608: Boot to Toot

37:26Like, I feel like it's kind of one of those things, kind of like USB-C, that when Apple finally decides to do it, it will be after the point when it's, you know, they'll let it be non-controversial, right? If it did today, it would be controversial. But there's a common point where few people will care about it, and they'll just do it. But as someone who continues to charge with the wire pretty much all the time, except when I'm in the car on the MagSafe mount, I still could give it a few more years before they go full wireless. Honestly, I don't see it happening. I think phones use too much power and the inefficiency and inconvenience in a lot of cases of wireless charging.

38:04The carbon neutrality, yeah. Yeah, obviously carbon neutrality over the last term of the product, it would go up like 30 % or something if it was wireless only. I do wonder how many people like what the percentages are only Apple knows but like how much wireless charging used to be zero percent because the phone didn't support it right now what percent of phone charging in terms of like I don't know battery capacity or milliamp hours added to the phone is that and then you do the math on the massive inefficiency of wireless charging versus wired and see how much waste heat we're throwing out and how much energy that adds.

38:35Yeah, that could be another thing keeping Apple from doing this for a while. Well, I think also, I mean, how many regulars out there do you see using MagSafe for wireless charging instead of cables? I see almost no one using it. Yeah, it's a good pop culture thing to watch. In pop culture, you will very often see people complaining in modern TV shows and movies that their phone is out of charge and they're desperate to find a charger and they're always plugging a wire into it, right? we'll know that that turnover has happened when in pop culture we see the person who's desperate for their phone to be charged i don't know sticking it to a mag safe puck i'm not even sure how they would do it but yeah obviously this that's a trailing indicator not a leading indicator but uh yeah the wires are still pretty prevalent in popular media also think about like the the practicality of that like a lot of people carry a phone charger with them for whatever reason that you know a lot of people need to do that are they going to carry around like a usb plug in like a giant MagSafe puck in their bag.

39:32Yeah, MagSafe pucks are not small. Right. And like, or what about like if you have to charge up from some like battery out of a vending machine? Like people do that. That's a thing. Like how is that going to work? There are so many contexts where I think regular people just use wire to charge their phone the vast majority of the time based on just my anecdotal observation. Frayed broken wires. Sure, whatever. But and oftentimes, you know, cheap third party ones. But like bought in a drugstore. Of course. But that's what people do. If I need a fast charge, if my phone's low and I'm going to be in my house for a while, let me charge this up in 15 minutes.

40:07I'll use USB-C. I'll use it almost every time. I think a lot of people use the wire. I think the whole idea of we're going to make a phone that has no port on it whatsoever, I can't say they would never do that. But I can't see that ever being the mainstream phone option. Like, you know, maybe, you know, the rumor about the iPhone 17 Slim that might come out next year, maybe something like that, if that wasn't intended to be the mainstream model. Not enough room for USB-C. Yeah, like if that wasn't intended to be the mainstream model iPhone, maybe that could be a way they could get that. But I think most people don't want that.

40:43Most people want a cable. yeah if you want to know how they're gonna how they could get to uh no cable in a way that is not controversial for people uh rather than thinking of advances in wireless technology you have to do is fast forward to the point where um i mean who knows if we'll get this far but if if silicon continues to advance and we don't and the wall that we know we're inevitably going to hit is farther out than we think it is uh you could get to the point where the total amount of energy inside a phone in the battery you know for all day battery life is just lower and then you don't need like advances super advances and charging technology you use the same stupid inductive coils we have now but because you're filling a battery that's a quarter the size all these issues become much less right and if you have solid state batteries and they charge really fast like i think that's how you would get to it it would essentially require advances continued advances in silicon which are slowing rapidly as we all know and also advances in battery technology and then we get to the point where it's like okay well all those issues they used to talk about about charging your phone and heat or whatever that's ridiculous because now it charges in 35 seconds off of an inductive coil and nobody cares yeah for what it's worth uh i very rarely use a cable to deliberately to charge my phone you know the the bedside charger is uh chi charger and aaron's bedside charger is a magsafe puck the original version of it we do have a spare laptop charger that i just happen to have laying around um downstairs actually by our turntable and so that's our it with a cable of course and that's our oh no i really need a bunch of charge right now charger um and obviously if i'm plugging in to do debugging or something like that but for the most part both of us both aaron and myself and she is very normie in a way that i think we can all agree i'm not um we almost exclusively chi charge i mean this is one data point or two i guess but for what it's worth all right uh end-to-end encryption is coming for iphone to android rcs messages so if you recall in ios 18 uh apple embraced or adopted rcs which is a better version of sms that were that supports you know like delivery receipts and things like that but it is not end-to-end encrypted well apparently reading from mac rumors the gsm association or gsma the organization responsible for developing the rich communication services or rcs standard announced on tuesday that is working to implement the end-to-end encryption for messages sent between android and iphone devices though no specific timeline for the implementation has been provided currently not all rcs providers offer end-to-end encryption Google Messages, which enabled end-to-end encryption by default for RCS conversations last year, is one of the exceptions.

43:33Apple's proprietary iMessage system also features end-to-end encryption, but this protection does not extend to RCS messages. I'm not sure how they're going to do this, because I think the way Google did it, you essentially need key exchange servers. Essentially, the servers that Apple runs for iMessage that handle negotiations between the parties and allow the end-to-end encryption to happen. Obviously, they can't see or infiltrate it. That's the whole point. but you still need kind of like a middle party to mediate the exchange and so google has that so if you're doing like android rcs from another android phone it goes through google servers just like imessage goes through apple servers but it doesn't help when you're using rcs between an iphone and an android phone you don't get the encryption together so the gsm association is coming up with a standard for this but then who's going to run the servers like does apple stand up its own sort of rcs key exchange servers does google open up its servers to everybody do the carriers run the servers i'm not quite sure this is going to work but it's good to see that they're working on it a little bit it would be better if the rcs standard came out of the gate with a solution to this problem but it absolutely did not i want to ask casey though because i think you're the main one who has complained about uh having conversations with android people and dropping messages and everything have you actually used rcs uh to your knowledge and is it better than it was when you were just using sms i have some so here's the funny situation the one group I do exchange messages with individuals that are on Android, but not terribly often.

44:57But there's one group chat that I talk on maybe once a week. And that is Aaron's brother and his wife. So my brother-in-law and sister-in-law. And Aaron's brother, my brother-in-law, is on Android, has always been on Android, will likely always be on Android. But my sister-in-law is enlightened in this regard and has had an iPhone since she's been part of the family. and so I noticed that I was not sending RCS messages in that group chat and yet I did have an occasion to send a text to my brother-in-law and that was RCS so I think I've gotten screwed by my damn sister-in-law who hasn't updated her damn phone to iOS 18 and I think that's the issue so I haven't yelled at her yet to get on the update train but I need to do so at some point there's also some confusion about when the iOS messages app shows RCS like as placeholder text in the text field to tell you that it's RCS, but in some cases it's not really RCS.

45:54It might just show that now, even when it's just doing MMS stuff. I don't know. There's some confusion about that. But anyway, good luck in getting everyone upgraded and let us know if that improves your life. Yeah. I will say, though, that in the brief exchange that my brother-in-law and I had directly, it was definitely better. I got a delivery receipt as an example, which was nice. I mean, the big thing is the images aren't terribly over-compressed thumbnails. Right. Yeah, I feel, I don't remember which conversation it was in, But I do feel like I did receive one image that was not potato quality, and that was an extremely welcome improvement.

46:26So I was very happy to see that. Moving right along, Apple is still tweaking their screen recording app permissions, and they're further decreasing the pop-up frequency in Sequoia 15.1, reading from MacRumors. In the release notes for the sixth beta of macOS Sequoia 15.1 update, Apple says that users aren't going to see as many screen recording permission pop-ups for apps they regularly use. Quote, Applications using our deprecated content capture technologies now have enhanced user awareness policies. Users will see fewer dialogues if they regularly use apps in which they have already acknowledged and accepted the risks.

47:00So this, I mean, again, I don't know how this affects the thing we talked about in the past where you can just use the plist thing to override it, although one of the feedback that we got was that 15.1 was the one that used bundle identifiers in the plist instead of using pass to the application so i guess that thing is still there but like now that we know that that exists and until apple invalidates that this entire thing just seems like a waste of time like don't bother trying to do things to make it less annoying because the only reason that anyone would ever be accepted of any annoyance here is in exchange for increased security for the purpose they wanted to do you know so you don't have an app that's recording without your knowledge that you forget about it or didn't know about it and you want the os say hey you might not know this or you might not remember this but app x is recording your screen that is the supposed security benefit right and there are many possible scenarios in which that could be beneficial but stuff like this where it's like oh if you use it frequently you'll see fewer dialogues or if someone just sets the p list key you'll like according to i wish i should have pulled the quote from snell but he was saying his understanding is that every time you use the app essentially it kicks the can down the road a little bit farther for you seeing the dialogue and if that's true you could just keep using the app every day and never see the dialogue but like like what are we even doing here if this is one google search away from you know a domestic abuser making it so you never see this dialogue we're not getting any benefit and you're just annoying people who don't benefit from this feature at all but anyway glad to see apple still working on it great uh john can you tell us about hotkey registration in sequoia please this is a weird one uh i and it came up because i actually use this so uh this is sequoia now requires global hotkeys to use at least one modifier that is not shift or option possibly only for sandbox apps so i have been able to confirm that a global modifier is like if you know hit command shift three take a screenshot right it doesn't matter what app you're in that keyboard shortcut in theory works anywhere in mac os that's a global keyboard shortcut and in sequoia you better use a modifier that's not shifter option or you can't do it and the reason this comes up for me is i have a i had uh although i think i still have it because i think the app's not sandbox a global key modifier and keyboard maestro which is option c which centers the front most window uh which is surprisingly useful if you're taking screenshots and stuff like that and it's a cool thing that keyboard maestro can do and i used option c because i couldn't think of any app that i used where option c was a keyboard shortcut that i used frequently but in sequoia if i guess if keyboard maestro was a sandbox app that wouldn't work and there's a comment in apple's developer forums from an apple frameworks engineer saying the following this was an intentional change in macOS sequoia to limit the ability of key logging malware to observe keys and other applications the issue of concern was that shift and option can be used to generate alternate characters and passwords such as the zero with a line through it which is shift option o so this is like basically apps can't i guess again maybe it's only sandbox app can't monitor for keystrokes uh globally that use shift and option because those are modifiers that you might use when typing a password i a lot of people in the forums also had trouble parsing like yeah but is this like how does it stop key logging aren't they just registering with this like an api call to register for a hotkey they're just registering for option c they're not going to see any other keystrokes unless someone hits option c how could you get someone's password that way it's very confusing but clearly it was intentional and so yeah i hope you didn't have any global hotkeys that used either only shift or only option that is a little wonky to me but whatever maybe they'll reverse it in 15.2 who knows and then anonymous writes in uh and says i just learned that on select max running sequoia there is usbc liquid detection i assume it works similar to how the iphone does when wet in that it refuses to charge and pops up a dialogue warning you that the iphone may be wet with the always inadvisable and baffling option to override and charge anyway i've encountered this warning before after using my iphone while in a pool i thought it was dry enough and foolishly plugged it into charge, I ended up just charging wirelessly for a day or two, a significant benefit of having MagSafe.

51:14Related to this, I was at a UVA game this past weekend, and the ground was a little dewy, you know, had a little bit of moisture on it because it was a noon game, because, whatever, I hate noon games, but here we are. Anyways, I had a USB-C cable that I had let flop into the grass that I was using to charge my phone, and when I put it back in my phone, it took a few seconds, but all of a sudden, and I can't recall if Bluetooth audio playback had stopped at this point or maybe it had continued, but all of a sudden I heard this like kind of distressing alarm coming from somewhere that was vaguely in the direction of both the speaker and also my phone.

51:52And I eventually realized, oh, it's my phone. I don't think I've ever heard my phone make this noise before. And sure enough, I picked it up and it was like, for the love of God, your USB-C port may be wet. It was very upset. And so I immediately unplugged the cable and it was very happy again. But I had seen something like this maybe last year, but certainly on Lightning phones. And it was far less aggressive. And it definitely, like I said, it made an audible alarm. Was it like the flash flood warning? Similar, not quite so traumatic, but similar if memory serves. But interestingly, it did so, even though I'm pretty damn sure the phone was silent.

52:34because my phone is almost never silenced. Excuse me, almost never on loud. And so it made that noise regardless, which I get, you know, if this is a potentially dangerous thing for the phone, I get that it would, you know, override silent mode. But it was very striking and very surprising. Did it give you the option to charge anyway, like this feedback says? I don't think so, but I wasn't looking that closely, to be honest with you. Anyway, look for this coming soon to a Mac near you, maybe. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think it's a good idea. Like if they have these liquid detectors and they can detect that there's liquid in the port saying, hey, I know you just plugged it in, but I'm choosing not to charge because I've detected liquid.

53:10And again, maybe not with an option to override, but it may be in really humid places. They get that every time they plug in. But yeah, it's good for Mac OS to get those features as well because anybody who's got a USB-C port, there could be water in there. Yep. I mean, Lightning too, but definitely with USB-C. All right, so we have some breaking news from I think the day before yesterday as we record. uh google apparently has to open android up for third-party stores and a bunch of other things and this is thanks to our quote-unquote friends over at epic uh reading from the verge on october 7th judge james donato issued his final ruling on epic versus google ordering google to effectively open up the google play store excuse me google play app store to competition for three whole years google will have to distribute rival third-party app stores within google play which is different And it must give rival third-party app stores access to the full catalog of Google Play apps.

54:03I'm sorry, what? Unless developers opt out individually. These were Epic's biggest asks, and they might change the Android app marketplace forever if they aren't immediately paused or blocked on appeal. And that's not all that Epic has won. starting on November 1, 2024, which is in, what, like three weeks, and ending on November 1, 2027, Google must also, number one, stop requiring Google Play billing for apps distributed on the Google Play Store. The jury found that Google had illegally tied its payment system to its App Store. Number two, let Android developers tell users about other ways to pay from within the Play Store.

54:40That sounds pretty cool. Number three, let Android developers link to ways to download their apps outside of the Play Store. also very cool. And finally, number four, let Android developers set their own prices for apps irrespective of Play billing. However, Google cannot share app revenue, quote, with any person or entity that distributes Android apps, quote, or plans to launch an app store or app platform. They cannot offer developers money or perks to launch their apps on the Play Store exclusively at first. They cannot offer developers money or perks not to launch their apps on rival stores.

55:15They cannot offer device makers or carriers money or perks to pre-install the Play Store, and they cannot offer device makers or carriers money or perks not to pre-install rival stores. In Epic vs. Google, Epic successfully argued that Google had created such a substantial array of deals with developers, carriers, and device makers that it was nigh impossible for rival stores to spring up. By blocking these sorts of deals and proactively helping rival app stores, it's possible that some real competition in Google's monopoly could now arrive. Google will still have some control over safety and security as it opens up the Google Play Store to rival stores The injunction says that Google can quote take reasonable measures quote that are strictly necessary and narrowly tailored and are comparable To how it currently policy uh polices policies uh polices I don't know uh the Google Play Store The Google will be able to charge a fee for that policing too Epic has repeatedly argued that Google should not be able to deter third-party app stores through policing so it's likely Epic and Google will keep butting heads over this.

56:15Would anyone that we know deter third-party app stores through policing? This is such an incredibly harsh judgment in a situation where Google was already way more open than Apple, and yet the jury decided, you may claim that you're open, but you've constructed all these deals and all these incentives that you really aren't open. So A, you're a monopoly, and B, the stuff you're doing in Paris competition. I don't think this bodes well for Apple. we'll see different cases sometimes uh google has gotten worse judgments because they like were claiming that they were open but they weren't whereas apple never claims that they are they're just like it's totally closed but like oh you know it's it's so hard for third-party app stores to get going you know how it makes it really hard for third-party app stores to go and completely never allowing them at all in any possible way like apple had been doing right but look at this they have to distribute the third party it's as if the epic store had to be in the app store and it automatically got access to every app in the app store unless the developer opted out like this is so can you imagine this judgment going against apple again with the caveat appeals blah blah who knows what this will end up but wow this is like the doomsday scenario for judgments on app stores it's all of apple's worst nightmares come true and all epic streams come true uh with the exception of the security policing thing which obviously they'll they'll argue about because like Like if you give a company like Google any kind of lever, any kind of oversight or input into this process, Google will decide how they can use it to try to get back the control that they're getting taken away by this.

57:48But man, again, this is in the US. So this is not DMA. This is not the EU. This was the case. We've talked about it before. Google was found to have a monopoly. How are they going to fix it? They're going to fix it by saying, yeah, Google, all that stuff you were doing, you're not doing that anymore. For three years. I don't know why. Three years. like when three years is over did this go back to the old way this is a slightly confusing remedy but boy this is i was about to say this is epic but i'm not going to do that this is extremely harsh google cannot be happy and i guess apple's over there thinking well boy i'm glad that will never happen to us because we're so different than google i mean so okay in all fairness the google case had a lot of details that do not that would not apply to apple in the same way like it isn't what was ruled illegal or you know or you know bad behavior that requires action was not just them having an app store and you know like and requiring their in-app purchase system it's like it isn't a directly applicable ruling to what apple is doing it's in the ballpark but there's a lot of differences in the google case like the actual things they were doing mostly because google didn't totally disallow all this stuff they had a system that ostensibly allowed it but then they did anti-competitive things to stop it from happening which you would think isn't that isn't what apple's doing even worse but in the past legal cases apple has come out ahead because they're like apple never even pretended they were allowing this there's not they weren't you know illegally restraining what should have been competition there never was any competition it was never allowed at all and obviously the eu thinks that's bad but so far that has actually helped them in u.s cases yeah exactly anyway so this you can't really read into direct conclusions that would affect Apple.

59:33However, it does strike in the ballpark. And what this shows, like, if this actually is not legally, you know, intervened with, like, if this actually comes to pass, this is a pretty disastrous result in a lot of ways. And so much of it is like, okay, yeah, it is better for consumers if certain things are open and competition is preserved and everything. However, the actual practical implementation of this remedy is going to be a mess for consumers and for developers especially. So this kind of shows the risk that these big platform companies take by trying and failing to self-regulate is that someone else will step in and regulate you in some other way that you have a lot less control over.

1:00:23And that way might be disastrous. So it is within the company's best long-term strategic interests to avoid this kind of regulation by not becoming an abusive monopoly, by not doing things that are anti-competitive and that might violate antitrust law in certain ways or that might tip off regulators that something needs to be done. Like ideally you as these big platform companies avoid this kind of thing happening to you in the first place because when you play fast and loose and when you are too greedy and too short-sighted and you invite this kind of scrutiny and regulation and court cases, you run the risk of there being a massively destructive and non-ideal resolution like this remedy.

1:01:10and who knows how destructive it will actually be by the way because obviously is destructive in that it destroys the thing that these people wanted to have because what they had before was what they wanted to have because they got to choose uh and that's what they wanted but like as we've said many times over i think it would actually behoove these companies to have to compete right to to to eventually have this competition force on them. What we would hope is that it would force them to make better products and services because now there's competition. So all the things that we would complain about about these services, they would say, well, there's no competition so they can get away with being that crappy because in the end they're still big.

1:01:46And someone in the chat room said, Chris said, the idea that you can't make a closed platform because the law explicitly says you can't is insane. Just to reiterate, you can make a closed platform. There's absolutely no problem with that. The only time there becomes a problem is if you are if you are found to have monopoly power and found to have abused that monopoly power. and if you're just making a closed platform you probably don't have monopoly power because you're a dinky little startup and it will take years and years and years if you're lucky for you to gain monopoly power and we could argue about is it a duopoly because apple and google are rare but there's no arguing that there is like a diversity of competition in the mobile phone app marketplace there's two things two main things especially in the u.s and the rest of the world there's more like in china and everything but like that amount of power is found to be by by the eu obviously and also by u.s courts to uh to require a different set of rules to apply to you so it's not like you can't make things integrated or whatever it's like when you get to a certain size when when the decisions that you make i think jason uh snell talked about this on upgrade recently uh when when you get so big that the things that you decide to do affect like the world economy and the competition across an entire industry that's when different sets of rules apply to you and it's easy for that to sneak up on you and it's easy for you to stay in the mindset of just like never give an inch keep everything um and you wake up one day and you're like the biggest company in the world and you and google control mobile phones uh almost entirely yeah and you get these judgments to go against you and i think the other thing to be that's interesting about this case is it was a case in the u.s and there was a jury and the jury basically bought a lot of the arguments that are in the complaint that the doj has filed against apple that that doing these things if If you're found to have monopoly power and you do these things like, you know, tying your payment system to the app store, the jury found that that's a thing that they shouldn't be allowed to do.

1:03:40Well, Apple does that. And, you know, paying people to not go into rival stores or whatever. Apple doesn't do that because they just forbid the rival stores. But it shows that there are U.S. juries that are ready to say that these kinds of practices are not just, oh, that's just the way it is and I accept it, but that apparently the lawyers were able to argue in a way that convinced the jury that, yeah, they probably – Google probably shouldn't be allowed to do this. Not that no company should ever be allowed to do this. Not that this is illegal, but that Google specifically, because of the things that they became convinced that Google has illegal monopoly power and so on and so forth, Google shouldn't be allowed to do these things.

1:04:15And a lot of those things are some of the same stuff that Apple does. Again, surrounding circumstances are also different. Cases are different. Juries are going to be different. The venue might be different. We'll see how it goes. But this is not a neutral judgment for Apple. I think this is at least a slight negative because it happened in their country and it happened to the company that is the closest to being like Apple, even though, again, there are big differences. And it happened with a U.S. jury that found some of the same things that Apple does were illegal. if you have monopoly power.

1:04:47Yeah, I wish I had had the presence of mind to reread the Stratechery articles that were about this and the Apple suit, because I remember Ben saying he expected Apple to do better than Google, but for the life of me, I can't remember what the justification was for that. It's because they never had an opening for competition. So it was like the illusion of competition, making, you know, deals, oh, you can do X, you can do Y, you can do Z, but then like coercing them through other means is found to be worse than just saying, look, there are no relationships with third-party stores. We don't allow third-party stores.

1:05:19We never have. We never will. It's basically like when you buy the iPhone in the before DMA days, when you buy the iPhone, you're not buying it with any expectation that there are third-party stores. Or you bought an Android phone, it's like, oh, Android is open. I can get apps from anywhere. But the Google was essentially disallowing that. I think that was the gist of at least one of the arguments. We need a podcast to summarize it for us. Hey, welcome back, everyone. No, I find this very fascinating. And I also find it fascinating as someone who writes code somewhat for a living. Some of the requests that the judge is making, the amount of rejiggering and rewriting and just code that is going to be required to make this work, I just can't fathom it.

1:06:05Like this is so much work. I mean, Apple was working on DMA stuff. It might be less than what Apple did for the DMA. though don't you think i don't know because apple wrote so much code to make sure that they could do what they wanted to do in the way they wanted where they could have just said fine third-party app source you know what i mean like it's it's less work to allow more things and apple works so hard and made so many frameworks sometimes necessary like trying to allow the browser engines while maintaining security like i think that was necessary but sometimes not necessary like yeah yeah but you know hey that's that's part of the danger of having a judgment go against you You don't get to decide.

1:06:38Suddenly you have to do a bunch of stuff, not on your schedule, not when you want to do it, not how you want to do it, but because a court ordered you to do it. And that's not no one wants to develop software that way. That's the danger of losing court cases. If you had actually self-regulated and been a little bit, you know, less controlling, you could have set your own schedule to do stuff like this. But didn't. Anyway, we'll see. You know, I don't know what the schedule is like. This will get appealed for the next five years. and we'll be talking about this in 2030 when Apple's carbon neutral, but we'll see.

1:07:08Yeah, I hear you. I don't know. It's wild. I don't know how it makes me feel that I'm kind of pleased that Tim Sweeney has made all these changes happen. And I bet if we were to listen back or have a podcast summarize our podcast for us, if we were to listen back to the episodes in, I think it was like late 2020, about when Tim deliberately, and Epic deliberately started taking third-party payments in their apps. You know, they had clearly planned to get evicted from the app stores, both Google and Apple, and it had like a whole site ready and waiting to go that they launched immediately after they got punted.

1:07:50I don't remember thinking of it fondly at the time, and I thought that they were being kind of pretty big turds. But now, looking back on it, maybe it wasn't so bad. Oh, no, they're turds too. they're just turds in different ways well true because you know why does epic want to run their own app store because they want 10 or 15 of everybody's purchases like that of course they want to be to be fair they're taking a lower percentage and you know why because when there's competition you have an incentive to undercut the competitor and especially when it's like you know zero percent margin software you can undercut them if you're willing to take less profit and for epic it's way more profit than not getting any profit from mobile platforms so they're willing to undercut Apple but you know Epic's tactics are not always in great and sometimes they ask for unreasonable things but that's the result is it's causing uh these these systems that have held up the two giant mobile platforms to come under scrutiny and to be judged and uh decided that they are actually impairing competition and here's how we should try to restore competition to the extent that benefits Epic ideally it would benefit anybody who wants to make a third-party store is now more free to do so than they were before.

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1:11:20in 2022 a 10-year 2.5 billion dollar deal was signed that kept most of mls this is major league soccer this is uh america's you know premier soccer uh league uh anyways kept most of mls exclusive to apple fox and univision would occasionally be able to air a game but most of the league would now be behind a paywall apple's deal would eventually help incentivize one of the world's most popular soccer players ever to finish his career in america as part of lionel messi's agreement with inter miami messi gets a cut of the revenue from new subscribers to mls season pass apple streaming service for mls games as messi's inter miami inter miami goes on a historic run clinching the supporter's shield an award given to the team with the best regular season record one has to question whether the league's deal with apple has blunted the impact of one of the all-time greats playing in america messi and inter miami's dominance this season wasn't a major storyline that sports observers were paying attention to or covering highlights have to appeared frequently on SportsCenter.

1:12:18Major online highlight factories like Bleacher Report and Overtime also haven't made much mention of Messi since he made his debut in 2023. It's hard for viewers to watch arguably the greatest soccer player in history during his run in the United States if the majority of his games are behind a paywall. There are no marketing partnerships of depth with the big dogs of sports media, and there's not much promotion done on linear television or even free online options like YouTube. It's a recipe for irrelevance. We don't need to talk too much about this, but I thought it was fascinating that here it is, you know, soccer slash football.

1:12:51We don't need to hear feedback on this, please. Soccer is arguably the most probably, maybe not even arguably the most popular sport in the world. I think F1 and soccer, it depends on who you ask, but they're both up there. Anyways, one of the most popular sports in the world. And here is, I think, arguably the best current active player of the most popular sport in the world. And nobody's paying attention. I only follow certain sports and I don't follow them super closely, but typically I'm aware enough that if something major is going on, you know, like my friend who had sent this to me, someone will mention it in a group chat that we're in, or you will call my attention to it or whatever.

1:13:29I don't typically watch SportsCenter or anything like that, but these sorts of things bubble up. I haven't heard diddly squat about MLS nor Lionel Messi outside of Apple initially, you know, mentioning him every four seconds when the deal was still new. I don't know if you guys remember that. But it is fascinating to me that Apple, understandably to my eyes, made a gamble that, hey, let's bring the world's greatest player, let's bring him into American soccer, let's put these golden handcuffs on him, and let's make a great deal so that he will only be performing for us in so many words. And yet, because it's behind Apple's paywall, it seems like nobody at all is paying attention.

1:14:11And that just is totally wild to me. And it shows that even when you throw a bunch of money at a problem, that doesn't necessarily fix the problem, especially if you don't understand it very well. Is it because of the paywall, though, or is it just because Americans don't like soccer? That's a very fair question. That's the easier solution. And the other thing is, I don't know much about soccer or this person, but from the article you read, incentivized him to finish his career in America. I am assuming he was the greatest soccer player but now he's getting kind of old and so i can you know you can equivalent of other sports of a great sports player that maybe is past their prime and they're you know by far they would be the biggest player in the mls but who are they playing with are they playing with all of their rivals from the peak of their career no they're back playing the real soccer and the rest of the world right so even even to a big soccer fan it's like oh well you know they got this great guy at the end of his career it's great he got put out to pasture and he can go beat up on the americans who aren't as good at soccer but like that's that's not enough to support a league the rest of the soccer world has all the stars of soccer playing each other which is much more exciting and i mean the paywall probably doesn't help here uh i'm i'm it's one of the most fascinating things about this deal is that they were able to finagle it so that he gets a percentage of his subscription revenue that's star power to have a deal with apple percentage subscription revenue like that just shows that he is the only player that matters in the league because i don't think there are many other players in mos that are getting a percentage of apple subscription revenue well but he probably only got 70 percent um he's probably getting a tiny percent but any percent it's like when movie stars get big enough to start getting like a percentage of gross right that's even bigger than that so i i think this the answer is that that americans just aren't into soccer but yeah and you know apple couldn't get the nfl that's what it comes out they tried they couldn't get it well i don't know though is it that they couldn't get it or that they just didn't really try hard yeah i mean i i think they literally couldn't because i think they one of the things i heard was that they were insisting on certain provisions that the nfl would not agree to as in like you know we need to have these rights or be able to shoot the games in this way or whatever and nfl wasn't willing to give that up and apple wasn't willing to do the deal without it so it's not just a matter of money it was a matter of like conditions maybe but either way they didn't get it and i think a lot of americans i don't know what the percentages are but i bet a lot of americans maybe even more than 50 percent pay to see the nfl even though technically there's over-the-air broadcasts that they could be getting right and so i don't even think the paywall issue is a big deal like if you put the nfl entirely behind a paywall and took it off over the air, people would complain and the viewership numbers would go down, but it would still probably be more popular than baseball.

1:16:55Yes and no, because honestly, the NFL is easier than ever to get one. There's asterisks and daggers and double daggers there. But for broadly speaking, the NFL is easier than ever to get access to because it used to be that the only way to have access to what's called Sunday ticket, which is basically you get to see all of the football games again, asterisk, dagger, double dagger. You can see all the football games really easily. And it used to be you had to have a DirecTV subscription, which was a satellite cable, not a cable provider, but a satellite provider here in the States. It was easier overseas, but here in the States, you had to have a DirecTV dish.

1:17:32You had to have a DirecTV subscription, et cetera, et cetera. Now you can do it on YouTube TV, but it's something like$500 a year. It is astronomical, the price of NFL Sunday ticket. It is hilariously expensive. and because of that i think that a lot of people will go to fairly stark lengths in order to avoid paying that money and uh let's just say i've looked into this and there are not a lot of great options that i've found but um it is it is extremely expensive and i don't i don't know how it would turn out if the nfl came off of terrestrial tv but no i'm just saying it came off of over-the-air waves.

1:18:14Like, it would still be on basic cable for your home team or whatever. I don't know the terms. But anyway, the NFL Sunday ticket is for the people who need to see every game or whatever. It's very expensive. But I'm saying, if the NFL was not available for free, then in other words, you had to pay for cable television, for example, to see games, right? We're not in that situation now. Basically, I'm wondering how many people watch the NFL on over-the-air broadcasts. I don't think it would be that many, to be honest with you. Also, before I forget real-time follow-up, it's not Lionel, it's Lionel Messi.

1:18:39My American is showing and I apologize. I'm sure we've gotten a thousand emails and tweets. I'm sorry about that. But no, to come back to the NFL, I don't know. I think some of what's going on with the MLS, as you said, is just that Americans don't care about soccer. But I do feel like if this content was easier to consume, you would see more of it. So as an example, I don't pay much attention to the NBA, even though I would actually like to pay more attention to it, but I just never think about it. I don't pay much attention to the NBA, but I'll see interesting plays bubble up through one of several different group chats.

1:19:12I'll see it occasionally through, you know, Mastodon, or if for some reason I do open Twitter, usually to look at a single tweet and then dismiss it, then oftentimes I'll see like a basketball, you know, play or sequence floating by. There's so much, and like NBA Twitter, from what I gather, is phenomenal. There's so much that bubbles up. And I think a large part of that, and this is what this post or this story is trying to say, is that so much of that is because it's easy to capture, it's easy to share it's easy to get to americans like basketball that's why i think it's really popular i think what canadian invented it maybe but it's basically practically an american's for the love of god john it was invented in springfield mass all right i can't forget it was a canadian oh my god basket but anyway the point is americans like basketball that's why people that's why you're seeing clips from it well i think it's i don't think you're seeing a lot of clips of basketball games and you know other parts of the world where it's not popular but it's really popular in this country have you heard of michael jordan that was a long time larry bird oh my god you're getting older you're getting older i'm just saying it's been popular for a long time obviously nfl has come from come from out of nowhere to become the most popular sport but like yeah you're you're of course you're going to see highlights you're going to even see heights from baseball the american pastime even the nfl is more popular right uh i think that's a better explanation and not the the venue for the thing but you know maybe they need like they had drive to survive to try to get Americans interested in F1.

1:20:31They need like a boot to toot or something for saving Americans into soccer. Oh my God. Good luck with that. Yeah, right. I'm pleased that we had an actual conversation about this. I feel quite satisfied now. Thank you for indulging me, gentlemen. Oh my goodness. All right, let's move back to tech stuff or strictly tech stuff. Apple has said or is being said that Apple is no longer in talks to join OpenAI's investment round. We had already heard that they were not going to take a board seat, if I'm not mistaken, but now they're apparently not even investing. So reading from the Wall Street Journal, Apple is no longer in talks to participate in OpenAI funding round, expected to raise as much as$6.5 billion, an 11th hour end to what would have been a rare investment by the iPhone maker and another major Silicon Valley company, according to a knowledgeable person.

1:21:18The two other tech giants, Microsoft and NVIDIA, have also been in talks to participate in the round. Microsoft is expected to invest around$1 billion, adding to the$13 billion it already has put into the company. according to people familiar with Matter. The funding talks aren't completed and it is possible the participants' investment amounts could change. OpenAI is also in the process of overhauling its corporate structure from a non-profit into a for-profit company. That change, which was encouraged by many of the investors in the round, you don't say, will be a complicated process for the startup.

1:21:47If it doesn't complete the change within two years, investors in the current round will have the right to request their money back. Apple hasn't even shipped their OpenAI integration and already they're just like, we talked about this before how open ai's the culture and apple's culture are not a good match uh but that's sometimes just the way it is with a young company and an older company young upstart right you know maybe they kick out their ceo and he comes back and kicks out everyone like a lot of drama going on recently their cto left and a bunch of other people like it's open ai a lot of drama and apple doesn't like drama but they did the deal they did the deal with open ai they talked about them in the keynote when you know your thing on your phone can't figure it out you'll have the option of sending it to open ai and they did this deal which supposedly no money's changing hands they don't know the details and they were going to be an investor and they were going to have a board seat oh no board seat and actually you know what maybe we're going to sit this one out investment wise maybe we just don't think there's a big upside there and i don't and apple was really touting like you know we did the deal with open ai but we're almost we've almost got to deal with google for gemini and we haven't heard anything about that since wwc when they were like yeah totally it's not just open ai where other where you know this gemini deal is probably going to happen real soon now and that not that they said that but they were hinting in that direction and so far no gemini deal open ai is ostensibly going to ship as a feature of our phones at some point in the future and apple is rapidly not distancing itself but getting less cozy than they were before with open ai maybe they just didn't they just figured you know we could have better use of our money we've got the deal that we want we don't need to invest or maybe they're really just you know hedging their bets and you know i don't think they're going to be investing in google anytime soon but uh and maybe that's part of it maybe open ai is getting so big and has so much funding i think they've raised more money than any quote-unquote startup ever if you can call this company a startup at this point um but yeah maybe they're just like they don't need our help and maybe we're we'll talk about this in overtime but maybe they think maybe we're like accidentally funding our future biggest rival and we don't want to do that or maybe they just uh are rethinking getting even tighter with this company that seems to be in constant turmoil all right let's do some ask atp and let's start with james sutcliffe asking will john be buying the new 700 sony playstation pro and can you john give me the two second overview you on what makes the playstation pro pro and also 700 please yeah this is a thing that sony's been doing where it's not a mid-cycle update but like uh at some point in the life of their console generation they will release a better version of the same console that plays all the same games that plays them better in some way uh so the the ps4 and the ps4 pro this is in addition to the slim model which is just the plain ps4 and it was the ps4 slim anyway there's the ps5 which i have then they made the ps5 slim which is a slimmer version of the ps5 and now they've announced the ps5 pro and what makes it better it's got a beefier gpu a little bit better cpu sometimes they have more ram uh i don't know the the technical details uh that much for the playstation 5 pro uh but it is i do know the effect on the games and the effect is uh sometimes they run at higher frame rates sometimes they run at higher resolution or higher apparent resolution with upscaling uh but they run all the same games just a little bit better i always buy the pros models because i want to run the same games a little bit better uh and very often they will be not remasters but like game existing games that they've already shipped will be updated to look better on the pro version of the console and that's happening with a bunch of games that i like uh i think they're doing an update to the last of us part two and the last of us part two tv series is coming out soon so i might replay through the last of us part two before the tv series just like i replayed through the original last of us uh for the third time before the tvc series came out and just like i got to replay through the sort of remastered ps5 version of the last of us now i'll get to uh replay through the ps5 pro enhanced version of the last of us part two and so to answer the question yes i already pre-ordered my sony playstation 5 pro and i'm looking forward to it and i'm sorry it's replacing a regular playstation 5 yeah i'm the what's going to happen is the playstation 5 will rotate up to my son's room replacing the ps4 pro which is this is the rotation in the house so we just said when i get a new console my old one goes up to him and that'll be good because the ps4 pro even though i have an ssd attached to it it's just so much slower we're playing the same game like we're playing destiny with each other right but i have to wait for his load times and this will really be a big upgrade to his load times you but it's really for you though you are you said you have to wait for his load times you really you're speeding up your own well you know he'll like having a better game console to even though half the time he's playing games on his iPad anyway.

1:26:35But the PS5 will take up way more room on his desk in his room but he'll survive. You know, with all of the redundant PlayStations, you could have bought at least one Xbox. That's something you could have done. Why would I want that? Or like a gaming PC and you can stop buying Mac Pros. Also true. I would much rather have the PlayStation than the gaming PC. Alright. Justin Waring writes, iOS 18's vehicle motion cues mitigated John's motion sickness at all. So to recap, and then I would like to throw in my two cents real quick, vehicle motion cues is there's a bunch of dots, like circles, that are on your phone screen as you're riding in a car.

1:27:13And let's say you're holding your phone and the car starts to accelerate. Those dots will move toward the bottom of the phone a little bit. And I think the way this is supposed to work is for your vision to match what your inner ear is feeling. because otherwise, if you're staring at your phone and nothing's moving, there's a disconnect between what your inner ear is saying is happening and what your eyes are seeing. And so it's supposed to allegedly help. And I don't recall if it's on by default or not in iOS 18, but I certainly had it on for a little while, I guess on my iPhone 16, I believe.

1:27:45And I found it so incredibly distracting. And as someone who is not used to motion sickness, you know, I don't typically get motion sickness. I found it so distracting that it didn't take me very long to turn it off entirely. um aaron also suffers from motion sickness when reading in the car and i don't think we've been in the car very long with her as a passenger so i haven't had a chance to ask her about this but with that preamble aside john have you tried it i get motion sick when i look at my phone so i would never look at my phone in the car but this is the whole thing what i know it's the chicken egg problem it's like oh but no now you'll be able to because the dots will save you it's like why would i why would i ever look at my phone in the car it's like it's like asking you to like drink this cup of ipecac it'll be fine no thanks wow um so here's the thing though i i was aware of this feature and i made sure when i updated you know it's ios 18 even before i got my new phone i made sure it was on automatic because automatic is supposed to like you can turn it off or on or on automatic automatic is supposed to detect when you're in a car by like your gps location and you're you know it detects when you're driving and it will turn the dots on and freaking thing never turn the dots on i'm in a car phone yeah yeah i'm a passenger in a car we're driving down the highway at 45 miles an hour like it's not turning on i want to know what it's waiting for so what i did do was i added the dots thing to control center the new customizable control center and i had i do actually want to try it at some point but honestly like i'm never going to look at my phone when i'm in the car like i i get everyone gets motion sick to varying degrees and i get motion sick extremely easily the dots are not going to save me like there's no there's no freaking chance like i i understand the theory you stated it well but that's not enough like those little dots are not going to be the thing that makes me not get motion sick you don't know that you've never tried it you don't know i'm going to try it and i'm going to get uh you know sick to my stomach and i'm going to be mad at the stupid well with that attitude yeah you will i'll try it for science but like look it's like it's like those glasses with the liquid in them you've seen those like it's like a bunch of glasses you wear but they have like water in them and so as you as your head tilts like on a boat the water will stay level and it's in your field division so it's like i've never heard of this i've heard of all the the motion sickness thing you can possibly imagine like i i i'm sure this will help this will help people if you're within the threshold that this can help you that's great i'm so far past the threshold stuff's gonna help me i'll try it for science if i remember to the next time i'm a passenger but i have dim hopes because i think nothing can help me but not moving me good to know oh goodness neil mcgregor writes given the time scales that we think we know about iphone hardware lead times it seems unlikely that just this generation of iphone was really quote built from the ground up for ai when do you think the first true built from the ground up for ai iphone will be launched what specifications will be the telltale signs for example a step change in neural engine performance on characteristic jump and ram bigger battery for demanding workflows custom compute beyond the neural engine etc the difference in this generation appears to be the ram size which i assume it could be added to a chip design relatively late in the development and i would and it was likely to happen at some point anyway i get what neil's saying here and i don't disagree but i don't know what i would look for other than you know a wildly beefier neural engine i'm not sure what else would be a good sign to me we need suruji what's his first name johnny suruji yeah we need him every time he gets an interview he says this exact same thing and he's like i just can't get it through your thick skull so i'm going to keep saying it and i agree with him what he would say if he was given this question is we've been putting neural engines in our phone chips for years built from the ground up for ai that's a marketing term but practically speaking apple has been putting machine learning hardware in its chips way before anyone else was they were emphasizing it they were building features around it they were like making apis for it they were making frameworks around it they continue to do so so if you look at the phone and say what would it look like if it was built for ai would it have like a beefy neural engine well they already have that like they didn't it doesn't look like it's any different because they just make the neural engine better year after year or whatever um increasing the ram size uh neil's right that's something that's pretty easy to do and it's pretty clear they did that for apple intelligence but honestly i think a you know even though surely this phone was not when this hardware was being planned apple intelligence maybe wasn't even a twinkle in anyone's eye so in that respect the whole built from the ground up for ai is a little bit marketing spin a little bit of truth in that we did make sure they all had eight gigs of ram like so i give it a pass on that it's not you know it's not a completely bogus marketing thing but it's also not true that when they were planning this phone they were like this needs to run apple intelligence because they didn't even have apple intelligence based on the rumors that we've heard of when this was conceived in the you know three-year lead times or whatever on new phones but honestly a phone built from the ground up for ai wouldn't look that different than like the 16 pro and the 16 pro max like i don't think we should expect any massive change to the soc for apple intelligence especially since apple intelligence as we record this is still essentially an unproven feature do people love it and they want a hundred times more of it or does it just like it's all right i hope they make it better like like siri is a good example a voice system is great and we take it for granted and we think it's an important feature and it should be there but they didn't remake the entire phone around it because a siri wasn't good enough for that and b there are so many other things that we do with our phone that are not siri that there was no reason to bend the entire phone around siri they did make the microphones better they didn't make siri better they did have the neural engine to make it beefier and beefier but like in the end And were we previously using phones that were built from the ground up from Siri?

1:33:28Like, I think this is putting the cart before the horse, as the entire industry is, with the assumption that AI will be the most important feature on our phone and we want the entire hardware design to be focused on that feature. Let's see how the feature does before we completely change the hardware design of the phone around it and, again, give it a three-year lead time. Sharon Gordon writes, I'm wondering if any of you have made the switch and really started using passkeys. What are the pros and cons, not just security-wise, but convenience-wise? Is it difficult to transfer them to a new device?

1:33:57Right now I'm in a situation where my 2FA codes are an authy, which doesn't allow export, and I'm considering redoing them all and putting them in Apple's new passwords app, even though I'm a paid 1Password user. It's all getting a little confusing. Are there any articles you can recommend that really go over this, especially from an Apple ecosystem point of view? I have largely been ignoring passkeys. There's a handful of places I use them, but generally speaking, I don't. And that's mostly because of a similar ignorance. And also, I don't feel like I have a good understanding of how sharing a passkey would work if such a thing is even possible.

1:34:34But there are some things that Aaron and I, like let's take Amazon as an example. Aaron and I, you know, both use the same Amazon login. And I don't know, I genuinely don't know. That's not, you know, a figure of speech. I truly don't know how that would work if I were to switch my Amazon login, for example, to a passkey. So I am here for you to tutor not only Sharon, but me as well. I mean, my answer is pretty boring. Whenever a website asks me if I'd like to add a passkey, I say yes, and I add it. But most websites don't ask me that. So I only have a handful of them so far. I'm not taking proactive actions to move myself over to it.

1:35:14not out of any kind of fear or political statement about them, more just I have more important things to do most of the time. And that's just like that's one of those kind of like technical hygiene tasks that I think most working adults don't have time to actually really ever do. So I intend to maybe someday get there, but I just haven't yet. But whenever websites ask me, I say yes. John. So to help answer Sharon's question a little bit, we should link to Ricky Mondello's post about migrating password managers, migrating to the Apple password system and pass keys. And it's got some good advice about not trying to do like a big bang type of like, I'm going to go in there and change everything and transfer all my stuff that you kind of do it sort of the demand page version of it, sort of slow, gradual.

1:36:08one so that's actually a good uh a good some even if you don't follow the advice in the article it's a good mindset to get into that you it's not like you're you're not missing some boat that's leaving and you need to get on it and it will change your life or whatever right this is pass keys are a developing technology i'm kind of in the same uh boat with marco in that i'm when they offer it i take it but uh as ricky will tell you lots of websites uh that implement pass keys choose totally different policies for those passkeys than other websites because you can websites can choose to do whatever they want they can give you a passkey and then remove your password they can let you use a password and a passkey github uses passkeys as a second factor in a two-factor login so you enter your username and your password and then as a second factor one of the things that you can use is your passkey which is totally not the supposed intention of passkeys but technologically there's nothing stopping you from doing it so the bottom line is that every website that uses pass keys is has some different notion of where they fit in in their website and maybe that will change over time like in the beginning we wanted to roll out pass keys just to try them out and if lots of people adopt them maybe we'll do this but like you just because a website supports pass keys or anything supports ks doesn't mean my my perspective is i don't know based on that how it's going to work okay so you've got pass keys when someone says like oh we support usernames and passwords i more or less know how that's going to work these days although there was a kind of a older people remember the somewhat annoying drawn out transition between sites and other things asking you for a username that was not an email address you both remember those days right those were not good days some websites still do it but in general we've sort of settled on if you're going to have a login to a website that's not going to be like a third-party login like login with google login with twitter login with apple whatever thing that it's going to say username and a password and the username is going to be an email address but back in the battle days you had to come up with a username and put numbers at the end of it and do other awful things right that's where we are i feel like with pass keys it's like oh so you support cassies i don't know what you're going to want from me if i if i enable this pass key are you going to remove my password and my password won't work anymore because sometimes i don't want to do that because not because i don't trust passkeys but i don't trust the website to implement passkeys well enough and there are some things you know casey mentioned the sharing of passkeys which i think is trivial with apple's passwords it's just like you put it in a shared group or whatever and by the way i'm loving the shared groups i made a bunch for my family and they're really making your life better so thumbs up on that as someone who wasn't a one password user which has that feature has had it for ages it's great for me to have it now and the apple uh key chain thing but pass keys there are still some technical limitations the the sort of export import flow for pass keys is supposedly coming soon but it's not available yet they want to do it in a secure way so on and so forth and that is the limitation versus plain old passwords where it's easy for example not easy but it is very possible for example to migrate from one password to apple's password system because one password has an export and apple's password have an import obviously making that export is incredibly insecure right because there's your passwords in plain text and a file that you're going to import or whatever so that's not great and passkey is going to try to do that better but there's no good cross-platform way to do that with passkeys yet and every website that uses passkeys can pick a different policy and you really never know what it's going to be can you just log in with the passkey by itself can you keep the password in the passkey if so how do you choose to use the passkey are you only prompted to use your passkey when you use browser X and not browser Y, does it work on your phone or your Mac?

1:39:57My stance is anytime there is a passkey, I would like to use it instead of a password, but I'm not even always given that option. So I think we are in a transition period and it's fine for you to dip your toe in. Find a website that uses passkeys that you think it will make your experience better and try it for a while. I've been on sites that took away my password and I've disabled the passkey so I could get my password back because I didn't trust yet that this website was implementing passkeys well enough that I wasn't going to get locked out of my account, right? You have to kind of make those choices on your own.

1:40:28So fingers crossed for me on passkeys. I'm optimistic about technology, but it is still young. All right. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Tailscale and Delete Me. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week's overtime is on AI moats and trade secrets. So tune in if you're a member. You already get it. If you want to hear this and you aren't a member, atv.fm slash join. Thank you so much and we'll talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.

1:41:13Oh, it was accidental. Accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause it was accidental. Accidental. It was accidental. Accidental. And you can find the show notes at atp.fm. And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's Casey List M-A-R-C-O A-R-M And G-Marco R-M-N S-I-R-A-C U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech Podcast So long So, my kid's gaming PC It's a laptop It's a Razor laptop. All three of us in our household have Razer gaming laptops of varying ages and specs. Those are, together, our gaming PCs.

1:42:23Tiff's is dying and won't even boot anymore. Oh, cool. And it's actually her second one. Mine is perfect and works great because I hardly ever use it. And my kids has been having some problems. a lot of problems. You know, first of all, it's a Windows laptop. So, most of the time when it is closed, for some reason, it is very hot. The fans still run. It's like, it's, it's like, you know, standard kind of like, you know, messed up Windows laptop problems. Like, this thing doesn't sleep well like me with a pseudo-ephedrin. So, like, this thing does not sleep well. It, it seems to be doing a lot of work for nothing.

1:43:11most of the time. The thermals are awful. So I thought and he started to complain a lot about really bad performance in pretty much any action. Now at first I thought like maybe it's some kind of weird malware that he installed while downloading some random thing off of a Discord. But then he actually showed me like there were some common tasks like it was opening up the browser and it took so long to open. I'm like okay something is more wrong with this than that and like any game would fail miserably it's not like all right maybe it's thermals it's a laptop it's been running its fans on a high for like two years so chances are there's probably a lot of dust and crap in there maybe it's clogging up one of the heat sinks or some of the fans so can i pause for a second here just point this out which i know i mentioned this before but just to show that it's not just my family and that it is a thing when we were all kids.

1:44:13When there was a problem with the computer, we fixed it because our parents were old and didn't understand computers and we were young and we did. Not every young person understood computers, but we did. Now that we are older, I mean, my parents said this to me all the time when I was a child. When you get old like me, your kids will have to explain technology to you. But instead what happens is that our children's computers don't work and they bring them to us to fix because we understand computers. Now, obviously we have a tech podcast where programmers like we're not the average person. But I still feel like we may end up being, or at least my generation, Gen X may end up being the only generation that had to fix all the computer problems when we were kids because our parents were tooled to understand it and still have to fix all the computer problems when we're older because young kids don't know or care anything about computers because they just take it for granted and PCs are for old people anyway.

1:44:57And so here you are, Marco, debugging and fixing computer problems for your kid. Where was the future we were promised where we would be old fuddy-duddies and our kids would have to fix our computers? My kids don't fix my computers. I mean, I think eventually my kid will know enough about computers that he won't need me anymore. That time has not yet come, though. I mean, he's only 12. My son is a junior computer science major with excellent grades, and I still fix his computer. Anyway, so I decided this laptop is long out of warranty. and I tried I even looked like I installed some process monitoring tool and I even tried like I used the built-in task monitor or whatever and like nothing seemed to be using a lot of CPU or GPU power like there was no reason why it had to be running its fans on full blast I'm like all right well whatever let me open it up and see if I can blow out some dust unfortunately I know where the story is going so I just wanted to ask you a leading question here before you got to this stage is there anything else you noticed about the computer that gave you any pause no okay not at all proceed all right so i you know so i flip it over i get out my trusty i fix it screwdriver kit find the right screwdriver to take the bottom screws off and and you know so i mean you know i do like the four corners of the the screws i think it's like you know three across the top three across the bottom so i take off the the and when i when i get to the corner on on one of the one of the two bottom corners when i open it up the whole panel kind of pops up not a good sign and i'm like hmm that's unusual why are the contents under pressure like that's did you shake up the laptop before you opened it i'm like hmm that's anyway so i i uh continued to open the rest of it pulled it off and i noticed the uh the battery has ballooned somewhat and i'm like all alarming i another aside here by the way you posted this on was it massonara thread where you posted this i keep forgetting threads exists all right so there is there is speaking of threads there is a thing that there are people writing stories about this and it amazes me they're writing stories about this now and not last month or the month before the month before that because it's always been true uh about threads uh things on threads uh like having the algorithm on threads essentially promoting they're calling it like engagement bait but it's kind of like the version of clickbait it was basically the well someone will post something uh innocently like pretend innocently post something that they know will be incredibly controversial and everyone will reply about and so marco unwittingly did this but not on threads posting a picture of his battery and saying do you think this looks okay and it was exactly like the engagement on threads where it's It definitely is.

1:47:52Nobody would ask that. No sane person would say something like this unless it was totally like because they know a thousand people are going to reply and say, hey, dummy, don't you know about X, Y, and Z? I can't think of an example from threads, but just you don't need me to put an example. Open up threads right now. Go to the algorithm timeline that it automatically switches to you even if you switch to following because they're evil. And just look at what the top post is. And it's going to be some person innocently saying, I always thought that X, Y, and Z, but I'm not sure about whatever. and there's gonna be a thousand reply guys replying to this engagement bait and that's what threads has become well marco is is i think it was were you you have to tell me were you legitimately asking that question or were you doing it just to get uh insane reactions i was legitimately because like okay i know that swollen batteries are a bad thing good um but i didn't like it was only a little bit puffy so i didn't know like no that is not true this is the puffiest battery i've ever seen in my entire life look like a ravioli it looked like it was about to explode i thought you should have immediately put it on your driveway and called the fire department well when i saw it i'm like okay well it has puffed up enough to like you know to push the case but i'm like i've never seen a razor battery i don't know what their starting state is this is how they normally they normally look like pillows i don't know it pushed the case open but only like it wasn't like only a little well yeah like you know what you normally see is like laptops where like the keyboard is starting to bend upwards or the trackpad has popped out that's why i was asking like did you notice that like that was the case bulging and the reason i asked that is because i saw the battery right but no the case was fine it was just like a little bit of pop on the case when i opened it up so like it didn't that's why i was like i know this is not i like i'm pretty sure this isn't normal but like how far gone is this this it was a perfect example of engagement bait unintentional apparently but yeah anyway so everyone reports back to me oh yeah that's bad apparently they're called spicy pillows like no one taught me this slang so right but and of course every single reply is making that joke i'm like oh wow you guys really really original there um i I assume some YouTuber popularizes this term.

1:50:06It's a, I don't want to say it's a meme. It is a term of art, let's say in the field. And yes, there are pouch style batteries, but there are no ravioli style battery. Anyway. And I heard from a bunch of people who said basically their razor laptop also had this happen, including the replacement battery they got also had the same problem, like within a short time, consistent manufacturing. Yeah, exactly. So anyway, um, so I'm like, crap. Like, I don't like he, there's a possibility of a gaming PC happening in his Christmas future. So I'm like, I just, I gotta make this last till Christmas. I'm like, how?

1:50:43But now that I've seen this, it's like, I can't just let this go. Like, I can't just leave it there. Like, I have to take action now that I've uncovered this. That's what the world was telling you. The world was telling you your house will burn down. Right. So what I was wondering is, can I get this to work, you know, until Christmas at least? and miraculously so first i i blew out all the dust out of all the fans and everything um and it seemed to work but then i was like i wonder when you say it seemed to work i was gonna say like you have these gaming laptops but honestly they're gaming desktops that are just bad desktops because like who's using a gaming laptop not plugged in your performance will tank so were you using this you had removed the battery and disposed of it properly but the thing would still boot if you just plugged into power that's what i wondered because like i would assume that a modern Apple laptop will not boot with the battery unplugged.

1:51:35Because I would assume it's like buffering the power through that in some way. So I thought there's no way this is going to work without a battery. So I'd say, you know, let me just try it. I took out the battery. It took a long time to get the battery out. Maybe because it had swelled. You were trying not to explode. That too. But I think maybe I was looking up all these different YouTube videos on how to disassemble these things. And of course, like every minor revision of a Razer gaming laptop is differently laid out inside enough that no YouTube video matches whatever one you happen to be needing to take apart in a given moment.

1:52:13So like I'd never found one that matched the one I was looking at. But it was clear to me that like, OK, I've unscrewed like the five screws that hold this in and it's not coming out. I eventually had to like bend the case slightly to like get the battery to pop out. So, oh, that's good. I think I think it had just swelled beyond its original size. Anyway, I eventually pop it out and I'm thinking like, all right, let me see if I can just turn it on without the battery. And sure enough, it works totally fine. It just boots up like it's like, OK, fine. I guess I don't have a battery anymore. I guess I'm a desktop.

1:52:46OK, like Windows is so gloriously dumb. It's just like, OK, cool. I'm a desktop boots right up like no. Like it doesn't even give me a message. Nothing is complaining. It just booted and everything works great. So now it's just a desktop, a crappy desktop, as John said, but a desktop on the list. The performance issues are gone. It works way better. Part of that is also probably the anti-malware scan that I did that removed eight unwanted programs or whatever. But it seems to be in a much better state now. I think the Christmas gaming PC is probably still going to have to happen. but uh i think we will get there now uh more safely did you tape the power cord in or something or put a little note that says do not unplug no i mean i told him hey this is not going to work on a battery anymore but like he never used on a battery anyway because it sucked on battery i was gonna say who's using a gaming laptop on a battery anyway it really i mean and first of all like i can't say enough mediocrity uh about razor uh as a as a company that makes gaming laptops like it's one of those products that's great as long as you don't use it too much and there's a lot of products out there like that especially in tech so my razor gaming pc is great because i hardly ever use it i absolutely it's it's now a few years old it's it's worked great for the few times i've actually played games um that's who a gaming gaming laptop is for a gaming laptop is not for gamers it's just not like it is like an actual gamer who's going to use it regularly should have a desktop because these laptops are just and and it's an impossible problem like the if you're going to have any kind of remotely gaming possible gpu you're going to have such power demands and such heat production from that thing it's just not going to have a long life in a laptop form factor and and it's going to be a crap laptop like and i and knowing this i i didn't even get like a really high spec one i got like a mid-range gpu in his i figured like i know he's going to still use it as a laptop like back and forth to the beach like i didn't want to you know have too too short of a life so when i when i specced out to buy it i specifically chose like the like the second lowest gpu option uh and and still even then massive heat massive problems the battery life was never usable like ever uh so i think the the answer is for pc gaming desktops are the way to go so but why are you getting another laptop then i'm not i'm saying a gaming desktop is going to probably happen oh i thought you said you were going to get another gaming laptop from yeah no now if i was getting myself a gaming pc i would most likely get another laptop if i needed to but my current one works great even though it's three years old because i never use it and so yeah gaming laptops great if you never use them