598: Three-Burner Stove

37:33Southwest, along with UPS and FedEx, haven't had any issues with the CrowdStrike outage. In response to CNN, Delta, American, Spirit, Frontier, United, and Allegiant, all said they were having issues. But Southwest told the outlet that its operations are going off without a hitch. Major portions of Southwest systems are reportedly built on Microsoft Windows 95 and Windows 3.1, which is something the company has come under fire for in the past several years. It should go without saying that Southwest needs to update its system. But in this case, the ancient operating system seems to be doing the airlines some favors.

38:01so i when this thing happened i was also away on vacation and i saw the story go by and i saw the windows 3.1 thing i'm like haha that's funny i absolutely did not think this was real because it's just it's such a you know typical joke of like southwest being the weird backwards airline they don't even get to pick your seat although as casey noted they're changing this uh they're winning three point and i kept i'm like i refuse to believe this i kept falling short can i find a more reputable source for this it's not like an onion story that's been reprinted as far as i can tell this is a real thing the southwest airlines is running windows 2.1 now we've all heard the stories of like oh eight inch floppy drives control the whole transit system for some subway system right because they updated it you know sometime in the the uh 70s or 80s and they haven't updated it since like those are all things that happen but southwest is a pretty big airline here in the u.s and it just boggles my mind that there are people they pay to keep their systems running and what they're keeping running is something that runs on windows 3.1 and windows 95 and the reason this article says it goes about saying that they should update is they're like hey if it works why would they change it because those operating systems have massive known security flaws in them and are generally less secure and less reliable than the things that they replace and yes once in a blue moon your butt's going to be saved because you're running something really old but you're also much more vulnerable on a day-to-day basis to someone breaking in and destroying everything and stealing all your data and all that good stuff which again also happens with modern software but i would say in general it's not a good idea to continue to run windows 3.1 forever and ever and ever it is not perfect it is not like complete and flawless or anything like that it is just a really old piece of software that is not getting any better ever it's also not getting any worse but it is probably getting harder to find systems that will run it so i would suggest they change things.

39:50Assuming this story is real. Does anyone want to play Spets? Is this a real story? Does Hellbush run on Windows 3.1? Please say it's not real. I don't know. It wouldn't surprise me. I mean, I also was like no way, but it wouldn't surprise me. And like, what does it mean to run on it? Does that mean they have one computer somewhere with it? Yeah, they have one computer that does their payroll. Yeah, like, you know, that's very different from like all of our systems. Like, can you even still buy hardware that runs Windows 3.0 or is it all being run under emulation? Like, there's so many questions.

40:21Yeah, or Windows 95 is the updated version. Who knows? Like I said, again, please don't send us all the stories about all the things that are running off floppy disks and tape drives and especially military stuff and government stuff. Like, we all know that exists, but for a large, you know, successful, well-known private company or commercial company anyway, it seems somehow less excusable than like a government thing or whatever or some obscure, smaller obscure thing. Anyway, Southwest, get your act together. And as for the signed seating versus not assigned seating, I have no opinion. I don't know.

40:52I've only flown Southwest a couple of times. And I think I didn't care for the unassigned seating in no small part because it's unfamiliar to me. You know, I'm not used to flying Southwest because I've only done it a couple of times. And it just seemed odd. Plus, then there's like people who are saving seats, but you're not really supposed to do that. And then you get into like all sorts of unnecessary confrontations about, you know, you can't save seats and blah, blah, blah. And I don't know. I don't think I care for it, but I do not have strong feelings about it. I already asked people not to send us things.

41:21And the chat room was filled with 747s running on floppy drives, a German railway running on MS-DOS, New Jersey needing COBOL programmers to fix the unemployment system. We get it. We know they exist. It's just shocking that something as big as Southwest. Yeah. What was it that Chuck E. Cheese was running on? It was running on floppy disks or something like that, or Palm Pilot or something? Yeah, the music show was all on floppy disks too. Yeah, you're thinking of the IMAX PalmPilots. That's why I'm conflating the two. You're right, you're right. Anyway. Can you imagine a worse programming job?

41:52All these other ones, running COBOL, running PalmPilots, those are all kind of like... COBOL, there was a lot of COBOL programmers at one point, so maybe some of them are retired and want a little side project to do. PalmPilot was a fun thing people loved. Nobody loved Windows 3.1. I know, that was my first operating system as a computer user. It was fine. No one loved it. Can you imagine today having to go work on a Windows 3.1 software package for your job? We need to go update this because it's still being used to run an airline, a big airline apparently. Oh my God, that would be soul crushing.

42:29Well, so now we have the real-time follow-up for the debunking story from Kotaku. No, Southwest Airlines isn't using Windows 3.1 in 2024. So my instincts seem to have been on the right track here. We will put the link in the show notes. That's probably for the best. I saw it in reputable publications I'm like this cannot be true this has to be a made up thing but anyway so we will put the Kotaku debunking link in there as well sorry for besmirching your good name Southwest in any case alright so going to the verge again this time on the 23rd of July inside the 78 minutes that took 10 millions of Windows machines at 12.09am Eastern on July 19th cybersecurity company CrowdStrike released a faulty update to the Falcon security software where it sells to help companies prevent malware, ransomware, and other cyber threats from taking down their machines.

43:17Whoops. CrowdStrike's update was supposed to be like any other silent update, automatically providing the very latest protections for its customers in just a tiny file, just 40 kilobytes. That's distributed over the web. CrowdStrike issues these regularly without instant, and they're fairly common for security software, but this one was different. And I don't think we have anything in the show notes about this, but I thought it was funny that apparently, like New Zealand and Australia started sounding the alarm because they got these updates first. And I think under the radar, certainly you've talked about this, Marco, and I think we've even talked about it here from time to time, that generally speaking, when you release software to a worldwide audience, it is common, it's like a good rule of thumb that you don't want to release it to everyone all at once.

43:59Obviously, there's exceptions and gotchas and catches and whatnot, but generally speaking, you want to kind of dole it out in little bits and pieces. And a few years ago, Apple started allowing developers like us to say, yes, I would like incremental release, where I think they release it to like 1%, then 2%, then 5%, or something along those lines. It doesn't matter what the specifics are. And that's what I always choose. Even when I'm completely confident that something's good to go, I always choose the incremental rollout, because you never know. And apparently CrowdStrike did not do that. They just said, screw it, baby, we'll do it live.

44:29And they released this thing to everyone, and the people at the beginning of the day in New Zealand and Australia started saying, uh-oh, and it was already too late. as the sun races across the earth destroying people's computers yeah we're gonna get to it uh in a second the uh the from this verge story about what can be done to present that prevent this but that like casey that is my number one take-home point which is anytime you're releasing software that's like on critical systems and that you are a critical part of this and we'll get to the criticality part in a little bit you do it incrementally casey's releasing an app lets you look up stuff about movies and tv shows he's doing it incrementally nothing no planes fail to take off of case he messes up his app and still why would you not do it incrementally this is just like basic software best practice and i worked in health care which was similarly critical you'd never released everybody all at once if you could possibly help it even if you do something incredibly primitive to have like a pool of guinea pigs who you pay money to be your guinea pigs knowing that if there's any problem they're gonna see it first and you give them like a discount on the thing that you're selling or something like but if you're something like crowdstrike that's used like all over the globe and i forget what the percentage it was but it's a fairly high percentage you know not i think it was like maybe 15 20 or whatever but still it's a large number of machines no it's like one percent of windows pcs but it's a very important one percent i was actually was it one percent anyway whatever it is it's millions of machines and like why would you why would you not have a strategy it's not like they're a new company that is just just now coming on the scene and releasing software like this is their business is their main business the security software and they their regular release procedure is push out to everybody all at once i can understand having that ability because if there's some critical vulnerability and you need to get the fix out there asap but i hope that one of the things they take away from this and we'll put a link in the show notes to their uh preliminary post incident review so where they go over what they think happened one of the internal takeaways is we need to have a way to release our updates incrementally not incrementally via the sun right by a time zones but incrementally as in we release a percentage and then we monitor that's the key thing you have to releasing a little bit at a time is only works as well as your feedback loop and that's the kind of the flaw in apple system where you just like sit back there and wait to hear complaints from users or whatever but ideally what you want is some kind of way to tell has this update hosed our customers right support call volume uh feedback email address like some kind of connection with your customers where you have like a monitoring thing you're always monitoring this what is our what is our incoming support volume uh what how many crash reports are we getting like this should be on a graph with thresholds and alerts right so you release to your tiny tiny little guinea pig pool and then you watch and then you release a little bit more and then you watch like just doing it incrementally and going home doesn't help you because you'll just release to everybody without anyone watching right oh crowd strike anyway sorry and this also like can we talk yet about like what technically like the kind of update this was because yeah to me this is this is fascinating like so it's you know running in kernel mode so that's like already you know and there's all these politics around you know kernel extensions and security companies with windows and everything but this is this is not this is a driver that runs in the windows kernel fully executable code in the windows kernel okay that's already like you know something that used to be commonplace in the computing business but it's very much not commonplace anymore for the for most applications for lots of good reasons and also in the kernel this what what these updates were were not just data files it was not like the kernel driver wasn't like all right here's what i'm going to load from this data file is a list of signatures of known bad malware binaries no what it was loading from from those files was executable code like so all those updates they basically seem to be making basically like an interpreter in the kernel and they download these data files with, again, no staging environment, no slow rollout, seemingly not much production testing, okay.

48:47They download these data files and then execute them in the kernel. So you are directly sending code from an all-at-once non-stage rollout directly into Windows machine's kernels to execute. So if there's any crash logic in there, it will crash the kernel which will crash the machine and cause a reboot or a blue screen that like that is bonkers to me like the fact that like that they even built the system at all okay that's risky enough that to have a system in the kernel that reads arbitrary executable code from outside the kernel and just runs it that's already terrifying on a lot of levels but then to also have it be these like quickly deployed downloadable things we're just gonna deploy this code out there and just run it in the kernel and just go.

49:39Have fun. That is, this was a powder keg just waiting to explode. Yeah, I don't know the specific technical details of their update mechanism, but I have worked with and built myself lots of systems that are like this. And the reason people do stuff like this is because you always want the ability to sort of, you know, fix the airplane while it's flying, right? You don't want to have to reboot. you don't have to restart anything you want to be able to just say at any point i can push this update in real time to the running system and it updates itself and that leads you down the path of doing things like okay well we'll just watch this directory for files i'm going to file appears here we'll load it and we'll shove it into we'll interpret it and shove it into the memory image of the already running process like i totally understand why they made a system like this it's just that if you do make a system like this you have to know what incredible risk you're taking and be like as conservative as you can possibly be to say if there's anything even remotely strange about this do not update it if we do validation on every single thing we can think of and i think part of the problem is they you know the thing was loading code and not validating anything about it and it was invalid or whatever but like i understand why they kind of why they do this but yeah the kernel the kernel mode thing is an issue that's what this next part is about all right so reading from the verge just despite not being directly involved microsoft still controls Windows experience, and there is plenty of room for improvement in how Windows handles issues like this.

51:06If Windows determines that a driver is crashing the system at boot and forcing it into a recovery mode, Microsoft could build in more intelligent logic that allows the system to boot without the faulty driver after multiple boot failures. I think macOS does this, by the way. I think there is a system where if it boots multiple... I may be wrong, but like, obviously people manually do this, but I think there might be an automated one that's like, hey, we tried to load this driver and it crashed last time, so now we're not loading it or we're loading it in safe mode and again booting in safe mode is probably not the solution here because you probably still couldn't remotely update the machines without it but that was part of the problem is that they're they're crashing on boot and because they're crashing on boot they never can get to a runnable state so you can't push your update to them uh automatically like people think of like companies running computers as just like a person running a computer but that's not how it is there are thousands upon thousands of computers and a very small number of humans who have to manage them from far away often very far away so nobody like there's not like you have physical access to these thousands of computers somebody does somewhere eventually but there's not enough people out there to go and manually fix computers that was why this was such a problem it's like well so what they made a boo-boo just push out the new version of the software well you can't push software to a computer that hasn't booted and none of these computers could boot so someone had to physically go to them and physically like boot them into safe mode and repair them and this is not something you can be done remotely or whatever so it was a big problem so you know it's it was it was a bad situation but uh there is room for improvement here yeah well on microsoft side i'm like it was it because again as i said it's not microsoft's fault like microsoft didn't write the bad software but windows needs to defend itself against bad software because in the end microsoft took some of the blame for this probably unfairly microsoft deserves some tiny part of the blame for making windows not as resilient as it could be in this like in this basic way like again this is the verge not some deep technical analysis knowing like hey if you've tried to do something and it's failed a bunch of times don't keep trying to do it continuing from the verge but the bigger change would be to lock down the windows kernel access to prevent third-party drivers from crashing an entire pc ironically microsoft tried to do exactly this with windows vista but was met with resistance from cybersecurity vendors and guess who?

53:22EU regulators. Microsoft tried to implement a feature known at the time as PatchGuard in Windows Vista in 2006, restricting third parties from accessing the kernel. McAfee and Symantec, the two big antivirus companies at the time, opposed Microsoft's changes. Geez, why? And Symantec even complained to the European Commission. Microsoft eventually backed down, allowing security vendors to access the kernel once again for security monitoring purposes. So this example of applying pressure, I'm going to mostly blame the virus vendors and not the EU. It's not like the EU said, so a lot of people are reporting this and saying, well, the EU told Microsoft that Microsoft, because you have access to the kernel, you have to give all third parties access to the kernel.

53:58Otherwise, it's not fair. Otherwise, you're giving yourself an advantage that they don't have, which is not a thing that they said, first of all. And second of all, is mostly kind of silly because Microsoft writes the kernel. They write code in the kernel and no, other people can't write code in the kernel. Now, Now, Windows does have a kernel extension feature that is available to third parties, and also Microsoft itself can also write kernel extensions. But it would be ridiculous, and again, I don't think this is a thing that the EU did, to say that because you have kernel extensions, you must forever have kernel extensions.

54:31Because forbidding third parties from making kernel extensions doesn't stop the need for kernel extensions from Microsoft. Many things in Windows are implemented in the kernel. some of those are packaged as drivers that come with the operating system. That is probably never going to go away. If a kernel exists, it makes sense to have parts of it modulized into a driver system, even if that system is not accessible to third parties. So the idea that you could say, well, either everybody gets to write kernel extensions or nobody does, doesn't make any sense. Because the company that makes the operating system will almost certainly continue to need need to make kernel extensions to its own kernel as part of making the operating system but again i think this you know throwing the eu under the bus here is part of the whole big regulatory thing i'm sure they did complain to the european commission but the eu did not come to microsoft and say you are not allowed like issue a decree if you're going to have kernel extensions in windows you must allow everyone access to it what did happen is the virus makers said hey all our software uses kernel extensions if you stop the virus makers yeah it's anti-virus antivirus there's a thin line there there's a very very thin line sometimes the malware is coming from inside the house uh-huh yeah i think that they applied pressure kind of the same way that like microsoft and adobe applied pressure to apple to said hey if you ship a new version of mac os that photoshop and office don't run on that doesn't include a good way to port our apps we're not going to support it and you're not going to have office and photoshop right i think McAfee and Symantec said, if you ship Windows Vista without our software's ability to run on it, we're going to be super mad and you're not going to like it.

56:09And Microsoft backed down on that. And Windows Vista was a while ago, right? So this is kind of older history. But anyway, I'm going to say that I don't blame any of this on the EU really. Although I'm not putting it past the EU to come up with a wrongheaded notion like that, but I'm pretty sure that they didn't in this specific case. All right, continuing from The Verge, Apple began locking down its macOS operating system in 2020 so that developers could no longer get access to the kernel. Quote, it was definitely the right decision by Apple to deprecate third-party kernel extensions, says Patrick Wardle, but the road to actually accomplishing that has been fraught with issues.

56:41Apple has had some kernel bugs or security tools running in user mode could still trigger a kernel panic, as Wardle says. Apple, quote, has also introduced some privilege execution vulnerabilities. Ooh, that's a mouthful. and there are still some other bugs that could allow security tools on mac to be unloaded by malware yep so in our neck of the woods kernel extensions were a thing in mac os 10 for a very long time it's how a lot of software installed its quote-unquote drivers to work with you know hardware peripherals and other random stuff and in 2020 apple said you know what kernel extensions are going away over the course of several years in cooperation with our vendors that have things based on kernel extensions and the vendors would say but our software needs a kernel extension to do its job how are we supposed to ship our software we literally we need kernel extensions and apple's answer was whatever things you need to do we will provide a way to do in user space as in in a process that is separate from the kernel so that if your code crashes it's not inside the kernel and the kernel keeps running and the operating system stays up and bit by bit piece by piece apple has been rolling out user space versions of things that used to require kernel extensions and what patrick is saying here is sometimes apple rolls out those things and they're bad and they have bugs and still you can end up crashing the kernel because there's something on the kernel talking to the user space thing and if the thing in the kernel that apple wrote has a bug in it it can take down the kernel it's a long slow painful process third parties don't like it especially third parties that have kernel extensions they may say you know back when we had a kernel extension we had really smart people on our team and they wrote a really good kernel extension and we debugged it over the course of 10 years and we think it's a bulletproof and now our choice is to use this user space thing that apple is offering that connects to apple's own little thing in the kernel and their thing in the kernel sucks and has bugs and is brand new this year this is a downgrade so people are angry but apple is taking its lumps and causing disruption with its eyes on the prize of no more third-party code running inside the kernel uh and that's you know we make the joke about courage with phil schiller and with the getting rid of the headphone part or whatever but in some respects it does take courage to essentially So endure the pain and the justified anger of your developers if the goal is a future that is better for everybody involved.

59:01it's better for users, surely. It's better for Apple. And in the end, hopefully, it will also be better for third-party developers who don't have to write that super high-risk code that runs inside the kernel. Yeah. It's a tough nut to crack, right? And everyone has both selfish and unselfish motivations for it. So I don't know. But apparently there is an official, like we were saying, an official API for this. And there is even a WWDC video from 2020. The API is Endpoint Security, and this is reading from Apple's developer site. Endpoint Security is an API for monitoring system events for potentially malicious activity.

59:40Your client registers with Endpoint Security to authorize pending events or receive notifications of events that have already occurred. These events include process executions, mounting file systems, forking processes, and raising signals. Develop your system extension with endpoint security and package that in an app that uses the system extensions framework to install and upgrade the extension from the user's Mac. So that's the equivalent of if CrowdStrike existed for macOS, it would use endpoint security, which is a user space API that connects to a thing that Apple wrote inside the kernel.

1:00:10And that's how every going forward, that's how every sort of anti-virus, anti-malware, anti-whatever thing made by third parties on macOS must use Apple's endpoint security system, which is new and has bugs and is not as good as when you could write your own kernel extension. but in the long run it's better to have in theory one vendor who's the vendor that makes the operating system writing the thing inside the kernel that everybody else all the third parties talk to and they're out there in user space so all those third parties if they crash they don't take down the operating system but if apple crashes that they do that's the that's the theory behind it again it's not always a smooth road to get there because people complain that the thing apple wrote is not as good as the thing that they had wrote before and for a long time they're going to be right about that.

1:00:55But the thing is, there's many third-party developers in just one Apple, and hopefully eventually Apple will iterate and iterate on its endpoint security thing and all the other stuff they have inside the kernel talking to those user space processes. And once it gets ironed out, that makes it better for every antivirus program and every Mac user. You don't have to wait for every individual third party to get up to snuff or whatever. Finally, Microsoft does what you would expect. It calls for Windows changes and resilience after CrowdStrike. Reading from a new article on The Verge from the 26th, Microsoft wants to reopen the conversations about restricting kernel-level access inside Windows.

1:01:32Quote, this incident shows clearly that Microsoft Windows must prioritize change and innovation in the area of end-to-end resilience, says John Cable, Vice President of Program Management for Windows Servicing and Delivery, in a blog post titled Windows Resiliency, Best Practices and the Path Forward. Cable calls out a new VBS Enclaves feature that does not require kernel mode drivers to be tamper-resistant, and Microsoft's Azure Attestation Service as examples of recent security innovations. These examples use modern zero-trust approaches and show what can be done to encourage development practices that do not rely on kernel access.

1:02:05As Cable, we will continue to develop these capabilities, harden our platform, and do even more to improve the resiliency of the Windows ecosystem, working openly and collaboratively with the broad security community. Yeah, so Microsoft is, you know, working on the same things that Apple has done, which is let's make user space equivalents of all the stuff that used to require uh kernel access but they're apparently have not gotten to the point where apple has has a flat out forbidding kernel extensions or making it extremely extremely difficult for them to load and requiring all sorts of hoops to jump through and all that other stuff and uh real-time follow-up someone in the chat room said that crowdstrike does exist for the mac so there you go yeah and linux too i believe actually yeah um all right so then uh you know what it's all good all sell all is well that ends well because crowd strike is taking care of their customers they are doing what's right they are offering them a ten dollar apology gift card on uber eats for the album i when i saw this i'm like this has to be fake like there's no way this is a real story this is just like the windows 3.1 thing this has to be joke but this is in tech crunch so i'm gonna click on it again.

1:03:11Have they updated and say this is a joke? I think this is real. Oh, no. As far as I know, it's real. They have first-party sourcing. One person said that they received it and so did somebody, I think, at TechCrunch or whatever. $10 gift certificate is not going to cut. We don't have the links in here, but I think Delta is suing them for a billion dollars or something. I should have put that link. I did have it somewhere in the notes. I just didn't get to it in time. But I think it's Delta Airlines is suing CrowdStrike. And I think that is actually interesting because as anyone who has used software for a long time knows, there's a thing called end user license agreement.

1:03:48And surely something that is equivalent in enterprise software sales that usually says in all caps somewhere words to the effect. We don't guarantee the software does literally anything. We know, like, whatever you think this software does, you're paying us money and we're saying we are not promising that it will do that thing at all, ever, under any circumstances. Right. And furthermore, if we break your stuff, if we delete your data, if our software does anything to harm you, you agree it's not our fault because we couldn't possibly be held to the standard of making working software. Right. Now, again, I'm not a lawyer and I know there are certain things that you cannot put in a contract and sign away all your rights or whatever.

1:04:29So the courts in our country will figure out whether Delta is owed billions of dollars from CrowdStrike or not. But I do have to say this is a fun test because, you know, normally these things don't get tested because we click through the end user license agreements because we're like, yada, yada, yada. It's nothing we can do about it anyway. What are we going to do? Sue Microsoft, sue Apple. Like we don't have that kind of money. Right. But Delta Airlines does. So Delta Airlines versus CrowdStrike will be another interesting test of end user license agreements. can CrowdStrike make Delta Airlines agree that they pay X amount of dollars per year for essentially nothing right for saying you know we're giving you money and we're signing a contract that says in exchange we expect nothing from your software whatever you're telling us it does if it doesn't do that we're saying that's okay because that's what all the end user license agreements say because lawyers put it on that in there early on and they got away with it and we all just ignored it I'm sure there have been other tests that have tested EULAs I don't know what the law precedents are or whatever but this is a fairly high profile one so i think when this i mean i'll assume they'll just settle so there'll probably no precedent set here because what's going to happen is delsa is going to extract a bunch of money and they'll sell out of court because that's what they'll do but it would be fun if it actually went to court and actually established some of these old precedents if someone if a listener knows what established legal precedents on enforceability of eulahs is please let us know but i imagine a lot of these cases get settled because in the end delsa just wants some money to make up for all the money that they lost i saw a graph somewhere of like takeoffs per minute per airline right and as you can imagine during crowd strike it went down but delta's graph was so much worse than everybody else's i don't know why it was so much worse maybe there's a lot of delta flights or whatever but i mean there was a dip in the overall like global takeoffs per minute but delta was like plummeted to almost nothing it was terrible so good luck delta getting some money in that settlement the whole crowd strike thing here I think the bigger story here is, first of all, that this company, I think, was doing things in a pretty reckless way.

1:06:26But second of all, you have to, as a company, as a computer user, you really have to weigh the value of malware prevention software or malware defense software against the malware. like what like what what likely outcomes are they actually protecting you from and how can the malware itself go wrong the the anti-mail the anti-mail you did the same thing i did the anti-mail your malware software how can the antivirus software go wrong yes yes that yeah sure that is what i meant you're right but like how you know when you look at like what the malware what the anti-malware software has to do it does a lot of the same things that malware has to do It has to hook into your system at a very low level, which introduces tons of risks and possible instability and possible performance problems.

1:07:17If you look at what malware does, malware hooks into your system at a very low level. It can potentially see all your data and potentially have problems with that. It can potentially cause instability of your system and performance problems and can rob your resources and can introduce weird risks. well anti-malware software does all of those things all of them so granted like the anti-malware companies have very different incentives and they have i think a better track record of not actively trying to hurt people but when you are trying to like you know combat the risk of dealing with malware you are trading a a possible bad experience with a guaranteed bad experience like when you install into malware software in a lot of ways you are guaranteeing that you will have mediocre performance on certain levels you're introducing more risks more moving parts uh you know more potential for instability and stuff like that and so you have to have a really good reason and you have to really choose that software very carefully uh and i and i think what i what i hope the crowd strike problem i hope a lot of a lot of learning goes on here Well, the thing is, the motivation, the reason why you have to be very careful and decide what you're doing, companies have a very strong motivation to buy this software because it's required for compliance reasons.

1:08:46And they have a very strong reason to go with a company like CrowdStrike because CrowdStrike will sell you a thing that will cover all your compliance needs. They have gone through all the certifications, and they can say whatever things you need to comply with. If you buy and install CrowdStrike, you will be compliant with all of them because we went through the certification procedures. That's what, like most enterprise software, that's what they're selling. You company, whether you want this or not, you have to have some solution to this. Are you going to roll your own and go through your own certification and deal with that?

1:09:15Are you just going to install our product and we cover all the bases for you? And nowhere in that scenario is there any kind of consideration for the quality of that software. And on a smaller level, not on the big like blue screen of death and no one can get on their planes level but on the small level we've talked about this like i've talked about it back my jobby jobs of having what i called corporate malware installed on my laptop like you were saying marco it makes the laptop worse not in a way that like it crashes and it blue screens and you know you know people are getting their stuff encrypted and asking for a ransom it just makes every corporate laptop a little bit worse than it would be if it didn't have that installed when the thing grinds over your whole system this is even worse back in the days of hard drives looking for whatever it's looking for, scanning every file that's run or causing weird bugs.

1:09:59It's just a tiny little tax that's paid by every person using a corporate laptop. And it's probably lesser a case for the servers and stuff like that, because there's no human experiencing that. But the risk is still there of like, hey, what if the company that you paid all this money to get for your security compliance? What if they're not particularly careful? What if they do a bad job? You're not particularly monitoring them. That's what you're paying them for. So you don't have to worry about it. now maybe lots of companies will be looking at other vendors but CrowdStrike was a pretty popular one we are brought to you this week by 1Password Extended Access Management imagine your company security like the quad of a college campus there's nice brick paths between the buildings those are like the company-owned devices IT approved apps and managed employee identities and then there's the paths people actually use the shortcuts through the grass those are unmanaged devices, shadow IT apps, and non-employee identities like contractors.

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1:11:48there's been some rumors going around and this one in particular with regard to forthcoming hardware is very unusual they're talking about iphone 17 not 16 but 17 slim rumors iphone 16 who cares about iphone 16 that's old news we're talking about iphone 7 i think didn't we even talk now we talked about uh in overtime i think we talked about like making thinner laptops and stuff are making slimmer products yeah so even we were talking about yeah the hot rumors are all about iphone 17 forget about iphone 16 it's not even going to come with apple intelligence on launch iphone 17 is where it's at or so it seems so john can you tell us what's going on here so there's a bunch of stories about the iphone slim uh and related stories about the iphone ultra so here's an example headline ultra thin iphone 17 see what they did there to feature a19 chip shocking single rear camera semi-titanium frame and more this is from uh mingxi quo uh shared a specification for a new ultra thin iphone 17 model rumored to launch next year quo expects the device to be equipped with a 6.6 inch display with with a current size dynamic island a standard a19 chip rather than an a19 pro a single rear camera and an apple design 5g chip he also expects the device to have a titanium aluminum frame but with lower percentage of titanium than those used for the 15 pro so this is the current or a recent mutation of the iphone slim model and the whole idea you know as the name says it's an iphone but it's slim so what do you what sacrifices do you have to make to get it slim well it's only going to have one camera it doesn't have an 819 pro it's rumored to have the apple design 5g chip that they've been working on for years and years iphone 17 in 2026 this is the year for the 5g chip and it's going to come in an iphone slim and then there's also the rumor that the iphone se4 will also have the 5g chip right and ming shi kuo has a reasonable track record and sources and and you know supply chain and stuff like that so other than just vague rumors of an iphone slim or an ultra thin phone or an iphone ultra there's like okay some part suppliers are think that this conglomeration of stuff equals a phone and if it does it's a weird one because there is no current phone that is known for being slim there's no separate slim model uh and this sounds like a strange device it's not a pro model but has a single rear camera that's apple hasn't done that in ages on any of the phones that are like exclusive or expensive and presumably the slim would be see this i i love this rumor and i hope they do something really out there with this um i mean well you know for apple it's it's not going to be that out there because it's Apple but this sounds like a lot of fun to me because if you look at you know what what the iPhone line has been it's been so good like and but it's it's been so good in fairly predictable ways for a long time we don't really get a lot of surprises in the iPhone line we don't get a lot of like seemingly like high risk experiments in the iPhone line.

1:14:56It's just a really good product line. They deliver every year with these wonderful, often incremental, sometimes bigger improvements. And it's just a really solid all around predictable thing. I've been having the same phone, the same size and approximate weight class phone for years now, just as so many other iPhone customers have through multiple models here and there as various upgrades and replacements happen over the years. But you kind of feel like you get the same phone over and over again for quite some time. Something like this could make a lot of people change their pattern. It could be something new.

1:15:32It could be something different. And I think it's interesting. As you look around the smartphone industry, what most people are using is just like these standard kind of like mid to high end, you know, boring but really great smartphones. Like we don't talk much about them anymore in terms of like, oh, what did they upgrade this year? because, you know, it's a mature category. We're all using them constantly every minute of the day. They're the most important computers in our lives, but they don't change that much in ways that we really notice that often. Something like this, I think this has the potential to make a bunch of people make a different decision than what they've been making recently.

1:16:13This has the potential to be kind of like what the original MacBook Air was, hopefully better, but kind of like that. People were delighted by the MacBook Air because it was just so different from what they had used before. And it looked delightful. It felt even more delightful. And it was just cool, even though it had lower technical specs than similarly priced computers from the similar era. And so what I'm kind of hoping for this iPhone 17 slim rumor, whatever they end up calling it, it looks like it's trying to kind of maybe replace the Plus phone in certain ways in the sense that like, all right, they have the pro phones.

1:16:55They get all the pro features, highest price, biggest cameras, biggest everything, you know, biggest screens. Then they have the less expensive, you know, iPhone 15, iPhone 14, like the non-pro phones that have been like, you know, about the same size, near the same weight, a little bit lighter because they don't use steel or titanium. So like, it's been kind of similar, but just like cut down. And then they have the like you know they have the the base iphone 15 slash iphone 14 then they have the plus which they which they launched to what a year or two ago and the plus seems to not be selling because it's like all right we made the base phone bigger but nobody wants that really so they kind of had this like hold in the lineup they they did the mini for a while killed that they did the plus now for a while i think they're gonna kill it too it doesn't seem to be going about that i know i'm gonna say well you're probably gonna say they have tons they sell a ton of these things they can keep both but i'm gonna say that every phone can be your best-selling phone yes right sometimes you have to sell a model there's always going to be a model or two in last place anyway yeah the rumor is that this would be replacing the plus but uh there you should buckle up because there's more coming that you may not be prepared for fair but i think overall though like i love i love the idea that they're trying something that's much more different than than the plus versus the regular or the plus versus the pro max like they're trying something that is much more different by all these rumors and even if only some of this stuff ends up panning out like you know usually iphone hardware rumors from decent sources like ming chi quo like usually those are pretty reliable and so it there is enough smoke around this fire that it does seem like maybe we don't know every detail yet but it does seem like there is some kind of additional iphone 17 model that is going to be very thin and have more hardware risks being taken, including some lower-end components than the Pro phones.

1:18:55And I think that is an interesting thing. Because the direction the Pro phones have gone, I keep buying the Pro phones, even though I actually don't use some of the most, the pro-iest features of the Pro phones. Because what I want is stuff like, I want the nicest screen. I want ProMotion. I want titanium and stuff like that. I want some of the Pro Camera Systems features, but there's a lot of the Pro Camera Systems features I don't use at all. Like anything involving ProRes or even much video shooting or stuff like that. There's all sorts of raw shooting. There's all sorts of Pro Camera stuff that I just don't use.

1:19:34And I think it's true of a lot of people who buy the Pro. People buy the Pro not because they want all the Pro features, but because it's the nicest. And it has the best cameras. Yeah, and the best cameras. I mean, even if you don't use the video features, it's the best still image camera. And even if you don't use RAW, it's making the best JPEGs, too, in theory, as well. Yes. That being said, like, you know, having the multi-camera system has always been a bit of a crapshoot because, like, you know, what does it mean to have the best cameras versus, like, you know, like, is that 3X or 2X before or 5X now?

1:20:04Like, is that camera, like, that good? Like, there are asterisks on it sometimes. But overall, yes, you're right. But I think it's interesting if they're going to make a new iPhone model that is going to be like physically and or visually very distinctive from the other ones, even if it ends up having lower end specs in order to achieve that, I think a lot of people would choose that, you know, partly because it'll be cool and probably because it'll just be different and it'll be it'll be a novel thing for them. You look around the rest of the cell phone business and everyone's making folding phones.

1:20:37They're trying. Other companies are trying to do, like, all right, let's see what can we do that's going to shake up the smartphone market a little bit, maybe get us some attention and some new sales. Folding phones have actually started to take off in certain markets. There's still a lot of challenges around them. There's a decent amount of shortcomings to them, and not every folding concept is a very good one. But there is some traction happening there. Like people are finding, oh, this kind of crazy hack actually does work and actually is good for certain things. I think this is Apple kind of taking their own version of a bet like that.

1:21:12This is them saying, all right, we're going to mix it up too. We're not convinced on a folding maybe yet or ever, but we're going to do an Apple way of taking a weird hardware risk. This sounds like that weird hardware risk, and I think it's going to be really fun. All right, we'll see. so a few few things about what you said here so uh the first is for the uh like the cameras like well you know how good are all those cameras having all those cameras in the phone there are rumors that uh an upcoming phone i think maybe the 17 it was that all the cameras would be 48 megapixel on the back instead of just like the good camera being 48 megapixel the other ones being lesser there's also rumors i forget again i forget which year about a mechanical aperture changing in the cameras on the back so an actual iris that expands and contracts mechanically inside the phone to get potentially real depth more real depth of field instead of the portrait mode type thing um for this particular rumor now this is here's another another iphone slim dug out from the past this is from may and this is from the information which again is usually usually has some good sources uh saying uh the information today reported that apple plans to release an all new high-end iPhone 17 model next year.

1:22:23And there was one detail worth singling out the rear camera could be relocated to the top center of the device. The report says the new iPhone 17 model will feature a major redesign akin to the iPhone 10 and a higher price tag than the Pro and the Max model. So this is a little bit older rumor, but the same type of thing. Top center phone. I've been complaining for years that they shouldn't put it in the corner or anywhere. It's ridiculous. And the earlier rumor was a single camera. To your point about the cameras that you use, one trade off that apple could make is have one camera instead of three but make that camera two and a half times as expensive two and a half times as good you know maybe that's the one with the mechanical iris for aperture on it right have one really good camera instead of or one really really good camera instead of one really good camera and two media cameras or whatever um and as we say like being in the apple ecosystem one of the sacrifices is you do not get the diversity that exists in the rest of the ecosystem so there's android phones of all shapes and sizes but when you buy a mac an apple phone you have a choice of whatever models apple puts out and they can't even be bothered to make a mini phone let alone all the diversity of things they can make so this would be another play for them to diversify their lineup now that they've undiversified it by getting off the mini train again i think stopping the mini and stopping the plus are i mean you can't have every model in the world like the question is how much diversity is enough for apple to have i think a mini and one other non-mini phone is probably near their limit right now the the rumor is they're going to have neither but i guess the plus would be replaced by this so here's the rumored iphone 17 lineup uh this is from earlier in july uh this is from mac rumors reports in recent months have converged in agreement that apple wouldn't discontinue the plus iphone model in 2025 while introducing an all-new iphone 17 slim model that that has an even more high-end options sitting above the 17 pro max and we'll get to that in a second uh in the lineup the latest information from ice universe that's the person's name apparently shared yesterday on weibo corroborates this and claims the alleged display sizes and price ones will be as follows plain old iphone 17 with a 6.27 inch display for 800 bucks 17 pro for 1100 bucks with a 6.27 inch display and 12 gigs of ram iphone 17 pro max with a 6.86 display for 1200 bucks and 12 gigs of ram and iphone 17 slim with a 6.65 inch display 1300 bucks eight gigs of ram so they're saying this slim will be the most expensive phone won't have the most ram won't have the most cameras its screen won't be the biggest so the screen is like it's the screen is closer to the pro max size but it's bigger than the plain old pro and 17 size and only eight gigs of ram and then notably all four or all four iphone 17 models will apparently feature the ltpo display for the first time enabling pro motion across the whole line so isn't that great so that's that's the rumored iphone 17 lineup and you may be thinking how does that make any sense well kind of makes some sense in like the macbook air thing it was kind of expensive when it came out it was actually less powerful than the ones that it replaced but yeah what you what are you getting for that extra money you're getting the slimness you're getting the coolness factor that's that's the theory but here i'm going to probably make marco sad because some of the current thinking slash rumors say the following and we will link to the max tech's video max tech video where he talks about this and there's also a rack rumor story that we'll link to as well uh the the gist of it is that the new iphone 17 slim model is actually drum roll please the iphone fold which was leaked years ago from multiple sources but it's not going to be called the fold max tech says it's going to be called the Ultra.

1:26:03And he says he thinks the reason everyone is calling it the iPhone Slim is because the device is significantly thinner than any other phone. That's the current state of this rumor is that, you know what? This iPhone 17 Ultra, iPhone 17 Slim, it's thinner than all the other models, but it costs more than them. How do I square this circle? And also Apple is thinking about making a folding fold. The iPhone 17 Ultra Slim is the folding phone. It has to be thinner because when you fold it in half, it gets twice as thick. Apple has been working on a folding phone lots of other manufacturers have shipped them some rumors for years about apple trying to solve the creasing problem with the screen and everything the information i'm not going to say corroborates this but information had a story from last year this time saying that apple's absolutely working on a folding phone it's going to be like the galaxy's e flip phones where it flips like goes down vertically or whatever it has a code name of v68 inside the company and they do all the caveating or whatever the information says apple designers have struggled to come up with enough compelling features that would make consumers want one especially given its high retail costs compared to non-foldable phones so this is the sad ending of this rumor mark was like i'm gonna have a cool slim phone it's gonna be a different form factor and you know folding phones whatever but anyway an iphone slim will be cool how are you gonna feel if the iphone slim is in fact the iphone fold i don't i mean so okay it depends on how much of this rumor is accurate so So I think the biggest thing for me is that I have yet to see any good reason why a foldable phone should be the kind of flip phone style where it flips up like a Nintendo DS or like an old flip phone.

1:27:38Diagonal. You want diagonal like a sandwich? The main utility I've seen from foldable phones are the ones that unfold like a book into basically like a little square tablet. those i think that makes a lot of sense because you it's basically like having like an ipad mini you know not quite that big but like it's like having a small ipad with you all the time so if you want to do something that needs more screen space like you're working on like a document or something there is i think substantial utility for that while keeping it still in like the regular like smartphone rectangular shape in your pocket i don't think i would need something like that Wait a second.

1:28:19So would you want a phone that folded that way that has a screen that you can use without unfolding it? Ideally, yes. But I don't know how that would be done necessarily by Apple. Android phones do this, and they do it both ways. I believe they have the ones where to use it at all, you've got to unfold it, and it becomes like a small tablet-sized thing. And there are also ones that say, actually, to use it, there's another screen, because, of course, then it has to be two screens, then the folding screen. and then the non-folding screen, which is a separate regular portrait orientation screen that you use when you don't unfold it.

1:28:49And obviously that would make this thing even more expensive. Given that this rumor here is that it's only going to be$1 ,300, I can't imagine that's what Apple is doing. That's the thing. And if you look at the price of good folding phones, there is no way Apple is making one anytime soon for$1 ,300. It's just not going to happen. But if Apple is going to make a folding phone at some point, I really do think it makes a lot more sense to make it the opening book style folding rather than the old flip phone style folding. Because the flip phone style of folding, what you start with is a thick square, which doesn't fit very well into pockets anyway.

1:29:28And what you end up with after it unfolds is basically just a regular smartphone size screen. Or maybe a slightly larger one, but it's not that much of a big screen. Whereas the book ones, at least you start out with something that's roughly the size of the phones we've already had for years. And when you open it up, it becomes almost a small tablet. That is way more utility than a flip up phone. So I can't imagine Apple doing the flip up style. But anyway, all this is to say, I don't think these specs, I don't think the rumored specs of the iPhone 17 quote slim, I don't think these specs match up to a folding phone.

1:30:03The screen is not big enough and the price is too low. Yeah, I mean, prices obviously is the most difficult thing to get an accurate rumor about because that's not going to leak through the supply chain or whatever. Right. So I take that with an even bigger grain of salt. I'm not up on the latest sales trends in folding phones, but my impression is the vertically folded ones are more popular than the ones that open up into books. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but that's my impression just from seeing reviews of Android phones and stuff. So if Apple is making one, I believe like I mean, this is from the information from last year.

1:30:37The rumor was, was that it's like the Galaxy Z Flip, that it's a vertical folding phone. That's what Apple's working on. Doesn't mean they're not working on other folding phones. Doesn't mean there couldn't be other ones. But if I had to bet, I would say, if Apple makes a folding phone in the next few years, it will be vertically folding. And I agree with you about everything you said. It's like, well, what the heck is the point? All you've got it is, you know, you've made it smaller, but it also got thicker. And when you open it up, it's the size of a regular phone. Again, it's close to the size of the Macs, but it's not even bigger than the Mac.

1:31:02So it's not even like, oh, you're getting an even bigger screen. No, you're not. You're getting a sub-Mac size screen, again, if these rumors are to be believed, in exchange for it being a little bit smaller in your pocket. But I think the vertical size change, as long as it doesn't get too much thicker, might actually make a difference. Especially for people who have clothing with pockets that are not sufficiently large for an actual phone. I mean, obviously, I have fairly big pockets on most of my pairs of clothing, but my shorts that I wear in the summer, some of them have bigger pockets than others.

1:31:33and even with a plain old 14 pro i notice when i wear the shorts that pockets are a little bit shallower because i have to be a little bit more aware that when i sit down to make sure my phone doesn't squirt out of the pocket or fall out of my pocket when i get up from sitting down or something like that and my pockets are big like i'm not even like women's clothes that have fake pockets that aren't even real or real pockets that are like two inches deep or whatever i'm not sure folding phones going to solve that but for whatever reason my impression is that the vertically folding ones are more popular in the market than the book open folding ones and i think the book open folding ones have to have a second screen on them because nobody wants to manually unfold something the size of a small tablet every time they want to do something with their phone there are use cases for that when you essentially hey i need to carry an ipad mini around with me but i don't want it to be that big in my pocket great folding one but i think there has to be a screen and once you're doing one gigantic folding screen plus a regular phone size screen that's like a three thousand dollar device from apple right so i find that less likely than a vertically folding one but at this point i i like that i like the notion of all the rumors swirling together saying the slim the ultra the fold these are not three separate products it's one product right uh but on the other hand i think i personally would be more excited by a plain old non-folding slim slim one good camera new form factor iphone 17 called the ultra it doesn't fold at all it's 1300 bucks that is the product that is the most exciting for me that is more boring than a folding phone and every story about the folding phone always has the caveat to say apple might decide they can't do it apple's still working on decreasing apple's not sure they're going to ship anything like this so i think these just might be getting combined together i understand the logic slim fold slim fold see if it folds it's probably also slim when it's unfolded because when you fold it it's going to get thicker and then that's why you know i get it but i'm just not quite sure but all this is to say that the iphone 17 lineup is currently shaping up to be a lot more interesting than the iphone 16 not the iphone 16 is going to be bad i'm going to get one it's my year to get a new phone i'm sure they'll be great and everything but it's kind of i'm it suits me because i will be happy to for once have the final most refined iteration of the current stupid design with a gigantic three burner stove in the corner of the phone or whatever like i've been saying for years every time i you know i do that again the jason snell report card thing i say they can't go on with this they can't keep making this thing that's supposed like just look at the back of your phone once it passed the 50 mark i'm like that's not in the corner of the phone anymore it's just a poorly centered thing on the back of your phone like they need to they need to find a way out of this and sent one centrally mounted camera is a way out i'm ready for a new big redesign but i am happy to this year buy a 16 pro which will be the last greatest best refinement of this design we've had for how many years now and then i'll let my wife figure out what she wants to do with the 17 fold slimmer ultra in 2025 six i don't know when's the 75 five five okay yeah 2025 sorry i think also what's two other interesting points here number one a 17 slim that, you know, by these rumors, would, yes, not only be slim, it would probably also be a lot lighter because the way they would make it slim would be removing certain components, making the battery smaller, things like that.

1:34:58It would probably end up being a lighter weight phone by a noticeable amount. And I think that would be really nice to feel in the hand. Unless it had terrible battery life. Well, we'll see. And that's the risk of slim. You get rid of those cameras to make it slimmer. You get rid of a bunch of other stuff. You know, you take everything you can to make it slim. You take out battery for sure. and you and like the rumor is that having an a19 and not an a19 pro is it an effort to preserve that battery life so you don't put the hottest you know cpu in there you get the one that's like a step down i think they could do it like i think there is a place for that i mean i said the same thing about like i thought that the plus was the model they should have had their lineup just for like consistency and because some people buy it i think the mini should be in their lineup because some people want a small phone if they're getting rid of the plus please bring the slim in and bring back the mini i think that is the mini a slim a pro a pro max and a regular i think that is an adequate amount of diversity even the rumors don't say that no rumors of the mini coming back sorry mini folks no i i think the slim is the mini this is just like all right we're gonna make a phone that is you know smaller in certain dimensions but doesn't sacrifice the big screen that everyone actually wants and ends up buying not the many people the many people don't want the big screen yeah but there weren't enough of them and and what's interesting about this too is like even so a couple things so number one they're probably going to sell a smaller volume of this one it makes more sense for apple to say all right if we're going to have a smaller volume phone we'll make it like more of a statement piece and we'll charge more money for it so smaller volume sure but then we'll charge more for each one and we'll make up some of that some of the difference secondly this could enable them you know one of the things we talked about in the past a lot is like for apple to choose a component or material or a technique in iphone manufacturing they can only they're restricted to only choosing things that they can mass produce in very large numbers because they just sell so many of the regular mainstream iphones maybe having this other model in the lineup can allow them to to make more bold choices with things like materials or components that maybe they just can't get the volume.

1:37:07Like maybe if they have some really good camera module, maybe they can't make however many millions of iPhones they sell every year. Maybe they can't source that many millions of this camera, but they can put it in this model that they don't have to sell that many millions of because most of the ones they're going to sell are going to be the pro phones and the regular phones. And then this model can have some crazy new component or it can have some, you know, material like this, like, you know, they're saying like a half titanium frame or whatever that means. They could do things like that that maybe they can't match produce for the volumes of the regular iPhone lines.

1:37:41Also, this allows them to take some risks. So if the market is telling them we want more and more cameras, but they can make this phone with just one and that saves them a bunch of other stuff and allows this to happen, this allows them to actually give people some different options. Again, for the first time, we don't have a lot of different options in the iPhone line. We have a small number of extremely similar options that make extremely similar tradeoffs. Again, this is something that's going to be a different set of tradeoffs. That's very exciting. Honestly, I think I would love this phone.

1:38:13From what I'm seeing, from what the rumors are, I am tentatively very optimistic. I think I might actually really like this, and I really am looking forward to it. Keep in mind that it will be bigger than your plain old Pro in your hand. Again, it's closer to a Pro Max size when you're actually using it. Yeah, but I just redesigned my app to put all the controls at the bottom. I'm good. But again, it's offering lightness and thinness. That's really cool. And again, what if some of the ways they achieve that lightness and thinness are doing other things that seem bold or that might require feature removals or limits?

1:38:48So for instance, if you only have one camera, you're not shooting spatial video. That is an interesting tradeoff at this point in Apple's history. We'll see how that goes. spatial video I think has not taken off the way we expected it to or the way they expected it to well the iPhone 16's moved their cameras for it so Apple hopes it's still a thing maybe well they moved their cameras and that will become possible we don't know if that's why they moved their cameras that's absolutely why that's absolutely why they moved the cameras I think the giant plateau that only had two cameras diagonally set looked kind of bad well so that's the thing about by the way the plain old iPhone 16 so that what we're referring to is that the two cameras in the iPhone 16 are not on an angle they're they're straight up and down from each other which is better for spatial video but i was looking at that and i was like oh and this will you know this will be back like which one was it like the the 10 or the 10 and uh the 7 i think which one had two cameras vertically or like the vertical lozenge the 7 the 7 plus are you sure that was vertical because the iphone 10 was vertical i think the 7 might have been horizontal but yeah anyway there have been past cameras that have had essentially a long thin lozenge with either one camera or two right but yes i'm follow-up you're correct yeah on the 16 the uh i was like oh the lozenge will be there and that way the cases will just have to have a narrow slit for the cameras but no because the rumored uh pictures of the back of the 16 show that the flash thing is to the right of both of the cameras in the middle so you're still going to need like a triangular opening or some kind of like vertical opening with a little notch cut out of it so the flash can go out of the thing so So if you're thinking that the camera Mesa will be smaller because they just have two vertical cameras, think again, the flash is going to ruin it.

1:40:28Anyway, going back to the 17th Slim, I think this is a very, very fun sounding option. I'm very excited for it. I think it could be really, really like it could shake things up in a fun way. And I wonder, too, like how will they achieve such thinness? Maybe the whole back of it isn't a sheet of glass. you know like maybe they found other ways to have radio transparency for the nfc antenna maybe doesn't have one who knows like there's there's all sorts of what ifs that i think i think it'll just be a really interesting story it'll be a really interesting product and it will inject some delight into a market that is very nice like the iphones have been very good but we've we've been a little bit short on the like newness and delight factors just because it's such a mature market and so this could be really fun and i'm looking forward to it yeah on the cameras by the way there is rumors lately that apple is for the first time in a while going to be going with lg and samsung in addition to sony for camera sensors uh it used to be that basically all sony for all their camera sensors in their phones for several years now but uh pulling in lg and samsung i mean a it's just good business to have more than one source for a lot of your stuff uh and b it could lend credence So the idea that Apple is doing different things with cameras in different volumes for different phones instead of just, you know, Sony sourcing all of them and trying to reuse them across all of their things.

1:41:49So the rumor about the phones with lots of cameras, the pro phones, being all 48 megapixels is also kind of exciting. I don't that doesn't mean that all the cameras are going to be equally good because that's just probably not the way it's going to work. But it's it seems like they're getting closer. Like for too long, I've been like the one X camera is really good. And the two X cameras there and the wide angle also exists, you know. and they improve them a little bit year after year but the 1x camera seems to always just race ahead of them i would love for those cameras to come together again again i think the 15 the 16 rumor is that the 5x camera that casey's got on his giant phone is also going to be on on the pro phones the small pro phone as well so that's another thing that i'm looking forward to the camera that casey has tested out for me i'll be able to get that in a reasonable size phone in the 16 you're welcome 16 is the sounding like it's a good thing for me and the 17 assuming it doesn't fold sounds like it might be the phone for marco i mean the i wouldn't hold my breath on all three cameras being 48 megapixels actually delivering the quality upgrade that we want i think what what is holding what has held back those cameras to date has been smaller sensors and just optical realities of those of those focal lengths i don't see either of those being massively different because those are also related.

1:43:05You can't fit a larger sensor behind certain optics of certain focal distances within a certain amount of thickness. So I think what's more likely, keep in mind when the iPhone 1X camera went from 12 to 48 megapixels, they did that with a bit of a trick on how the subpixels on the sensor were red. And the sensor size, I believe it increased a little bit in that year because it increased a little bit a lot of years. but it was not the sensor did not get four times larger so i think what is with that rumor what is more likely to be the case is maybe all three maybe the other two sensors grow a little bit in size kind of incrementally but the way they would achieve 48 megapixels would be the same method it would be like the sub pixel tricks the pixel binning yeah of course they would be they're not going to be real 48 pixels but the good thing is even with the bin pixels with the 1x camera you can shoot in that 48 megapixel mode if you have sufficient light and presumably that would become an option the others like i mean the other thing holding back the other two cameras is cost like they're they're not going to make all three cameras cost as much as the most expensive one they're going to spend less i'm just saying like the gap is going to be there i would just like the gap to be narrowed and all the other cameras having the ability for example to do 48 megapixel raws that does occasionally come in handy if you're doing like an outdoor picture and you want to be like a landscape and you want it to use the ultra wide the ultra wide looks kind of soft and smushy uh on a bright day i would love to be able to do the 48 megapixel unbind it's not again the optical realities are still there it's tiny tiny lenses tiny sensors but i'm willing to see what those trade-offs are like i've kind of always been disappointed that the one x has just been moving farther away from the other cameras maybe the gap was narrowed by the 5x i don't know casey do you feel like the 5x camera is closer to the one x camera than the old 3x was yeah like so there's the quality of the one exit sets the bar on any given phone.

1:44:53And then the lesser camera is always worse than it. And it used to be like that. The three X camera was tons worse than the one X. What is the gap between the five X and the one X in terms of quality? Anecdotally, I don't think it's that big. Well, unless you're, you know, talking like low light, but in just average everyday use, I don't think the gap is very big at all. Yeah. Anyway, I'm looking forward to the gap being narrowed somewhat between those cameras, you know, and i'm also intrigued by the idea of one really good camera with like a mechanical aperture in it but at a certain point i mean that's why i think they should redesign the bump or think more about the bump like obviously they need more depth in there a centralized bump maybe gives you more like look at the pixel phones they do essentially like a strip across the whole back in fact to the extent that the rumors about the 17 have been using photoshopped or very similar pictures to like the pixel phones with their strip that goes across and saying look it's the iphone 17 i'm like that's the google pixel you've just you know pasted on some apple cameras but like everybody sees the pixel like yeah if you just like it's a huge thing on the back of the camera it's thick but it goes from edge to edge you don't have to worry about the phone wobbling and just like just give into it we know that like you're most of the the huge amount of cost and space and this camera is being taken and this phone is being i just called it a camera and this phone is being taken up by the cameras don't pretend that you're hiding them in the corner you're not right so a centrally located one or a mesa that goes across the whole thing or something that's that's our dreams for the 17 yeah you know i i feel like this is what marco was saying earlier it at least in part but what i find appealing about the 17 and this hypothetical 17 slim less folding like i don't know that i don't personally feel like i want a folding phone but then apple make it and i'll say I must have it.

1:46:37Naturally. We're all going to buy it. Well, John will. Casey, you and I will buy it. Yeah. But I really like the idea of Apple having an additional phone, be it a slim or a wonky or a, you know, I don't know, throwing stuff against the wall, the iPhone 17 al dente, where it gives them permission to try crazy stuff. and iPhones are really, really, really great. And I would argue have been for a long time, but they're really, really great. And they're also really, really kind of boring at this point. And that's good boring because they're so great. But I would love for Apple to allow themselves to do like an iPhone 5C all over again, you know, or whatever the colorful plastic ones were.

1:47:30Granted, those were not that popular. I don't think anyone, or certainly the nerds, didn't seem to like them for the most part. And this is where, you know, all the seven fans, the dozens of fans are writing us saying, oh, I loved it. I feel like there's been a lot of rehabilitation of the 5C. People look back on it fondly now. They're almost fond of it when it was being released, but people look back on it fondly. I think for the reason you're outlining is like, remember when Apple did fun things? Exactly. And so I feel like having a slim or whatever, I don't even care what it's called. I don't care how it looks.

1:47:58iPhone Air was suggested in the chat room, which I think is an obvious example that they probably won't use yeah probably um i i feel like having apple you know give themselves a little slack to get a little crazy i think would be super fun and would be the kind and it would inject the kind of you know like interest and fun into the iphone that like the the political situation here in america has gotten a lot more fun over the last week or two um and so i am really excited at the idea of Apple getting an additional phone where they can just loosen the belt and just kind of have fun. And we'll see if that happens, and we'll see if it'll be folding, if it'll be colorful or what it might be, if it'll just be just absurdly thin.

1:48:47But I would love for them to have some fun and let us have some fun along with them. And that hasn't really happened in a meaningful way in a long time, especially with the top-of-the-line device. And maybe the state-of-the-art device is still the boring iPhone 17 Pro or whatever. But like we've said, maybe there's some interesting little tidbits and treats in the 17 Slim or whatever it ends up being. And I'm here for it. I'm excited about it. Well, you know, if the iPhone 17 Slim Slim Ultra is the most expensive iPhone, that probably dooms it not to have exciting colors. Yeah, exactly. All right.

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1:50:27And you can find the show notes at atp.fm. And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O, A-R-M, N-G, Marco, R-M-E, S-I-R-A-C, USA, Syracuse. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech Podcast. So long. So Casey, we've had a busy time in our apps' lives. I discussed on last show I was about to launch the Overcast rewrite. And here we are now, two weeks later. And it is launched. And it is out there. I've already issued three bug fix updates to it in the time since we last talked about it. And meanwhile, your app Call Sheet is about to hit its one-year anniversary.

1:51:34and I kind of wanted to go kind of revisit, you know, what's been going on. How has Call Sheet gone? And I wanted to discuss briefly how the Overcast launch has gone so far in our after show. So you want to go first? Sure, I certainly can. I don't have too much to say at the moment because the renewals, I don't watch App Store Connect like a hawk, you know. I do look at it from time to time, but I'm not sitting in there like refreshing every five minutes to see what my retention rates look like or anything like that. So I haven't gone in and I haven't gone spelunking to try to get advanced warning or notice or enthusiasm about what my renewal situation looks like.

1:52:17But it occurred to me, I think because I got my own renewal notice. And obviously, if you don't recall, I had put, I almost said overcast, I had put call sheet on the App Store a couple of days before its official release to do a few things that apparently CrowdStrike didn't want to do, like test and make sure that in-app purchase worked and subscriptions work and so on and so forth. And so my renewal notice came before most and it was the you know, hey in a month you're going to renew And this was like two or three maybe in three or four weeks ago at this point And so I got that renewal notice and and I knew it was coming and I thought to myself well I probably need to start Reminding people what they're getting for their money and The more I think about it the more I think I might have priced call sheet a little too cheaply And i'm not interested in having that conversation right now, but i'm happy to have that conversation another time Isn't that interesting?

1:53:13I'm so surprised to hear that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Well, anyways. As I sit here at$10 a year, trust me, I know. Right, right. So again, we can have that conversation. I just don't think now is the time for it. So with that said, even though I don't think it's a bad deal by any stretch of the imagination, I do also concurrently think I should remind people, hey, here's what you're getting for your money. And so a couple of weeks ago now, I put up a blog post, and I basically they said, hey, renewals are coming. Here's a list of literally all the release notes summarized, but all the release notes from all the different versions I released in the past year.

1:53:54And there's a lot. And you know me, I'm not one to toot my own horn, really, ever. But there's a lot here. And I really think in my heart that if you even vaguely enjoy Call Sheet, if you open it at least once every month. I think it's worth the money. I really, really do. And I hope that people who are getting these renewal notices for year subscriptions, and I mean, I also offer monthly subscriptions. So, you know, some people have renewed and some people have fallen off already. But for the year people, I really thought it would be a good idea to remind them, hey, here's what you're getting.

1:54:30And that's what I did. And we'll see how it goes. If you haven't renewed yet, I encourage you to please allow it to happen. If you're feeling particularly generous, you can go into the app and into the in-app settings and where you manage your subscription. You can go in there and you can choose a different subscription. And if you want, once you tap the choose different subscription or choose new subscription button, that you see the monthly and the yearly plans. But then there's a more purchase options, bit of text, that's a button that you can tap on and you can choose to even up your subscription if you like, or I mean, you could also, you know, back it down if you wanted to, but we're not going to do that around here, right?

1:55:11So you can up your subscription to either$20 a year or$50 a year from the default 10 or excuse me, nine, actually. You don't have to do that, but hey, it would be really neat if you did. And so I'm hopeful that in the next, I don't know, two to four weeks, I'll get a, I mean, candidly, I hope I get a whole pile of money from Apple from people who have, you know, renewed and re-upped and that would be really great. And I have my fingers and toes crossed i have no reason to believe that it's not going to go well but this is my first rodeo when it comes to subscriptions so i'm nervous about it and and i'm hopeful and so uh that's basically my story i'm happy to if you have questions i'm happy to talk further about it but if not we can talk overcast i am a little curious um do you do you have the stats anywhere um of like how many people have told it not to renew because that's something that we now have like store kit two or whatever at some point they changed that so that now you have that data available to you.

1:56:08And I wonder like... Oh, I don't think I knew that. Yeah, you can tell if something is set not to renew now. Oh, right. I see your point. I see your point. I also, I use AppFigures to track my stuff. Do you use anything like AppFigures for tracking? No, no, I don't. I probably should. You should. AppFigures is really good, despite the latest update being annoying. I probably should embrace that. Honestly, I was talking to, I think it was Ben McCarthy about this, And when they released, I think it was Ketchup that they did subscriptions, if I'm not mistaken. Ketchup is a really fun, like, Pokedex sort of thing for Pokemon players.

1:56:46We'll put a link in the show notes. In any case, I believe it was Ben that I was talking to that, and they were wondering, you know, would I roll my own when it comes to in-app purchasing and subscription and all that? Or would I do it differently? And honestly, I don't regret rolling my own, but I think if I were to do it all over again, I would probably just use Revenue Cat. And I think they are a former sponsor, to be completely honest. And I'm genuinely sitting here right now. I don't know if they're a future sponsor, but they should be. I think if I were to do it all over again, I'd probably just do Revenue Cat because you get so much for free.

1:57:28And I think I've gotten, for better and for worse. Well, it's not for free. Well, fair. It depends on how much you're earning, I suppose. At my level, I think it might be for free. I haven't looked at this in a while. But I think if I were to do it again, and there's nothing stopping me from adding it now, but it seems like a whole bunch of rework for not that much benefit. But if I were to launch a new app tomorrow, I'd probably start by at least looking into RevenueCat's pricing and seeing if I thought it was worth it. Because that gives you a lot more of this visibility than I have right now because I have to do it all myself.

1:58:02And I see what you're saying about knowing if people are going to renew or not. And honestly, it never occurred to me to fire analytics entries about that. So no, it's going to be an adventure for all of us, but particularly me. I would say for whatever it's worth, maybe this will prevent them from becoming a future sponsor. I think with your needs and with Storkit 2, I don't think you need RevenueCad. I think the in-app purchase handling of subscription stuff used to be a lot harder. It is a lot less hard now, especially if you're willing to not do server-side validation, which it depends. How much risk are you willing to take for somebody stealing your servers through some kind of weird jailbreak or whatever?

1:58:42Like for me, I have reduced that over time, like, you know, to the point where I think right now, I think I with my rewrite, I have to double check the server side, but I think I'm actually not validating the receipts server side anymore. I'm still sending them to the server and the server saying, OK, but I'm not actually doing the validation because the they changed like the signature mechanism a long time ago and I just never updated to it. and like i would have to rewrite it and like when i was trying to get my rewrite out the door like the last thing i needed to spend time on was validating an app purchase receipt in the server for something that doesn't cost me much money if somebody steals it so i'm like i just said all right whatever just just say okay i'll trust the device validation enough um and so far that's been fine and i think as long as you're willing to do that which for most apps where you're just like kind of getting features and not getting like expensive resources necessarily um that's generally fine.

1:59:37So I think ultimately you could do this all yourself. You are doing it all yourself so far. And so I think you could do it again very easily yourself. Anyway, that being said, I will be very curious to hear how the renewals go. In my experience, renewal rates are actually very high for Overcast, but it's a different app. It's a different audience. My renewal rate is shockingly high. I don't have it in front of me, but when Apple did the small business program for developers where you pay 85 % or you get 85.15 from the beginning, not just after one year renewals. That didn't change my income very much because I already have so many people who subscribe for more than a year to Overcast that my average rate I was paying was something more like 80.20 or whatever that was.

2:00:31Yeah, it was something like 80.20 instead of 85.15. So it was already pretty close to that, up from 70-30. So anyway, how do you feel about, how has a year of Call Sheet been for you, professionally? How happy are you with it? How is it going kind of momentum-wise, not just money-wise? Yeah, I think it's gone better than I ever could have dreamed. And, you know, we've talked about it on and off over the last year. So, I mean, I'm happy to go on and talk about this for as long as you want. But in the interest of trying to be a little bit brief about it, I have a very big problem with Call Sheet, which is it's been well received and well regarded enough that it's hard to cling to my imposter syndrome.

2:01:26You know what I mean? Oh, what a problem, Casey. Oh, my God. I know. Obviously, I'm saying this with a big smile on my face, but it is kind of unusual. It's such a problem that people keep telling me that I'm good at my job. I know, right? Oh, my God. It's really difficult. Please, please weep for me. No, but I mean, all snark and kidding aside, it's been weird trying to... not reinvent myself or reevaluate, but it's been weird. And it's hard, honestly, if I'm being completely honest with you, it's hard for me to accept what evidence seems to indicate, which is that I'm not altogether dope, you know, and that I actually have put together something that's pretty great.

2:02:04It's not perfect, but it's pretty great. And, you know, I've been trying to embrace that without letting it go to my head. And it's cool to be mentioned in the same breath as Overcast or any number of other highly regarded iOS apps. And it's a very unusual thing for me. You know, imagine, if you will, if you're a longtime listener, it was 10 years ago now, which, you know, is a long time, but it feels like it was just yesterday, that everyone was making fun of fast text, injustifiably, and especially the icon, justifiably. and that was a long time ago and in a far cry from where I am today but it turns out if you're persistent and stubborn and you know are willing to just keep trying and if you're willing to keep failing to a degree it turns out you can come out eventually with something pretty great and that's where I've gotten and it's been really hard and weird in the best possible way for me to accept that hey I'm actually pretty good at my job and that's pretty awesome And I've been really overjoyed by that.

2:03:14I mean, I probably shouldn't admit this publicly, but I'm very tired and I'm feeling a little sensitive in a happy way. Every once in a while, like maybe once a week, I'll search for overcast. I keep saying overcast. I'll search for Call Sheet in the app store just to see my little Editor's Choice badge because it is so lovely and wonderful and means so much to me that I am one of a relatively small list of apps that has that badge. And it just makes me really happy. And that's probably not something I should be saying out loud, but here we are. And we're amongst friends, so it's okay. But I'm really proud of that.

2:03:55I really, really, really am. And I'm super proud of my Upgradee that I received. And you look around and you say, and I think from the song, it was meant in a not so great way, but you look around and in a good way, you say, this is not my beautiful life. Like, how is this me? How, I was always the one everyone was making fun of. And now I'm the, I'm one of the ones that people are saying, Hey, you do great work. And that's, that's such an amazing professional and personal achievement that I'm so deeply thankful for. And again, I'm not trying to sit here and say that, that call sheet is perfect.

2:04:30It's not, I'm not trying to say that it's without problems. It's not, it has problems, but I really am proud of it and I'm really overjoyed with the reception to it. And I really am optimistic, very optimistic about how the next month or so will go when I start, you know, getting more feedback from Apple and eventually, hopefully a big, relatively speaking, a big fat check from Apple. So it's been great. I don't know if I've actually answered your question or not, but it's been really great and I'm really thankful for it. No, that's great. Honestly, I'm very happy to hear that because it's it's a great app and you deserve all this success and happiness and some fighting against your massive imposter so so tell me about overcast though because the release happened if i recall correctly we recorded our most recent episode right before release do i have that right after so it doesn't it doesn't it's something like that um yeah so we recorded it uh i released it on july 16th and so this is kind of the first episode we're really recording like after it has been out and after the reception and all the bug fixes and everything else um it has been a whirlwind but mostly a good one um there there is there are some exceptions to the goodness um but uh i'll get i'll well you know let's do the exceptions first i'll end on end on a good note there we go the exceptions are i'm getting a ton of negative reviews um Right now, like, AppFigures does a helpful thing if you go over to the ratings tab where you can graph lots of things, including your average rating over time.

2:06:09And my average rating over time, like, you know, from before the update, it was 4.72. It is now 4.68. So it has dropped a tiny bit. But that's because I have, like, 65 ,000 total ratings. it also graphs some things for you that are more informative such as average of new ratings that's an interesting metric what's the average among new ratings each day that tells a very different picture that the average of new ratings from before the release was in the high fours like 4.7 you know 4.5 uh now the average of new ratings is 1.9 um so here's what's happening that's undesirable yes so what's happening is um my customer sentiment is on fire now i think overall the customer sentiment is not terrible for the rewrite but the people who don't like it are being a lot louder than the people who do.

2:07:15So first of all, listeners, if you do like the rewrite, I would love to hear from you in the form of a star rating in the App Store to that effect. Please. But secondly, it is also an important feedback mechanism. In the rewrite, there have been some fires that I had to put out that justifiably made people upset. There have been a few bugs that I was able to iron out, including a release literally this morning that did some of the more important bug fixes like playlist orderings being lost and stuff like that. There are a couple of big bug fixes in today's update. But there's also design changes and there's the big feature change of losing streaming.

2:08:00What was interesting so far is I thought losing streaming would cost me a lot more in user sentiment and negativity. What has actually cost me a lot more, certainly there are people out there who don't like that, and that's fine. I accept that. I knew losing streaming was an expensive thing to do. I hoped, and I think so far still believe, that it would be worth it because the amount of problems and technical complexity that it solves I think are worth taking a temporary hit in that area. what i was not expecting was that most of the problems people have with the new design are not about streaming they're about like just you know smaller little little things um like smaller behavioral changes some of which i've already fixed um like i i took out uh one tap play mode in the in the original release i have since re-added it because you would not believe how many people were very upset about that like that was a massive thing just you know just about how the episode cells respond to taps like that that was a huge thing for people um so i ended up putting that back most of the negativity now there's there's a little bit left of that's like you know people who hit a bug here and there for the most part that's mostly ironed out most of the negativity now is design bugs now i use that term literally i'm not i'm not saying design feedback because there are people who hate any design change i accept that as part of doing a design change like that's what happens you do a design change because you kind of have to just stay fresh over time um and whenever you do it you're going to have people who hate it and that's going to give you a bunch of once our reviews you know okay i accept that as a reality of doing business um but design bugs are things like this feature is not being found or people are misunderstanding this and one of the like right now i am literally like my my head is like on fire with brainstorming ways to solve a massive design bug i have which is people are not finding the sleep timer hmm is there a little clock at the bottom i i never use it so i've never paid attention it was a little clock at the bottom oh okay now i moved i moved it into the audio settings panel like so the bottom now has you know airplane in the middle on the right is show notes info and on the left is like the like the kind of adjustments icon and that's where in that panel you have sleep timer and audio settings no one is finding it there i've had so many people say you took out the sleep timer where is the sleep timer i have also had many people say they did find it but they they hate it being there it that it's like that they have to now have one more tap to get to it and they use it so often that's like a huge friction point.

2:10:53So I have to figure out where to put that. That's, I think that's going to be my next kind of, you know, larger update is going to be like tweak to the now playing layout. I want to try to put the chapter list in where the info is, like in the screen, not as a sheet above the screen. Maybe also the audio settings. Maybe convert the buttons down below from 3 to 5 to put the sleep timer back and one other thing maybe a star who knows oh you're straight lines marco you're straight i know i know you're gonna be an hourglass now i know so i mean i was that's you know for for a long time uh it's kind of the opposite of my actual body shape um but we're talking about is that he had aligned the items where like the progress bar is wide then the three buttons in the middle are a little bit narrower than the three buttons in the bottom are narrower still and you could draw a straight line at an angle down both sides going from wide to narrow but once he gets rid of the three items in the bottom and replaces it with four or maybe even five straight line is gone and four would be tricky because much of that screen visually is centered like it's a very centered design heavy screen um and if if i make it four then the airplay source label when it's not the built-in speaker i i will show the name of your headphones or that are connected or whatever and that would have a hard time being centered with four things down there so it would it would probably go back to being five, which is what it was before.

2:12:20One of them would be the sleep timer, and the other one would probably be the star. Or maybe a Marcus Blade thing. I haven't quite decided all that yet. You're going to get all the reviews like, yay, he finally brought back the sleep timer. I know. It never actually left. But that's a design bug. The reality is the design is not working if people are not finding this. That is a design bug I have to fix. Those are a little harder to fix than functionality bugs because it's kind of you don't quite know you know you could do some testing you could you could you know do some like surveys or whatever but it doesn't until it's really out there you don't really get the full effect of like how effective this thing is or isn't um so i'm gonna have to you know look at stuff like that um but otherwise it has gone overall very well the trend of my ratings is indeed very concerning uh for for long-term health of my ratings that that That is extremely concerning.

2:13:13But with that exception and with the exception of the bugs I had to fix, which are mostly and mostly most of the bugs are fixed now, I think. It has overall gone very well in terms of having to rewrite a 10 year old app from scratch in a new language and new UI framework. I think it went very well. But there is still a lot of work to do. But it's mostly now getting down to the more fun stuff, like re-adding little details that didn't quite make the ship date or whatever else. But it has been quite a roller coaster. I am exhausted. I'm very glad I hit this release date. It was very important to me.

2:13:56I'm glad that it is done and out there now. It was this huge thing that's been hanging over me for a long time. and again like as i talked about you know two episodes ago it really was getting to me personally and emotionally as a developer that i wasn't shipping this thing it wasn't out there i was falling behind whatever else so to have all of that behind me is just a massive deal to me so now i just have to figure out how to make people hate it less but again and i don't i don't want to overstate the problem like i'm sure that the people who were leaving all the one-star reviews that doesn't seem to be the majority opinion because if that was a majority opinion i think there'd be a lot more of them but uh so mathematically i think i'm still okay uh but i do want to try to figure out like how can i how can i fix like design changes here and there that are causing people paper cuts and and see if i can improve that but that's going to be a little bit longer of a process probably over the span of weeks not days um and maybe even longer depending So we'll see.

2:15:01I mean, from my perspective, from what I've seen, it seems like the response has been really, really, really good. And I'm not here to argue about, you know, whether or not the ratings have gone up or down or whatever. I mean, it would not at all surprise me if your ratings have plummeted because you have a wildly different user interface. And that isn't necessarily bad. But as you said earlier, it's different. And different when it comes to user interfaces for a lot of people is bad. Even if it's better, it's bad. And so it would not surprise me at all if you're taking a bath on ratings because that's one of the only ways that regular people feel like they have leverage over you.

2:15:41But in terms of what I've seen and the people I've spoken to about it, everyone seemed pretty universally enthusiastic. There's a couple of bugbears here and there. I had no idea how unbelievably offended people are by two-tap playback because I've seen some of these conversations go by in Slack. I don't get why it is such an immense burden, but oh my word, apparently it's an immense burden to tap twice instead of once to start a podcast. I would have come to the same conclusion as you that this is probably unnecessary and useless complexity to continue to have the two different ways of doing it.

2:16:18But here we are. But no, I feel like I had a couple of very frustrating bugs that understandably, since you had this deadline you didn't fix before release but they are i don't know if the uh playback when you do priority podcasts you know what i'm thinking of i forget how you describe it specifically but basically it would finish playback on a podcast and stop stop dead instead of continuing with the next one and you fix that bug certainly in the test flight beta is that released yet or no oh that yeah that was fixed on day two okay i think or day three like that was that was one of the that was the biggest day one on fire bug was continuous play was not working with play next by priority like that it was and i didn't realize a couple of people reported that during the beta and i couldn't find it and it seemed like a weird edge case so i figured like i can't find it yet i need a bigger sample to really find this and sure enough i got one but it was it was like oh this broke in a really big way for people and like and it took me i think it took me like two days to figure it out um but um that was no that was definitely like a show stopping like must fix immediately kind of bug yeah but i mean once you got that squared away that was good and you know things are in different places but you get used to it like at first i really didn't like not having the lateral swipe to look at show notes and stuff but it's fine.

2:17:44Like you just relearn the, I was going to say gesture, but that's a bit overloaded in this context. You relearn what you have to do in order to use the app. And that sounds bad. I think I'm coming across negatively. I don't mean to at all. It's fine. And the app is responsive and it works well and it lets you do what you need to do with it efficiently. So I think this is an update you should be proud of and it certainly seems like i know a lot of this is your hair being on fire because it's a new release you're putting out and you're putting out fires and you know fixing bugs and blah blah blah but i just get the vibe that you are far more productive in the code base today than you were yesterday oh night and day night and that's got to feel incredible i mean i've issued like three updates in what two weeks like that's never like i have never had this level of productivity with the code because it is all like you know new fresh code and i and i've you know it's better like it's just better code i i am 10 years better as a programmer writing this code as i was with the old you know structure of the old app so like and and you know the languages have gotten better the tools have gotten better like everything has gotten better and more productive now um like one thing that's interesting is like my crash rate is way down because swift just doesn't crash as much when you write it correctly as old apps.

2:19:03And I'm doing a lot less with concurrency in weird ways. And so that's a lot less unsafe concurrency practice, basically. So there's all sorts of ways. The new app really does not crash very much at all compared to the old app. And the old app wasn't crashing constantly or anything, but it's better. I think for some people, the new app has been less reliable because they were hitting some of those bugs. I'm curious to see from today, now that I fixed the playlist reordering bug at least the biggest one and there was a minor progress loss bug that I also fixed in today's build so I'm hoping to see I think more people out there will start to see the rewrite as being as solid as it is for me and my usage and I hope they get that and appreciate that and it works as well for them as it works for me but either way like if i have to fix something or tweak something or change something it is so much i mean look i added one tap playback in like an hour like it was so fast to add that back in like it's just it's so like working with swift ui oh my god it's a delight like yeah it's a slow start but it is so easy to do something like like you know for instance one thing you know some people of course when you change the design the immediate feedback you get is give me an option to change it back yeah which is bananas right i get it i get it and so you know and so it's it helps to kind of like don't react immediately when people say that like give it a second see see how you and they feel after a bit of time you know but if for some reason i have to do things like you know give people a way to view playlists uh as a as a vertical list again instead I have a horizontal list.

2:20:50Like, I can do that without a ton of work. It's some work. It's not nothing. It certainly creates some more conditions I have to test in the future. That's probably the biggest cost of it. But, like, to have things like UI preferences there are very easy in SwiftUI compared to how they were before. So much easier. So that's the kind of value that I've built by having this new code base. i've i have created like easier opportunities to make the app better for people to add more weird options like if i want to have i probably won't do this but like on the now playing screen if i want to have a like prominent sleep timer mode where you can go set a setting and the sleep timer is always displayed in the bottom like i can do that very easily now i won't do that because that's a bad idea, but I can do things like that.

2:21:43For instance, one of the things people have requested since the beginning of Overcast is an on-screen volume control. The way the music app has an on-screen volume control, you have the big slider. I've never had one on Overcast because I've always thought it wasn't worth the screen space it took up. Well, now, if I want to have an option that most people won't want or need, and I won't want it to be on for most people, but if I want to have an option that adds, you know what fine have an on-screen volume control I can do that now with very little work and it probably won't break too much if anything and that's like that kind of flexibility I just didn't have before with UIKit and with all my like massive complicated layout code and everything I just didn't have any of that flexibility before and now I do so that's what I've built I've built the ability to have not only a great fast framework now and what seems seems so far to be a much more reliable one, but also to be able in the future to iterate more quickly and to give more people weird little options that I don't think should be the default, but I can add them for you.

2:22:48I can do so much more of that now and so much more easily, and I can actually iterate a lot to find the best design that's best in the first place that I don't even have to make options for. There's so much of that possibility now, and that's what I was building towards, and I'm finally here. That's awesome. I mean, I hear your concern about your ratings and I get it. I absolutely get it. And it makes sense. But I feel like overall you sound like a coiled up spring that has been released, you know, that you're feeling mostly at peace. And once you get through this phase of screw that guy, he changed what I knew.

2:23:27It's different. I don't like it. And I think once you get through that, you're going to be in a real, real solid, real good place. And you certainly sound like you're much better for it. And I'm excited for you because I know this was a long, hard road and you've made it to the end. Or, well, maybe not the end, but you've made it to the next milestone, the next waypoint. And that's super great. Thank you. And to torture this metaphor further, it's like that highway was ending. I made it to the junction with the next highway because the highway I was on, I'd reached the end and I couldn't keep going on that highway.

2:24:03I could not keep going with the old code base anymore. I just couldn't. It had no future. It barely had a present. and I couldn't work on it anymore. I couldn't maintain it anymore. I couldn't keep up with it. I couldn't add new features. I couldn't iterate the design. It had just grown too much and too complicated and I couldn't keep up with it. And so there was no other option. There was no option to continue on that path. It was merely a question of how great or how acceptable can I make the new path to people? And that's going to be an ongoing process. I'm still working on it. I'm still open to ideas for changing things I'm still going to tweak the design here and there but there it's we're not going back we can't go back like there is no back to go to this is this is the way ready for my app update yeah wow you have one no I feel left out I do have two apps nobody buys them they're fine they do not have subscriptions I don't have any renewals people paid me five dollars four years ago and that's all the money I'm ever getting them from them there's no new sales although I did while you guys were on through that I did count up how many releases I've done how many releases for my two dinky apps do you think I've done total in how many years did you say four I'm going to say maybe like 15, 20 yeah I was going to say 20 75 oh wow 75 releases for that$5 you paid me once back in 2020 you've gotten 75 well 75 combined releases it's much more on one app than the other but anyway yeah no i still like my apps i use them every day i'm glad they keep working i i still have to test i did test builds i test one of them on uh sequoia i need to test build another one to see what they're doing but i did make one of them strict concurrency compliant uh like earlier in the year the other one i'll tackle eventually too so i do continue to develop these uh and uh they exist and my review activity is nothing no reviews so what does that mean my average is zero or five I mean sometimes nothing is better than what you actually get yeah no I have a good average I don't want to break the average with bad reviews