616: I Have No Grippers

32:50But those memory chips, those little squares that you see them soldering onto there, there's no legitimate place to get them, apparently. Apple won't sell them to you. Apple suppliers are not supposed to sell them to you. You could get them from old Macs that are broken, but the SSD is fine, but then it's basically a used chip. Or, as you know, maybe they're quote-unquote diverted illegally in the supply chain, where the company that is making and selling these to Apple. On the side, we'll sell some, you know, out the back door to some other people or whatever. But all of the difficulties in this procedure are not technical, are merely business related.

33:25That Apple doesn't want there to be a market for a third party upgrade to these computers, despite the fact that the SSDs are removable. And I think we discussed this last episode that one of the obvious reasons Apple would want to make them removable is because it makes their repairs cheaper. If the SSD goes bad, they don't have to throw out the whole logic board. obviously on laptops they've been soldering them down because it's a very small area and size is a constraint but on their desktop max even in the mac mini there's enough room in there that you can make it removable arguably you could still kind of make it removable on laptops but for whatever reason apple's been soldering down the ssd chips but that makes any kind of repair like if one of those ssd chips goes bad or something so expensive because you have to chuck the whole thing out and give an entirely new logic board now on their desktop max you don't have to do that if the SSD goes bad, Apple can just replace it under warranty with one of those little module that costs them a price that is much lower than what we would pay for it.

34:15And speaking of third party storage upgrades, reported on MacRumors, French company Polysoft has successfully reverse engineered Apple's proprietary storage modules for the Mac Studio and plans to offer more affordable upgrade options starting in January 2025, following a successful Kickstarter campaign. It raised a little under$100 ,000 from 144 backers. They plan to offer two terabytes for$420, which is about 30 % less than Apple's$600. They plan to offer four terabytes for about$850, which is, again, about 30 % less than Apple's$1 ,200. And eight terabytes for a little less than$1 ,200, which is over 50 % less than Apple's$2 ,400.

34:58dollars great remember those prices for apple are not the price that they will sell you that module for because they won't sell you those modules that's the price for upgrading from 512 to that amount so when going from 512 to 2 terabytes you're paying for 1.5 terabytes for 600 so if they were to sell you these individually like they do on the mac pro the 8 terabyte one would probably be 2800 or something like that right but yeah for the 8 terabyte one they're undercutting apple they're saying well for half price you can get eight terabytes in your mac studio for half price and note that what they're selling here is third party ssd upgrades for the mac studio you can't just buy these and stick them in your mac pro or in another computer like they're just it's very specific because they have to be matched to the soc and the whole motherboard and all that other stuff right but i see this and i think wow look storage competition it kind of opens my like if they're successful and marco listed many reasons why they might not be and we'll get to some more in a little bit but if they are successful this would actually put some competitive pressure on apple and it might bring us back to the days where we say oh if you're going to get a mac get it with the smallest amount of storage available and then just chuck that out and buy one of these upgrades from a third party because it's the exact same part in fact it might even be better uh but it can be uh as cheap as half price uh so apparently luke miani miani my i'm sorry uh tried it i didn't get a chance to watch this video before we recorded so what's going on here yeah it just is he bought one of these things and installed it in his uh mac studio and in fact he installed it backwards for the first time he didn't realize that what that one's got to go in one slot and one's got to go in the other slot and it didn't work right right but he eventually figured it out um but yeah it's a lot easier than soldering you just buy this thing from somebody it comes in the mail you open up your mac studio which is annoying because there's this stupid circular foam thing you have to cut off with adhesive anyway apple could really make these macs easier to open but anyway you open it up and stick the things in and uh you got eight terabytes in his uh mac studio for half the price that he would have if he bought it from apple uh and you can check out the video but mostly i put it in there to show that this is i mean i guess he's kind of an apple centric thing but this seeing videos about upgrading mac storage this is the topic of the day for these desktop macs i mean obviously this is about the mac studio but also the mac mini like if apple's going to put these in modules people are going to look at that and say i should be able to upgrade that and apple will say but you shouldn't but you know but yeah i should be like i can i can physically remove it it's here in my hand can i get another one of these but not buy it from you it's kind of like the app store stuff where it's like everyone's like yeah we want to sell things to customers but we don't want to give apple 30 is there a way we can do that once once you you know if you conceive of the possibility can you imagine selling software without Apple getting 30%.

37:41Well, anyway, people have that conception in their mind because it's the thing that used to happen all the time and people don't forget. Or even the people who weren't alive then, the old people can say, kids, we used to sell software through the web and Apple wouldn't get any percentage of it. Can you imagine that? But yeah. How do things work then? We used to be able to upgrade storage. How did Apple not go bankrupt? Right, right. We used to be able to upgrade. Well, they almost went bankrupt. Anyway, we used to be able to upgrade storage. And now here it is again, these new Macs. Their storage, it comes right out.

38:16This is interesting. And so we'll see how this goes. It's a Kickstarter. Anyway, so we should read Jonathan Dietz's analysis of how he thinks this is going to go. Indeed. So Jonathan writes, I stand by what I said in my previous email. I don't see how they can legitimately gain access to a sufficient supply of NAND packages with Apple's proprietary MSPs. I'm also not sure they sufficiently differentiated their design so as to avoid legal action from Apple.

38:53The legal thing makes me think, oh, that's the way Apple will go, because the printed circuit board. So they reverse engineered Apple's printed circuit board by basically sanding off the layers, like the Luke Miani video shows some pictures from that. That's how they figured out how the circuit board works. We have a legit one that works. will how do we reproduce this slowly sand off the layers of the printed circuit board so you can see what each layer does and look at all the surface mount components and maybe upgrade a couple components uh and then you just got to get those nan chips so you know um they're they're worried about the supply of certain specific components which has got to be those proprietary nans and i have no idea they're getting them and i imagine they don't want to say anything about the msp because why would they why would they say that they're doing something illegal like someone's selling them these things on the sly who shouldn't be so yeah um i mean i and i assume most of them are new but again they could be from like macs that are you know old or broken in some other way but the ssds are fine so we'll see how this goes but uh if i was looking to save money on storage on a mac i'd be willing to at least try this uh just because storage price on whatever my next mac is is going to kill me because i'm pressing up against my four terabyte i really pressed to get the four terabyte in my mac pro in 2019 it was like the most expensive upgrade that i applied to this machine i think was just increasing the storage and i'm you know the only other choice i have that's bigger than four from apple is eight and that's gonna like double the price of whatever the next computer i get so i'm i'm watching with interest how this goes and i think a lot of other people are too and like i like to see this i want apple to feel feel competitive pressure if you make a removable component and someone can figure out how to make that same removal component and sell it for what must be still and jonathan said this in his email but i didn't quote it must still be really healthy margins for polysoft just not apple healthy just not 6.5 times market rate maybe it's only three times market rate but it's still a good business to be in you could undercut apple you know sell the eight terabytes for half the price that apple sells at less than half the price because again that's the price of just the upgrade from 512 sell for half price still make a healthy profit, maybe that'll put some pressure on Apple.

41:06Maybe people will, if this becomes a legit business, people will stop paying the giant Apple prices and just go back to the conventional wisdom of, oh yeah, get that desktop Mac with the lowest amount of storage and upgrade it from a third party later. We are sponsored this episode by Trade Coffee. We've all been scrambling for last minute gifts and trying to make them feel like they're not last minute. With Trade, you can send somebody a coffee subscription. directly to their inbox in minutes. It's fast, easy, and guaranteed to impress because no other gift gives them something to look forward to every single morning.

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43:27let's do some topics uh let's start with threads um maybe we should before we get into the topic can we do a quick um temperature check on how much all of us are using threads um for me i feel like i started using it a fair bit three-ish months ago something like that and i was starting to really like it and then i don't know if i was feeding the algorithm poorly or if the algorithm changed or something like that. But I started falling kind of out of love with it maybe a month or two ago. So it was only like a month or two that I was really kind of into it. And then Blue Sky kind of found the juice after the election.

44:05And I've been paying more attention to Blue Sky than Threads recently and generally enjoying it more. But that's where I am. Marco, where are you on Threads and Blue Sky? I'm really not there. I have accounts on both the services for both me and overcast um and of course and we maintain atp accounts that's a separate thing john does that i think entirely but uh anyway so for just from yeah for my stuff i have my personal account i have atp and i have overcast accounts on on threads uh and blue sky and mastodon i only use mastodon regularly of those three as i as i pulled away from twitter over the years, I learned that I didn't really need Twitter for my business.

44:50It was really just a place I enjoyed hanging out personally, sometimes. Sometimes it was not enjoyable. And it was a huge time sink for me. The whole reason I made an app called Quitter was that I was having trouble not spending all day on Twitter when I was supposed to be working. But I was spending all that time on Twitter because I thought it was necessary for me to reach customers and my audience and things. So it was necessary for business reasons. And what I have found out, when I left Twitter and only really started spending time on Mastodon, Mastodon, I have a way smaller audience there, not even close to the size that Twitter was.

45:31And yet, my business metrics didn't go down at all. In fact, nothing went down. And what's interesting too is that over the last year or so, I've also really pulled back a lot from just social media in general. I pulled back a lot. I hardly ever post on Instagram anymore. I don't post that much on Mastodon, and it's mostly just dropping in here and there. And also, my numbers didn't really go down. With Overcast stuff, building an announcement mechanism in the app to reach my customers in the app was way more effective and benefited way more people than using the social media channels for that purpose.

46:17And so what I'm finding is I don't really have much of a business need to maintain a strong presence socially. So it's really just what do I like to do personally? And what I like to do personally is more and more as I get older, I want to just hang out with my friends and that's different from broadcasting publicly into a room full of strangers most of whom want to yell at me that i didn't broadcast publicly correctly social media has gotten so much less fun over the years as just it's as everyone's gotten angrier um the recent election did not help at all um but you know even before the election everyone has been getting angrier for so long that what's left on social media is a bunch of stuff to make me angry about things I mostly can't control that are going on in the world and a bunch of people who have been made angry so when I come and try to you know post about programming I'm mostly you know posting in front of all those people who are angry about other stuff and then sometimes that blows back on me and I'm just like I don't like what am I doing this for?

47:27I just want to hang out with my friends. I'm no longer interested in like sharing what's going on in my life just for the sake of sharing. Like that's a big reason why I pulled back so much on Instagram. You know, if I take some picture of, you know, like me and my new glasses, who cares? You know, the people close to me care about it. People have to see me every day. They care about it. No one else needs to care about that. What about like when I take a trip somewhere? I found this new restaurant in the city. It's really cool. Who cares? No one's following me for that. So what I'm learning is I don't want to just be performing my life on social media to try to, I don't know, gain followers.

48:08That's not really what I'm there for. I don't mind sharing my life, but I'd rather do it with people I actually know, like my actual friends and family. And so I have found relatively little place in my life now for social media besides casual browsing and sharing for professional or business reasons. So if I want to talk about Swift or some kind of app technical thing, Mastodon's great for that. I go there for that. If I want to ask a question about code, yeah, Mastodon, perfect. for that. If I want to read, like just catch up on what my friends are up to, Instagram is good for that, but I consume mostly and don't post much.

48:56So that's like a read. It's becoming a primarily a read only medium for me. So what am I going to use threads and blue sky for? Well, it seems like threads and blue sky are mostly successful for people who want to be like really jacked in to social media. This is like journalists, people who were like information junkies, people in certain verticals that those are maybe strong in. I know sports is kind of gaining traction over on Blue Sky from all the Twitter refugees and stuff. And politics are obviously a huge part of all that. And so when I dip into these services, what I mostly see is a bunch of people who are probably just going to make me upset or angry based on what they're talking about or what's going on that day.

49:42what are we all mad about today? Join the pile on. I don't want that anymore. I don't have a place in my life for that anymore. I have other things that I want to spend my time and attention on. So all that is to answer your question in the longest way possible. No, I don't really use Threads or Blue Sky very much. Fair enough. Thank you. Thank you for that succinct reply. John? When I left Twitter, I went to Mastodon, and a critical mass of the people that I care about hearing from are also on Mastodon. So I feel like I'm there and my people are there. that's my main place where i am uh and have been for a while now uh i have i was excited about blue sky back when it was announced way back in the day as a spinoff project from twitter and i signed up for a blue sky account on like day one and i've had it forever but i haven't really used it that much uh threads i also signed up on a day one just to see what that was like uh for threads in blue sky one of the things that annoys me about both services is their third-party client ecosystem them is poor yes i don't think there's any third-party clients for threads and there's some for blue sky but uh none of the clients are do work the way i want them to and there's just not as many as there are mastodon clients there are so many mastodon clients to choose from there's some really really good ones and that makes a difference to me um it makes a big difference in how i use them i do check um threads and um blue sky every single day i recently promoted those two apps out of a folder on one of my other screens up to they're on now on page two of my you know home screens so the second home screen not in a folder because i just i'm i'm checking them every single day usually multiple times a day but what i'm doing there is i'm essentially monitoring people who are trying to communicate with me there right because i do have accounts there and so does the i have i manage the atp accounts that are there as well and people if people who are there are trying to communicate with me or with atp or with rectifs or with my hypercritical cloud i actually have a bunch of accounts on all those things um that's what i'm doing i'm not reading the timelines on threads or blue sky much occasionally i peek but it's just like it just confirms that that's not that there's not much there for me um and we'll get to that in a second when we talk about what this actual topic is about but but yeah i'm looking at them all the time to see who's at mentioning any of those four accounts that i have in all the systems and having to deal with either the first party clients or the not so great third party clients and not not so great third party clients for blue sky a lot of them are really good they're just not uh suited to what i'm doing which is shuffling through four different accounts checking for mentions that's not a normal pattern for most users right most users are reading their timelines and replying to people and stuff and i am basically using it as a essentially customer support type of thing uh in terms of reading the i'm looking at mastodon mostly i follow a list of people on mastodon that gives me things that end up in this show i'm also looking on threads and blue sky for things that end up in this show they're just harder to find because people are talking about different stuff most of the tech people i have found to follow are mastodon there's fewer of them elsewhere so yeah i'm using all those apps every single day i'm checking them diligently, but I don't like the clients and I don't spend any personal time.

53:01They're all my personal time. If I'm spending any personal time or following people or just like friends or post interesting thing, that's all on Mastodon. Yeah. And just to build on that for a moment, you know, the client thing really heavily affects me as well. The reason why I got so into Mastodon was that I learned what I really liked about Twitter was the experience provided to me by TweetBot, both on the phone, but also more often on the Mac. And what TapBots did, when Mastodon became big and Twitter shut down their API to third-party clients, they basically adapted the code base that they had for TweetBot and made the app Ivory, which is basically TweetBot for Mastodon.

53:41And because Mastodon is a very Twitter-like service, what that ended up doing was it let me not really change any of my habits or workflows. I just changed the app name that I was using from TweetBot to Ivory. And I was able to move my habit into that, and I just kind of fit right in and didn't have to think about it and could keep working the way I always did. That is not, at least at the moment, as far as I know, they don't have anything like that for Blue Sky, which at least has an API. Threads doesn't even have the right API for that, as far as I know. And probably, Threads probably never will, but Blue Sky does have a bunch of pretty good third-party clients.

54:18Yeah, like knowing Facebook, they're never going to have like a client read and write kind of API. Like they want you to add value to them by posting to them. They have an API for posting, but I don't think they're ever going to give you an API that will let you build a reading client. So, you know, that's not really going to happen for threads, which is where most of the people are. Blue Sky, I mean, look, if Blue Sky ends up like continuing its growth and sustaining all the people, which is hard and, you know, not super likely. Like, I'm glad they're having a moment. You know, they're having strong growth right now.

54:51But a lot of people love kicking the tires on a new social app that they hear is where, quote, everyone is going. Keeping them there after a little while, that's hard. That doesn't often happen. We've seen that before. I mean, look, we even got people to go try out app.net for a little while. Then everyone left. That's a throwback. Yeah, that's why Ivory was as possible as it was, because they adapted TweetBot to App.net, so they had to generalize it. And once they did that generalization, even though App.net went away, when Mastodon came along, they said that we've already done the work to generalize our Twitter-like client app.

55:24And so it was easier, from what I heard, to slot Mastodon in. Yeah, we can actually somewhat thank the success of Mastodon among our community of Apple nerds to NetBot, which none of them would remember. No, I remember, but yeah, I'm with you. And by the way, for anyone who's making a blue sky client or whatever, like Ivory, I also use Ivory, even though Twitter was my first and biggest love on iOS. Tweetbot is also very good. And if you're wondering what kind of features are useful for people like me who are monitoring lots of accounts, just copy everything that Ivory does. They make it easy to switch between accounts with a small number of taps and gestures.

56:04I think I counted it the other day. I think threads requires three times the number of actions to do anything that I do on a regular basis. It's maddening. Yeah, and everything is very compact and they have really good multiple account support. And you can when you're replying, you can choose which account you want to reply from. And just at the last moment, it's it's like that's not why most people are using it. They're just using it because it's a really good client. But it's a really good client for a single person reading a single account. it's also a really good client for someone monitoring quote unquote brand accounts or doing customer service or whatever.

56:38Yeah and that's what I'm doing is monitoring three different accounts two of which mostly just for replies and then my personal one I'm kind of posting and replying here and there but I'm monitoring three different accounts now even if suppose I don't know what if TapBots is planning on making a Blue Sky client or not or, you know, adapting it into Ivory. I don't know that. But suppose they did what I think would be, like, the best thing for my personal preferences, which would be modify Ivory to also support Blue Sky in one unified app. That would be great, I think, maybe. That would be great.

57:17But, you know, then what? Then I have, you know, two different personalities on two different services that I'm kind of cross-posting to, and that's always difficult, And like there's always like little gotchas and little crappinesses that go along with you trying to use cross-posting and trying to appear that you're really there in two different services. So like that's difficult. That's a difficult problem to solve. You still wouldn't have threads, which is where by far the most people are and will probably continue to be. So you have all those kind of logistical and mechanical problems of trying to juggle multiple services.

57:52ultimately Twitter back in the day, for all of its faults, was overall better for most people. because it was one place that you could be pretty sure like anybody who you would want to reach that way was probably there. Anything that you wanted to follow, any kind of like informational feed from government agencies or businesses or scientific agencies or whatever, it was probably on Twitter. It was great having that all in one place. As much as Twitter, the company was always a train wreck, even long before Elon bought it, like they've always been a train wreck as a company. They were just train wrecks in different ways than they are now.

58:32And maybe overall, maybe less of a train wreck. But it was good back in the day when it was one place where everybody was. Now, when there's all these different places that everyone has split up to, I don't really love any of these services enough to really use them heavily the way I used to use Twitter, which honestly has been a huge benefit to my life to not have that anymore. having to go to multiple apps to monitor these things though is annoying and i'm just uh not not that this one we're going to too deeply just to uh let people know and preempt some feedback there are apps that let you read multiple services at once uh the latest version of the reader app r-e-e-d-e-r uh is multi-service you can do rss feeds uh blue sky threads twitter i thought not twitter well maybe gas twitter oh no not with the api anymore but anyway you can do multiple stuff if you do at least mastodon and blue stay uh there's a icon factory has an app that they're working on i think it's still in beta that lets you have essentially a single timeline with with multiple different services mixed into them um that like margaret was saying i'm for reading kind of like treating it as like it's an rss reader but you can also read uh social services with it as well that's cool um but it's not quite the same thing as participating in the timeline where you're conversing because you'd be it would be like if if every one of your messages threads in the messages app was in a single conversation view yeah now you can see everything that everyone's saying to you but when you reply to one person like you reply to someone who posted something on blue sky but then another person replies to something and they're on mastodon and they didn't see either of those two that were on blue sky but you think they did based on what they say and you reply to them as if they saw those but oh you got to scroll up and look there was a little tag that said that one was from blue sky like keeping track of an interleaved chronological timeline of seven services and trying to have conversations with the people on those services i don't think is a good experience which is why a lot of those reader apps like redr and the icon factory app are focused on reading primarily they're not there for you to have conversations but it is there for you to have a single timeline that you can catch up on kind of like an rss reader you're not you're just reading different websites right that's there and of course there's the federation aspect fact mastodon is federated um and in theory independent of any single company blue sky uh wants to be federated but is not uh it's it's it's centralized but they're working on it they've been working on it for years wake me up when they get somewhere threads of course says oh yeah no we're totally going to federate a proprietary service with uh with activity pub and mastodon and they've been doing it in bits and pieces but they're doing it so slowly and so piecemeal i can follow the the president i'll soon unfollow but anyway you can follow big accounts that are on threads i can follow them for mastodon but you can't really have a two-way conversation now finally they can follow you but if you've only if you've replied from them and it's confusing because someone looking for me will find that i do have an account on threads if that's not the one that i use i use the one in mastodon so someone on threads will probably follow me on threads they wouldn't follow me on mastodon and it's you know maybe someday the federation will actually work and then i could have an account on mastodon and not feel like i'm missing anything happening on threads uh but today is not that day they're just taking baby steps in that direction so the bottom line is i am now checking at least three edition different social services i mean there's i have accounts on instagram as well for some things but mainly those three services where once i had to only check one of them and that is not as pleasing and more annoying but that's the reality we're in you just you got to do what you got you got to go where the people are i can't there's nothing i can say or do that's going to make everybody go to mastodon or everybody go to blue sky or everyone go to threads people are going where they're going maybe they'll settle in some position you know and the people when i say everybody i'm talking about like listeners to this show which are not representative of the general population which is why so many of them are on mastodon but in the general population mostly people are on threads because they leverage the instagram social graph and blah blah blah and then blue sky is you know is big now right but those people who are going to Blue Sky are probably not as many ATP listeners as we're already on Mastodon.

1:02:41So anyway, that's the situation we're in. Now we can finally get to what I thought was going to be a short topic on Threads. Well, you thought wrong. Threads is testing the option to choose your own default feed. Reading from The Verge, Threads will now let users decide what feed they want as their default when opening the app. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the news in a post saying you'll be able to choose between the 4U following or any custom feed you've set up. Zuckerberg's post notes that Threads is quote-unquote testing this option, will also offer different feeds more visibly within the app.

1:03:11Yeah, so speaking of Threads, one of the things that has been true of the Threads app from day one is that when you launch the app, it puts you into the algorithmic timeline, which is the right default for most people, because most people don't do what I do, which is carefully follow a list of people and then read everything that they post. No, they chuck you into an algorithmic timeline, and you can have your complaints about the Threads algorithm. them it is what it is but that's where it chucks you when you launch the app but if you like pull down on the screen and go up to the top or whatever you'll see that there's the like whatever it's called for you and there's the following one um like there's another tab at the top of the screen that brings you to essentially a chronological timeline of the people you follow and remember when threads launch like oh there'll be an algorithmic timeline and there'll also be a chronological one so it's whatever you want if you want the algorithmic one you got it the threads will try to show you posted it thinks you're interested in mix them with the people you follow but do you want it to be like old school for the weird funny duddies like me who want to read a chronological timeline of the post from the people they follow it's right next to it you just tap that and now you're reading a chronological timeline well guess what from day one the threads app lets you do that and click on the following tab and get a chronological timeline but every single time you relaunch the app it says oh uh here's here's the algorithm timeline you can go to the chronological one if you want it never remembers intentionally it always wants you to go to the algorithm it could remember it's just a simple preference they could save the fact that i went there they could save the fact that i always wanted to go to the chronological one they could save the fact that literally the first thing i do every single time launch the app is go to that one but no they won't save it it's one of the most user hostile things a piece of software can ever do is intentionally ignore what they know you want because it's not what they want they want you to see the algorithmic timeline because they think they know better they think we get more engagement when we force people to see our algorithmic timeline doesn't matter what they want because our testing has shown if we let people make that preference sticky if we remember that they went to the chronological timeline and we keep it there we get less engagement from that person and it doesn't matter what they want it only matters what we want what are metrics that we care about so from day zero the threads app has been doing this and i've hated them for it and it's like well it's facebook what do you expect but here's this story from this is from november 25th this story oh mark zuckerberg ceo the big ceo says hey guess what and this was around the time blue sky was getting popular because of the election or whatever right so like oh competition threads is feeling the heat people are going to blue sky they got to do something even just the slightest bit of competition the slightest idea that anyone might know blue sky exists makes the CEO of the company Mark Zuckerberg come out and say oh yeah now we're working on the secret technology that will allow you to to see the uh the chronological timeline we finally figured out how to save a bullying and a preference we did it we finally figured it out and how did they figure it out nothing to do with blue sky we just we just thought this would be a cool feature that you might like so we decided to roll this out for no reason and it's being announced by the CEO of the company so incredibly use a hostile feature that only you know gets reversed when there's even the hint of competition but here's the thing as they say they're testing this option i still don't have it every day i go to threads and every day i check do i have it am i being ab tested have they done the update no they haven't that was november 25th and i'm still waiting to be able to get this stupid app to remember that i always want the chronological timeline every single time and instead it's kind of like the you know what you know crop uh you know format original or whatever a crop aspect original thing that for every time i went to photos and resized an image 65 000 times or whatever it was i came up with that was just an oversight this is them legitimately doing a thing that i don't want them to do because it's better for them and they finally say that they're not going to do it in november and here we are december 5th still not out so i'll keep you updated on this but like i want this option because i never want to see the timeline ever ever please just it almost like they got the pr uh boost of saying hey the ceo said we're going to stop doing this incredibly evil thing we've been doing because of the the slight hint of competition of blue sky but then they don't actually do it like did they just take the pr window announcing that they're thinking about doing it yes so i know it might take them a while to figure out how to implement that you know they really have to test this feature really really test them i don't want to screw up the whole application but saving this preference off this is driving me nuts but if you're out there and you have this feature and by the way the way they implement it is insane you have to go to let me let's just pull up the app to figure out what you have to do you have to go to uh well again you have to go to following and just hold down on following and say edit feeds and then you have create new feed and then you see for you and following if you have the feature there will be little reorder grippers and for you and following and you change it so that following is on the top and whatever's on the top will be the default that's how they implemented it i had to look this up to say do i have this feature what is it's just yeah i don't have it yet i have no grippers i can't reorder them uh i'll keep you posted but anyway mark zuckerberg is terrible facebook is terrible i don't like threads wait so what do you do you you say that again you you mash i want to see if i have it because it'll make you so upset go go to go to the threads app see the little at sign at the top where it says for you and following yeah yep hold down on following oh on following feeds uh-huh and then you see create new feed for you and following yeah you don't see the reorder grippers on for you absolutely do well you've got it but i don't i'm just messing with you i'm just messing with you i don't have any grippers no that's up someday mark said in november they're they're testing this option Maybe they're going to test it and say, you know what, we get less engagement.

1:08:59So forget it, we're not doing it. Yeah, I mean, what do you expect? It's Facebook. Okay, so breaking news as of a couple of days ago. Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of Intel, is out reading from The Verge. On Monday, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger abruptly decided to retire after less than four years on the job. That was the official story, anyhow. Within hours, Reuters, Bloomberg, and the New York Times had a different one. The board of directors pushed him out. Three and a half years ago, Gelsinger announced an ambitious plan to turn around the troubled chipmaker within four years. Now he's reportedly been kicked out of the company before he could see it through.

1:09:30It happened so abruptly that Intel doesn't have a planned successor in mind. Cool. And so completely that Gelsinger won't even stick around as an advisor. He's gone. Intel's been in a tailspin for years. It missed the smartphone revolution. It has been plagued by quality control issues with its chips, lost customers like Apple to alternative processors, and is now at risk of missing out on AI too. If Intel's falling apart, this isn't just a business story. The United States government has called it a national security story too intel isn't just the world's former leading maker of computer chips it's one of the last companies to do both design and manufacture of them in itself instead of outsourcing the latter part of the manufacturing to asia it's one of the only level levers the u.s can pull to reduce dependence on taiwan for chips should china decide to exert control some of that might be in jeopardy because of what intel's management has or hasn't done or might newly be in jeopardy now that the board has kicked Gelsinger out.

1:10:22Now, with regard to splitting Intel into a chip designer as one standalone business and as a fab business as another, Intel can't spin off its own foundries very easily, particularly now that it's receiving nearly$8 billion in Chips and Science Act funding from the U.S. government. That money not only keeps Intel from engaging in stock buybacks for the next five years, but also specifically gives the U.S. Department of Commerce oversight over any change of control. If anything would see Intel own less than 50.1 % of the new company or lose its voting rights, the Commerce Department wants to make sure Intel will still fulfill its U.S.

1:10:57manufacturing promises. That could make it difficult to fully spin out. Quote, the economics of Intel's foundry are so challenged that I don't know how a spinoff is even feasible without a massive cash infusion, quote Ben Bajarin writes. Ultimately, I hope a buyer for Intel foundry emerges who can help the U.S. gain an edge in domestic semiconductor manufacturing, as this is far more strategically important geopolitically than many realize. Ooh, there's a lot there. So the sad story of Intel. Our perspective on the Apple side of things was that, you know, Intel was the enemy, then Apple went over to Intel when they had the best chips, and then they left them when they didn't anymore.

1:11:33And in between, a lot of stuff has been going on at Intel. Obviously, for the young people who don't remember, there was the Wintel duopoly, which was Windows for Microsoft and Intel chips. that those two companies dominated the personal computer age from the dawning of the PC until basically the internet age. Intel was powerful because of, you know, legacy and history and the duopoly power that they had. And also for a while there, they were powerful because they were the best at manufacturing silicon chips. Their fab, their fabrication facilities for silicon chips was better than everybody else's people who dislike x86 will say that's how they can make the ugly pig that is the x86 construction set uh be the dominant chip in the world because their fabs are so much better they have they had finer processes than other people their processes were multiple years ahead of the competition they were the best in the world when apple went over to them that was true they made the best chips in the world it just so happens the chips they made were x86 but whatever you could make that pig fly if you put it on a fad that's two years ahead of everybody else during that time when they're making all that money uh they were blinded by their success they missed out on the smartphone resolution because they're like we make all our money selling these x86 chips we're the best in the world we sell the best pc chips that's where the show is we sell server chips that's great who cares about phones we're not interested in that uh intel owned a big stake in a company that made arm chips uh so did apple for that matter and intel said you know what we don't think there's any future in arm chips and they sold it whether or not that was a smart move that you know they also didn't make their own mobile chips uh for the ai machine learning stuff or even like the crypto things or whatever where nvidia was out there uh you know is now the what was briefly the biggest company in the world is now the size of apple thanks to all the ai training they do on their gpus intel missed out on all that as well speaking of gpus uh nvidia amd will make gpus uh intel tried to make gpus a couple of times they're currently making gpus they're not very good at it uh one of their products by the way i remember um i had someone who i worked at a job with who left the job to go work um on uh at intel on this project the do you remember the larabee project let's let's make a gpu let's make a graphics card out of tons and tons of tiny x86 chips because that's what intel knew how to do we make x86 chips can we make a graphics card out of those what if we make a whole bunch of little tiny x86s and put a ton of them on the chip can we make a gpu out of that that was the larabee project you know who's in charge of the larabee product project pat galsinger right he was trying to make a general purpose like gpu massively parallel computing thing that project didn't go well um but during all this time intel has been like yeah but we make all our money on our other chips and so we're doing fine uh but then a bad thing another bad thing happened yet another bad thing uh apple or not apple intel which used to be the leader in fabrication lost that lead they made the wrong bet uh stupidly on what the next generation of silicon you know fabrication would be they actually made the right bet they invested in this company that would be the future of that they invested in this euv uh you know technology but then they said you know what even though we invested billions of dollars in it we think that's kind of expensive and we think we can do it a different cheaper way and they were wrong they could not so they blew a multi-year lead on the entire industry while the rest of the world made the right bet or tsmc made the right bet and now the intel has got chips that uh they sell for like servers and pcs apple doesn't buy from them anymore their fab technology stagnated for years because they made the wrong bet right so they didn't have the best fab in the world anymore uh they didn't even have the best x86 chips in the world i think one of the worst one of the biggest signs that intel was in trouble one of the you know sort of leading indicators that intel was in trouble if you're paying attention was uh way back when they were all powerful uh they couldn't even successfully transition from 32-bit to 64-bit.

1:15:50They tried with Itanium, and it was another bad bet. Their competitor, their sort of like little tiny little brother copying off them, AMD, came up with x86-64. And Intel didn't come up with that. Intel wanted to do Itanium. And it didn't work out. And guess what we're all using? When we say Apple went to Intel chips, with the exception of, I think, some of the early ones, they went to x86 underscore 64. and Intel didn't make that instruction set. AMD did, right? So they just lost, Intel has lost everything. They're not the best at making chips. They don't have the best chips. They're not selling the most chips.

1:16:27They're not selling into any of the big growth markets, mobile, GPUs, crypto, AI training. They're nowhere to be found. So into this, Pat Gelsinger comes, comes back to the company. He was also the lead architect on the 486. He worked on Larrabee. He's like, he spent 30 years at the company. He left. he came back after being at VMware save the company Pat and Pat says here's how I'm going to save it I'm going to fix everything I'm going to make our fab best in the world again I'm going to have our fab take we're going to make chips for other people we didn't used to do that we only made them for ourselves because we were the best but now we're going to make them for other people too and then the other part of the company we're going to make the best chips in the world and if our fab can't fab them we're going to fab parts of them at TSMC because they're the best in the world now so we just know more of this like oh we have to be tied to our fab we're just going to do everything we're going to make great chips we're going to fab them whoever's the best and our fab people are going to try to make the best fab and he was on the way to trying to do this uh plan and it wasn't working great uh and they just the board of directors got tired of it and said you've spent too much money it doesn't look like it's going well you're out arguably they didn't give it a chance to see it through to the end but also arguably the end could have been the company going under right because they spent so much money especially on the process stuff their new processes that are supposed to be competing with tsmc are not as good as tsmcs are behind schedule uh and they apparently have no customers so if you're if you're going to be like tsmc and you're going to be in the business of making chips for other people and you want to make the best fab in the world a you better have the best fab in the world and b you got to have someone who's going to pay you money to make chips for them that's an important part of the business if that's what you're doing uh and then the other side of it, Intel trying to make its own chips.

1:18:09It's been messing up by making chips with a bunch of problems that you may have read about in the news. And it's been using TSMC to help fab them. But TSMC is like, if you want to fab your chips with us, we would prefer it if you weren't also trying to be a fab yourself. And so if you're going to have your own fab over there where you're trying to get our compete for our customers, we're going to charge you more. If you give up on that whole fab thing, TSMC might say, we'll give you a better price. Just be like Apple. Like they don't have a fab they just pass money we make their chips they're not competing with us and so you know pat was trying to make intel do everything all at once and it wasn't going that great and they kicked him out and this is a really really sad another very sad chapter in the downfall of intel not that i cared that much because i'm not too invested in intel and amd is doing great and nvd is doing great and apple's doing great and tsmc is doing great but that whole part that we read at the end there with the whole sort of geopolitical thing that's that's a real thing uh it's not just like rah-rah usa so much of the world's economy essentially depends on tsmc now all of the top end chips the best manufacturing that's in taiwan taiwan is in a politically precarious situation it would be great for the u.s government or any government to say do we have a hedge against that if things go really badly over there can we make chips and the current answer is no not really i know we've got tsmc with a plant in arizona but again it's the same company and also they're not making the top end chips they're making like two years behind type chips intel got eight billion dollars from the u.s government to help with manufacturing uh but now the ceo that was trying to uh make that plan happen is out and now like the rumor is that maybe the board wants to really split it off and say okay we're just going to be fabulous we're not going to make any chips we're just going to design them and then farm them out to somebody else and the u.s government's like wait no don't do that the whole point is we need someone in this country who can make chips a u.s company that can make the best chips in the world we used to have that intel that used to be you but it's not anymore and we need to get that back strategically and so maybe intel has got these eight billion dollar handcuffs here which isn't that much because i think intel like lost 16 billion dollars in like the last quarter or something so the numbers here are big but um yeah if the u.s government wants some u.s company to compete with tsmc i think it's going to take more money and i'm not sure it's going to be intel but i just look at this whole story and i i feel bad for pat galsinger because i think he maybe he bit off too much maybe there's no way that his plan was going to work anyway but at least he was trying uh and his his you know his heart was in the right place and the things he was trying to do were technically possible if he was given enough runway it's almost kind of like if steve jobs when he came back to apple in like 1998 and then he started working on his plan and if there was some board of directors that said it just doesn't look like he's going well steve he gave you a couple years but you're out and that would have been the wrong move like i'm not saying that he would have turned it around like steve did but i really feel like he didn't have enough chance like if the board's going to support him and support this plan as they did see it through to the end don't get cold feet halfway through because you can quote unquote tell that it's going downhill because from everything that i've read the intel board of directors doesn't really know or care anything about technology it's kind of the reason they're in this situation is like we know how to make money and we want to make more money and don't tell me the mobile is going to be big and don't tell me the gpus are going to be big and i don't want to hear about ai training and nothing will ever change because we're intel and those are the people who got them in the situation and so they hired pat galsinger and then they just fired him and i think it's sad and i'm sad about it i I feel bad for Pat and I feel bad for Intel.

1:21:46But I am glad Apple is isolated from it, but I still just worry about the entire world depending so heavily on one small island in a politically precarious situation. Growing up, especially as a PC person, like Intel was amazing. Like I was never upset about anything Intel ever did growing up. Now, granted, they obviously made a lot of wrong choices. The Pentium 4, you aren't upset about that? That was a little upsetting. I mean, maybe some. It has netburst architecture. It'll make the internet burst faster. But see, the thing is, Intel, for the young people, they made a chip that wasn't that great.

1:22:25But then what did they do? They made a better chip after. Like, they fixed it, right? They were good. For a while, they were good at what they did. And again, it really helped that they had the best fab. Well, in either way, like, they were firing on all cylinders for most of my childhood. Or at least that's the way I reflect upon it. I feel like that's the way I knew about it then. And even when I was really into Windows, there would still be a lot of stuff that would annoy me about Microsoft. And the only thing that annoyed me about Intel was that they kept coming out with better stuff that I didn't have.

1:22:56It was the march of progress. And Moore's Law was reliable as hell at the time. And I don't know. It was such a, like, maybe the American in me is coming out. Maybe I'm getting a little rah-rah USA and I don't realize it. But it was such a great story of like, you know, let all of these people came together and made this just unbelievable company kind of sort of out of nothing. I know it was from a shell of what was it? Something semiconductor. Fairchild. Fairchild. Yeah. But for the purposes of this conversation, it came from almost nothing and became this juggernaut, international juggernaut.

1:23:30And it was so cool. I mean, it was so important. And Intel wasn't what generated Silicon Valley, but it was early on in Silicon Valley. And there was such a great American story, a great corporate story. I mean, I know I have very different feelings about capitalism than I did a little while ago. But still, it was such a great story. It was something to be proud of as a nerd, as an American. And it really, from the outside, seems like they were sniffing their own farts way too much. And they just thought they could do nothing wrong. and then they continually did things wrong and didn't seem to care because other parts of the business were, you know, booing them.

1:24:09They were money. They found, they wanted to make money. They did what they thought were smart decisions to make money and those people who made those decisions are rich and retired now and so they're like, yeah, it worked out but none of them were technologists. Like to be in the tech industry long term, you do have to have some, your decision making needs to be influenced in some way based on technical understanding. what's what's the next big thing is it important to be in mobile uh is power consumption important on cpus are gpus going to be more or less important in the future like things like that or like you'd you'd come to that to like a bunch of business people and they'd say okay yeah sure maybe but like let me show you the numbers we're making money selling x86 in the server right now because the internet is booming and we're better than amd and we're better than everybody in the world and we just got apple so we don't have to worry about like the iphone who's going to buy an Apple phone.

1:25:00That's so stupid. Like you need someone with some tech industry instincts to influence your decisions. And if you don't do that and you just do what's going to make you the most money right now, you will miss everything. And Intel missed everything. Yeah, it's really, it's such a sad story. And again, from the outside, it seems like such a cautionary tale about hubris that it really seems like they thought they could do no wrong. and didn't really understand or believe when they did do wrong. And it's really just crummy. It bums me out. And as much as I feel for them, if you've been shooting yourself in the foot slash torso slash face enough times, I'm running out of sympathy.

1:25:45And while from a geopolitical standpoint, yes, I think it's important that we are not completely and utterly reliant on Taiwan, but it certainly doesn't seem like Intel is going to fix that problem for us, no matter how much money the U.S. government is pumping. And I feel like they're handcuffed now because the way they would fix it is like, we should just be giving money to a company. And the only thing they're going to do is figure out how to fab chips well. And being tied to Intel, which wants to sell chips that it designs, some of which are fab to TSMC, just complicates things. Like if you're a fab, you just make chips.

1:26:16Anybody who wants to make you, they give you money, you make their chip. That's your whole business. You don't make any chips. You don't sell any chips. You build chips that other people tell you to build and they give you money for it. That's what TSMC does. it's a business that makes sense and the other side were all the other chip makers apple amd like they don't make their own chips they design them and then they pay somebody else to make them they call it fabless chip designers right and intel pat's plan for intel was like we're gonna be have a fabless chip design part of the company and we're gonna have a fab part and they're gonna be the same company technically but like we're gonna build a wall between them and the people who are designing the chips they're they don't have to go to intel to build them they should go to whoever has the best and then the intel fab just you should just try to be the best and it was just it was never going to work out again because when intel is trying to fab it ships with tsmc tsmc is gonna be like so you want to fab your chips with us while you try to work on a business that competes with us here's your price it's a different price than apple gets right and it's just it's and now apple's you know the u.s government's giving the eight billion dollars and intel i think the board of directors would want to say we just need to split this we're just two companies we can they need to not be with just two companies the fab and not the fab but where does the eight billion dollars go and the u.s government's like uh you can't do that because we gave intel eight billion dollars and so you cannot split otherwise we're going to have something to say about that so i don't know how this is going to work out i don't see how firing pat does anything except for like lets them stop spending so much money because they were spending a lot of money trying to implement his plan and now he's gone and now the plan is gone and now what do they do next they don't even have a ceo they just have interim ceos not great not great intel we are sponsored this episode by one password extended access management quick question do your end users always and i mean always without exception do their work on company-owned devices and it approved apps all of it yeah i didn't think so so next question how do you keep your company's data safe when it's sitting on all of those unmanaged apps and devices.

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1:29:13good question. And I was thinking about this earlier today and off the top of my head, I can't really think of anything, which no, no, no. I, I'm sure there are some things. Um, I, the only thing I could come up with, which is, I think I could work around it today, but I don't have any particular interest in running a server for call sheet. And I think, um, and we'll talk about this in the future. I think I'm going to end up doing so a little bit in the near future. Um, but if I can avoid it. I'd like to. And one of the most frequently requested features that I haven't even begun to think about is let me know when a movie is available.

1:29:51Perfectly reasonable. Perfectly reasonable thing to do. And the easiest way to do that is to have some sort of like background daemon that will every great once in a while look and see, all right, of all the things you have like pinned or favorited or what have you, are any of them available yet? And if so, send a notification. And there are ways that you can work around this within the context of what Apple allows today. But the easiest way one could argue for me to handle this is just to have some process that's running in the background always. And once every hour, once every day, whatever the case may be, it wakes up and does a little research and processing and then goes back to sleep.

1:30:27And that's not allowed. And honestly, I think it's for the best, but that's the only thing that I can think of off the top of my head that I would potentially ship. But again, that's kind of a weak answer because I can work around that in other ways. In fact, Marco, you and I talked about this. I can't remember if it was privately or on the show. Marco was telling you to make a server. That's what he's going to tell you. No, you and I had talked about this I think privately and there were ways to handle this outside of running a server. Or having a daemon or what have you. I'm not interested in exploring that right now.

1:30:53We will surely explore that sometime eventually in the future. That's the only answer I have. John, let's go to you next because I have a feeling your answer will also be pretty simple and then Marco, I think you're going to have a little bit more to say. There's things that I don't ship not because i think apple want to prove them i know they want to prove some of them i've tried to submit just to see that they want to prove um on the mac the things my app does are not that complicated but i would like to do some other things that just aren't apis for uh to give just one example uh my switch glass thing is like a little pallets on the side of the screen and of course the doc exists too and you can't get rid of it because there's things only the doc can do so i guess that's one category of like things that only the doc can do like get notification badges and stuff there at various times in history have been ways to sneakily get at those private apis and use them but of course if you figure out how to do that uh you will not get into the app store so if i want to be in the app store i can't do any of that but let's talk about something much more basic uh my little switch glass palette thing can be on any edge of the screen right uh but i also want to know when the dock is on the same edge so i can implement things of like hiding when the dock like if you're on the same edge as the dock and you make the dock appear i want my thing to hide itself so they don't conflict with each other you know that type of thing right i've got a preference that says like hide on dock conflict in my settings screen or whatever but to implement that well what i have to know is something that i'm sure everybody who thinks about this for two seconds thinks surely there's an api for this which edge of the screen is the dock on simple question you can only have it in three places bottom left and right that's it i just want to know where's the dock uh not only is there no api for that but in some situations there's no way for you to figure it out the way you can figure it out sometimes is by comparing the available height of the screen versus the full height of the screen because there's an api that will tell you here's the pixels you're able to draw in and it subtracts like the menu bar in the dock and you can figure out you can basically i know the menu bar is roughly this height uh and if the height if the remaining height is not what i think it should be it probably because the dock is down there taking up some part of it so you can figure out where the dock is based on those apis which is a real roundabout way to do it that makes you have to try to figure out how you're going to estimate the menu bar height which is not also a really good api for and it's like look i just want an answer with three possible you know an api where dock where is the dock tell me left right bottom just tell me that's all i need to know but no you're doing a bunch of math.

1:33:23But if they have the doc set to hide, then you can't even do that. Because then it says available pixels, all of them. You're like, yeah, but the doc is hiding down there. I have no way to know it's hiding down there because now the math doesn't work anymore because it's taking up zero space unless it's visible. So at any given point, if you try to do that math, you don't know where the doc is. But guess what? There is an API for this. It's just private. And you can get at it. And I figured out how to get at it. And it's an API that says, where's the doc and it tells you whether it's left right or side all exactly what i wanted uh but no apple rejected my app because i used that api uh and you know obviously i filed feedback and said please give me an api that lets me know where the doc is and they're never going to do it uh simple stuff like that is maddening because back in the pre-app store days uh you could just do it you if you could figure out how to do it just ship it and if they break that private api well, you'll have to fix it in your app and test it on betas and so on and so forth.

1:34:19Tons of apps do that. I was thinking about the Christmas lights app. What is the name of that one that has been going around lately? Oh, I know exactly what you're thinking of. I can't think of the name of it. Festivus or festival or something like that? I think it's like Festivus. One of the things it does, it puts Christmas lights on your dock. And when you're like mousing over the dock, if you have magnification enabled, the Christmas lights move up along with the magnification. I looked at that and I said, how are they figuring out what level of magnification it's set to? I know you can find a way to get that on the Mac.

1:34:45but is that an api that would be acceptable in the mac app store i don't know for a fact that they're using private apis to implement that but i think that app is not available in the mac app store which makes me think hey they're doing something it's a christmas lights app who cares but apple would be like no you can't have it on the mac app store you've figured out how to tell what the magnification is set to on the dock because you can set the magnification at different levels still right so you don't know like you can track where the cursor is but you have to know a that magnification is enabled and b how high is the magnification enabled so they know how high to move the Christmas lights up as the cursor moves around.

1:35:18And it's just a fun little app like that. Things like that can exist. The fact that things like that can exist in the Mac App Store is criminal. Like, I understand why they like, you know, we don't want you to use private APIs or whatever, but it's either like allow people to do that or make APIs for that stuff, right? It's frustrating. Anyway, and yes, of course, you say, well, why are you distributing a thing on the Mac App Store at all? Why don't you just do what the Christmas light app did and just sell it on a website? for me with my apps, they're worth more than$0, but not much more. They're not worth enough for me to run my own store.

1:35:53They don't make that kind of money, right? To, you know, it's like, so I'm kind of, for me, the Mac app store is a boon because I can sell apps for pittance and not make too much money and not have to worry about it or whatever. But it is frustrating to me. And very often I've thought about, um, having a version that's outside the Mac app store that has more features. Uh, and the final thing that I've talked about in the past is, uh, My app is like the dock and I wanted to be able to right click and quit apps. And I couldn't do that. See a past episode where I talked about this. I had to ship a non sandboxed app that you can download from my website that communicates with my Mac App Store app to allow you to quit apps.

1:36:27It's basically like the functionality that I couldn't ship to the Mac App Store. I shipped in a separate app that I have to sneakily lead you to download if you know where my website is. And once you have that app installed, my app will find it and launch it in the background so it can talk to it to do the thing that I want it to do. That's insanity, and it's entirely because Apple will reject my app if it does what I want it to do, which is be able to right-click something and quit like you can on the dock. That's really quite sad. All right, Marco. I actually have much less to say here than John.

1:37:02Oh, I'm surprised. Well, I sold you short. Because they actually add APIs to iOS, I think, but not so much to Mac OS. Yeah, that's true. So basically, there's a couple of reasons why you might want to do something that Apple would reject. One of them, a big one, is something about money. Another big one is a category of app they won't even allow the entire category. Think stuff like porn or emulators previously, that kind of stuff. Or another one is John's thing of like, I want to either use a private API or I want to use an API that is public, but use it in a way that Apple would reject because I'm using it like, you know, quote, wrong, like in an unintended way, like hijacking the volume button for the camera shutter, like, you know, that kind of stuff.

1:37:46And so when I look at like what I have, you know, thought about doing with Overcast over the years, in the context of like types of apps they won't, or types of features they won't allow, I've never really run into that kind of problem. Like I don't want to make an emulator or a gambling app or anything like that. So that's not really been a problem for me. And also, well, what you also don't want to do, which is also totally forbidden iOS, is make, I guess what you would call like a system enhancement app. Things like Quicksilver or Switchglass or like a thing like when people use to jailbreak phones that like change notifications or the multitasking switcher, like things that work at the system level.

1:38:24They're not an individual app. You just want to change how the whole system works, like multiple clipboards that people have been trying to do on iOS forever. And it's so clunky because Apple absolutely does not want you to make apps like that for the phone. Exactly. So I haven't run into that. And so, you know, there, I don't have an answer to anything like that. Now, if you look into the, you know, the private API side, or the unintended API side, I have occasionally had ideas for features or implementation details that I have backed away from like, I forget what this idea was. But a long time ago, I had some idea that was like you could, you know, because I'm always like playing podcasts while, you know, walking my dog in all kinds of weather, you know, including rain and snow and cold and everything.

1:39:12I've had all sorts of different ideas for like how to remotely control the app when the phone is in your pocket. And I've tried things like using the accelerometer to detect certain tap patterns. If you like just whack the back of the phone, that was even before they added the triple tap accessibility gesture you can now do that with. you know stuff like that and one idea i had was what if you what if like if you pause the podcast while it's paused if you use the volume up and down buttons maybe it can navigate through a spoken menu and you can like it's like the ipod without the buttons on it yeah like so you know i've had ideas like that over time where i've thought about the idea i'm like well but then they would probably reject that because i'm misusing the volume buttons or whatever like Or in the modern day, like the AirPods thing where you can shake yes or no.

1:39:59Yeah, right. Apparently, I bounce my head too much because every time a notification comes in, I start hearing those little ticks. Like for people to know, when you get a message and it says like, do you want me to reply? You can shake your head left and right to say no or up and down to say yes. And when you shake it, what you hear in the AirPods is a little doop, doop, doop. That sounds like little like beads knocking around to let you know that it's sensing you're shaking. But whenever it comes on and notifies me, I'm not shaking my head. I'm not trying to say yes or no, but already while it's reading me the message that says, do you want me to reply?

1:40:28It's going tick, tick, tick, because I just move my head around too much. It doesn't trigger a yes or a no, but it is weird that I feel like these little rattly things are loose. But anyway, you could use that for like head shake gestures to control overcast, but oh, there's no APIs for that. Sorry. Yeah. Or, you know, there's been other stuff like, you know, last year's OS is watchOS 9 or yeah, whatever. last year's OS's, when they released the Series 9 watch that had the double tap gesture introduced. Then you know it's not watch OS 9 because it was Series 9 and the numbers never match. Right.

1:41:04Anyway, yeah, you're right. So for the first year of the double tap gesture, the OS did not let third parties do anything good with it. All it would do would be hit the first button on any notifications that would show up on our app. Thanks a lot. You know, so there were all these customer requests saying, hey, can you please make double tap player pause? And I couldn't do it because there was no API. I bet there were some kind of private notification name somewhere that was being posted that I could have responded to, you know, but I wouldn't. But, you know, Apple would definitely reject that.

1:41:35So there's been occasional things like that, but nothing really big. And then finally, like the other big area of, you know, stuff Apple would probably reject that I would stay away from, as mentioned earlier, is money stuff. So what could I do with money or business model stuff that Apple would most likely reject? And the only time I've ever really thought of something good here, and it wasn't actually good in the end, was, and I've mentioned this before, I briefly started asking around different podcasters I knew if they'd be interested in participating in what I would call the readability of podcasts.

1:42:09This is like a throwback back to my newspaper days. There was a competing app called Readability that I was briefly involved with. They had a scheme where you'd pay them, I think it was like$20 a month or something. It would keep track of what articles you saved to it. And if you saved articles from sites that participated with them and that agreed to their program, they would divvy up your$19 a month or whatever. And it's like, all right, well, if you read five articles from the New York Times and five articles from USA Today, then we'd give$10 to New York Times and$10 to USA Today, like that kind of thing.

1:42:42That never really took off with readability in large part because the publishers didn't really want to form agreements with them. And I had the bright idea, why don't I do this for podcasts and briefly forgot about that side of it. My idea was what if Overcast collects whatever it is,$10,$20,$30 a month from people and divvies it up to pay whatever podcast they listen to, make an alternative revenue stream for podcasts. Apple's 30 % at the time cut would really eat into how that would look to people. Because the idea is like, all right, well, if Apple's taking, if you're paying, you know, 10 bucks a month, Apple's taking three of them, Overcast would probably take one for, you know, to be able to pay for the admin cost of the program and have any kind of revenue for me.

1:43:29Then you're down, you're down to 40 % down from your, from your price. Like you're paying 10 bucks a month and what's going to get divvied up to podcasters is only six of it. Like that's a crap selling proposition. So that's mainly what kept me from moving forward with it. And then, of course, the second problem with it is that no podcasters wanted to do it. But that's the second problem. It turns out people don't like you getting in the way between them and their customers and their money. Nobody likes that. They don't want another middle party taking a cut. Right. And I can't blame them because you know what?

1:44:01If that was us, we wouldn't do it either. I can't blame them. And that's the biggest reason I didn't do it. But anyway, So I've had over the years a few bad ideas for things that probably would have not worked. The only time I came close was a few years back, Overcast briefly had, for maybe a year, I forget how long I did it, I had a feature where you could add a certain rel tag, if you did like a rel equals payment, in either your feed somewhere or in the show notes for an individual episode. I would highlight that link in green to indicate money, of course. Green is the color of money. So I would highlight the link in green or in the interface of Overcast if you have one of those links I would replace one of the buttons in the bottom of the Now Playing screen with a dollar sign button.

1:44:50And if you tap that dollar sign it would just open whatever the URL was to that link. So the idea was give people a way in their podcasts or show notes to link to something that gives them money. whether it was a Patreon or their own membership program or whatever. And I ran this for about a year, and I kept analytics on how many podcasts showed it and how many times did people actually click on it. It was used very, very little. And then this was right around the time when Apple started getting up everybody's butts trying to scrounge up more services revenue. And this is when they started giving 37 Signals a hard time.

1:45:28Well, no. But this was when they really ratcheted it up. They started looking around the couch cushions. So this is the 37 Signals with the Hey app, I believe. That was the big controversy of the time. They were starting to get really aggressive with people having any kind of way to link out to anything that gave anybody else except them any money. And so even though Overcast was not making any money from those at all, it was literally just like the publisher specify a link and I direct people to it with a dollar sign. But because of all that stuff going on, it spooked me. and I didn't want to become the next story.

1:46:02Yeah, Overcast wasn't making any money, but neither was Apple. Right. And so I knew that was a risk. And then I looked at the numbers and it didn't get that much traction. So I just quietly turned it off one time, like in some update, and no one said anything because nobody was really using it. But it sounds like what I'm saying is I don't need more freedom and we should leave things the way they are because all the ideas I had to do things that Apple wouldn't like were actually bad ideas also. And that is somewhat true. But I think the spirit of what Jason is saying in the Mac is the Model piece, which is very good, is basically that there's a lot of software out there that never even sees the light of day because people know that, well, this is close to the edge of the rules or this is kind of maybe over the rules, over the line, and so Apple will probably reject this, so I won't even bother making it.

1:46:56an example from your business models thing is the thing you didn't even mention because we've all just been so institutionalized to reference the shawshank redemption upgrade pricing we just don't even talk or think about that it's not because we don't want to do it because we just know well we just know that's against the rules we're so accepting of the walls that we're in what you're talking about is things that are like oh they might be around the edge or they're interesting ideas part of the reason what you're coming up with is like oh it's just a bunch of bad ideas that i didn't want to do is because a bunch of proven ideas like upgrade pricing are just flat out forbidden and there's no way to do them sensibly and we just don't discuss them and don't talk about them and don't don't like say oh it's a thing i wish i could ship but i can't because it's like well everybody knows you can't do upgrade pricing that would be madness upgrade pricing doesn't even work it's not sustainable unlike the app store model which is totally sustainable so now we all have subscriptions even beyond that like there are so many features that like yeah i did have some pretty bad ideas for how to use the volume buttons and i did have a pretty bad idea of how i could let podcasters get a little bit more money somehow But I knew so soon into thinking of them, I knew Apple wouldn't permit them probably or they would cause problems for me that I dropped them before I even tried to develop them into something that could have been better.

1:48:06And that I think – the real loss here, yeah, you have problems where Apple starts shaking down somebody to get more money because what's very clear to all of us is that Apple really needs more money. They're having some hard times over there, and they really need our help to get through these hard times. So there's always going to be stories like that where Apple is being a jerk to somebody because they need all their money, of course. That's just today's Apple. That's the kind of people they are, and that's the kind of people that Tim Cook – this is what his Apple is. They've decided that is the kind of people that they are and that they want to be.

1:48:43So you know what? Good for you, Tim. We're really happy for you. But the real harm that's done is in all those ideas out there that people talk themselves out of even trying. Because, yes, some of them are bad, but not all of them. Some of them have promise, and some of them could actually be good if they were allowed to develop and evolve. So there's this overall chilling effect on the ecosystem when we know that there's all this potential that could be really great. But we kind of think like, well, Apple probably wouldn't like that or probably wouldn't allow that. So we don't even try. We as the developers who would make that kind of thing are not the only people losing value here.

1:49:24So are Apple's customers and so is Apple. I hope someday when they get new leadership that maybe they reconsider this stance. because it isn't just about the dimes and dollars that they're going to make on commissions or possibly miss out on on commissions. It's about the ecosystem and the usefulness of their devices and the software that can run their devices and the way people can use their devices. Having more software and more types of software and more business models for software has huge benefits to the entire ecosystem of that platform, which they make tons of money from in lots of other ways, chiefly the sales of the hardware and their super expensive storage devices.

1:50:07So they have lots of reasons to have a healthy software ecosystem that has less of their own filtering keeping things from being made. And it isn't just about trying to make sure you get your 30 % of every dime that somebody spends in Candy Crush. It's so much more complicated than that. Previous Apple leadership that liked computers leaders would understand that a little bit better. But that's not going to happen with current Apple leadership. And it's a shame because it does overall limit the software that can run on their products and therefore limit the usefulness of their products. I can even blame some of my woes on the iOS side of the fence because, I mean, you may be thinking like, well, what's the problem on the Mac?

1:50:48You don't have to be in the Mac App Store. That's why you got the Christmas lights app. So you're complaining about, oh, you can't put your apps, you can't put these APIs in your apps because they're in the Mac App Store. Well, what just i mentioned like they're running your own payment processing and everything is a little bit of a pain and you need some minimum amount of money that your apps are going to make to make that worthwhile it doesn't really make sense for my apps or whatever but setting that aside um if uh apple allowed actually allowed and not just like fought tooth and nail not to allow despite government asking them to um more competitive uh ways to distribute software on their big platform ios that would make it more possible for there to be competition for the mac app store now there is competition for the mac app store there are companies like paddle and there was kagi back in the day and stuff like but the problem is that the mac is not where the show is now it's it's tiny compared to the phone so in order for a third-party company to compete with the mac app store it basically needs to be a company that can sell phone apps ipad apps oh yeah and maybe also Mac apps, right?

1:51:50If it's just a company that just basically does what the Mac app store does, but not by Apple, that's a tough business to be in, which is why the choices for me as a very small time developer with some dinky apps is like, yeah, the Mac app store is basically the best fit for me. And so my apps are worse, because my options for selling them at the volumes that I'm able to sell my dinky apps, make the Mac app store the best choice. And it has the worst rules for distributing stuff. If Apple allowed competition on its phone platform, the companies that would grow up around that, actual good big companies that are not constantly being beat down by Apple, and we'll talk about that in future shows, if there was actual real open competition for stores that could distribute things to the iPhone, surely those companies would also sell iPad apps and probably eventually Mac apps because they'd build all this infrastructure to be a developer and distribute to their store and blah, blah, blah.

1:52:46And their rules would be more open than Apple's and they would take a smaller cut than Apple's because of the magic of competition. And then maybe I would have an option that is as easy for me as the Mac App Store, but allows me to do things like find out what side of your screen the dock is on. All right, thank you to our sponsors this episode, Squarespace, 1Password Standard Access Management, and Trade Coffee. And thank you to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. one of the perks of membership is atp overtime our weekly bonus topic this week on overtime we're kind of having a a collective photography corner we have a lot of you know kind of follow up and new directions on sim on some photography topics we've talked about in the past um some of them in overtime um and so we're gonna do some more photography talk this time in overtime you can join us to listen atp.fm slash join one more time uh thank you everybody for listening and We'll talk to you next week.

1:54:13And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-G, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech Podcast. So long. I'm on the precipice, and I'm scared. Are you about to mail me a TV antenna or something? Like what's going on here? No, no, no, no, no. Well, we'll see how Sunday goes, right? No, no. Yeah. But no. What's going on is, so I've been working, well, I started by kicking this can down the road repeatedly over summertime and early fall. And I'm almost at the point of delivering on something I've been working on for CallSheet for quite a while.

1:55:16So my biggest, or maybe not the, but certainly one of the top three biggest requests I get, is to be able to have multiple lists of pins. So CallSheet has the ability to pin movies, TV shows, or even people. So basically a way of favoriting or saving, or hearting, if you will. Just marking things as your favorite. That gives you, among other things, quick access on that main Discover screen and affords a couple other things as well. So a lot of people have been saying, and justifiably, you know, this is great and all, but I want one list for perhaps things I would like to watch and one list for things I have watched or maybe another list for just my favorites or whatever the case may be.

1:55:59And this was taking what you could think of as a single database table and blowing it into two database tables. And for what it's worth, the actual database in question is not SQLite. It's CloudKit, which I've actually had pretty good experiences with. It's not core data in the cloud or whatever the current flavor of that. I forget what the actual name of it is. But it's just regular raw CloudKit. And it's been, generally speaking, pretty reliable. I've written what I'm actually pretty proud of as like a front-end to CloudKit. It's pretty simple. It's pretty simple for me to use where I need to use it, which I really like.

1:56:37And it kind of abstracts away a lot of the complexity, which is obviously great. But I really feared doing this because now I'm changing the wings of the airplane while I'm in the air, right? Because I've already deployed the CloudKit schema, the way the database looks to iCloud. And in order to do this, I need to change the schema. And this is something that Apple affords you to do. But this, oh, no, that you just said is exactly why I said, I'm going to do that this summer. And then I had a busy summer with like life things. Everything's fine, but everything's great, in fact. But I had a busy summer with life things.

1:57:18I said, OK, I'm going to do it early this fall. And then I had, you know, the return to school and all of that is in, you know, the kids return to school and busy life. And so hopefully before the end of the year. And I'm happy to report that once I finally forced myself, no, really, you need to stop kicking this can and just freaking do it. Once I sat down to really just do it, I didn't need a graycation, although I was wondering if I was getting to that point. I didn't need a graycation. And it took a couple of weeks to do the heavy lifting and a while after that to kind of clear everything up.

1:57:52As it always is, the last 20 % takes at least as long as the first 80%. And it is in test flight right now. And at the moment, I'm not really looking for new test flight users. So please, I appreciate your offer, but no, thank you. But I'm at the point where really, I should probably just ship it. And I am so freaking scared. And I probably shouldn't be because one of the things I had to do, and one of the only things that kind of bums me out about CloudKit is that in order to push it to test flight, I needed to actually push the schema change to production. So this schema is live in production right now.

1:58:31The good news is it was all additive. So my CloudKit facade just ignored or didn't even look at anything or the shipped version of the app doesn't look at any of this new data. It's completely ignored. It's never requested. It's just sitting there out in the ether. And I don't think anyway, it's not hurting anything. But that, first of all, was super freaking scary. I really wish I could have said, you know, to TestFlight, I could have told TestFlight, use the development, you know, iCloud schema for TestFlight users. And so I don't have to actually push it to production yet. But I've already pushed the schema to production.

1:59:07And I've had at least a handful of people trying it on TestFlight. And it seems like that's going okay, which is really impressive, because one of the things I had to do as part of this was, if you think about the way the database was laid out with the currently shipping version of CallSheet, it expected a database that is just one table. That's, you know, the name of the pin and what the unique identifier is of that pin and whether it's a movie or show or a person and whatnot, and maybe a couple other superfluous things, but not much else. Whereas now what I needed to do was add a column to that, which is what list is this pin a part of?

1:59:45And then a whole new table that is what are all the lists? And that means that what do you need to do when you upgrade or when the new version of CallSheet gets installed that can talk multiple lists? One of the things you need to do is a database migration, or not really a database migration, but you need to do a data migration. So you need to add a entry to the table that represents all the lists, that is pinned items, as I think what I called it by default. and then you need to edit or modify, update, I guess, strictly speaking, to use the right term for it, you need to update all of the rows in the existing pin column and say, oh, they're a part of that list, the pinned item list.

2:00:24And so far, the handful of beta testers I have, it seems like it's working. I'm knocking furiously on my desk as I say that, but it seems fine. But I have watched Marco in particular, many friends as well, do this enough to know that especially because i haven't had like a catastrophic failure for my test batch yet my test group yet shortly i'm missing something and i'm so scared to actually push this out even though again the scheme is there it's just you know submitting the app to app review and then you know presumably it'll get through and that and then hitting go even knowing that i can do the incremental rollout which i do every time just for safety's sake i'm so scared y 'all I'm so freaking scared.

2:01:09Sounds like you shouldn't be on the photos team on Apple because I think if someone had a data loss event and they lost their pinned items and call sheet, they'd be annoyed. Maybe you get some complaints. But in the grand scheme of things, losing access to their photos or their health data, it could be so much worse. I mean, imagine changing the file system live, in flight, on the phone. Losing all this. The file system team is like, I can lose all your data at once. there. I'm not restricted to just losing your photos. I can lose it all. But you know what I'm saying? I don't know if I'm, I guess I'm half looking for you two to say, it'll be okay, just do it.

2:01:46And I'm half just saying, letting people look at what I slash we go through as developers is, this is so scary. And I agree with you wholeheartedly, John, that ultimately if people lose their list of pins, yeah, it kind of stinks. But is that going to hurt anyone? No. It's an additive change to a low-volume, low-stakes data collection. It's pretty much the best case scenario for the first attempt at doing a migration. The only thing you have against you is that you're forced to use Apple's APIs because they do mysterious things that you don't control. You don't have the source code for it or whatever, which is part of why Marco does everything himself is at least he knows then if he screws up, it's something that he did.

2:02:21Oh, yeah. I mean, I think the challenge that... you face with cloud kit is that you are in very little control of that infrastructure. so like you know if if you are running your own server which you should not do please for the love of god don't do that i'm trying i would love take my servers please you know like it's like i would love to get rid of my servers anyway um so if you are running your own servers though you control every part of that so like if you're just adding a column to a table in my sequel you just alter table, pins, add column, pin, book, int, big int, default null, or default zero.

2:03:07Everyone has a pin list zero, and you're set, and you're done. That's almost nothing else you have to do than just build up the stuff on the client side that talks to it. Doing it on CloudKit, theoretically, that should be fine. But if it's not, but first of all, it's difficult to test. And then it's difficult to like try things out. And then it's difficult to know what to do if it goes wrong because it's not in your control. That is the tradeoff you make when you use someone else's server side infrastructure. Like when you're using, when you're not running your own servers and you're using some kind of like managed hosted service of some kind.

2:03:50That's what, that's the tradeoff that you're making. Now, the advantage is if sometime in the middle of next year, a year after you've written this code and it's just running out there in the wild, if CloudKit has some data center break, you're going to have some email, but it's not really your thing to fix. Fixing it is not on you. It becomes your problem to your customers. And depending on how bad of a problem it is, you could regret that down the road. But it isn't your job to get up in the middle of the night and fix that server when it breaks. It's Apple's job, and they have people to do it for you thanks to all of our 30%.

2:04:29Because they really need your 30 % to keep those people, those starving server admins, they need to keep them fed. But the thing is, what you're doing here is a relatively ancillary function of the app. and what you're doing here is adding a column for which the previous version of the app, as long as they can continue reading and writing to the schema, so I assume there's some kind of concept of a default value for the column or whatever, as long as that's not breaking, this seems like a pretty low stakes migration. You're not rearranging the whole arrangement of the data, of the table. You're not changing it to a whole different table for storing all people's pins like this seems like a pretty safe one to do so i think you'll be okay and intellectually i know you're right both of you are right but it's so scary i'm so scared to actually do it and again if something goes wrong you can put a put out a bug fix update really quickly so you know right i don't have to wait for anyone to approve it or anything like that um no i mean all kidding aside the the good news is is that i can do the incremental rollout or whatever Apple calls it, where I think it's something like they do 1 % on the first day and five more percent on the next day.

2:05:47And then like, I forget where it goes after that. But basically over the course of a week is when they start offering the update to people. And I think we've covered this on the show before, but if you know an update is available and it hasn't been offered to you, generally speaking, if you do an actual search for that app, so if you search for call sheet on the app store, for example, and then you have to go all the way into the details. It's not enough to see it on the search results. You have to drill into the details for call sheet or whatever the app may be. And then usually what you'll see happen is the open button will magically turn into an upgrade or update or whatever button if you want to kind of jump the queue a little bit.

2:06:26But in any case, I can do this rollout to 1%, 5%, 10 % or whatever the numbers are over time. And I think I would find out reasonably quickly like, oh, your junk is all broken, my guy. You need to stop the rollout and do something to fix it. And so again, intellectually, I think it will be fine and it shouldn't be an issue, but it's just scary. And I've used CloudKit a touch in the past, but not a ton. And this is the first time I've done any sort of migration or schema change or anything like that. And so I'm scared of it. And I need to just do it. I'm going to give it, I think, a few more days in test flight to see if I get any feedback that's, you know, worth investigating or changing or whatnot.

2:07:04But hopefully sometime next week, and certainly before Christmas, unless something weird happens, I hope to have this out and done. And then after that, we'll see what I get into next. I have some thoughts, one of which includes running a very small server, which we'll talk about in the future. Well, we can talk about it another time, but I think you would agree with this one use case, because it's very, very, very simple but we'll bicker about it another time unless it's if it's sending push notifications then definitely on a server because that is something like it it is really i find it kind of sad how many like services businesses there have been launched over the years that try to sell to developers the ability to send push notifications because it's so easy to send them and it's it's like it's so incredibly low resource usage like it's so easy and costs nothing to send push notifications and they're oh god it pains me when i see people like you know paying some absurd price to do it that's what i was saying for the thing that notifies you when a movie comes out and he's like oh i gotta run a job in the background just run a server it just has to watch the list of movies is finite and there's it could be millions of people who are interested in one movie but your server just needs to know when that one movie comes out i think it's send push notifications to everyone who's interested it's makes sense see the what you're saying is in the middle that you said just run a server that's a pretty big just i know but like Like you said, for push notifications, it gets you out of the business of worrying about how you're going to run in the background.

2:08:32Like running in the background on everyone's phone to check. And they're all checking when some popular new movie is coming out versus one server that you're running checking one time. It's so much more efficient in terms of resources and usage. It's just like it just it makes so much more sense. Yeah. I don't know. I have alternate plans for that specifically, which Marco and I discussed in the past, which, again, I don't want to get into that now. We're already running a little bit long, but we can talk about it in the future for sure. Yeah, right. But in any case, I have a use case for a server that I think you both will approve of.

2:09:05And maybe we'll talk about that next week. Don't run it as a server. Just run it as a Lambda on AWS. Well, actually, what I'm talking about doing, that is potentially possible. But the big problem with that is I know in principle what Lambda on AWS means. I have zero experience with it and don't truly understand it. So maybe that'll be next week's After Show as we can talk about that. But one way or another, wish me luck. Godspeed.