622: Duplicate Garbage Generation Process

43:23And it got Apple, in theory, not provably, a carve out in a bunch of regulations and rules, I forget what they were, that would have hurt Apple a lot financially. But for whatever reason, Apple was excluded from those. Interesting. so will you know kissing up to trump get you a business advantage history has shown that it is possible perhaps even likely right that's the nature of corruption he is a corrupt politician bribing corrupt politicians gets you something that's why they're corrupt like that's the whole point bribing an honest politician doesn't get you anything lots of companies give money to the you know inaugurations and funds of lots of you know that's the thing that tech companies always do it's like we just give money to all politicians people angry about that like you can't give it to all politicians when half the politicians are doing terrible things but like anyway um we just do that because it's just a thing that we do but like in theory if a politician thinks they at least have to pretend to be honest they're not just going to be like oh take your money and then write into the law everybody gets this law except for apple don't ask me why nah right that's that's corruption right so i think tim cook has some reason to believe that giving this money will get Apple an advantage because it did last time.

44:39It's, you know, it's terrible. It is an indictment of the Trump administration. But I think there is reason to believe that this will be a smart business move for Apple. Now, a smart business move for Apple. Marco thinks that they should, you know, take their lumps along with everybody else. If Trump does something stupid that makes Apple, the price of Apple products go up because they're made in China, they should take that because guess what they are made in china right and that should they should just take that the way it is that's one possible position the other position which marco said in a funny voice before but i think is a is a position that has some merit is sort of the position that uh i'll put a link in the show notes to uh because i actually looked at this quote because i couldn't remember exactly that was uh has some historical uh connotations that are not positive uh this was a wikipedia the article about charles irwin wilson who was up for the nomination for secretary of defense some many decades ago um and this was this was back when people really actually need to pretend to be somewhat honest and during his confirmation hearings they were like well wait a second because he was he was previously the ceo of general motors like you're going to be secretary of defense but you were running general motors isn't that unfair aren't you gonna have a conflict of interest like between like you want you know you want things that are good for general motors but now you're supposed to be making decisions for the whole country but you're not gonna you surely not you're not gonna do anything that hurts general motors um can you imagine being being afraid of a conflict like that given the insane conflicts that everybody has in government including everybody anyway it was a different time uh and it was answered in the confirmation hearings but his oft misquoted answer was essentially uh to paraphrase uh that he thinks that what's good for general motors is also good for the united states and vice versa so he's like well you know So, like, I'm not going to do things just to benefit General Motors, but General Motors is so big and so important that what's good for General Motors is also good for the whole country.

46:33So I'll just do what's good for the country, and it will also be good for General Motors or vice versa. And that was widely condemned as saying, like, oh, you think, you know, the country and General Motors are equal and just as important to each other. And so you don't even draw a distinction. You're like, I'm just going to do what's good for General Motors, because as we all know, whatever is good for GM is good for everybody. and the rest of the country's like no not that's not the way it works right uh but that angle on apple is perhaps a lot more apt than it was for gm apple is huge uh not just in terms of the people they employ and the money they make but also in terms of given the current financial situation how much of every private person's retirement who has any kind of retirement account is unknowingly wrapped up in Apple and three other tech companies, right?

47:22Because we all like people who have 401ks have mutual phones, and they're invested in the stock market. And what are the big players in the stock market? Like what percentage of people's portfolios are unknowingly made up of the big tech companies like they don't know that because it's a mutual fund. It's not like they're buying individual Apple or Google or Microsoft stock. But like the fact is tech giants are tech giants for a reason. Financially speaking, the footprint of Apple across the financial fortunes of the entire country is huge, kind of like GMOs back in the day. What's good for Apple is good for the country.

47:54What's bad for Apple is bad for the country because we're so freaking big. And you may not even think you have any interest in Apple whatsoever, but guess what you kind of do? Because if we get screwed over and we get destroyed by these tariffs, your 401k is going to go down and you're not going to understand why. And it's because tech dominates our industry, right? that angle does exist now it is extremely charitable to ascribe to tim cook the motivation that he wants to essentially protect the fortunes of all the people who are financially dependent on apple it may be true it may not be true i don't know what's in tim cook's heart but practically speaking it is a fact that if apple gets massively hurt financially obviously apple employees get hurt by that because a lot of their retirement and compensation is wrapped up in apple stock tim cook himself who cares he's a billionaire he doesn't he's not worried about that and no one else is so he's not you know in it for his own personal wealth or whatever but tons of people rely financially on apple maintaining at least its current level of health so and you know trying to protect the people who depend on apple employees investors everyone who's got stuff on their 401k there's something to that now you could say that's not worth the price you're paying you're enabling the evil trump administration or whatever but the most charitable and noble interpretation of what he's doing is personally sacrificing his own reputation and perhaps historically his his own view in history because if trump turns even worse during this term everybody do anything to support him is going to they're they're uh they're you know they're going to go down in history as like the person who uh you know helped out this even more terrible person right personally sacrificing himself because he knows people are going to hate him for this and they do right and he donated himself rather than donating it through apple and that doesn't deflect the blame from apple because again it's obviously an apple donation done for the purposes of protecting apple like it's clear what it's for but by doing it himself he is putting his personal reputation in the trash can, right, for doing this in exchange for protecting the company.

50:06And I honestly believe, again, I don't know what's his heart, but I honestly believe he's not doing it to protect his riches. He doesn't care about the money for himself. He knows he's got enough money. He's going to give all his money away anyway. He seems like a nice person. He's not someone like some of the billionaires we know who can never feel like they have enough power and money and always have to have more that's i don't think that's tim cook's mo so i think he's doing it to protect apple could be argued that uh his tunnel vision about protecting apple is causing him to miss the wider picture which will say there's protecting apple but now you're enabling the terrible administration on the other side of that you can say is this amount of money going to uh materially affect how much evil the trump administration does or is it just going to enrich the brother-in-law dj because in the grand scheme of things it's just the inauguration fund which is going to be skimmed off of by a whole fleet of grifters that yeah those people probably go off and do bad things but honestly they'll probably just blow it on jet skis or whatever so i i like i i'm not i i hate this i i think everybody who is against the trump administration hates seeing apple support the administration in any way but i also feel like i've been here before i hated seeing uh tim cook standing next to tim apple in the mac pro factory I hated the Mac Pro's good name being sullied by that whole thing.

51:21Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Cheesy peasy. But like, but it did get a carve out for Apple. Is it fair that Apple has a carve out? No, it's not. It's corruption. Should is it a more defensible, more moral stance to not give into that corruption and not pay the bribe? Maybe. But morality is not just a one dimensional thing of like, do you participate in a corrupt system by paying off the corrupt politician or do you not? That's an easy decision. that decision doesn't happen in a vacuum because there's also the people who all wanted to retire from apple this year but when apple stock price gets dropped in half because trump puts giant tariffs on it that hit apple all those people can't retire anymore what is the moral factor in you know one person sacrificing his own personal million dollars and personal historical reputation in exchange for protecting the financial fortunes of all these apple employees now see that to me that is a really dangerous argument because once you start saying that we have to let apple keep making as much money as possible because if you don't let them keep making as much money as possible through through basically whatever means they deem necessary then we're going to harm all these people's retirement funds so then it doesn't mean you need to grow without bound it just means if something terrible is going to happen like these china tariffs that again might not ever happen but anyway if these if these terrible things that were threatened didn't come to pass It was not just a matter of growing without bound or even just maintaining.

52:41It's a matter of like massively hurting. There is. Oh, God, there's so much wrong with this. But like, you know, I think number one is like if if Apple does it. So suppose again, if these tariffs do happen and Apple gets a carve out under the argument that this is good for people's retirement funds and the employees and everything, it totally would be. Well, OK. But like, first of all, does Apple need any more unfair advantages? they're a monopolist in so many areas already like so for instance like you know should should the ipad cost less than like a high-end amazon kindle those are made in china i know that's that's the nature of corruption yeah they're the people with money bribe right what about like a like sonos most of their products are made in china how about the remarkable tablet that's made in china like should the remarkable tablet cost fifteen hundred dollars when the ipad is seven hundred because of this you know because they because they weren't big enough to make up to give a million dollars to trump like it's the entire like to say that the solution to corruption is more corruption it's not a solution to corruption but it is trying but what is it it's harm reduction what is the what is the least how can i make the least amount of harm come out of this terrible situation we're all in no what should happen is if these tariffs end up ever being real every single american who voted in or who chose not to in this past election should feel the pain of what they voted for.

54:00Honestly. Yeah, we know how well voters are able to connect the consequences of their vote to things that they don't like. They just reelected Trump. If they vote for a guy who says let's raise the prices of everything from China, fine, do it, I dare you. See what happens. Yeah, well, we'll see how it works. Anyway, I don't support this. If I were Tim Cook, I wouldn't have done it, but I'm not Tim Cook. I don't understand the, first of all, I don't understand what's in his heart, and second of all, I don't understand the responsibilities he feels. what's in his heart is completely irrelevant you judge him by his actions look at what he's doing but his actions, net net, his actions may be reducing the total amount of harm that happens during the Trump administration when you count the number of people times the amount of harm he's doing the most harm to himself and in exchange he's protecting a whole lot of other people from consequences he's a cheap ass coward is what he is hurting, competitive, but like no, that's the difficulty of ethical and moral decisions deciding, you know, this we may discuss us in a future episode the good of the one versus the good of the many and how do you balance that right it's not it's not so cut and dry like i i you know we all hate it we all don't like it i don't i'm not going to come out and say it is a noble move by tim cook because i don't know that it's a noble move by tim cook but like the i'm not ready to say that the consequences of it are uh it won't actually be better overall when you multiply the amount of harm times the number of people it affects.

55:27And no, it's not fair. It's corrupt and terrible. Like, I'm not saying this like, oh, you fix the problem. It's not fair to Sonos. It's not fair to any, it's not fair to the people who vote. It's not fair to anything. None of this is fair. Nothing good is happening here. It's just trying to figure out how can we minimize the harm. And on that front, I think one of the things that you can argue is like with the slippery slope thing, which I think is true, is like, okay, well, the inauguration, a million dollars, personal donation, like in the end, is that going to enable any harm that wasn't going to happen already anyway?

55:53Probably not. but there are things that you can do later by okay well now i need another few million another few billion i need you to do to support this nominee for this or whatever and you can't just say like well no whatever bribe i give it's fine because i'm reducing harm maybe you're not maybe you shouldn't support the nomination of the devil incarnate to some government position in exchange for apple avoiding the tariffs because the devil incarnate is going to you know do devil things right like it's just like you can't just say oh no matter what you do it's fine because there's some good that comes of it right i think this is very close to the threshold because you are giving money but it's not a lot of money and it's just mostly gonna be sucked up by ancillary grifters right and it's not nothing that bad that is going to happen wasn't already going to happen anyway with or without this million dollars and yada yada right but it's it is actually a slippery slope and that's one of the things that people hate about this it's like okay well once you've decided you're ready to bribe corrupt politicians, when does that stop?

56:49Do you just bribe them all the time now? Once you know the bribes work, like this is how corrupt governments happen. It's like, oh, well, everyone knows you have to bribe to get anything done. We don't want that to be the system. Unfortunately, a corrupt politician has been elected and a bunch of the largest tech companies in the world are all saying we are going to now pay the bribe in hope of avoiding the things that he's been threatening us with, probably in exchange for getting bribes. That's not a good precedent. And then the result of that will be every single smaller company who can't afford to bribe the politician is going to have their product squeezed even further out of the market.

57:22Yeah, I mean, and that's and by the way, that's not just like forget about corrupt politicians or whatever. That's true of everything having to do with anything, no matter who's into the administration. The big companies always get advantages, the whole like regulatory capture and like, you know, open AI being in favor of constraints on AI, like regulations regarding AI, because they know they're big enough and rich enough to navigate them and nobody else is. They're squeezing out their competitors by trying to get regulations on the books that only they can navigate. Microsoft has done the same thing, like setting aside Trump.

57:51This is just something that big businesses always do. They get advantages over small businesses by donating money to politicians. It is, you know, Citizens United has made sure that that is a thing that can continue to happen in this country. One of the many things that is broken about our system. And every big company does it. And it is unfair to small companies. This is worse than that because the person they're bribing wants to do a lot more than tweak regulations to favor big tech companies, right? But it is not unprecedented and it has always been happening and it has always been terrible.

58:24And it's one of the many, many things, wrong-wheeler country. Yeah, it's just I think the problem – this is something that I've been struggling with a fair bit both in a personal level and a professional level. we well i shouldn't say we i fancy apple as a company that tries to do good in a company that's trying to do right by people and tim cook is a good man who's who who cares about things that i care about and they're it's everyone's good they're all good and rank and file apple by and large are good people tim as you both have said predominantly john is probably i i think he's mostly a good person.

59:05But as Apple gets bigger and as their monopolies get stronger and as they operate as a bigger and bigger company with all the bad that comes of that, it's real hard to be really enthusiastic about Apple. And I think this comes in fits and spurts. I think if you were to plot the vibes of ATP over the last 10 years, there have been times it's been hard to be a fan of Apple. And there's been times it's been easy. And it's funny because right now, in terms of products, by and large, I think it is a pretty good and easy time to be a fan of Apple. And yeah, you can start saying, well, what about this?

59:40What about that? But I mean, look at how great Macs are these days. iPhones are iPads. I mean, these are all great products. And in that sense, it's easy to be a fan. But it's hard for me to come to terms with, I don't really want to support a company that is a clear, to me anyway, a clear monopolist, and doesn't give a shit that that's the case. Like, they just don't care. It's like, yeah, we are owed this money. We are owed 30 % of everything. You know, we're owed, we put in a lot of hard work, we're owed it until the end of time. And that's hard to be enthusiastic about. And it's hard to find a way to be enthusiastic about a man who even though on the whole, I think is a good person who donates to this just frigging monster.

1:00:29Like, I'm sorry if you're enthusiastic about Trump, maybe you're cackling and excited about what we're saying, but I am not, I am not. And we are not. And to shoulder up to slash kind of snuggle with him is just frigging gross. It's just gross. And I can squint and I can think of a thousand different reasons why it's by some definitions, the right thing to do. And this is what John was talking about, but it's also just gross. And so it's hard to be enthusiastic about this company that I have enjoyed for a long time, not as long as John, but I've enjoyed for a long time. And to some degree I've hung, like I've hitched my horse professionally or hitched my cart rather, uh, it's professionally to this horse in many different ways, not only this very program, but you know the apps that I write they're only on Apple platforms and yes I could switch and yes I could do a bunch of things but I don't want to do those things so it's making me kind of feel like I mean I'm being a bit dramatic now but it's making me kind of have that oh wait are we the baddies moment and I think Apple are the baddies and I think Tim at least in this action is a baddie and again I can justify I can make a passionate argument why this was 100 % the right thing for him to do but it would be a hollow argument because i i don't think he should have done it and i i just i'm i it just makes me feel disgusting it makes me feel super gross and i hate every bit of it and that's part of like the sacrifice is that if we imagine ourselves in that position we would never want to do it because it would feel so terrible like it would be so soul destroying and denial like especially if we're you know us in our position where we know how we feel internally we were like how could you ever bring yourself to do that because it would feel so bad even if you were convinced which you may or may not be that it actually is the the you know the the thing that produces the the least long-term harm you still have to eat that beep sandwich see i do it myself i don't know you still have to eat that beep sandwich yourself like i have to do that all right so now i gave you like the noble tim cook self-sacrifice version of it here is the less noble less charitable version which you can decide if it's more or less likely uh one area where I think it is possible that Tim Cook actually does agree with some of the things that the Trump administration stands for is when it comes to regulating big business.

1:02:52Tim Cook probably wants what's best for all the people in the world, but he thinks, he may possibly think, it is very feasible and plausible to imagine him thinking that the person or entity best positioned to decide what is good for all the people of the world is Apple and not the U.S. government. Therefore, Tim Cook may agree that less regulation on big tech companies is better than more. Tim Cook's recent experience with the EU and the DMA is some evidence that Tim Cook thinks maybe governments don't know what's best when it comes to making decisions that affect large numbers of consumers and so even though tim cook may be opposed to pretty much everything that the trump administration stands for he may in his billionaire heart of hearts believe that this kind of regulation of tech companies Please.

1:03:50is harmful and those kind of decisions are best left to benevolent, wise, smart people like Tim Cook, who run the companies. And it's very difficult, I think, to become a billionaire captain of industry and not start to believe that the people or entities that know best are the captains of industry, the private companies that have all this money and power. especially if you are as i think tim cook is a benevolent captain of industry who does want what's best for people and isn't in it to enrich himself past all reason for you know like there's no actual reason any billionaire needs more money but some people just can't stop trying to amass money and power as if it's some kind of game and they'd have some kind of terrible sickness i don't think that's his position but i think he does believe governments should not be telling apple what to do.

1:04:45And Trump also seems to believe mostly to enrich, mostly because of a hangover from his own life as a quote unquote business person that like, yeah, rich people should be able to do whatever they want. And the government should not tell them what to do. So I should be able to discriminate and, you know, do terrible things and cheat on my taxes. And there should be no regulations on me. And I should be able to put lead in the Cheerios that I feed to the kids. And like, that's the world Trump wants. And Tim Cook doesn't want any of those bad things. But he absolutely does not want the government telling Apple what to do.

1:05:14So he is actually aligned with the Trump administration's supposed possible, you know, as much as they have any kind of coherent anything, he is aligned with that. And so I think as much as he hates Trump and what he stands for, if there is an opportunity to do something that produces less government interference with Apple, he would do that no matter what, no matter who was in the administration or out. He would be lobbying for, I don't think you should make more rules that govern Apple. Don't do what the EU did. It's bad what they're doing. Don't do that here in the US. Don't regulate us. We know what's best.

1:05:53We're Apple. We don't need any more regulations on us at all. Regulate our competitors, fine, but not us. So any rule that's going to affect us, we don't want. And you can see that in every kind of shareholder meeting in Apple, where there's sort of like shareholder proposals. We think Apple should do X. We think Apple should do Y. And the default answer is always Apple recommends you as a shareholder vote against this because we don't want anyone telling us what to do. Well, let's let's reframe this a little bit, though. The Department of Justice currently has an open lawsuit against Apple. For now.

1:06:23Right. So why else might Apple and might Tim Cook support Trump? Huh. Maybe the million dollars and all the support. Maybe this is not just about tariffs. Maybe it's also because Apple wants the regulatory pressure and the lawsuits from the Department of Justice to go away. Now, under pretty much any other non or less corrupt president, that would be unheard of. Under this president, that will become commonplace. so we are saying the two of you maybe are saying um things from the point of view of tim cook really doesn't support trump but he's grinning and bearing it for the good of whatever what if tim cook does support trump like i think tim cook actually literally does support trump he absolutely does not he does not support trump how do you know we have a gay man he's not going to support a president who hates gay people you think he's the only gay man who would have voted for trump like no of course not but i'm but i'm saying he absolutely does not he he loves the environment trump thinks uh climate change isn't real he's he does not tim cook every fiber of tim cook's being is counter to everything that trump stands for except for the part where the government doesn't interfere with apple does see to me people are bending over backwards trying to justify why tim might be doing this despite hating trump it sure looks like tim cook supports trump period like that's it what else do you call it but he didn't he didn't lobby for him to get elected he He didn't give millions of dollars to help get him elected like Musk did.

1:07:56It's clear that he did not support Trump. When every other big business person gives Trump some kind of financial support, we all say they're a Trump supporter. Why don't we say that about Tim Cook? No, he only is giving this after he's been elected when he has the power to do something that affects Apple. Tim Cook is a Trump supporter. What do you call it? If he had been giving stump speeches for Trump, then maybe I would believe you. But even that would take a lot of speeches to think it wasn't some weird strategy, because personally, from everything we know of Tim Cook, he is not, I mean, he was out there trying to get Hillary Clinton elected in the first time Trump was elected.

1:08:30Like, it's not a Tim Cook thing. It's a long time ago. Things change. A lot of people support Trump now who didn't then. As you noted, it doesn't really matter what's in Tim Cook's heart. It only matters what he does. But I would bet such a huge amount of money that Tim Cook hates Trump and everything he stands for, except for the part where he doesn't regulate Apple. I think Tim Cook likes making a lot of money from Apple. And I think if you compare... You think he's motivated by his personal fortune? No, not... Well, no, I think he's motivated by his company's fortune, which is related very heavily to his personal fortune.

1:09:00But listen, if you compare the behavior of Tim Cook in all the various App Store regulation lawsuit kind of stuff, right? Compare that. Do you think Tim Cook really would like to be a little friendlier and less horrible with the app store in-app purchase policies but he's for the good of his company he's making the difficult decision to be a greedy a**hole no he's doing that because he thinks apple knows best yeah and and he thinks apple shouldn't be sued by the department of justice probably too and apple shouldn't have tariffs too like i don't see what the i don't see why these are different things that's just tim cook that's him like and i think he should be more aware of how many lgbtq people he has in his own company who have a big problem with this and are literally have their lives threatened by this administration.

1:09:45Like, talk about supporting the troops. He doesn't support them at all. It's all about Apple and money. That's what I was saying. How much additional harm is happening from donating a million to the inauguration versus how much additional harm for doing something more substantial. Like, there is a line, right? Tim Cook is walking right up to that line. You maybe think he's already over that line, right? Tim Cook flew over that line in his private jet. But now listen. Now going back for a minute, I do want to, what Casey said a few minutes ago, I think is worth discussing. you know it is hard at this time when you are as fired up as i am or as casey is and maybe john's down there i don't know where john's on a different planet right now a planet of compassion and understanding casey and i are like i'm in the sun i'm mad about it too i'm just able to see i'm just able to see more sides of it i'm not i mean as i think i said in other conversations about this the way tim cook has dealt with china is also enraging in similar ways yes right like like he's like the way and and he has and tim cook has actually articulated like whether it's the truth of his motivation or not he has articulated he said this is why i'm doing this with china because he thinks it is better to engage with them and do the best we can than to do what facebook did which is like say no we're not dealing with them at all and you can argue about that is it better to deal with them and engage with them and let china enter your data centers and do all the stuff that you would never do sacrificing apple's customers i think that it's easier to argue against that because apple's moves in china open up millions of apple customer to invasive stuff that apple supposedly doesn't want and stands against but tim cook says no it's better to engage with china and that gets back to marco's thing of like well maybe it's better to engage with china because they manufacture all your stuff and if they didn't you'd be screwed isn't that convenient yeah no so i think it's important to kind of bring this down a little bit uh back back down to the john's planet of compassion but you know cases on earth john i don't know what part of this little system you're in.

1:11:32But anyway, to bring this back a little bit, what case is it a minute ago? It's like, how do we process this as Apple customers and Apple fans? And I think that's a worthy discussion to have because it's hard. It is not an easy thing to do. I brought this up a couple of times in the past. I think it's a great analogy. A while ago, our friend CGP Grey said somewhere on a podcast, whenever he'd complain about Apple stuff, people would suggest, why don't you move to Android? And he compared changing your major computing platform to be like moving to a different country in terms of disruption to your day-to-day life.

1:12:10Which also comes up having to do with Trump. Yes, well, exactly. And so I think it's a very apt analogy of like, what do we do if we disagree with the political moves of the person at the top of Apple? What do we do about that? Do we stop buying Apple products? Do we get rid of the ones we have? Do we move to different platforms? And I think you can, it's a very, it's a direct parallel to like, if your country gets, you know, bad leadership, if you have a bad election, you get bad leadership, do you move to a different country? And I think obviously like there are certain aspects of moving to a different country that are – that people are like, well, that's a ridiculous analogy to changing operating systems.

1:12:52It's much easier to change operating systems. But in some ways it's easier. In some ways it's harder. Like as Casey was saying, like our entire businesses are related to Apple and in many ways inextricably tied to Apple. like it would be difficult for us to continue doing this show and continue making our apps if we all stop buying apple products and try to move off of all of them like that would be difficult it would you know we could maybe make apps for other platforms and you know and you can again look at the country analogy of like well are the other platforms like much better in these regards do the other platforms have much better leadership because if they only have like sometimes better leadership or slightly better leadership that move's not going to be worth it do they have much better leadership or worse was it we just listed you know google donated microsoft donated like where are you gonna go what is there some big tech company that's not playing this game that's the problem like i think microsoft didn't or did they but yeah they did google microsoft as well yeah so like and that's the problem like when you look at what other platforms like you know there's whole you know the whole like we can move to the woods and use linux thing but like even even that's probably like you don't know who's running like all the companies that maintain linux like that's probably i don't use linux because that murderer made a file system right like there's a there's so many like you know gotchas when if you try to look around for like a country that has no bad political problems or or an operating system or a major tech platform that has no bad people funding or running it you're not going to find one it's like it's like when you get mad at an airline like i'm never gonna fly you know united again or whatever and then like that's me yeah i mean united is terrible but like you say that but then like well there's only like four airlines that fly into your airport so you're gonna probably fly them again because these are because these are systemic problems they're not problems due to like one bad person or the ceos are all evil and it's just it's the system the system is bad and it gets to the question of do you fight to fix the system or do you flee to canada where nothing is wrong and their system is great and they would never elect somebody who's from the right wing right and that's and that's the thing like you know when i think that's it's useful to think of that way of like what you know are we gonna move to a different country because we don't like trump like no But that's not to say that we never would.

1:15:01That's not to say that our tolerance for that is infinite. But things have to be pretty bad for that. And the alternatives have to be substantially better. And I think in this case, we don't have that dynamic. Things at Apple land aren't that bad. And the alternatives aren't better meaningfully. And they're mostly worse. Right. Exactly. In every aspect, every aspect we're talking about in terms of like, you know, donating. Tim Cook donated personally. The other companies donated directly from the company. If you care about the environment, if you care about diversity and inclusion, like show me the companies that are all better than Apple on all these fronts.

1:15:37Like it's either a wash or Apple is still ahead. Right. And that's why I think like, you know, the same reason when people when people complain to us, like if you don't like, you know, X, Y, Z, whatever thing we're complaining about that that month. If you don't like this thing Apple's doing, why don't you leave? And it's like, why don't we move to a different country? because that's ridiculous and the options aren't better and that's then that would destroy our lives in so many ways and and by the way on i'm talking about what we do i mean maybe this is just for my background but i feel like i my non-programming like my regular jobby job career fun i was a full stack web developer for 25 years and worked for a bunch of different companies did a bunch of different things but my other career my apple related career i mostly view as being an apple critic like i wrote uh reviews of mac os 10 which were not universally flattering for 15 years right like i i feel like uh being critical of apple does not impair my career in fact mostly is my career and i think that applies to both of you as well with the exception of developing apps for the platform which is slightly different right which is not as big a part of my business my my income as it is both of yours so that is that but like on the podcast criticizing apple just like a political podcast political podcasts don't go away when the the party that they support wins or loses an election like uh criticism is uh just as valid commentary as praise and i feel like you know we could still make a good podcast when we praise what is praiseworthy and criticize what is worthy of criticism yeah but and and i think the the right way to address this as an apple fan is to be vocal about it you don't need to move to jupiter like you can you can just you know obviously maybe maybe support apple less right write a letter to tim cook yeah like make make your position known that this is not okay and this and why this is not okay like what you think of this and and and you know in ways that supporting apple is optional maybe don't like you know if i if i was like you know about to develop a vision pro app for some reason like maybe this would stop me i don't who knows lots of other reasons why i don't know how motivated you are to make vision pro apps yeah i know but like that's probably a bad example but like no actually it's a good one because that's like it's not the tim cook donation thing that's stopping people from vision pro but there's tons of other things that people don't like about apple that may be influencing people's decisions to perhaps not develop for the vision pro as we've discussed in the past right and like this this kind of just like all the app store you know in-app purchase bs like this this kind of sentiment accumulates and can can kind of affect mood and that overall mood can cause problems for the company when they try to do something like Vision Pro and no one wants to support their new platform.

1:18:16Like there are lots of knock-on effects that are hard to evaluate like the numbers behind them. It's hard to put a cost on alienating a whole bunch of your own employees and your customers to support a corrupt dictator wannabe. Like it's hard to put a number on that. So maybe Tim Cook can't understand it, but it absolutely has massive value destruction. but but the right so the right answer here is fight it from the inside like because you can't really like i'm not going to go buy a pc to fight this like that's not going to do anything except ruin parts of my life so instead i'm going to try to fight it from the inside because that's all i have in the same way that i'm i'm fighting this terrible corrupt government that we're about to get from the inside of my own country i think part of the understanding of the uh the damage that is done by uh tim cook doing this is reflected in tim cook doing it personally because what that means is when he retires, some of the badness goes with him because you can put the blame, some of the blame on him personally.

1:19:15Oh, Apple did this bad thing when Tim Cook was in charge. Remember when he donated to the Trump thing, but now he's gone. Like that, I think he does recognize that. And I think that's one of the positive effects of him personally donating instead of making Apple do it is that it transfers a tiny bit more of the badness to him. And so when he's gone, that tiny bit goes with him as opposed to like trying to reshape Apple as a company that supports Trump, which he's not attempting to do. Someone in the chat room asked if NVIDIA had donated. I believe they have not. But there's a story in The Verge that we will link in the show notes about NVIDIA flattering the Trump administration to to what?

1:19:55To get fewer regulations on selling AI chips that NVIDIA makes. So lest you think that Nvidia is the one morally upstanding company that would never engage in this kind of corruption when it comes time to stop Trump from making or stop the Biden administration, for that matter, making rules that say Nvidia can't sell as many chips as it wants to whoever it wants. Nvidia says, Trump, you're not going to do that, right? You're our pal, right? It's all just so gross. And we're going to and we're not going to forget. When Tim Cook retires, this sticks with Apple because this is entirely on them. This stain he put there and this will stick there and we will not forget.

1:20:35I don't even forget the Mac Pro Factory thing. People are forgetting about that, not me. Cheesy peasy. But this is even worse. This is just straight up corruption. I think it's about the same. It's a lot worse. I mean, it's worse because it's a second administration. But honestly, by the time he did that, we all knew better. It was bad then. This is literally giving him a million dollars. It's not giving him. It's giving his brother-in-law DJ a million dollars. This is giving him a million dollars. It's hard to be worse except giving him even more, which I'm sure will happen over time. But his personal wealth has very little effect on anything, and he's not getting this money directly.

1:21:09It's going to his cronies and gives him a tiny bit more power. But anyway, I think it's – No, it goes to him. He's not a good businessman. Where do you think his money comes from? It comes from grift. It comes from grift and corruption. that's what all of it is he doesn't he's gonna be dead in a few years anyway from old age like him accumulating more money is so pointless now he's just one of those like just blind he's got the blinders on where he just thinks like this is what you do you amass money and it's just like for what to what end like there's no you know there's no helping him that we just need to hope we just need to contain the the badness that he can cause for four years or until he dies of old age all right john what's the uh latest update with the app that shall not be named good transition boy we'll just come off of that totally light fluffy topic you gotta follow that i'm sorry anyway uh as you may have heard i'm developing an app or an apple platform but it's the good apple platform that like lets you do stuff except i'm putting another mac app store anyway do you have a launch party fund yeah right oh donated money to my launch party fund uh brother-in-law needs that money um all right so as i said last episode uh i am indeed going to make the test flight uh for my new app available to atp members so it's not there now so people in the chat room don't run off to atp.fm and look at your member page but after we finish recording this episode i will press a bunch of buttons and I will get the link up on the member page.

1:22:42That means you go to ATP.fm, you log in, and on your member page, if you click on membership in the nav bar or whatever, you will see near the top a thing that says, hey, do you want to go on the test flight for this thing? Here you go. And it will give you a link. You will need to install the test flight app on your Mac if you don't have it already. I link to that as well. And you'll be able to install the test flight and try it out and totally destroy your disk and then not blame me. Yeah. So, obviously, once you if you are interested in the test flight and you do install it you will know the name of my app so i have to i have to reveal the name of the app on the show now uh because i've just been holding off and now everyone needs to know so um we talked uh about possible names for many episodes ago i read many of them i didn't want to say whether uh i said at that time that had already chosen a name but i didn't want to say whether i had chosen a name that was recommended by somebody or whether i had to come up with something on my own uh and i have to say and i and i said in a later episode that i think people aren't going to like the name that i chose based on been there based on all the people who were sending feedback about that huge list they're like i like this one i like that one like people eventually voted with like giving their opinions on the many names that we listed and nobody was interested in any name that was anywhere close to the name that i chose so it is what it is uh as i think i described before i wanted the name to be have some chance in being discernible as an app that finds duplicate files and replaces them with clones like i didn't want it to just be like lavender or like just some fanciful name that is not connected in any way uh i didn't exactly hold that rule as well as i had hoped but it's because one name uh grabbed my attention and i initially didn't think it was that great but it just hung on and eventually ate away and it was like all right fine fine you're the name uh this name was suggested by a listener oh it was suggested by jared hoffert on december 13th 2024 uh in a mastodon toot uh and that name is hyperspace that is good i do like that you can see how it ate away at me okay so let's start here hyper uh my website uh my old podcast hypercritical right anything with hyper there's a connection there space disk space storage space it's not great it's kind of something about getting space back it's got space in the name and the one that kills it star wars star wars hypercritical storage space the three of them together ganged up on me and made me pick this name now am i going to be sued by lucasfilm maybe and i'll have to change the name of the app but for now shh don't tell them that i'm using hyperspace's name in my app and then they won't notice me because i'm too small and it'll be fine uh but yeah that's what the app is called it's called hyperspace uh i dig it i was going to intercap it switch classes intercapped intentionally because i love intercapping that is the uh the tradition from the classic mac os days where macintosh application names had a beginning capital letter and then in the middle of the word another capital letter like mac write capital m capital w mac paint capital m capital p it wasn't always just with mac something but there was a lot of that mac write mac paint mac draw all that stuff right super paint capital s capital p i think anyway intercapping was big back in the day uh switch glass is capital s capital g uh and i almost did hyperspace capital h capital s but star wars doesn't do that so i didn't don't tell them anyway hyperspace capital h no other capital letters that is the name of the app uh if you want to try it you can for the test flight people i have some instructions this is difficult because i didn't want to junk up my app with a giant dialogue that pops up in your face that tells you about the test flight but i almost did there are instructions linked with a three siren emoji on either side of it in honor of Casey on the member page that tell you, please read this first.

1:26:55And it tells you things about the test flight that you might need to know, including the one thing I put in the test flight release notes in all caps, which says this build will not actually reclaim disk space. It will not actually do the thing that my app is going to do. It will do everything but that final last little thing. So it's important that you pretend that it's working. It will tell you that it works. It'll be like, I reclaimed, you know, five megabytes of disk space. It didn't, but it did everything up to that point. So please use the app as if it will do that thing, but know that it will not.

1:27:30Why am I doing this? I know this for multiple reasons. First of all, I don't want to destroy our disks in the first beta. So this one will not actually modify any of your precious files. It will just do stuff off to the side, but it will do all the work except for that final part where it just swaps it in for your file right so please do test that the second thing is if you use this app and get rid of all your duplicate files you can kind of only do that once and then all your duplicate files are gone until you generate more somehow and so i want to kind of save that to the end because it's not useful if everyone uses the very first beta it rids their entire drives of duplicates and then says okay well how am i supposed to test the the next beta there's no work left for me to do should i artificially make some duplicate files so keep in mind that this this beta and many of the betas many of the test flight builds that come will not actually reclaim disk space even though it will say it's doing it it's totally not which lets you repeat the process over and over again which is good for my testing um second thing to know if you haven't been on a test flight before test flight builds will not actually charge you money the purchase stuff is in the test flight build you you can do scanning for free but as soon as you try to reclaim space it'll be like oh you got to pay feel free to click those buttons they will not actually charge you money i believe the ui will tell you oh by the way this is not going to really charge you it does but it's easy to miss yeah but it will not like just i'll link to in in the documentation that you're all going to read links from the member page i link to the apple page that says i swear it will not charge you money like it looks like it does but it doesn't only the test flight build the real builds that you get from the app store will charge you money but this one will not but please do test the purchase part this is probably the part of the app that i have my least the least confidence in because i've never done it before and it's not easy to test please test the purchase part like buy it pick like there there's a bunch of things and prices in there we may or may not talk about but like they just ignore the prices don't like obviously it's not charging you real money prices may change the ways you can buy it may change lots of things may change but like please do test that right um about subscriptions because some of the options are subscriptions in test slide subscriptions renew at an accelerated pace again i'll link to the apple page that talks about this they say that they renew uh renewed daily up to six times within a one week period regardless of the duration so even if you get a one-year subscription it's going to renew every single day and i think they expire after like seven days like the time it's not real time that's what i'm saying so don't be freaked out of like hey i bought this supposed free fake subscription and then the next day the app said i needed to charge money again is that a bug that may i'm not entirely sure but it may be the nature of the accelerated renewal thing again i haven't done this before um finally feedback you can send feedback on the beta through the test flight app itself through the app on your mac called test flight not in hyperspace but there's there's an app called test flight that you'll use to install the test flight beta it's like a blue icon with a propeller thingy blueprint on or whatever um you can send feedback in that app if you launch the test flight app on mac os find hyperspace in the sidebar and then click on the send feedback button you can use that to send feedback attach screenshots so on and so forth you could also just email me there'll be an email address in the documentation that you're all going to read links from your member page that says you can send email to hyperspace at hypercritical.co that's fine um the icon is a placeholder uh it does not have feet but it's all right all right it is not the final icon don't worry about that now uh as for what i want you to send feedback about literally anything i can't figure out the app i don't understand this i didn't know what this button did i didn't find any duplicate files it did find a bunch of duplicate files like just i i don't know how people are going to perceive this out obviously atv members are not the general public but they are perhaps the type of people who might buy an app like this so please just any feedback you don't have to give any feedback you can just look at it and throw it in the garbage you don't have to join it but if you decide to give feedback don't feel like oh he probably doesn't want to hear this just it doesn't have to be a bug report it doesn't have to be a feature requests it could be just your opinion your experience what you thought where you were confused things you didn't understand depending on how much feedback is i might not be able to respond to you individually but it's good to hear people's experience using it if they can make heads or tails of it when you work on an app for a long time it starts to become like obvious to you where everything is and how it works and it's not that complicated of an app but if you don't have that background knowledge and you're just faced with this ui it may not make sense to you so i'm open to any and all feedback about every aspect that you see before you including the pricing which again we may get to in a moment here but like the pricing is not final or real in the app and everything is free so it doesn't matter but like if you have opinions about that throw your feedback over the wall i'm glad to hear it i i do value atb listener feedback a lot because you all if you have been listening for a long time know a lot about me and a lot about app development stuff from listening to us.

1:32:23So please give your opinions. Show the app to someone else who doesn't listen to the show to get a more outsider opinion if you want and then tell me what they thought, like whatever. So anyway, there it is. Hyperspace, beta for ATP members coming as soon as you listen to this episode. A couple of quick addendums. I'm speaking for you. So tell me I'm wrong if I'm wrong. But once the app is released on the proper app store, the test flight will go away the same way it did with call sheet is that fair to say uh that is true although i don't think you can make it go away immediately doesn't like 90 days or something correct so like i said before when we talked about this this is the you know you're on the test flight but this is a specific test flight for atp members this test flight will end uh when the app is ready to be released actually you might be able to expire all the builds but if you have more than a handful of builds that'll take a freaking year to go through and expire them i didn't even know how to do that in app store connect oh yeah one final thing this is a fun note on how little i know about testing in-app purchase stuff or whatever um i installed the test flight version of my app on my own computer and i was testing the purchase flow in the test flight build of my app and i subscribed to my own app with one of the subscription options to see how it worked i was like great you subscribed you know it didn't charge me money okay fine and then i was like all right well i want to i wanted to look like i wanted to take like screenshots of what the sunscreen looks like when you haven't paid for the app but i've already paid for it so like i just got to find a way to cancel that subscription that i just made uh and i do have a managed subscription button in my app that uses the apple approved api to bring up the managed subscription interface uh but my subscription to my own test flight build of my app was not in my subscription list and so i couldn't unsubscribe to it i googled for it and i asked people who knew they're like well it should be in your subscription list you know like i like i swear to you it's not there like i just don't see it is it an app store connect somewhere i didn't use a sandbox apple id which i do have a separate account with a sandbox apple id i know how to deal with that one but that's not this i use my real apple id that is on the test flight to purchase from the test flight version of my app and i just could not for the life of me figure out how to cancel that subscription and yeah it's renewing like once every day or whatever and some people said they thought it would expire after seven days but it hasn't been seven days since i did that could not figure it out you know i eventually solved this problem please tell me because i haven't solved this problem myself with testing subscriptions casey has have i you have you know you know i solved this problem i solved it with call sheet now i'm deeply confused so thanks to craig hockenberry who pointed me in this direction right so on mac os there's you know you can make a button that says like go to manage subscription what it does is it launches the app store app on mac os and it shows you your list of subscriptions but test flight things are not there well there is the same api in ios and guess what on ios it does show your test flight subscriptions oh fun call sheet the test flight version of call sheet has a thing in settings where you can go to manage subscription and it calls that api that brings up a sheet that shows you all your test flight subscriptions and lo and behold hyperspace test flight subscription was right there inside casey's app and i just canceled it from there you are welcome i will take five percent of your proceeds why does that not exist on mac os because apple doesn't care about mac like like i guess what you do is make a stub application like a stub ios application run it in the simulator pull up that like subscription management sheet and lo and behold in ios it has that little square bracket sandbox section that shows you know call sheet and all your other betas ridiculous i cannot believe thank you to craig hockenberry for pointing that out to me i would never have guessed that either making a stub iOS application or launching call sheet would be the solution for me to unsubscribe to my own app.

1:36:12I'm glad I could be there for you, John. That's the solution, Marco, if you want to figure out how to do it. I don't know why, like, maybe you don't know about the API, but yeah, well, I'll see if I can find a link to that to put in the show notes. But Casey just had the link because he literally has the code for it in his app. Well, I was just talking to Craig about this a couple of weeks ago, so I should be able to dig it up for when we were talking because he had asked me, you know, how do you get the managed subscriptions thing? Yeah, here it is. Managed subscriptions sheet is presented. I will put a link in the show notes and in the chat room and so on and so forth but this is how you do it I see Margo was putting in our Slack all the people who own hyperspace stuff yeah there's just so much hyperspace stuff speaking of one of my old competitors Epic Healthcare like I worked for a competitor to them back when I had my jobby job they have a thing called like hyperspace something or other like chart or whatever yeah if someone comes and sues me I'll have to change the name of the app so we could be back to the naming thing But for now, I'm going with this.

1:37:05Yeah, I think from a cursory look through things, I think you are reasonably safe. Because, you know, trademarks are on certain types of goods and services. Like you have to narrow it and say, well, this is what I'm claiming. And if you look through, like there's one that's a little close, but it looks like it's a dead app actually. So everything else looks pretty far away. I think you're okay. But the actual truth is if literally anybody comes after me for any legal reason, I'm just going to fold immediately. What am I going to do? I'm going to fight them in court? over like no i just never get there is the law of like people with money win like i'm not i'm not going to invest any money in battling this type of thing so just you know just don't tell anybody and we'll just have this little hyperspace app off in our corner and uh lucasfilm will never come knocking on my door yeah the the best defense for uh like disputes like this is obscurity yeah and if not i'll just change the name of the app like like uh steve jobs would say just change the name no big deal not not that big of a deal i believe it was speaking of pricing how should i price my app i will give only one constraint to my co-hosts after which i will hear their advice and my constraint is this app is going to be free to download uh and the idea is it's free to download and it's free to scan to find duplicates because the whole idea is hey if you don't find any duplicates don't buy the app it's not gonna do anything for you i don't want to like take people's money when they literally don't it's not going to save them any space right but on the flip side of that if they scan some folder and it's like oh you could save eight gigabytes now suddenly they have a concrete motivation to give some amount of money to get that eight gigabytes back and so that's the constraint free to download free to scan free to do everything except that final step that gets you that space back so i'm open to any and all pricing structures and in fact if you for the people who have the test flight you will see that i have implemented every possible pricing structure does not mean that they will all be there in the release version i was just trying to make sure that I knew how to code all of them.

1:38:57And so they're all in there. Well, the obvious pricing structure is 100 % consumables. And so you get 10 cents per gig saved. And that's how you do it. This is not iOS, Casey. I mean, first of all, that's not that crazy of an idea. But one thing I think that you need to know is how much space people stand to save on average. And I have no idea right now. Do you have any kind of analytics for the test flight that will report that back to you? No, that's why I ask people to give me reports. Like, so my I have zero analytics, zero. My privacy policy is this app collects no data. Like I collect nothing.

1:39:34I probably will never. I have no telemetry. I have no data. I have nothing. I only only know what people will tell me. I know what I see on my disks and like this is my family, but I have no telemetry. And I understand from a business perspective, that's stupid. You should have some. but i just at this point i just don't want to deal with the privacy implications of collecting literally any data from anybody and so i'm not i mean honestly that's fair i mean that's like i like i make forecast and the only the only you know data i have from that is if the app checks the sparkle rss feed for auto updates but i don't even look at that yeah i have crash reports from apple that's the that's the extent of my and i don't even know if you can opt out of those yeah i don't think you can but yeah so i think it's hard to know what the value will be of it without knowing how much space people stand to save on average so i think like if you look at other like disk space saving apps in the mac app store prices are kind of all over the place but it generally ranges from like 10 to 20 bucks for for this kind of thing there are there are free ones that one i talked about that does basically the same thing as my app but not as fancy is like six bucks up front one time pay yeah um on the other hand you are john freaking syracusa so you can charge a premium based solely on not only you know your your fame here but also the reputation that you have of being a good developer especially regarding knowledge of the file system and how it works so this is like people people trust you rightfully so to know how to do this safely well they should not trust me people have said this my enthusiasm for the file system does not translated into an app that has fewer bugs what i will say is that i think my app is more full featured and nicer and more careful than a lot of the other apps simply because i've spent a lot of time but i mean you can judge for yourself like i'm not gonna like i know what my source code looks like i know what their feature set looks like i think i have put a lot of work into this and have worked hard to make it safe that may be why like why can you charge more money so we talk about this like mac apps can charge more money for like phone than phone apps because they're bigger on the screen like there's something to that the idea that like physically it is larger therefore it is worth more money like the things that that translate into people being willing to pay more money are wild so anyway i think seeing the feature set maybe or the interface or i don't know the perform like does it look like it was more carefully constructed than this other app doesn't mean that it was but does it look like it was does it look like a more like a native mac app does it look you know anyway that's that is influencing my thinking about pricing i'm not going to undercut my competitors i'm going to probably end up charging more than they do yeah so i i think if you were doing like a like a more full featured like cleanup unnecessary files like you know that kind of app there's lots of those then i think you could be up around 20 bucks but those are a little janky if you've ever used those and that's true those those look shady sometimes oh absolutely those look shady most of the time but but you know the fact is those are going to recover more space and have more utility than most apps will especially those are going to remove files and mine will not well right but that's that's a distinction that many people will not draw this is a space saving app you know regardless of how that happens i i mean my app is trying very hard to draw that distinction but uh and my marketing will try to draw that distinction but like really my app will only appeal to the people who understand that distinction otherwise why Why would they get it?

1:43:10I mean, fair. But anyway, so I think you should free up front to find out how much you have and then to delete the files, I think$10. Doesn't delete any files, Marco. To recover your space, hyper-relief,$10. Without removing files. Traveling without moving, Marco. Another movie you haven't seen. Yeah, you're right. All right. Yeah, so I think I would – and I think$10 is the premium price for what you're doing. $10 for what? for the deletion or excuse me for the traveling with that yeah for for the non-deletion but like like uh well you pay that once and then it's like a one-time purchase and unlock forever i think so because you know you're not offering people a lot of reasons to run this frequently you know it's it's the kind of thing that you're going to run once you're going to recover a hunk of space and then maybe you'll forget about it for a year or more like and then you run it again And you'll recover a smaller hunk of space.

1:44:08But most of the value that you're going to deliver to most people is going to be up front on that first run. Because that's when the most space will be saved in all likelihood over the lifetime of them using the app. So that's why I think you should have it be a one-time purchase. Ten bucks. You can delete as much as you want after that. Actually, non-delete as much as you want after that. Reclaim, I call it. You're reclaiming space. There you go. Casey? um i think marco's answer although i think you could charge more than 10 i think you might be able to swing 20 bucks but i think broadly marco's answer is probably the right answer um this doesn't necessarily strike me as a subscription app um i i think you could do it but i think it would be a tough sell i i think i well first of all i love the way you're doing the pay wall i think that's brilliant i mean it's it's somewhat obvious but it's still brilliant um that You know, you're getting right up to the point of reclaiming, not deleting, Mark.

1:45:06Oh, gosh, but reclaiming space. And you have to delete files. Right? I could delete all your files for free. But anyways, getting right up to the point where, you know, this is what you would have saved. And I think, by the way, as a quick tangent, you should make it very clear, particularly at that step, that this is not, like, reiterate at that very last step. This isn't a deletion. It's a reclamation. and you're not losing anything. You're getting this effectively for free. Somebody in the chat, and I lost who it was and I apologize, but somebody in the chat, oh, Philco said, you should refer to the Apple SSD upgrade pricing.

1:45:42We just saved you$5 ,000 worth of files, which is eight gigs or whatever, which I think is very funny. But I think the rightest answer is probably to do a one-time unlock everything in-app purchase at that point, like you and Marco have both said, or well, Marco definitely said, and you've kind of hinted at. Um, but I think something that could be fun to play with is doing, and I said it jokingly at first, but the more I think about it, the more I think there may be something to it is to do some sort of consumable. So as an example, you can run this one time or use it for a day or whatever, but I'll probably run it for one, one time.

1:46:20And that's 10 bucks. you can get a three pack for 20 bucks or you can get a lifetime unlock run it as often as you want and maybe if you wanted to you could even have it like install a cron job or something like that and that's like 80 bucks or something like that i don't know if i'm standing by this crackpot theory but it's an interesting theory and this is one of the very few apps i can think of where that might actually make sense because you are like one of you just said you are only going to run this once a year maybe for most people and then other people go bananas and run it once an hour, but generally speaking you're going to run it like once a year.

1:46:57You could do consumables, assuming they're supported on macOS, you could do consumables here and I actually think it might even make sense. The problem is that when you first run it, you're going to recover way more space than subsequent runs for most people's usage patterns. That is a very good point. You also create an incentive then where you're like, well, if I'm only going to save a gig, I'm going to save up my ticket to use until later like i'll i'll come back to this in a year and then you make zero on that person or whatever like i i think you i think it's a one it's an unlock one time and that's it because the utility will vary so much per person but it will almost certainly be mostly up front yeah so consumables do exist and i said before that i implemented every possible thing but i didn't implement consumables that's how much i hate them so i'm never doing that all right fair enough it's just too like i understand the logic behind it but it just feels so gross to me and it doesn't feel like mac like for whatever that's worth um yeah the ones i did implement like i setting aside the pricing which is who knows if i got anything close to that like i have all these options in here at this point mostly because i think all the options make sense in a certain scenario and i haven't priced the options against each other to try to motivate one of the other there's no price advantage to choosing any of the options that i have available um in terms of running the app multiple times here's the thing to factor in here so first of all this is the discussed a little bit in the uh the documentation fact thing that i'll link to but like the especially the tesla version but probably the 1.0 version of this app are extremely conservative i'm trying not to break anything so there are whole swaths of people's disks that I will just not touch.

1:48:38I will just ignore 100%, including large areas that people want me to look at for duplicates. I just will not do it until I can have some confidence that I can do it safely. An example is iCloud Drive or anything that is like any file that is owned by, like backed by one of those things that makes the file magically appear when you click on it, like the ones where they use the file provider API, like OneDrive or the new version of Dropbox or obviously iCloud Drive. I will not touch those files at all because i have no freaking idea what will happen if i try to do my magic to them so it's just like i'm gonna reclaim duplicates in my cloud drive my file will complete my program will complete instantly and say nope can't save you anything because it will refuse to touch them i will not touch anything in your library directory even though my library directory has 12 gigs of stuff that i could reclaim why because i'm terrified of touching anything there it's too much stuff that's that can be screwed with nope won't touch it uh i won't touch anything in your photo library i did my photo library with the pearl script not ready to do it to yours so if you think you're going to recover space from your photo library you're not my thing will totally ignore it i have so many limitations on this thing maybe too many maybe people will do in the test flight and say it found nothing and maybe i have to dial them back and i can dial them back and i almost added a ui for dialing them back but like you know what 1.0 let me just see which means that subsequent versions of this app will surely have some of the guardrails either removed or optional, which means that over time, as I develop this app, if you purchase it, you will be able to find more space to recover, not because you've created more duplicates, but because my app is becoming more brave or you are becoming more brave with your settings in my app of what you're willing to examine for space.

1:50:21So there's that. Second thing is an app like this, there is an ongoing development burden of making sure that it continues not to host your drive especially with little picky file system stuff like this right so if i wanted that to continue to work and continue to be on the market i will have to continue to develop it which makes me not want to do a one-time purchase from my other two apps i you know someone paid five dollars from my app five years ago and i'm never getting any money from them again and they run it 24 hours a day like i run switch class 24 hours a day i'm never giving myself any more money for it right but just fine if you think the app like switch glass is going to be like feature complete you never really have to do anything to it again but this app i feel like is going to have an ongoing burden and i feel like i'm over time going to make the app braver and braver so i was looking for some way to potentially fund what i see as the multi-year development life cycle of this app up to and including things like a privilege helper tool that can do stuff outside the sandbox that you could secretly install like i did with switch glass right uh they can do stuff across accounts or things that run in the background, scanning for duplets.

1:51:24Like there are many sort of more ambitious goals that will never be achieved unless there's some form of funding that is more than just someone paid for this once, one time five years ago, and you're never going to get any more money from them. So I did want to add some kind of option for ways to get money on an ongoing basis. But I do recognize that most people will either run it once and then just never run it again or run it once and then run it five years from now. So the options that you'll see in the test flight are there is a buy it all up front thing for so much money that no one will ever pay it right but it's there but like we always talk about like what's the right amount should i ever have an unlock forever option what's the right amount i should put there i feel like i gave myself like a five year runway with the buy it all at once option for people who want it it's there it will unlock everything forever and ever and ever marco did this much with overcast and is still supporting it and people regret it but like how how should that be priced whatever it's basically a deterrent like don't buy this the other things you can buy are time spanned one-time purchases because people hate subscriptions so i've divided up my purchases into subscriptions and one-time purchases and yeah there's the unlock for every one-time person but there's also the unlock for one month one-time purchase and then there's the unlock for one year one-time purchase non-renewing do people know that can i communicate that successfully in the ui who knows we'll see what people think but like if you want it for a month is enough time to like make sure yeah i found all the stuff that i care about that one point i was gonna find and that's it it never recurs it doesn't rebuild you or whatever don't touch the app for three years come back to it in three years scan up it found some more stuff should i buy another month sure it's kind of like the consumables but not really because during that month you can run it as many times as you want right during that year you can run it as many times as you want and then the subscriptions are exactly the same price they just renew for people who want something that's renewing.

1:53:15I don't know why anybody would, but there's no price advantage to not doing it. I'm not competing. I'm not saying, oh, the subscriptions are cheaper, so you should do them so you forget about it and it auto-renews. No, there's no advantage. If you don't want something that renews, you have multiple options. One month, one year. I didn't do one week or one day. It seemed like too short or whatever, or forever. And then subscriptions, which are exactly the same price as their one-time thing. That's probably too many options. I should probably get rid of some of these. That's part of what the test flight's going to do.

1:53:41I'll let people tell me, oh i think your prices are insane i would never pick this option i would pick that one this didn't find any files it found 20 gigs of files like i'm hoping i get some actionable information on this but in the end what it might come down to is i don't freaking know i'll just i'll release something and if no one buys it i'll change it right like marco has changed the business model and pricing in his apps many many times that's just seems to me to be part of the process and i'm willing to like maybe there's only the only way for me to learn that is to like learn it myself despite all these people giving me advice from based on their experience there's all sorts of things i could tell myself like well their experience is on ios or their app's not like mine or i want to do it this way but it may be one of those things that i just have to learn the hard lessons myself and part of that could be launching a 1.0 that no one wants to buy and then i change it and and launch a 1.1 and change it and let you know like i'm as as frustrating as that sounds i actually kind of relish that process of learning because for me for an app like this it's like low stakes it's not a big deal this app is not going to be a big app or whatever but in the same way that i kind of perversely enjoyed fighting with the in-app purchase system like doing a part of my app that had nothing to do with my app i had everything to do with dealing with the app store one of the reasons i wanted to do this app was to play with that code to hope that i got it right and also playing with pricing strategies is another thing that i actually kind of look forward to uh granted it will be based on no information because i'm not collecting any information but that's all part of the game for me so i don't know we'll see i haven't finalized anything uh but in the meantime i want test light people to try all the options and give me your opinions on them if you know say if this was a real app uh i would pick x option i would pick y option if it was half the price i wish there was a z option let me know what you think because honestly like the main customer base for this app right now are people who listen to the podcast because they're the only ones who know it exists and they're the only ones who might even think about seeking it out in the app store because the ain't the name isn't really something oh by the way the name is not just that it's you know what what's the name of your app casey my app call sheet no that's not what it's called what is it called oh face splash or no that was the other one that was uh look up right sorry no call sheet what is it what is actually called though on the app store oh i don't remember like look up cast and crew or something like that call sheet colon look up here what is your app called marco i believe it's overcast colon podcast player i think yeah and my app is hyperspace colon reclaim disk space yeah there you go and this is part of this is because that's how the app store game is played even though casey refers to his app as call sheet in the app store is called call sheet colon look upcast or whatever like uh that's part of how it's played and the other reason is hyperspace i think was already taken by the epic app so i had to put something i probably would have anyway uh but yeah that's the only chance anyone finds me in the app store is they search for like disk space or something and mine comes up because of the subtitle and my keywords or whatever but you have to put store accusa as a keyboard you know yeah i don't think that i think they would have worse seo than hyperspace if that's possible no so i mean for your like you know subscription ongoing stuff i think that can work when you add more ways to recover space but i think you're gonna have i think it's gonna be a challenge when you're, quote, only doing this particular method of recovering space, I think you're going to be compared in people's minds to all the other disk-saving tools that delete temp files and stuff.

1:57:04Yeah, the ones that delete files, though, I don't feel like are my competition. Maybe they are. Maybe that's what people really want. Like, they already have had people say, oh, I don't want to actually recover space. I just want to find files that are duplicates and delete them. I mean, I can always add that feature. Obviously, I know where all the duplicate files are, and it's really easy to delete stuff. But, yeah, we'll see. Maybe that's a thing that I'll learn is that the function of my app performs is not desired. It's desired by me. That's why I made the app, but we'll see. Well, it's desired, but I think if you want it to be an ongoing revenue app, I think that needs to be one function of multiple functions that are all responsible for keeping your disk space minimal or recovering more disk space than what that can do.

1:57:46Yeah, we'll see. like i mean the it's not like it's not like ongoing it's more like uh punctuated like use it once wait two years use it a second time but when i use it the second time i want you to pay again all right you know i mean unless you've unlocked it forever but like that's what like if i get the pricing right you'll be like i you know a one month unlock is plenty i'm not gonna use this thing for a whole month i'm gonna be done with this in two days so you pay what you hopefully you think is a low price you use it for a month forget about it for two years two years later you come oh i should do more space and you download the app and you do the exact same thing like it's it's kind of like a consumable in the form of like i don't use this app that often but it does make the second use potentially you know a a transaction right obviously if it was 99 cents to do it everyone would do it they'd be like oh just pay 99 cents and do it for a month or whatever it's like questions how how high can you make that month thing and i really that depends on to your point margo that first big number when you do when you find all the duplicates the first time but like what i was saying earlier is that it could be that your second one actually finds more space than your first because two years pass and now my app is brave enough to delve into darker recesses of your mac where the real space can be recovered like i said my library directory is has been the largest source of duplication that i found but i'm just not ready to go there yet i think i think subscription is going to be a tough sell i really do like i get what you're saying it makes sense i don't see why anyone would do it either but if it's the same price and if that's people what people want yeah you got to reach for more disk space like i think again like you got to go for the library you got to go for the photo like like that's if you want because the thing is like obviously the more space you can save the more value you will have to people so i think you have to go for those yeah it would also be nice if i knew at what rate duplication is generated because that's one of the questions people had they're like why would there be any duplicates i'm not sure i know the answer all i know is that there are duplicates like i I don't think I was creating duplicates, but I've got just so many of them.

1:59:41How did they get there? Like, I can explain some of them, but not all of them. Like, they're finding duplicates. I'm like, how in the world do I have two of those that are not clones of each other? But somehow I do. So I don't know at what rate does new garbage get generated. If new garbage gets generated real slowly, then, yeah, no one's ever going to want to run this app again. But if there's something, some part of some process, especially in a directory that I'm not looking in now, like library or photo libraries or something, If there's some like duplicate garbage generation process that is just constantly eating people's disks, then maybe running this once a year is not a ridiculous thing to do or even continuously monitoring or something.

2:00:14So there's just so many unknowns here. And, you know, if I'm not willing to add any telemetry, I'm not sure how those unknowns are going to become knowns, but presumably slowly through feedback. We'll see. Thank you to our members who supported this episode for us. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. one of the person membership is ATP overtime our weekly bonus topic this week on overtime we're going to talk about Honda's announced EVs at CES in partnership with Sony which I didn't even know was a thing until this moment so this is kind of cool so anyway we're going to talk about Honda's EV announcement at CES in overtime you can join us at atp.fm slash join to hear that and every other overtime we've done and all the member specials as well it's a pretty cool membership so ATP.fm slash join.

2:01:01Thank you everybody and we'll talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Because it was accidental. Oh it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Because it was accidental. It was accidental. Accidental. And you can find the show notes at atp.fm. And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse. It's accidental. they didn't mean to accidental tech podcast so long

2:02:08john it's winter time and you have a new car in the house how's that going yeah i think we've got a little bit of uh after show car stuff to match up well with the uh overtime car stuff this is the first winter for my wife's new 2024 civic uh and i didn't really think about winter car performance until the snow started coming and i was like i've got a new car in the snow and i'm not talking about how the car drives in the snow because you know it's front wheel drive honda with all season tires it's pretty much a known quantity i don't think there's anything remarkable about this car i'm talking about the other stuff uh have about having a car in the snow which is basically when you wake up in the morning and it's time to get in the car and go to work.

2:02:53uh how what does that process look like now if you have a place where all your cars fit in your garage maybe this is not a big part of your life uh but all our cars do not fit in our tiny garage made for horse-drawn carriages uh cars with the exception of one are all on the driveway that means they're getting snowed on that means in the morning you got to go out there and defrost your car and scrape it all off and depending on the weather you had you could be brushing away snow you could be scraping off ice uh this is just part of life uh in a place with winter uh with a car and i guess i hadn't thought too much about it for so many years because so many of our cars have been the same we have two the same generation of honda accord we had a bunch of honda cords and honda civics before that but this 2024 civic throws in a few new wrinkles and i don't know if it's just like you know because my car is 10 years old my wife's car is like seven years old my wife's other car and her new one is the shiny new car and uh along with the first car having carplay there are other firsts in this car as well i'm not sure all of them are good but some of them are just a fact of life so this is our first hatchback uh and a hatchback has a rear wiper has a big hatch and yeah there's a wiper on the hatchback what the hell is that doing there uh that is a thing that i have to be aware of and avoid when removing snow from the back of the car lest i scrape the wiper off of my car and onto my driveway now hold on are you not doing the time-honored tradition of putting of moving your windshield wipers to the upright position when when it's snow is well i'll get to that so first of all the wiper on the hatch does not do that at all as far as i can tell that's a shitty design yeah i agree uh but there's that right um and yeah when the snow is on it you may not be aware of exactly where it is but the second thing is the hatchback also has a little sprayer thingy for spritzing water for the wiper to wipe away that is in the middle of the glass that is another thing you do not want to hit with your giant ice scraper as you're scraping the ice off the windshield with big long powerful strokes yeah that's another thing you don't want to do just for the purpose of argument here have you not considered just like turning the car on and turning the rear defroster on and just coming back in five minutes five minutes hey i'm not sure where you live five minutes is not gonna make a dent when you have like freezing rain that has put a centimeter thick sheet of ice over your car that rear defroster is not going to like make that stuff magically vaporized and no but it'll at least make it loose you then you can it'll it kind of just like falls off right you do what you can you give it 15 20 minutes but sometimes you're running late sometimes you don't have time to let the car sit in your driveway and defrost you don't want to just be sitting there just spewing fumes into the atmosphere with your internal combustion engine for all this time like yeah obviously you put on a defroster obviously you turn the car on obviously you want it to warm off obviously you turn the heat on inside you do all that stuff and yet still you want to get going you want to get out of the driveway you're late to where you want to go you've got the ice scraper out there you're scraping so i have to be aware of where that little nubbin is so you got the wiper on the back and you got the nubbin on the back and that's setting aside the other thing that you have which my wife does not care about but i absolutely do which is all the ceiling around all the glass and you have to be aware of what that is so you don't take your scraper and jam it into the ceiling around you know that's fragile right it's made of soft plastic or rubber your ice scraper can damage it i am of the opinion that you should not hit that with your scraper other people in my household are not of that opinion so i'm trying to preserve this car cheesy but and obviously you've got the side windows which have their own seals around them right but you also don't want to hit that you're also trying to scrape off that you're also trying to point the vents too so they help to rust it but now let's move around to the front where some real issues are happening so first of all this is the thing that i've gathered a lot of modern more modern cars do that i don't like which is they want to get the wipers out of the airstream so the wipers are like nestled more under the hood yes right both of our cars do this which means you can't just take them and pry them upwards because they won't go they'll hit the top of the hood what you have to do is go into the car and depending on whatever your car is do whatever incantation that tells the car can you please put the wipers in service position and they move and they blah blah all right now you can move them out and of course you can't put them back until you you know so that dance is stupid on the car because you have to like start the engine and then turn it off or turn actually turn on the accessories and turn them off which is harder when you don't have a key because the key you just turn halfway but you've got a push button anyway that's annoying i don't like i understand why they do it but i don't like it and the second thing is and i don't know if this is just a honda thing or this is a new modern car thing but i'm i have two minds about this all my previous cars that i've ever owned have the squirty things where they squirt you know windshield wiper fluid onto your windshield just like i have one in the back little like squirty nozzle you know sprays out and usually there's like two of them one sprays the driver's side one sprays the passenger side not the 2024 civic oh are they are they in the wipers yeah oh that's what the volvo is it's yeah something well and i understand why they do this what it has is the wiper squirty things they're not in the blades i mean they take regular wiper blades you can just replace them with any wiper blades the wiper blades are dumb like there's nothing smart in them but the little arm that holds the wiper blade has the squirty thing in it so this the stuff squirts out basically just in front of the wiper blade right like right there with the wiper blade so as you swipe the wiper blade it is squirting stuff in front of the wiper blade as it goes now i i would imagine their motivation is this first of all with the old one when you pull the little stock or whatever and it goes squirt squirt squirt there are situations where you could effectively be blinding the driver in a quickly moving car because that spray sprays onto the windshield and instantly freezes into ice or smears some mud or dust that was on there or whatever and now you're waiting like oh my god i can't see anything you're hoping those wiper blades come and sweep away the mess you just made and if you're lucky they do and if you're unlucky it like flash froze onto your thing because your windshield washer fluid was the wrong concentration and now you can't see and you're going 60 miles an hour on the highway you don't want to be in a situation where you spray a bunch of gunk on your windshield and they rely on the correct functioning of the blades to swipe it away.

2:09:32With this technique where they're on the blades, the only place you're putting it is right in front of where the blade is about to move into. And you're not spraying the entire window all at once. You're just spraying the region in front of the blade. So maybe there's a safety issue there. Maybe it is a little bit better. Maybe it's a more efficient use of liquid. So you're not spraying most of it into the air. So it's just blowing over the car. How much of it actually contacts the windshield? How much of it stays on the windshield here you're squirting it directly on the windshield but now you've got this problem where the little arms have little hoses on them and little squirty things and it's just one more fragile thing to go wrong and not mess with when you're there fumbling in the ice and snow maybe people don't know don't live around snow thinks that snow is like i don't know invisible or easy to deal with but like you know wet icy snow that's frozen onto your car and everything like it's not as simple as it's not just like this fluffy white powder that just moves out of the way like it can it can encase your car in hard stuff that you want to chip it out of but you don't want to chip it's like it's like chipping out a baby from like a giant stone thing you want to get the stone off but you don't want to use a jackhammer because you kill the baby my car is the baby in this scenario right so i there's ice coating everything i can't even get the blades up into service position because everything is frozen in place but i don't want to crack them out of those little tubes going into the arms to go up to do the squirter thingies and in the old way at least i could like know where the squirters were and like try to clean them off and clean off the nozzle they have a clear shot but now the squirters are facing down and they're inside the ice encrusted blades it is a much more delicate operation than it was before and i guess this is the march of technology a lot my wife thinks that the wiper arm squirters are not as good as the old ones just flat out and performance-wise.

2:11:19But again, I kind of see why they do it. But it is making the process of chiseling my car out of its icy prison, or my wife's car out of its icy prison, a lot more complicated than it used to be. And I'm not entirely sure that the trade-offs are worthwhile. Fun. What do you think of your wiper blade squirty things, Casey? John, I am a civilized human who parks in the garage and we very rarely get snow. We did just get snow twice, actually. So it does happen, but despite what you think. It just melted away instantly instead of snow that falls having to be there until March. Well, that's your own fault for living in the wrong section of the country.

2:11:57But nevertheless, no, I think in general, like in decent conditions, I like having them in the wiper blade. That being said, I went to replace the wiper blades in her last Volvo once. And I had gotten whatever, you know, reasonably not crappy ones I could find on Amazon. And then they arrived and I went to install them in the car and whatever the mounting situation was for the wipers I got was in direct physical conflict with the sprayer for the wiper fluid. So I quickly ended up saying, I'm not going to bother with this and trying to research what third party thing will work. And so I just, you know, pulled a Marco and threw money at the problem and just went to Volvo and got some new wiper blades from them.

2:12:37But oh, yeah. And on that front, oh, yeah, wiper blades aren't usually really any more expensive than good third party ones. unlike so much like you know the oem things where it costs a bazillion dollars to get the official one from your car manufacturer wiper blades not the case now maybe they're not as good as the third-party ones you would get for the same price but if you're worried about like i need wiper blades that exactly fit my car the oem ones are not that expensive you just go to your dealer and buy them like 20 bucks each or whatever or more than that's okay but still they're a lot more expensive i i think than crappy things you can get from amazon but they're at least not crappy anyway but they're they're about the same price as the really good third-party ones that you can again.

2:13:12That's probably true. But one way or another, I like having them, leaving the replacement issue aside, I like having them in the blade. My car, both of our cars do the hideaway, the blade thing when the car is in a steady state, if you will. But I don't really mind that, generally speaking. And again, I don't have to deal with snow on a regular basis. Do you even know the process of getting yours out uh i certainly did on her old car i think i do on mine i don't i don't i'm sure i could figure it out fairly quickly but i don't remember off the top of my head um but yeah i mean it's not terribly difficult it's just stuff in the center concept you think it's on a touchscreen somewhere yeah yeah exactly i mean that's what it is what it is that's modern cars for you baby and uh speaking of modern oh well actually before we move on how is the on road performance of the civic like does it go reasonably well in the snow i've only i've i drove my wife's car for the first time like a week ago oh okay so what'd you think of it we're on the streak of me just not driving first i was not driving in it because i didn't want to be the first one to scrape the wheels but then she scrapped the wheels but still i didn't drive it it was just you didn't want to break the streak but she was away for a while and i had to move cars so i did actually drive her car to move it out of the driveway i drove around the block to see what it was like it's fine it's nice um i like it's i bought this car because we talked about it before like i can barely fit in it because it's got a sunroof so i would not choose this car for myself but she likes it oh fair enough uh for me i have a little bit of car follow-up um i am mad with power gentlemen because i have installed home assistant which i think we briefly have touched on a handful of times are you putting yo link things in your car no although man if i could find a way I would do it.

2:14:58See if your sunroof is leaking. Oh, funny. Well, you know, you have a sunroof now too, big guy. Not me, my wife's car. Oh, yeah. You have nothing to do with your wife's car. Not a thing. I just drove it for the first time. We've had it for like six months. Anyway, there is, maybe this has been here for a while and I just didn't realize it, but there is a integration between Home Assistant, like a community integration between Home Assistant and Volvo's like APIs for controlling the car. And oh, baby, I don't even know what I'm going to do with myself because I installed this integration, which was challenging for uninteresting reasons.

2:15:35But I installed the integration like three hours ago and within an hour of it being installed, I've already written an automation such that if it's a weekday and the car is plugged in at about 10 minutes before she leaves in the morning to drop the kids off at school, it will precondition the car. This is stuff that Tesla owners have probably been doing for 10 years, but now I can do it. And the other thing is, I bet you I could do this in the Volvo app, but I don't care. I can do it through Home Assistant now. I've got a hammer. Everything's a nail, baby. And so this is very exciting for me. I can get like a readout in Home Assistant of the battery level of, you know, whether it's charging or not.

2:16:13And I think I can even tell roughly when it'll be done charging. Can you put it in your menu bar? So you can put it in your menu bar and see what your wife's car's battery is. I don't know why I would, but I could. And now I feel like you've nerd sniped me. I just kind of want to see if I can. But anyways, this is way too much fun. And I feel like, again, everything is a nail because now I've got the world's biggest hammer. And that's my quick bit of car-related follow-up for today. Marco, how's your car in the snow and everything else? And how was it on the long trip? So far, it's been great.

2:16:46I mean, I haven't had it in many demanding snowy environments. So I don't know how it compares to actual off-roaders I've had before because the iX is not an off-roader. It has all-wheel drive the same way most modern BMWs have all-wheel drive. And it has the benefits of electric drive of very high torque and everything. But it is not in any way a good off-road choice compared to any other regular SUV. Can you lift your wiper blades up with your hands without doing anything else? I don't know. I'll have to check. But they do have the squirters in the blades, which I also had in the Land Rover.

2:17:32I guess it's everywhere now. So I actually prefer the squirters in the blades because not only does it, as you mentioned, John, you have kind of less blinded time as the winch is sprayed. But also, it uses way less fluid to get a full sweep because you don't have to hold it down for a second and then the wiper blade goes across and scoots it over. And then you squirt a little bit more to get under the blade. You don't have to do that dance. You can just squirt a little bit of it and it coats the whole windshield way better with less fluid. I think less of it is spraying off into the air and doing nothing.

2:18:08You know the people who have like their squirters are not aimed correctly and you're driving behind them and they just send off this spout like a whale and it just splatters onto your windshield? Yeah, exactly. So I find it's nicer in every way and I have not yet found a downside. So other than those, the car has been pretty great. I've had a couple of like minor software things where like sometimes, you know, the iPhone won't unlock it very quickly. And I think, honestly, that's probably the iPhone's fault because I usually run beta iOS's and they change the Bluetooth details all the time in iOS betas for some reason.

2:18:47So that's probably the phone's fault, not the car's fault. Other than that, it's been pretty great. I love CarPlay. in fact there was even there was a story that breezed through the news today real quick that apparently bmw's next gen uh iDrive system everyone's saying like it's barely going to support carplay and what they mean by that is it's not going to support dual screen carplay it's going to keep having carplay just like in the main screen and not in the secondary like driver cluster but as far as i can tell i don't think my car supports the driver cluster second screen anyway and i had like the ix is supposed to have one of their most cutting edge iDrive systems and one of their most cutting edge carplay integrations i mean it's a few years old now like you know the the model's a few years old now so maybe it's not as new as the newest ones but i already don't have the second screen and i don't think i would want the second screen uh i think like this is probably a bigger discussion for a different day but i think carplay the way it is implemented in most cars, which is just like the window on the main screen, I think that is CarPlay's best self.

2:19:57They should never have tried to branch out any more than that because that was never going to work and there's other downsides to it. And I think having it be in that screen both keeps the automakers happier about keeping it there, achieves a nice balanced functionality with the users and everybody. it gives the car enough room on its ui to show what the car needs to show things like you know like when you have an assisted driving feature it will usually have some option to show in the middle like here's your car and here's a map of ahead of it here's the car that we think is there and you know kind of show like a visualization like the cars around you as the car sees them or you're following distance or your cruise control settings or whatever that all goes in the main cluster.

2:20:40So I like having CarPlay in its little, or in the case of the iX, in its giant rectangle on the main screen. I don't think it needs to go anywhere else. I think having it try to take over everything was probably the wrong strategy for Apple. And also, Apple doesn't put a lot of effort into CarPlay. So I think having it be in its rectangle on the main screen matches the amount of effort apple puts into it i don't think apple makes carplay good enough bug free enough or reliable enough or full featured enough to have it take over the whole dash so i think carplay in the rectangle is exactly where it needs to be and by the way remember uh carplay 2.0 the next gen carplay you remember that oh yeah yeah wherever the hell that that's gone i mean coming in 2024 yeah that's i mean look that's they're they're walking away whistling like that's gone like we all know that's gone that that's up it's up in apple heaven with air power i think apple is still insisting that uh this is still coming from some car manufacturers but uh they're they keep revising they i think they announced in 2022 nowhere to be seen an apple story for all of 2024 is totally it's coming in 2024 from one of these manufacturers that did not happen no it's not going to happen like that's that's fine anyway so i love having car play in what is a good version of regular CarPlay.

2:22:03It's still the one rectangular screen in the middle of the car. It's a good version of that on a nice, big, good screen. So I like that a lot. And yeah, otherwise, I'm very happy with the car. I disagree slightly with regard to the multi-screen CarPlay thing. It is nice to have, like in Aaron's car, it'll do multi-screen. And it is nice to have a map right there in the instrument cluster rather than only in the center screen. I think perhaps you've been tainted by having many cars where the screen was this giant thing in the center and there's little to nothing in the instrument cluster. But one way or another, I do like having it there.

2:22:42It's not critical, but I like it. And I think a lot of the brouhaha with regard to BMW from what little I read is that it is a regression insofar as they were supporting that previously in most of their cars, perhaps not the electric ones. and they soon will not be anymore. And people were pretty grumbly about that. But all in all, I mean, I do quite like having CarPlay. I still will not buy a car without it. You know, people keep saying to me, especially with regard to our conversations a few weeks ago, oh, you should buy the Rivian R3 when it comes out because it'll surely be cheap enough. Sure.

2:23:17But I'm not going to buy a car without CarPlay. I just won't. And you might think me a moron for that, and that's fine. I don't care. Like I will not buy a car without CarPlay because I just don't want to do it. I don't want to rely on a automobile manufacturer's software in order to have the infotainment that I want on my, in my car. You know, I don't want to have to use Overcast via Bluetooth. I want the damn CarPlay app and I just, I will not buy a car without it at least. And so I'm, I'm hopeful that CarPlay is not dead in its entirety, even though it does appear that next-gen CarPlay was never born, much less has died or anything like that.

2:23:57But, oh well.