that you cannot do on any of Apple's other platforms or any other platforms sometimes in the world. And that is correct and also not enough. Those are amazing experiences. Those are amazing possibilities. That's amazing potential. what it is right now so far for most of these things is more like a tech demo than a long lasting product that we've seen other vr headsets do this for years look back to when meta's horizon workrooms that was called when that launched what was it about a year or two ago we heard from people who tried that especially ben thompson was a huge um champion of it of just how amazing it was to do basically these kind of like virtual meetings with 3d avatars in a virtual room and it was all everything you were saying about how great the the um spatial personas were of like spatial audio being you know coming from the person and like a 3d representation of that person in the room ben thompson was saying for you know when that came out and i believe when mike and gray did it on cortex a couple years back i believe they came to a similar conclusion of like it really is way better than like a zoom or facetime meeting for you know virtually meeting with people and we know this already but yet that product never really took off like horizon workrooms doesn't seem to have gone anywhere the coolness of the meeting is not enough the coolness of these experiences of wow i i played battleship with my friend once that's not enough that's a great experience it's a cool demo it's more like going to a theme park though how do we get people to integrate this into more everyday life or work types of uses.

1:15:45And that really comes down to kind of more fundamental things. How do you get the hardware to be more mass market friendly, whether that's through cost or change it to the hardware itself, probably both. And then how do you get people to buy it and to use it regularly, not just use it once, have a cool experience, and then put it back in the drawer and not use it for another six months. that's really hard my concern is that we're not yet seeing apple really ramp up the content story or the app story that's concerning because if not enough people buy this or the people who do buy it end up not using it very often then all those cool experiences that you're describing won't happen people will do them once and then never do them again it's only so useful if you and a handful of your podcaster friends have this, but no one else in the world does.

1:16:41They have to get the product from where it is now to more people being willing and happy to buy it and use it more often. That's the chasm they have to cross. And they might do it. They might really blow us away and get there. Or maybe it'll be a really slow boil, like John was saying last week. And maybe three years from now, we might say, hey, you know what? It's slowly gaining steam. That may happen. I hope that happens. I'm not pessimistic about the product being able to be good. I'm scared that Apple won't do what it takes to get it there because they're not investing enough in the content ecosystem.

1:17:23That's my main concern here. First, for any of these experiences to be compelling, to be used more than once, you have to get a bunch of people to buy this thing. How are they going to do that? Well, the easiest way to do that, I think, is with really compelling content because the apps aren't going to be there. So next best thing, really compelling content. Get a bunch of music and movies and sports videos and concerts and get all this different types of content that people will be like, yes, I want to watch my basketball or my fish concert in 3D. I will get it just for that. Yes, do that. Somehow get people to buy it.

1:18:02That would be step one. and then once you have people accepting this device into their lives and using it more than once then you can start having these amazing experiences with people where you're playing battleship and 3d together or something but it's not going to get beyond this is a fun demo we did twice until you have a lot of people buying it and how are you going to get a lot of people to it without this whole ecosystem existing already that's that's a very tough thing and i still don't think we've seen enough from apple yet but again it is very early days it's been out for two months wwc is you know another two months from now so we still could see great things here but it seems like we should have seen more of it already being two months past you know post launch like i would have expected to see more of a push from apple more of a content push more of a press push it's just something like to keep reminding people hey this cool thing that we did it's out there and here's a new thing this week that we've released on it or something and that we're just we're not really getting that yet yeah i think a lot of the reason people talk about content so much for it and particularly content that is either entirely made by apple or essentially paid for or sponsored or subsidized by apple is because that is the one realm where nobody can test that headsets can do something other platforms can't you can use a web browser on a mac on your phone on your ipad or whatever uh you can't watch 3d video on any of those devices right you need a headset to get the headset experience and why should apple help fund that well if apple either produces or helps fund content a they can make sure it is optimized for their headset which happens to be very expensive and it's high resolution right so it's not they're not going to make the lowest common denominator content and b they can essentially say this is exclusively for people with vision pro right because if they help pay for it it doesn't need to be for everybody it can just be for people who have the vision pro and content is the most compelling use for the product that apple has put out despite the fact they say it's spatial computing that's not the other thing everything you can do in spatial computing in terms of i can use applications and scroll windows and type text you can do all those things on other platforms.

1:20:20There are advantages and disadvantages, but it's not a slam dunk. Well, you can't do any 3D video on any other thing that Apple makes. This is the only one. So there's no, you don't need to make some sophisticated argument about how it's better to manipulate windows in 3D space and how you like looking up at the ceiling to see your web browser. You don't have to make a nuanced argument like that. It's like literally you cannot do this on anything else that Apple sells. And also, by the way, people who see the 3D video find it impressive and compelling right so yes apps and make the os better and so on and so forth but we're like apple just make more content it's the easiest thing because first of all it doesn't require anything of the user you just have to like launch it and look at it and be amazed right and look around right it's very natural you don't need to learn any weird pinch gestures you don't have to you know this there's the learning curve is low it's incredibly impressive i feel like it is the thing that is most impressive to people when they do the in-store demo is seeing the 3d video it has no competition in apple's entire line and if apple pays for it they can essentially make it optimized for an exclusive for this device that is a short-term thing like eventually if watching nba games with a you know courtside perspective in 3d becomes a thing presumably the nba would want that to be available on every headset platform not just apples but if apple foots the bill in the beginning yeah you can make that stuff apple exclusive only on vision pro not because vision pro is the only headset but because apple paid literally millions of dollars to make this happen or because it's mlb and apple owns the rights to it or like that that's the part of the frustration is we see how you can make this product more compelling simply by producing content and that's not the story apple wants to tell about this device they want to call it a spatial computing device and it is right but the easiest sale is you can see 3d video like you've never seen it before and how about you make some of that apple i do i concur it's the easiest i'm not sure it's the most striking for lack of a better word like it unquestionably it's easiest ways to do this immersive or even 3d video but i don't know some of the most compelling experiences i've had were you know like the spatial persona persona thing and these facetime calls and that that's quite a learning curve you got to know somebody else with one you got to be computery like yeah like that's i'm kind of of the mindset of like you know kickstart this and then once people get accustomed because just getting them used to the idea of you put this on your head and you somehow to navigate to a thing where you can see the game eventually they'll be like you know what i'm feeling comfortable in this world and then hey i can i watch a game with my friend gruber and ben talked about this recently you can be sitting in the stands of a baseball stadium next to each other it started out as you're just watching a baseball game but now you're doing what you're talking about casey where now you're sitting next to your friend watching the same game together and you can turn and talk to them it's like i feel like that's the way in because starting with the thing doesn't require almost anything of the user is a good way to get them used to all the stuff that comes with it you know get them to shell out for it in the first place get them used to putting it on their head get them to figure out how it fits into their life whether they're going to feel comfortable using the library or in the Wegmans or whatever and then eventually you ease them into like oh now my friend is sitting next to me and we're watching the same movie screen together but now we're watching a baseball game together and now we're both courtside but now we're talking to each other and playing battleship that i feel like that is a a long road to to uh drive down and apple has not even like really set out on it yet yeah i mean i think this by virtue of this game room app being in apple arcade it would imply to me anyway that it was funded at least in part by apple now to marco's point earlier perhaps it was already written for other platforms and the funding was just the porting onto vision pro but still this is the kind of thing that all three of us are talking about like do more of this please apple give us immersive video give us 3d video give us all this stuff and i really want there to be more of it uh And I think that there is a world in which the Vision Pro can take off to the degree that a$3 ,500 device can, a frivolous device can take off.

1:24:16But it's going to be a long road. I mean, Marco, you're not wrong about that. So we'll see. Yeah, and it will be a long road, but they have to start driving down it. You can make it down a long road. Just wait. Like, over time, be patient. If you continue driving down a long road, like, you will get there. for me to have more confidence in the products i need to see that they're actually driving down the road and apple arcade is a great tool they can use you know we don't really see a lot of ways that apple funds development of third-party software like they don't really do that like you know obviously like you know they'll let you put it in the store asterisk asterisk uh but we you don't see apple behaving like a studio very often where like they will front the money to fund some third party making something.

1:25:02Apple Arcade is, I think, sort of one of those things. I don't know the details, and I know it's kind of shifted and changed a little bit over time, but from what we understand, Apple Arcade is a way they could do that. So if they wanted to fund some games and interactive-type entertainment experiences, that's a great place to do it. A great tool they already have. Use Apple Arcade. Use the relationships you have there. But everything we keep hearing is that the relationships there aren't that good, maybe. So I worry that it's going to take types of relationships and types of skills and attitudes that Apple historically has not really shown that they have in order to make good software happen for the vision program.

1:25:43Because honestly, like you guys were saying a few minutes ago about the computing aspects, I know John was saying that the computing aspects kind of were less important or less doable maybe than the video aspects. But longer term, I think there is more promise in some of the computing aspects than we think now. For instance, I'm currently trying to furnish some rooms in a house and figure out certain decor choices and stuff. it would be great to have you know some of the 3d house uh remodeling kind of apps or like you know room envisioning what does it look like if i paint this room green you know like that kind of stuff how does this chair look in my room some of that stuff is there now very very little mostly through like safari and the support for the uh the ar model stuff um some of that stuff exists sort of but it's very very minimal the division pro would be amazing for stuff like that what about virtual tourism.

1:26:41Take me to a balcony in a villa in Spain or whatever. You can do amazing stuff with 3D worlds and virtual tourism. Mindfulness kind of exercises and environments. Apple's own environments, they can broaden that. There is a lot of value to a lot of that stuff but for most of that to happen, you first need enough users on the platform that it's worth those developers making those things so that's hopefully where content can kind of jumpstart the install base make must have must see content and i you know again i'm not a sports person but sports seem like a really obvious good way to do that i see apple is you know kind of sort of dipping their toe into that so far that that could be very compelling for a lot of people i think also yeah concerts live events stuff like that that's that could get a lot of people as well i just hope they're doing that but i'm scared because what they have launched with is basically nothing and two months in and it's still basically nothing so how are they going to get from here to there i you know if the answer is just that we don't know about their their production pipeline and it turns out maybe like over the course of the rest of this year maybe they have a bunch of cool stuff coming great then we can look back at this and look how wrong i was that'll be awesome because i want this to succeed but so far we have no sign of that so i hope i'm wrong again just like i said last week i hope i'm wrong yeah we'll see what happens um it's just funny how i i wasn't or i don't think i was deeply pessimistic about the vision pro i just wasn't deeply optimistic about it and now i'm not sure if i would go so far as to say i'm deeply optimistic about it but my goodness i feel like i'm much closer to that than i was ever before And so, yeah, I mean, there's with with time, I'm finding more and more ways that this thing has impressed me.

1:28:40And I think that's cool. We're brought to this episode by Computex 2024, one of the world's largest AIOT and startup shows happening in Taipei from June 4th through 7th. Whether you're a seasoned industry pro or a passionate entrepreneur, Computex has something for everyone. You can discover cutting-edge technology from AI computing, advanced connectivity, and future mobility, exploring the latest trends and innovations shaping the future of tech. And you can network with industry leaders. Don't miss the chance to skyrocket your startup with Inovex, Computex's international startup hub. Inovex facilitates connections with manufacturing partners and global sales channels through competitions and presentations, ensuring heightened visibility and investor support.

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1:30:09All right, let's do some Ask ATP. Chandler Kent wrote probably six months ago, but here we are. Lesson learned, don't ever use Ask ATP for timely related things. because we probably won't get to it in time. Sometimes that happens, though. Sometimes someone writes an Ask ATP and it goes in the next day's recording, so you never know. You never know, but I wouldn't rely on it. But Chandler wrote 18 years ago, I need to buy a car, but I don't know how. I was thinking about buying a Power Mac G5. Yeah, right. I'm a tech nerd with no experience buying cars. I fear having the feeling of getting screwed by a sleazy car salesman.

1:30:43As tech nerds who are also into cars, what are your best tips for first-time car buyers to make the process less stressful and hopefully get a fair price? I'm based in the U.S. We are buying our first family car since we have two kids and are thinking about expanding our family. Currently on a Volkswagen Jetta that my wife bought in 2011. So my two cents, and I will try to make this quick because this could go on for another 90 minutes if we let it. My two cents are twofold. Number one, if you really want a stress-free experience, I haven't bought from this company, but I have sold to this company.

1:31:14And there are other equivalents, I think, similar to it. And full disclosure, they're based out of Richmond. but CarMax, they sell used cars and their whole thing is no haggling. Like the price is the price. Granted, you probably will not get the world's best deal by going to CarMax, but you will have an easy transaction. Carvana, I've heard very mixed things about, but this is sort of similar, but it's all internet-based. But I would consider CarMax, if you're not trying to buy new, go to CarMax and just find something on their lot or find something nearby and it'll be fairly straightforward.

1:31:44You won't get the best price, but it'll be easy. But for me, when we've bought cars in the last couple of cars we've bought, we've bought new mostly to get CarPlay. And what we did was I emailed or reached out to the salespeople for all the dealers within like two to three hours of my house and said, what is your best out the door price for the following car with an XC90 with this, that, this, that, this, that, this, that, what's your best price? and by the way, I'm emailing a bunch of other dealers to ask the same thing. So what ends up happening is one or two of the dealers will come up with a decent price and you can via email, you can just say, oh, well, you know, the dealer down the road said, you know, 50 ,000 and the dealer up the road said 55 ,000.

1:32:27Can you come down dealer up the road? And you can kind of create a bidding war. Now, granted, you have to be the intermediary to do this and it's a pain in the butt and it takes forever, but we've gotten some pretty darn good deals on our last couple of cars by doing something like that. So it takes a lot of work, but you can get a pretty decent deal. And pretty much all the haggling is done up front, which is really, really nice. So by the time you go in, it's mostly about just signing a few papers and getting the car. The other thing I would also advocate, and then I'll stop talking, is if you can provide your own financing, I would at least be prepared to.

1:33:00Now there's catches and caveats with that, because oftentimes you may get a better deal if you use the dealer's financing. but sometimes a dealer likes an easy transaction when you just hand them a check or pay cash that can go a lot easier so i think john has some links he's going to talk about so before we get there marco what would you like to add to this or anything else you'd like to contribute some brands notably like tesla and also you know rivian and many of the new brands they don't like the ones that sell direct where you're not going through dealers usually they don't even have negotiable prices like usually it's just here's the price it's like buying something on amazon This is the price.

1:33:37You can order it or not. And in some ways, that kind of takes some of the, quote, fun out of it for some people. For me, that took a lot of stress out of it because I didn't have to worry, am I getting screwed? Everyone's getting screwed equally. So you don't have to feel bad about it or put any thought or time into it. So that's wonderful when there's a brand that just there is no negotiation. When you're dealing with most other brands where you're going through dealers and having all these markups, it's like any other negotiation. the more information you have about their situation the better it helps to know things like for instance if you can use online nerdery to find out what does this car cost the dealer this i believe this is called the invoice price in some circles or whatever else but like you you can usually use some kind of online research to figure out what did the what is the dealer cost for this car now it's a little more complicated sometimes there's like certain incentives and everything the dealer gets to kind of cut into it a little bit but for the most part you should have some idea of what you can reasonably even ask for because if you're asking to buy a$35 ,000 car and it costs the dealer$32 ,000 and you go in there and say I'll give you 20 they're gonna laugh at you like because what you're asking for is totally impossible and unreasonable and that just shows you don't know what you're talking about if you go in there with some idea of what you're talking about and you know that their cost is you know 32 and you say i'll give you 32 five right now walk out the door like you're giving them a profit margin you know they're like because you know they're not going to give you give it to you for their cost they're going to want some profit so you give them 500 bucks or a thousand bucks in profit and usually they'll be fine with that and they'll be happy to have the deal done quickly now case's method is better you should probably combine these two so you should probably like you know have if you have multiple dealers in the region who will compete with each other, who you can just email and deal with it that way, that's better.

1:35:32But you should also know what to ask for in the first place, and you should know what kind of pricing is reasonable to expect. You should also know about other factors. So for instance, oftentimes, depending on how you want to finance it, oftentimes some of the best values in the car business are lease specials. Because if you want to and can lease the vehicle. Leasing is usually backed by some financial arm of the car company who you're buying the car from. And so if the car company is, say, kind of is maybe looking to miss some of their sales targets for the quarter and the end of the quarter is coming up soon, they might borrow against their future selves by offering a lease special to give you a pretty good deal on a car to get you to please, for the love of God, start this lease now in this quarter um so you can take advantage of factors like that you know end month end of quarter things um there's some some wiggle room there ultimately though all of this comes down to basic negotiation which of you needs it more you know do you do you want this certain car a lot do a lot of other people want that same car so for instance if what you're going for is a very in-demand car that maybe is in a bit a bit of a short supply you're going to pay through the nose and they know it and there's nothing you can do about it.

1:36:50Because if you don't buy it, someone else will come in later that day and they'll buy it. But whereas, if the flip side is true, if what you are trying to buy is a car that is pretty plentiful and the dealer is going to miss their sales target or the manufacturer is going to miss their quarterly earnings target, you can take advantage of that and you can get a good price. So the more information you have, the better, because you want to know where you stand. How much leverage you have depends on how much they want to sell you that car. And you need to know like how far down you can even go in the price while still being reasonable and within what they can accept.

1:37:27What's the John answer to this question? So my suggestion is, so there's lots of online tools to help you with this stuff. And there's a YouTube channel that I found interesting. And it's a good example. I'm not a good example of a genre of YouTube type channel where the channel is essentially a come on for you to sign up for a service. Right. but they have lots of free videos on youtube all of which are telling you to go to the website and sign up for the service and pay the money right uh this this is the channel is called car edge um and they have a website and they do have a thing they want you to pay for right but there's a lot of free value that you can extract from something like courage without ever paying them any money i've never paid courage any money but i've watched a bunch of their videos right and the thing i like about car edge is if you watch enough of the videos the free videos that are on youtube you will eventually start to get a feel for what what the dealership experience is like the bad olds negotiated price dealership uh experience um the one of the people who runs the channel used to be a car dealer so he knows what it's like on the other side right and they do lots of role playing in the channel which i think is the other important part of negotiating for a car car dealers just like any other sales people will leverage social norms essentially to get you to do something you otherwise wouldn't right so social norms of not wanting to disagree with somebody or not wanting to be rude to them those sound like things that wouldn't cause you to pay thousands of dollars more for a car but they absolutely will right and i'm not saying you have to be obnoxious and rude but there are many things that you will feel uncomfortable doing if you haven't either rehearsed them yourself or at least seen other people role-playing and rehearsing them uh because it's very easy to sort of get caught up and also frankly but if you find yourself in a car dealer one of the things they do is keep you there for a long time because you're like i don't want to go through this all again on another day i just wasted one of my weekend days doing this and i basically decided that i don't want to buy this car at this price but if i leave now all i'm doing is signing myself up to have to do this again next weekend uh and how soon do i need the car i needed asap because my old car was totaled or whatever like you don't ever want to be in that situation right sometimes you can't help but but it's just a thing to keep in mind like they're relying on you not wanting to feel like you're rude uh and you not want to be feeling exhausted and not wanting to go through this whole ordeal again to just be like fine whatever resist that so i would suggest going to something like the car edge youtube channel or their website or anything similar and sucking all the value out of that for free if you want to sign up for it fine i wouldn't give them any money but there's so much good knowledge on youtube of like here's what it's going to be like when you go in the dealer here's what the dealer is going to say to you here's why this is not true here's why that's not true and yes there are tons of websites where you can look up what the the dealer prices for this car and incentives and all that stuff what marco said about rare cars is true if you want a civic type r bad news for you you're lucky if you can even find one let alone get one that's not ten thousand dollars over msrp so try to buy a car that is not very rare right try to not be in a hurry for it uh do your research ahead of time and practice and if you if one uh if you're in a partnership and what your partner is more comfortable doing this type of negotiation if you do role playing and one of you just can't bring themselves to just walk out the door say no or no i can't do that have the other person to the negotiation just it's because you you have to you have to end up doing that and and i will say finally uh in the end if you before you even start this process you if you have in mind i think i want a honda civic ish car and i have this amount of money for it and if i paid this amount of money and I got a brand new Honda Civic-ish car, I would be happy.

1:41:27In the end, if you do get exhausted and someone says, hey, I'll give you a Honda Civic for a number that is within the range that you want it to pay, even if you essentially, oh, I'm overpaying, I got screwed. So you paid an extra$1 ,000 for a Civic. The world will not end. Make sure you get the car you want for a price that you're okay with and then maybe you've done minimal sanity checking on that price to make sure it's not completely outrageous and you'll be fine. Like there's no one who's going to come to your house and say, I heard you paid$500 more than your neighbor for your car. Don't you feel bad?

1:41:58Don't feel bad. Just get a car that you're happy with that hopefully you'll like for a reasonable price. There's no award for shaving down that last$100 off the price. It's, you know, you're going to spend that much filling up the tank twice. Or if you get an EV, you're spending so much money anyway, so who cares? no i think just to to reiterate what john just said it is important to know that no matter how nice or not sleazy the dealer is their profession is to manipulate you into paying them as much money as you are possibly capable of paying and so there will be moments where you have to say nope i'm out and walk away and there are moments where you probably will have to be kind of rude.

1:42:40When I bought the Volkswagen, I negotiated in advance. We came to a price. I said, okay, I'm going to come up at such a time. Everything's good to go. I'll have all the paperwork I need. I'll have a check for you, et cetera, et cetera. And this was at a Volkswagen dealer, the Volkswagen dealer nearest the Volkswagen of America headquarters up in the DC area. And I was trying to get this car bought. Everything was squared away. I just had to sign the paperwork. and they wouldn't get, they wouldn't put me in front of the finance people, which was silly because I didn't even need to finance anything.

1:43:14But nevertheless, they wouldn't put me in front of the finance people for like an hour. And eventually I sent a text to the child that was my dealer. And I said, look, I am going to leave if I'm not in front of somebody in five minutes. Like I was a total chad about it because I'd been saying like, what's the story? What's the story? What's the story? And he'd run off to go ask such and such and such, who's a mob of them. and eventually I sent a text. I was like, I will leave in five minutes if I'm not in front of somebody. And do you know what, fellas? Do you know what happened in about three minutes?

1:43:44I was sitting in front of the finance person who was then giving me the rigmarole about, oh, you need the underbody protection. Oh, you need the wheel protection. Oh, you need the tire protection. And you have to say, no, no, no, no. But eventually I sure enough got out of there with the car I wanted at the price I wanted and it all worked out. But it took me being a Chad to get there. And that was no fun. Although on the topic of this is another thing to watch the courage videos about. It's complicated, but like, should I tell them that I'm paying in cash? Should I tell them I have a trade in?

1:44:12When should I tell them these things? Should I not say anything about it until we've agreed on a number? Like it's more complicated than you think, which is why I think you should watch these free videos and get an idea of like the things you should and shouldn't say until you get an agreed upon price. And then you pull it. Oh, and by the way, I have a trade in. Oh, and by the way, I'm paying cash. Or by the way, I'll do your finance thing as long as there's no early penalty thing because they often have incentives to get you to sign up for the finance thing. They're like, look, we know you're going to pay cash for it.

1:44:38But if you will just sign up for this loan and then immediately pay it off, you'll never pay a penny in interest or whatever. That's not always a scam. Sometimes that's a real thing. I've done it with my own cars where we get a quote unquote car loan and then just immediately pay it off with no prepayment penalty whatsoever to get a lower price on the car. but that usually but by the time you're negotiating that it's after you've essentially got agreed upon price and maybe you're trying to get it to go even lower so anyway watch these courage videos i found them very educational it may make you think i never want to buy a car again or i want to buy something with no haggle price do you guys remember when saturn did that it was one yeah yeah we had a saturn that was my first car was a saturn and that was a dealership thing like it was gm it's not it wasn't like it wasn't like rivian or tesla it was a uh car from a big car company with a dealership chain where it was still no haggle pricing so yeah no pricing like marco said everyone gets screwed equally um yeah but it is possible to find a good deal on a new car and if not uh then on a used car as well so yeah i miss and obviously marco has the most experience buying cars in many of us but i feel i feel like is that true i don't know if he has the most experience buying cars he has a lot of experience leasing cars but buying cars i don't know you're in a dealership you're dealing with those people you're giving the money but you know leases are also negotiable right everyone knows that like you you can negotiate the price on which they're basing the lease fair enough all right we should move on and anonymous writes when apple hewlett packard and john deere sells physical products we don't actually own the product john deere uses software to prevent farmers from repairing their tractors hp use the software to prevent users from using non-hp ink in their printers apple uses software to prevent users from installing fortnite on their phones with all this discussion of the dma and apple's treatment of developers there's a little mention of apple's taking of iphone device ownership from consumers do you the host of atp have any opinions on how apple's assertion of ownership over iphones after they've sold them to consumers harms said consumers i i understand the premise here i granted i give apple a pass on a lot of things that maybe i shouldn't but i don't really get vibes that it's apple's device And in fact, there was, what was the kerfuffle about like photo scanning or something like that?

1:46:47There was something recently that all of us were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's not for you to be doing without my permission. Yeah, that was the CSAM analysis from last year. Yeah, like it's not that I have a problem with CSAM analysis, but like just telling me that you're doing this on my phone and sucking up my battery to do it and stuff like that. I don't love that. And they reverse course. But the broader point I don't think is unreasonable. and I certainly don't love that ownership is a lot squishier now than it was before. But with Apple particularly, I don't really feel that squeeze quite yet.

1:47:21I think I started with Marco last time. So, John, what are your thoughts here? I put this question in here just to give myself an opportunity to say something that I kept meaning to say that basically goes unsaid in all of our discussions of the iPhone and the App Store and developers being ignored or whatever. But I figure we should say it in case people don't just assume it. whenever we talk about uh developers being annoyed that uh they're not getting they don't feel like they're getting their money's worth from apple apple is uh running the app store in a way they disagree with it's taking too much of their profits whatever their cut is like and people will say why are they why are people mad about that they shouldn't be mad here is another situation where another company takes an even bigger cut and people aren't mad it's unfair that people are mad at apple right and this is i'll get to it this is actually related to the whole john deere hb printering thing right one of the explanations of why people might be mad at apple for doing something that they're not mad at other companies for doing an even worse thing is because those people who are mad view the phone the same way they view apple's other earlier platforms personal computers personal computers have existed for a really long time some of the people who have sold software for personal computers are still alive and selling software or trying to sell software for things like iphones and on personal computers for the whole history of of that product companies would make a computer and there'd be an operating system sometimes made by the same company sometimes made by the other and then you'd buy applications for them and you'd run them right and the applications used to be sold through agit software agit software would take 55 of every single box of software they sold which is way more than 30 and then the rest would go to the software developer or the publisher whatever in any way and you'd put it on your computer and then with the advent of the internet people said i don't need to get software i can sell you my software directly you buy it from my website download it to your computer you install it and you run it and apple isn't involved at all in that transaction apple sold you the computer maybe apple sold you the operating system apple has its own applications that you can buy but when you buy the application for me you go to my website you give me money maybe i pay a credit card processor maybe i pay some other payment processor or whatever but that's all my business and if you own a computer you can buy from me and put that software on your computer and people look at the phone and they think that's how the phone should work because we have literal decades of precedent maybe not decades with the internet buying on websites but decades of precedent of like hey i buy a computer from a company and maybe they make an operating system but after that i can do whatever i want and yeah maybe egghead software gets 55 of every box of software but that's not my problem i don't have to deal with that and in some respects people are more okay with retailers taking stuff it's like look they have to make a physical box and we ship it to them and they have warehouses and inventory and they pay employees and they rent a building and they heat and they cool it and you know like there's obvious costs involved there and and retail is a long established thing but still the computer is sort of like it's my computer i own it i can around whatever software I want.

1:50:23It's not like Microsoft can reach out and say, or Dell or whatever and say, no, I'm sorry, you're not allowed to play Fortnite anymore because Dell says you can't. And when, when Apple says that you can't have Fortnite on your phone anymore, a lot of times it feels like Dell is telling them that they can't play Doom on their PC. It's absurd to them. I'm not saying they're right or wrong. I'm just saying that this is a thing that happened in history. People remember that history. In fact, that history continues to this day on platforms that Apple sells like the Mac, where they can't stop me from downloading a piece of software off the internet and using it on my Mac.

1:50:56And so far, Apple has not. I mean, they could. But so far, Apple has said they won't and they haven't, right? So there is this other thing that looks a lot like a computer or a lot like the phone, if you squint, that makes people feel like the phone should work that way. And I feel like this person's question is similar. They say they remember a world or know about currently a world where the situation is different and they say what's different between the the phone and the ipad and a mac and a pc they're all computers with screens and ram and communication like what's so different and i'm sure you can come up with the reasons why it's different certainly apple has tried over the years i remember when the iphone first came out a lot of the reasons that apple said it was different was because it's the cell phone network and you don't want arbitrary software running on here because that could destroy the cell phone remember the whole like scaremongering about it wasn't that wasn't that steve jobs himself who gave that excuse yeah yeah it's like before before the app store existed like why they have to be web apps and can't be regular apps obviously you know but like this like i'm not explaining this to say this is why apple is wrong i'm i'm just putting this out there so people know this is one of the things that contributes to people's dissatisfaction because they know it has been can be and is different on other platforms that people think are close enough to the iPhone that it shouldn't be that different.

1:52:20And we never we don't really mention that we don't talk about that because we also like, oh, everyone knows on PCs, it's not like it is on the iPhone. But I just want to reiterate on PCs, it is not like it is on the iPhone. And that contributes greatly to certain maybe just old people's, but certain people's attitude towards the the iPhone and iOS and the Mac App Store and stuff like that is because maybe they're old and they remember the olden times, But even if not, even if they're young people, if you buy a Mac today, you can run any software you want on it. And Apple can't stop you. And that's a platform that Apple sells today.

1:52:49So I don't think when all us old people die, I don't think everyone will just accept Apple's cut and their total control over the App Store. I think as long as the Mac continues to exist, as long as the PC continues to exist, as long as those platforms like that exist, as long as the web exists and people are born every day and see those things, they will ask that same question. And the question is, why is this phone different than this PC? Or, you know, the John Deere tractor people. I've been buying John Deere tractors for 50 years. Why is this tractor something I can't fix it myself? Right?

1:53:22Why can't I take my cracked phone screen and get it fixed at the mall kiosk if I'm willing to do that for less money? Parts pairing? Like, I hope that we don't lose sight of the way things used to be because the way things are today on the iPhone are not necessarily the way they always have to be. Same deal with John Deere tractors or whatever. And in particular, when it comes to Apple's platforms, the fact that they were founded as a personal computer company and have all those decades of experience with personal computers, and we did have that time when personal computers existed and the internet existed and you could buy software directly from software developers without the platform vendor being involved at all, that contributes greatly to people's dissatisfaction.

1:54:01Things used to be simple and now they're not. And before we even started recording the bootleg, I was whining and moaning to the boys about doing some Minecraft related things for Declan this evening. And I couldn't help but think to myself as this was going on, like, what's the canceled comic when he was talking about Wi-Fi on a plane? Like, everything's awesome and nobody's happy. This is kind of like everything's awful and nobody's happy because there were like so many layers I had to jump through and so many hoops I had to jump through in order to get something working. where it used to be that you installed a piece of software and then it ran.

1:54:35And I get why things are not that way today. And for the most part, I prefer it the way it is today. But golly, when it goes bad, it goes real bad. Well, but also, you know, there's kind of an Overton window effect here of, you know, like the sliding window of what we accept as normal slash acceptable slash palatable in computers. And that changes over time, you know. And, you know, to kind of build on what John was saying, back in the day when when many of our listeners were probably not even born yet we had a there was a huge ripple throughout the computer enthusiast community when hardware started including drm in hardware um i remember there was um was it the intel tpm there was like there was like the the microsoft and intel were working together on like a trusted platform And this was when they were first adding basically security in the hardware for DRM, for DRM media playback to PC hardware for the first time.

1:55:38This was, I believe, in the late 90s. It was around the time DVDs had come out and all of the DRM arguments over the DVD CSS horribleness and the DCSS lawsuits and all this other stuff was going on. And it was really the rise of mainstream DRM in PC hardware. and you know before that you had formats like the cd which had absolutely no protection whatsoever i mean people tried to add it later kind of sort of worked sometimes but for the most part it was you know no protection whatsoever my guy we had protection before cds do you not remember trying to photocopy the sim city black on red oh the red yeah i mean come on right anyway so like there were all these like you know in the olden days before you know before basically the late 90s there was really no good way to do drm for most pc media or most media at all and so it was kind of just unprotected and left to well most people probably won't copy it or copying it's a little bit hard so maybe or a little bit expensive maybe people won't do it a lot and then we started adding drm to pc hardware and it was like all the enthusiast forums and the media and everybody like exploded when people started adding these things i'm never gonna buy a pc with a drm chip in it It's my PC.

1:56:55I can do whatever I want. Now, every PC has DRM chips in it. Every phone of the modern phone type has always had DRM type support in it. Now, DRM is everywhere. Everything we play, everything we stream, everything we download. Remember Steve Jobs' thoughts on DRM, thoughts on music, where he gave this big thing about, oh, DRM basically shouldn't exist. Now it's all back. Every streaming service that you play music from or that you watch video from, if it's a streaming service, everything's DRM'd. There's DRM in web browsers now. There's all these wonderful web streaming media things that you can view in a web browser with various web standards like HLS.

1:57:39But then you have DRM in those. I believe Widevine is the one that keeps getting up my butt when I try to download Phish concerts. there's drm in your web browser in the open world of the web running on your open world of your pc it's full of drm now and that's just considered normal like no one even blinks an eye so the window of what's acceptable to consumers does shift over time uh you know it's you know it's it's kind of a frog boiling thing and that like this is not necessarily a good thing for us in in many ways uh but over time people stop caring that you know you fight a little bit and then you give up and you move on or something compelling is on the other side like you really want to use one of those streaming services or you really want to use the iPod or whatever it is that has some kind of DRM in it or some other form of restriction of you as an owner and you go to it for other factors.

1:58:32It's hard to service your own car these days in many ways because cars have all these different electronically bonded parts and everything's complicated and requires special computers and everything. And yeah, it is hard to do a lot of that stuff yourself now, but most people are not driving big blocky cars from the 1970s that are death traps today but are easy to service because we have other alternatives or other advantages to modern vehicles now. Okay, fine, we'll accept that we can't do all of our own work on our car anymore. Not that I ever could, but other people could. Technology moves forward and it gives us certain advantages that convince people to move forward with it and we generally accept some of the restrictions that didn't exist in the old world.

1:59:15So as we move from PCs to phones, largely for a lot of people, phones have always been incredibly locked down. The result of all of that is we do, as consumers, have less control than we used to over a lot of these devices in our lives. But the result also is that because it's so locked down, we have Netflix and HBO and stuff willing to bring their content to these devices and not have to worry that it's all going to get ripped off super easily off of somebody's hacked up phone. It's at least more difficult to do that. Not that stuff doesn't get pirated, but it's more difficult to pirate it directly that way.

1:59:54And this is not a defensive DRM by any means, or of these various control mechanisms that these companies use. It's just the reality of how this works. Over time, more of these control systems are added because it benefits the companies and in some cases it benefits the product and people accept them over time that's just how it goes people accept it because there's some trade-off they decide you know what i yeah yes this i wish i could copy the songs the opposite direction off my ipod but i can't and i'm just gonna buy the ipod anyway because i like everything else about it that's what happens and that's what has happened with our phones and with john deere tractors the only thing that won't happen to is hp printers because they're terrible no matter what well it's not always just in one direction there is a moment when you have an amazing advantage that you can essentially force people to take these other things that are not advantageous for them but that are advantageous for you but that moment does eventually pass that's why you have the pushback of like these right to repair laws uh you mean push back against the john deere stuff or whatever that's you know we try to come to an arrangement that is

2:01:28acceptable to all involved. streaming because now you don't have to worry about syncing and downloading and by the way with the streaming you're getting drm because i know you want the streaming and so i feel like it's more of a seesaw you know like we we get the advantage we we the big companies take advantage of it but then we push back right we push back as things become commodified we push back with regulation push back with things like right to repair laws even the things like the tpus and drm stuff like that that's essentially the same technology that gives us like the secure boot on modern apple hardware that lets us know that the os that it's booting is really the os that it's booting so there are advantages to some of that technology as well that the people are like no i've never won any cryptographic stuff no secure enclaves on my no we want that stuff it can be used to work for us as well because we want our things to we want to know that the os that our phone is running is the one that we expect it to run and it hasn't been modified in some way like all that cryptographic stuff can work for us as well and that's what we want in the end and in terms of the marketplace things with platform orders controlling things like i said it's like It is the institutional memory and the actual present of the Mac and the PC that lets people know that this isn't the only way a software marketplace has to be.

2:02:35Either they remember how it used to be or they can see, hey, over there, that's a software marketplace and it doesn't work like this software marketplace. So explain to me again why this software marketplace has to be so different. And in the beginning, it was like, be quiet. We're selling a billion iPhones. And now it's like, well, you know, it's been a decade or two and are having some doubts about this arrangement between us and Apple. Governments have doubts about it and people have doubts about it and software developers have doubts. So I feel like this is an ongoing negotiation. But there is definitely an ebb and flow of amazing thing comes out and we will accept a lot of compromises.

2:03:05But that does fade over time as we push back. So hopefully, and, you know, HP printers, who cares? I'm with Marco on that one. But hopefully on John Deere tractors and right to repair and Apple's complete control of the iOS marketplace, hopefully we're starting to push back in the other direction now. Jonathan Sibley writes, the recent episode where you – gosh, he only knows how recent it was – where you discussed native versus electron-style apps on the Mac made me wonder what you think about Catalyst as a development platform. I recently came across an article, which we will link in the show notes, which is complaining about it.

2:03:37Does it feel abandoned, neglected, as this author seems to think it is? I don't really have a lot of constructive things to say about this because I've never really done that much Catalyst. I mean, I'm doing the thing with Call Sheet where I have the iPad app allowed to be run on macOS, but that Catalyst is the thing where you're using UIKit on macOS, right? Do I have that distinction correct? Yeah. I think when we did the first episode, I think this was the episode title. I think it was something that I said on the show. So putting UIKit as a way for you to write Mac applications, I described it as an extinction level event for app kit because there are so many developers who are familiar with ui kit and once you're able to use ui kit to make mac applications if apple actually continues to support that and make it a thing uh why would apple itself even continue to develop app kit of course i believe at that time we didn't know about swift ui so as it turns out the story is a little bit different because apple eventually decided after several years of kind of just implying they came out and said swift ui is the way you make applications for our platforms yes we have app kit yes we have ui kit yes we have ui kit on the mac that we call catalyst or whatever but just so you know swift ui and we all said swift ui is not yet ready but apple said doesn't matter it's what we're doing and so it's not like apple has stopped developing app kit and catalyst entirely but that's not where the action is so as it turns out catalyst didn't have a long life in the sun but it did effectively make AppKit on the Mac which is that Coco it's complicated API history on the Mac but setting aside Carbon for now which let's not go back too far in history AppKit was the approved native way to make Mac apps because there was no other approved native way to make Mac apps but then came Catalyst and once Catalyst arrived with all the UIKit iPhone developers it was like, alright, well then what is AppKit now?

2:05:30Are you going to keep making AppKit better? or are you just going to concentrate entirely on UIKit and Catalyst? And Apple just said, never mind all that SwiftUI. But either way, you look at AppKit and UIKit and Catalyst and you think, how much more work is Apple going to put into these things? And year after year at WWDC, when you go to the what's new in UIKit, what's new in AppKit sessions, how much big new stuff do you see versus the what's new in SwiftUI session, right? That is the thing that you have to gauge. and it's not like there's not new stuff happening app kit there still is and will be this year i predict a what's new in app kit session it was new in ui kit session a session about catalyst and there'll be stuff on them and there'll be exciting things and they'll be cool uh but that's apple has told us that's not the future the future is swift ui and the future is not quite ready yet but the future is swift ui and if you're trying to look at like how's catalyst doing uh if swift ui hadn't arrived i think catalyst would be doing a lot better apple has made a lot of the the apps that come with the mac with catalyst now very very slowly apple is starting to make apps or parts of apps with swift ui on the mac so i think the story about catalyst is kind of the same story as app kit which is uh there is a new star in town and it's swift ui and it's not ready yet but Apple says it's the future.

2:06:53So all those other frameworks are essentially legacy. AppKit is the most full featured. I think it makes the best looking, best working Mac apps. It's had literal decades of development. It came from Next and then Apple took it on and it's just had so much, it's incredibly full featured. But Apple has not said the future of Mac development is AppKit. So don't keep looking at that. Same deal with UIKit. It grew on the iPhone, has so many things added to it. It's amazing. but apple has not said that ui kit is the future of phone and ios and vision os development so that's that's the answer catalyst is in the same sad little car with app kit and ui kit on ios and ipad os and vision os for that matter and all like it's it's all apple says it's swift and swift ui and even though we all agree that their swift ui is not ready to replace any of those things yet someday Apple thinks it will be.

2:07:46A huge part of the value of Catalyst is, hey, you can take your UI kit code that you wrote for your iPhone app and you can make a Mac app with most of that same code running pretty much the same way with not too many changes. That's the appeal. But then when the Apple Silicon Mac transition happened, they allowed iPad apps to just run unmodified. When you compare the, as a developer, when you compare the amount of work it takes to make a Catalyst version of your app, it is way more custom work. It's not a ton of custom work, but it is way more custom work than just letting your iPad app run. You need to have a separate App Store entry so that you can upload to the Mac App Store, and that can't be the same upload that you use for the iOS App Store.

2:08:37You need Mac screenshots. You need to submit updates separately for your Mac version and deal with app reviews separately for your Mac version. This is all applicable, by the way, if you make a Vision OS native app, which this bit me because I don't know why I didn't realize this, but I assumed that even once I flipped the no, no, go from iPad compatibility mode to Vision OS native, I just assumed I would still be uploading a single binary and so on and so forth. And then I realized, oh, oh, oh no. Yeah, that adds a whole bunch of just overhead and potential for problems for developers. So it is pretty compelling for developers if we can get 80 % of the way there just letting our iPad app run and not have to take on any of that overhead.

2:09:22It's pretty compelling to say, okay, yeah, we'll just do that. so what really ultimately i think made catalyst a lot less appealing for third-party developers was that ipad apps running on the mac with apple silicon transition and and as time goes on that's only going to increase because you know at least you know three years ago when this transition began or four years ago whenever that was at least then the argument was well you can you can let your ipad app run on the m1 max but if you do catalyst it for one on the entire install base of intel max also. But over time, the install base of Intel Mac is going to get smaller, and the install base of the Apple Silicon Mac is going to get larger.

2:10:01And so that keeps shifting the balance even more towards, I'm just going to let my iPad app run. Now, with Catalyst, you can make a better app by far. You can take advantage of very Mac-specialized things with Catalyst. Catalyst gives you a lot of good abilities, where you're still using mostly UIKit code, but you have certain custom hooks into Mac-specific things to a larger degree than you have when running your iPad app. But from a developer point of view, that comes with some pretty large costs, and so I don't see it really being compelling for most developers. But it is useful just as kind of a middleware layer for Apple.

2:10:39And I think that, like what John was saying earlier, many Mac OS Apple-provided apps are now written in Catalyst, and I think that is for the best, because we saw in the era before that was really a thing apple had a lot more trouble keeping up feature parity between their platforms like the mac really got low priority work and it it showed and the and mac versions of apps that were also on ios or that were supposed to be on other platforms the mac versions were lagging way behind before catalyst since catalyst you know the mac is still not like the first priority and it probably never will be but it's way closer now and it keep they keep up way better ever since then so the the greatest value to the platform of catalyst is that it made it easier for apple to keep up their own software between the between the platforms better uh than they were before so that's a good point and and it's going to keep doing that for the foreseeable future i don't think the ipad apps are really the nail and catalyst cost a coffin it was swifty why right because like you said you can get your ipad app on the mac and yes they're all going to be armed so you don't have to worry about intel or whatever and that's great uh but you're like oh it's so much easier than all the work i'd have to do with rewriting with catalyst not that you need to write entirely but you got to do more work well now if you're going to take that step to do more work you're not going to use catalyst you're going to say oh apple has another way that if i'm willing to do some rewriting i can get the same app running on all their platforms and it's called swift ui like that's that's the thing that's killing catalyst isn't like hey uh if you're going to write an application if you write it in ui kit you can get a make it get a mac version pretty easy like you do a little small amount of work you know and you'll have like a quote-unquote native mac version with catalyst then you'll have an ios and an ipad version and that's not apple's answer anymore apple's answer is doing swift ui that's how you get a mac version and a tv os version and a vision pro version and an ios like that's their answer and so it's like what place does catalyst have anymore if you don't want to do any work run your ipad app if you want to do some work use swift ui if you're apple and already did some work use catalyst that's like that's basically the answer yeah it's legacy code bases like that's look there's there's a ton of ui kit and app kit code out there like believe me i know i'm trying right now i'm trying to replace it's easy just rewrite in swift ui mark how hard could it be how hard could it be for like it's taking me like two years to do like for new development apple's obviously pushing people to swift ui but yeah but apple is one of the biggest holders of legacy ui kit code in the entire world so that's obviously really important for them but that's why i think it feels like if you're like a new developer and you're like what should i use if you're starting from nothing and you have no legacy code base catalyst is not screaming to you to for you to be your choice for making a mac app like under no circumstance it's only like i've already got a ui kit the app and i have a mac app and it's written an app kit but i don't want to maintain it can is there a way i can just leverage the work i had to already do for the phone and the ipad and the answer for apple is yes you can make a catalyst version of messages and finally uh the mac can have freaking laser beams that did actually happen yeah we didn't have the lasers feature it was very annoying and then we got the catalyst version and now we have it and still the version of messages is not great but you know i mean anyway like apple's got tons of app kit code too so app kit's not going away catalyst is not going away and swift ui is still still i think not as good especially not as good as app kit but probably not even as good as catalyst at making native mag apps, but Apple wants it to be, so presumably it eventually will be.

2:14:01Thanks to our sponsors this week, Trade Coffee, Swift Craft, and Computex 2024. And thank you very much to our member supporters directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. We're now doing a member special extra topic every week called ATP Overtime. This week's Overtime for members only, it is Apple's work on robots. The new rumors and what we know so far with Apple possibly working on robots, which I think could be really cool. Anyway, you can hear that as members, atv.fm slash join as this week's Overtime. Thank you so much, and we will talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.

2:14:46Accidental. Oh, it was accidental. Accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental. It was accidental. And you can find the show notes at atp.fm And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M Anti-Marco Armin S-I-R-A-C U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech Podcast So long So, I went on an eclipse trip As everyone but me did And I'm assuming John, because John never leaves his house But as everyone but John and I did The eclipse came to me, more or less.

2:15:50I mean, yeah. Anyway, it was a wonderful trip. I'm very, very glad I did it. And as part of this trip, I got to drive all the way up to Lake Placid. Now, what's interesting about this trip is that I actually made the same trip for a different vacation in the fall last year. And I've seen over the course of that time, this is like a seven-hour drive for me. It's a very long, it's a lot of driving from here. It involves a good amount of distance and a good amount of car charging. And this is now a trip I've done twice with the Rivian. And I kind of want to give an update on some things that have changed with Rivian and kind of CCS versus Tesla slash NACS charging and fast charging.

2:16:35There have been substantial changes in the charging environment in the last, whatever it's been, seven months. and as we stand here right now Rivian has just done a deal with Tesla and the latest software update to Rivian's allows you to plug directly into a supercharger with the right adapters and have them just bill you somehow Tesla and Rivian worked it out behind the scenes so it's basically the same experience you get as a Rivian as Tesla owners get you just walk up to it and plug it in and if you have a payment method on a file in your Rivian app it just works and you get charged So that's awesome.

2:17:12And they're going to start sending out adapters soon. There's a couple of third-party ones I might take a risk on in the meantime because they're talking about later this year. The other thing about that, though, is that Tesla, before everyone was talking about adapters, Tesla actually built adapters into some of their superchargers. They call them Magic Docks. And I actually used that in September for the first time on the last time I went up this trip because they have some of those upstate New York. So I used that already and it worked great then. I went to the same one this time and it worked great again.

2:17:45Here's what's interesting. Now that Rivian and Tesla have this deal going, Rivian's infotainment system now shows Tesla charging stops on the map along with everyone else's. You can say like, only show me charging stops from brand X, Y, or Z because they have different reliability, let's say. And so what I've been doing most of the time before all this is only show me Electrify America chargers because they were the most reliable last fall when I was first using the car. Tesla got added by default. It's on by default. And so every Rivian nav system is now recommending Tesla charging stops as like you should stop here for in the middle of this trip at this point.

2:18:25so one thing i noticed first of all is that over the last seven months the quality and reliability of the electrify america chargers has gone down noticeably so i didn't think that was possible i assure you it is possible because it is it has been noticeable that the the number of times i approach an ea charger and it's broken or it's offline or it tries to connect and then somehow something times out and you can just never get it to begin the charge that has gone up significantly also the crowding at them has gone way up the entire time that i owned my two model s's and the entire time i've owned a rivian until about two months ago i've never had to wait for a charger two months ago i had to wait for the very first time i had to wait like a half hour it sucked and i know this has been different on the west coast they've had you know more crowding over there because they've had more people using teslas and stuff like that but that's that's never been a problem over here what has happened noticeably over the last seven months i know everybody keeps saying that apparently evs aren't selling that well because high-end cars aren't selling that well right now you wouldn't know it by looking at the chargers because what i've seen really just like in the last like three to four months is a huge increase of not only other vehicles with the chargers but a huge increase in the the variety of different models of vehicles with the chargers there are tons of them and you're seeing them from all different brands and what's interesting is that the other vehicles tend to not have deals with tesla superchargers so much so what you're seeing is at the ccs chargers like electrify america they are just being crammed full of all the other cars.

2:20:18In the meantime, also, Tesla has sold more Teslas. So the superchargers, the Tesla superchargers are also really getting much more full than they were before. Now, granted, the trip I just took, it was a high travel trip because it was for the eclipse. A lot of people are traveling, especially a lot of the kind of people who would have EVs. So this was more than usual, but I've been seeing this just recently with any trip I've taken. the charging situation is getting way worse for both for ccs because the chargers are getting worse and no one seems to be working on them and for tesla because they're getting more crowded what's interesting though is that now that i have a rivian that i that has a deal with tesla and some adapters here and there i can go to some chargers and a lot of times now tesla super superchargers and electrify american superchargers or you know other ccs chargers a lot of times they share a parking lot now that the rivian has this deal i can use either of them i can go to wherever the open space is now there's a bunch of other problems like the fact that tesla superchargers have really short cables that are optimized to fit only where a tesla's charging port is and the rivian's charging port on their vehicle so far is in the total wrong spot to do that so you have to kind of take up two bays or take like the one on the end so it messes up the whole parking arrangement at superchargers um but i see a future in which things get really good because you can just go to tesla chargers and tesla's going to keep building more of them because they have to for their cars because tesla has the best chargers it is simple as that they they are the best chargers although actually sorry with one exception for the very first time i got to try a rivian adventure network charger on this trip oh nice it's amazing because i think only ribbons can use it so no one's there it's it was i went to the one in newberg it was empty but i went there why is there an adventure charger in newberg because there's a huge hole in the new york state thruway that there were not enough chargers so they just put that one there recently like it was not there in the winter and it's there now that's bananas my my mom grew up in newberg i've been to newberg many times that's wild yeah and it's and it's right it's right across the parking lot from a tesla supercharger that's been there forever um so anyway that was an amazing charger everything's brand new it overlooks like this river in the back of the parking lot so it's an adventure it was nice and there was no one using it so and it was amazingly fast i got like 218 kilowatts it's the fastest charge i've seen so far so that was that was wonderful but anyway other than that tesla otherwise has the best chargers generally speaking because they're reliable and there's a bunch of them and they're in good spots the problem that i see here so like We were saying back when Tesla gave this standard to whatever the standard body was and kind of opened it up and made all these deals to make everyone convert all their ports over and all this other stuff.

2:23:11We were saying, what a great move from Tesla. This will be great because then they can become the great charging network of the country. Right, right. That's true, and they are, and they will keep doing that. but the more I see how incredibly bad the CCS ecosystem has gotten just in the last like six months the more I think Tesla gave away the farm now already at Tesla chargers you're starting to see Rivians move in you're going to start to see other brands move in Tesla owners are now having a worse experience yeah yeah because their chargers are now going to get crowded up with people like me who are not Tesla owners so it's making it worse for Tesla customers meanwhile Meanwhile, CCS chargers have gotten so bad.

2:23:55If Tesla would have kept their chargers proprietary, that would be a really strong selling point for people to say, you know what, I'm just going to get a Tesla next time because their network is just better and I'm tired of dealing with all the CCS crap. So I think, honestly, they might have done a big disservice to themselves here. I mean, maybe regulation would have forced it in the end anyway. And so maybe they kind of got ahead of it from that angle. but things are different now and i think i think they might have given away the farm i'm happy they did as a non-tesla owner because they they are making my life a lot easier on long highway trips now uh but i i don't know i think if i was a tesla owner i'd be a little upset about it i think i think you're right that they got ahead of the regulation like because it's if if they if the government had mandated something other than the tesla connector or some other market force that tesla would have to change all of its charging stations so at least now tesla doesn't need to change it so other than making like longer cords maybe um and then also to keep in mind those crappy ccs ones setting aside the compliance network which is like a volkswagen force because of the diesel gate thing to make uh uh you know whatever electrify america charger things that it uh doesn't actually want to do but whatever um all those ccs chargers presumably eventually will not be ccs chargers anymore because i think pretty much at this point pretty much everybody has pledged to go nacs in north america i think is there anybody left i don't remember stilantis went i think they did right i think they did yeah i think i think it's everyone anyway all those ccs chargers like this is this is an opportunity to get eventually greatly diminished the number of ccs chargers which means uh either just simply by building massively more nacs ones so the ccs ones become a smaller percentage or literally removing the really old cranky ccs ones and leaving one or two for legacy connections as more NACS cars are sold in the U.S.

2:25:44But yeah, there is still an opportunity for either Tesla or anyone else who wants it to become a good NACS-based electric charging infrastructure in the U.S. And Tesla's got the biggest head start. I feel like it's possible to make money doing this well. And with a single standard for all of North America, it should simplify the landscape. but we are definitely in a very uncomfortable transition period as you're noting where there's the ccs ones and there's tons of ccs cars out there and they're still going to need to charge but the charging network nobody cares about it and they care even less now because those connectors aren't even the future anymore and there's the tesla one that's getting overcrowded and i feel like there's an opportunity for either one of these existing companies or a new one to come in and start building out an acs things there's something speaking of overtime there's something way down in the show notes from like the latest u.s government plan involving a bunch of car companies and a bunch of money to start building an nacs powered charging network that is not tesla you know that is an effort through a cooperative effort through a bunch of companies that are not tesla to basically make a bunch of nacs chargers that plug plug in and charge and all the other stuff or whatever so maybe eventually we'll get to that because like all government thinks it's probably years and years in the future but i feel like the future is still bright and i feel like tesla still made a smart move because now at the very least tesla does not need to overhaul all of its charging stations and change all of its connectors on its cars and all those connectors on its charging like it's good like i think it was a smart move it's just you know i i you the i think they held the advantage that you were talking about oh buy tesla because they have the best charge they held that advantage for essentially as long as they could and now as you noted the floodgates are open everybody has evs they all are going to need somewhere to charge so hopefully they'll just build more of them and better you know you know how good we are building infrastructure in this country so i'm sure it'll be fine well honestly like i i think for Tesla to have this be a big, to be a growing part of their business, obviously I don't know about stock financing and expectations and everything, so I'm sure this is less exciting to Tesla's investors than they might replace taxis everywhere or whatever all their crazy self-driving promises were.

2:27:54Well, if they want it to be a big part of their business, they need to sell snacks, because as we all know, gas stations make all their money in the community stores. Honestly, I think Tesla has a giant head start in just being the default high-speed EV chargers for the U.S. highway system. I don't know how it is in other places, like how competitive it is, but here it's very competitive, extremely so. They have a huge head start. This could be a huge part of their business, but I think it's an unsexy part of the business for investors. This is the kind of thing that'll just throw off regular, dependable amounts of cash forever, but it's not going to be a hockey stick kind of situation.

2:28:34And so it's not very exciting, but I think it's a really, really good kind of just baseline cache generator for them. And I want them to keep expanding it and doing well with it because really the Tesla chargers are, they do a very good job with them. A very, very good job with them. And again, everyone else is nowhere close.