628: There’s a Certain Smell

33:14So here we go. Interestingly, for both of the things you mentioned, or actually for all three of the things you mentioned, Apple did this by acquiring companies. They acquired PA Semi to make the first Apple Silicon Chips, the A4 series. They acquired what, imagine something or other for the GPUs. And of course, they acquired Intel's cell modem business. Now, the thing is, PA Sammy was filled with like rock stars and the GPU company was filled with people who knew how to make small GPUs. Intel cell modem business was not doing well when Apple picked it up. It wasn't the cream of the crop, but it's what they could get and they bought it.

33:51And so maybe that's why the cell phone stuff has, again, according to rumors, been delayed, you know, delayed from when. Apple never said that it was coming. Anyway, the rumor was it was coming years before it actually came. You know, it's a hard problem. So is making the Apple Silicon. But I feel like PA Semi was more up to the job than Intel's failing cell modem business. But in all those cases, it came down to smart strategic acquisitions at the right time and then a multi-year wait to get to the point where they can produce something that's ready to be an Apple product. Speaking of all of that complexity, Pedro Fernandez writes, from a cellular point of view, the C1 seems to have all the bells and whistles, bands, and MIMO.

34:35What is MIMO? I should have looked at that. MIMO. I'm sorry. Yeah, multiple in, multiple out. It's like simultaneous transmission on different frequencies, I guess, or antennas or something. There are not many countries with millimeter wave, and you do need line of sight and to be close to the radio to get maximum throughput. We have to wait for measurements of the real-life throughput with carrier aggregation. It would be surprising if Apple managed to get as good performance as Qualcomm. One thing is being power efficient in standby mode. Another is while actually transmitting. If you have worse sensitivity and interference resilience, then you can end up using higher transmission power, and that's where power consumption is the most impactful on battery life.

35:13It really takes a lot of courage from Apple to put out a new cellular radio on an iPhone. Cell radios are one of the most advanced technologies out there. Hello, Marco. I always tell people that a cellular radio with negative 105, what is it, millidecibles, dBMs, I think that's micro, millidecibles, I don't know, very sensitive. Anyways, with negative 105 dBm sensitivity translates into decoding a signal that is about 31.6 femtowatts. And on top of that, it could be interfered with by other signals. It's basically magic. Now, I think it was John put in the show notes, to be clear, the measurement that Pedro cited, 31.6 femtowatts, that is 0.000000000000316 watts.

35:59We will put that number in the show notes so you can see how preposterously small this number is. It is effectively immeasurable as far as I'm concerned. And yet that is the level of information that this chip gets in order to try to make heads or tails of it. It's bananas. Having majored in computer engineering in college, which is actually just electrical engineering with some computer stuff added in, I had to take courses that explained what was then state-of-the-art, like in the 90s, state-of-the-art cell radio stuff. and all the different technologies that go into it and the competing networks for code division multiplexing and old time division multiplexing stuff.

36:38We went over all the different technologies and it was like, here's what they're doing, here's what the more modern ones, here's the problems with the old ones, and do you do problems and exercises of like, if you have this number of devices in this amount of area and they require this much power and how could they blah, blah, blah. And it was like, wow, this is really cutting edge stuff. And it was nothing compared to the number of phones that are out there, like the number and density of phones that are out there now, and how amazing it is that we get signal in so many places. Like, because that was part of the problem.

37:08It was like, how can we come up with a system where, you know, we've seen it ourselves back in the Wi-Fi days. How can we have a room with 5000 people that each have two Wi-Fi devices? Like, what can we use to make it so that works? All right, well, now, how about a football stadium where everyone's got a cell phone? How can you make all their cell phones work? And the things we were doing in undergrad in the 90s talking about like what if you have 100 people in a room and i was like that's that's nothing everybody has a cell now and and they have to expect to get signal everywhere and it's just like again 31 femtowatts like you just think about the the tiny electromagnetic vibrations you're like you're annoyed when you don't get enough bars and you can't load your thing and it's like do you know where the cell tower is you're inside a building with this tiny device the battery it's going to last all day how is this even working it's amazing technology is amazing Yep.

37:55Couldn't agree more. I also wanted to call attention to Andrew Edwards, who is a YouTuber in our same space. He got an exclusive tour, behind the scenes tour with Suruji for the C1 manufacturing process and information about the C1 and 16E and so on and so forth. I want to read to you a little section of what he said in his video, which will be linked in the show notes. This particular section is about 5 minutes and 15 seconds in, but the whole video is, I think, like 10, maybe 15 minutes, and it's very good. In there, Andrew says, the tight integration between the C1 and A18 allows the modem and processor to communicate in real time.

38:34So, for example, if your phone encounters a congested network, John, here's your football stadium, the A18 can signal to the C1 to prioritize critical packets. Maybe you just opened up messages and you're trying to send a photo or video to someone. The A18 can direct the C1 to prioritize what you're actively doing so things don't feel like they're bogging down. This dynamic traffic management not only improves the connection speed, but also makes your device feel incredibly responsive under heavy network loads. That makes a lot of sense, and that's the first I personally have seen that reported.

39:00So I thought that was an interesting tidbit. Yeah, well, when I hear things like that from Apple when they're talking about stuff, especially when I'm not well-versed in the technologies they're describing, I say, that sounds great. I bet that's all true. do qualcomm chips also do that not mentioned yeah you know i mean like but now but the the larger point is like this really saying with the whole it's like look now that we're making this once we get good at it which they're probably not great at yet but once we get good at it we'll be able to make it you know like with apple silicon exactly the chip that we want to make and we'll have an item more on that in a little bit but like i trust that they will be able to do better than qualcomm eventually because qualcomm has many customers apple is just one of them and it's a contentious relationship kind of like it was with intel where apple would make demands intel we want chips to do x y and z and intel would be like all right and we'll do this once apple can make its own chips they were much better suited to its hardware and i hope that same thing i expect that same thing to happen with the modem chips even if the first gen one isn't that great like what pedro was getting at is like this may be the most power efficient but there's like being power efficient and standby is great and i bet apple is great at that but if it's less power efficient when transmitting because they're just not as good as qualcomm yet you will burn your battery faster if you're actually using the cell network versus just sitting there sipping the data so we'll see when this thing comes out you know how it performs in the real world but doing it on the 16e is a good test bed because it's not the flagship phone no one cares that it's missing millimeter wave and if it really screws up oh well anonymous writes in in this week's episode number 627 which i guess was last week, actually.

40:31Some guy, Casey, says that Apple won't need to pay Qualcomm cellular license royalties on phones that do not use a Qualcomm chip. As Casey himself discussed in ATP episode 476 in March 2022, at around the 40-minute mark, this is not correct. Qualcomm generally collects royalties regardless of whether an OEM gets the modem chip from Qualcomm or someone else. Quoting from page 15 of the FTC versus Qualcomm court decision from 2020, OEMs are required to pay a per-unit licensing royalty to Qualcomm for its patent portfolios, regardless of which company they choose to source their chips from. Put a link in the show notes to that.

41:05For phones, Qualcomm caps the dollar royalty as a percentage of a$400 phone. From Reuters in 2018, quote, Qualcomm said it would cap the phone price that is the basis of the revenue calculation at$400. More expensive phones, which can sell for$1 ,000, would still be treated as $400 for the purpose of the Qualcomm license fee. Then finally, CNET said that they actually dropped that fee a little bit later in 2018, I believe. So yeah, my bad. I did not remember what I said darn near three years ago, which makes sense because I can barely remember what I said three hours ago. Someday those patents will expire.

41:37And by then, maybe Apple have a bunch of its own patents that it can charge people for from its C-17 chip. We'll see. And then finally on this topic, Mark Gurman says with regard to future chips, Apple has a long modem roadmap ahead of it with the company already testing the so-called C-2 and C3. We'll see the C2 in 2026 when it's slated to appear in higher end phones. When the C3 appears the following year, Apple hopes to be able to outdo Qualcomm's modem capabilities. But there's a new development. Apple intends to eventually meld the modem component into the main processor. That should make the electronics more energy efficient and reduce the cost.

42:11I'd expect this in 2028 at the earliest. That's always the question with these chips that as Apple makes them, hey, it had to be a separate chip on Qualcomm made it, but now that it's your own thing, does it make sense to put it into the SoC? Obviously, there is some issues there with the radio frequency parts of it and i'm assuming that's why part of it has made it seven nanometers and part of it's made it four like you don't fab the radio parts of the same uh size as the logic parts um but yeah some kind of integration does seem to make sense now apple has kept some things separate but it has folded other things into the soc um like the wi-fi chip we'll get to in a second so obviously you can't put everything into one big giant chip uh at some point there's diminishing returns but uh it's interesting to see that the rumor is that they're they're thinking the C3 is when they will be passing Qualcomm a couple of years from now.

42:57And that integration is on the table, which I think would be really useful for phones, for larger things like Macs that we want to have cellular. It's okay to keep the chip separate. We just want cellular. All right. You brought up Wi-Fi chips in the iPhones and particularly in iPhone 17. Reading from Mac rumors, Apple will use its own custom designed Wi-Fi chip in all upcoming iPhone 17 models, according to industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. So Jeff Poo, another analyst who covers companies within Apple supply chain, said in November 2024 that only the iPhone 17 Pro models will be equipped with an Apple-designed Wi-Fi 7 chip.

43:31We talked about this Wi-Fi chip, Wi-Fi slash Bluetooth chip, a while ago in the context of lesser products, like, oh, it's rumored to be coming out in the home products or whatever. This is an interesting rumor, if true, that it's going to be in all the 17s. That shows a large amount of faith in this chip. So we'll see if this turns out to be true or not. Like doing the cell modem with the 16e makes sense. I would imagine they were going to roll out the Wi-Fi Bluetooth chip on lesser products as well. But man, if it's on every single 17, this thing better be perfect. We are sponsored this episode exclusively by Google Gemini.

44:07Now, if you recall from the last ad break, I'm asking Gemini Live a question on the air to show some of the ways that it can be useful. This is not just simple questions, though, so you can have a full conversation. Here's a question I had recently. And as you heard in the last one, you can interrupt the response. You can ask follow-up questions. So here's a real question I had recently. I'm going to ask it to Gemini for the very first time. Here we go. What are some established VoIP services in the U.S.? And which ones are good for small businesses that can support old analog phones? Sure thing.

44:36Some good established VoIP services that are great for small businesses include RingCentral, Vonage, and Nextiva. They're all really reliable and have features that smaller businesses need. Plus, they work with those older analog phones if you need to keep using them. Can I port the existing phone number to them? Absolutely. You can usually transfer your existing phone number to a VoIP service. The process is called porting your number. It can take a little time. But the good news is that you keep the same number so your customers don't have to know anything's changed. See? That's great. So you can just talk naturally.

45:10You can ask follow-up questions. Gemini can do so many things. It's pretty useful. So, you know, there'll be one more ad break after this. You're going to hear even more examples, even more from Gemini Live. In the meantime, go download the free Gemini app and start having your own conversations. You can see for yourself what it can do in your life. So thanks to Google Gemini for sponsoring our show.

45:32A friend of the show, Riley Tested, has noticed something. And I think it was John that put this summary in the show notes, which is just chef's kiss. Apple approves new wording for emails. Very well done, John. So Riley writes, looks like Apple changed the wording of notarization emails to no longer say approved. Wonder what caused that? And there's two screenshots, old and new. From February 11, it says, hey, hello, Alt Store LLC. The following app has been approved for distribution. From February 19th, it says, hello, Alt Store LLC. The following app is ready for distribution. Hmm. This annoys me.

46:07because like, look, I'm, maybe this is the New Yorker in me speaking. I'm a fan of direct language. Now, obviously in this, in the previous sentence, the following app has been approved. Obviously this is a passive voice usage and there is no actor in this sentence. Who has approved the following app? Well, and that was the previous language. Like it's not like change it to that. Yes, the following app has been approved. Well, that's very handy. Maybe if they were more direct, they would say Apple has approved the following app for distribution, but that's not what they said before. But they have now made it even worse from it's been approved to the following app is ready.

46:42Why is it ready? How did it get ready? I would argue it was ready before. It was ready when Riley submitted it. That's when it's ready. When the developer submits it, what are you submitting it to? Huh? Because if you're submitting something, that kind of suggests that your app is ready. so for Apple to then approve it and to then say your app is ready as the notification of that it's like well it was already ready this is you know Apple's gross stupid policy having some gross euphemistic language tweaks put on top of it right in line with exactly the kind of behavior that we come to expect around this good job Apple you're being you I think this change is super dumb because like as I tried to emphasize last time we discussed this any reasonable person looking at this from the outside understands the two different contexts and meanings of the word and approve you didn't have to change the wording to somehow avoid something like you could have just left it as approved it we we under the situation is not mysterious it is spelled out it is uh experienced by people every day there is no mystery about how products get through this process like it is so clear to everyone and arguing over the words is such a sideshow there's no reason to change the words no one disagrees about what happens when you submit an app and who decides whether like there's no mystery so this is just incredibly dumb and yeah like someone changing this they're doing nothing except for making themselves look even more foolish because no one is confused by that word that nothing hinges on that word yeah It's just it's a weasel move.

48:29You know, this is this is them trying to weasel out of the mess they have created and continue to maintain for themselves. That's the opposite of courage. You know, making the cell modem. That is courage. This is cowardice. It's not even because it doesn't do anything. It doesn't like weaseling out of it would be doing something to avoid something. This does nothing. It doesn't help Apple in any way. Well, it's an extension of the passive voice. This is them trying not to own what they are doing with linguistic cowardice. Like that's all this is. Right. But it's not possible not to own it. They own it so thoroughly.

49:04No one doubts it. There is no debate about who decides what gets their approval. They do. It's Apple. They decide. We see that. It seems like they think that's different. It could be like the Miracle on 34th Street thing where if there's a court case, you just have developer after developer and you just call. now that the 700 ,000th developer on the stand, when you send an application, who decides where it gets through? Do you decide? No. Who decides? Apple. Okay, next witness. When you submit an application, like how many applications? Like you could just person after person. It's like dumping the letters to sand out.

49:38Okay, so the letters to sand is less, maybe less admissible as evidence, except in the movies. But like, again, I think there is no shortage of witnesses to tell you how this process, Apple will agree. That's how this process works. Changing the words doesn't change it. It's not like somebody says, we don't know how things get through. They just somehow they become ready. It's a mysterious process. Nothing acts upon them to make them ready. They just are ready. Right. Just walk away whistling. Who knows how they got ready? Gracious. And then Alex Pretzlov writes, they even changed the regular app store emails.

50:13It used to say the app was accepted. And now apparently it says review of your submission has been completed. It is now eligible for distribution. See this? So about every year they change this phrasing of what it means for your app to be approved by AppReview, even in the regular app store. And every year it confuses me because I'm like, my app is eligible for distribution. Right, yeah. Ready for sale? Does that mean it's in the store? Yeah. And before it said your app is ready for distribution. Yeah, does that mean it's in the store? It sounds like I still have to do something. But no, that means in the store.

50:50but like it and every every year or two they change the phrasing to be even more obtuse like this is just oh this would drive george carlin crazy oh my god oh and then actually like maybe a year or two ago remember when they changed uh um app store connect to like submitting your app was like a two-step process now you had like get it ready for a review but then like submit it for review so sometimes sometimes you think oh they just changed the language and then you'll be sitting there going i wonder when they're going to review my app and you realize no now now there's a second step where you have to like really really submit it to review yeah so it's quite a puzzle game for people who aren't uh developers and apple platforms uh it's an it's kind of like destiny it's an ever-changing world of uh you know rule changes and uh and releases and uh buffs and nerves mostly nerves all right and then uh finally and i we it would be we would be wise not to go on a long time about this.

51:47So we'll see what happens. But Apple has done what we all expected. It has removed advanced data protection from the UK after the alleged orders from the king of the surveillance states. Reading from Bloomberg, advanced data protection is no longer available in the UK for new users. This layer of security covers iCloud data storage, device backups, web bookmarks, voice memos, notes, photos, reminders, and text message backups. Customers already using advanced data protection or ADP will need to manually disable it during an unspecified grace period to keep their iCloud accounts. The company said it will issue additional guidance in the future to affected users and that it does not have the ability to automatically disable it on their behalf.

52:23Apple writes, we are gravely disappointed that the protections provided by ADP will not be available to our customers in the UK given the continuing rise of data breaches and other threats to customer privacy. ADP protects iCloud data with end-to-end encryption, which means the data can only be decrypted by the user who owns it and only on their trusted devices. As we have said many times before, we have never built a backdoor or master key to any of our products or services, and we never will, which smells a lot like a canary to me. Yeah, that's a bold statement. Like, and we never will. Like, that's, there's no ambiguity left there.

52:59And honestly, this, like, look, a lot of people have called them out and saying this was a cowardly move. You know, from what I just said two minutes ago, I'm happy to call Apple out if they do something cowardly or weaselly or otherwise you know selling out in in bad ways i think this was the best move they had uh in this situation this this was a bad situation they were put in by the by another government i think this was their best move yeah i completely agree with you continuing from bloomberg here just to make this clear and this is what so many people got wrong about this uh what bloomberg writes which i think is true is uh the move to pull its encryption feature rather than complying with building a backdoor is a clear rebuke of the government's order they're not complying with the government's order to be clear by pulling advanced data protection as we noted last time if that verge story was true which it seems like it was this does not comply the uk government wanted them to put a backdoor so that they had access to everyone's icloud stuff in the entire world pulling adp from the uk does not comply with what they were requesting so they did something but they basically did the thing that they're willing to do which is kind of like what they do in china and other places is like look if you want to screw over your own citizens fine they don't get access to this thing we can do that but we will never give you the back door to every single apple customer's thing so ever when this first came out people like oh apple caved in they absolutely did not they did they did not cave and they are not in compliance with this law or this request or whatever yeah and to say you know we didn't build a back door and we never we're never going to so don't be we're not it's not going to come next week.

54:37Don't wait for it. Yeah. That is a very bold and clear statement. So that, I mean, and, you know, we'll see what that means, but, you know, I think it's important for people to realize what this was giving up and where we were before. What this is giving up is advanced data protection. And they've only, they only added this, what, a year ago or two years ago? It was two years ago. Yeah. It's pretty recent. And it's not enabled by default. And, And for most people, they probably shouldn't enable it by default because this is the situation where if you forget your password and lose access to all of your devices and things like that, Apple cannot recover your data.

55:17They cannot reset your iCloud password. They cannot get your data back. Like Apple can't help you if you lock yourself out in this context. The number of people who lock themselves out of their Apple accounts all the time is way higher than most of us would assume. Apple is constantly dealing with that kind of support need in their stores and in their other support channels. So the default always has to be Apple has a key to your data that they can use if you or they need them to. That's also used to respond to warrants from law enforcement agencies around the world. So what they did with Advanced Data Protection is give you an option to optionally close that door, to say, Apple won't have a key.

56:04Therefore, if law enforcement comes to us, we won't be able to help them. But also, if you come to us, we won't be able to help you either. In the context of a mass market consumer device and platform, I think the right default is to have that not be the case. So what they've said is that will no longer be offered in the UK. The rest of the privacy and encryption and end-to-end stuff, the rest of it that was there before two years ago will still be there. They will still be able to respond to law enforcement requests just like they were before. but for the most part most of the other privacy protections are all still there because again this is only removing the option to enable or continue to use advanced data protection which is only two years old and which most people aren't using and shouldn't use yeah the interesting twist on that uh and uh as case you read there like they can't uh apple can't disable this for people so if there are people in the uk who have this enabled because it was available in the uk before Now, if you try to do it, Paul Hudson posted a graphic.

57:08It just basically says Apple can no longer offer advanced data protection in the United Kingdom to new users. But existing users still have it. So what happens to them? Like the statement is like, if these people want to keep their iCloud accounts, they have to turn it off. And Apple can't turn it off for them. Again, if Apple could turn it off for them, it wouldn't be much protection. Because if you ever need to get into the account, they're like, oh, I'll just turn off advanced data protection for you. Apple cannot turn it off. That's the point of advanced data. So these people have basically a time bomb on their phones.

57:35like it's uh i mean i guess it'll just stop working or just stop syncing or whatever but at a certain point they have to manually turn off advanced data protection on one of their trusted devices using their authentication and blah blah blah right because they're the only ones that can do it and if they don't do it all their iCloud syncing backup stuff or whatever is just going to stop doing that because Apple's gonna turn it off for the country so i wonder how that will go in terms of people coming to an Apple store and saying my stuff's not syncing and saying oh you got to turn off the security feature which you can never turn back on after that um in terms of the defaults like i feel like it's just a a simple calculation of like what is more likely to be a problem in your life someone hacking you and stealing all your data or you locking yourself out of your account if you are a government official or a celebrity you may make a different choice than if you're just a random person on the street most people are not specifically targeting you like state actors are probably not specifically targeting you to get into your phone data because you're just not that interesting and are important but you will probably lock yourself out of your account somehow at some point in your life and so you really just have to decide that for yourself which is the problem that's more likely to happen to me and what are the consequences of that problem so i feel like people who need advanced data protection they know they need it again government officials celebrities or just people who are really super serious about security but it's always that trade-off security versus convenience it's why i don't have advanced data protection on because I fear losing my data more than I fear being hacked.

59:05Then, uh, Burbacay writes, could you put out a call to all UK listeners to contact their local MP regarding the investigative powers act and Apple's decision to remove ADP from UK phones? More people who raise a stink, the more chance we get, we have to turn things around. Yeah. And meanwhile, in the U S we're trying to make sure that our dumb government doesn't try to do the same thing as the UK government. So we're all in this fight on our own little islands trying to keep sanity. Yeah. And as I said, you know, two weeks ago or last week, I think ultimately we're going to lose this battle. Like I think in most in most first world countries, we are likely to not have major platforms permitted to give us end to end encryption tools that they can't decrypt with law enforcement requests.

59:50That's just the culture of, you know, look, law enforcement, it's very hard for politicians to fight against them politically, legally, power wise. It's just law enforcement tends over time to get the surveillance that they want and they want it all. I mean, let's be clear, like what law enforcement agencies want and feel incredibly entitled to is access to everything all the time, often without warrants or kind of outside the bounds of, you know, like they do not like, look, the entire U.S. Constitution was designed to help protect us from overzealous law enforcement. it's a powerful force in governments and over time it tends to get more powerful so we will lose this battle we are we have already lost it in so many ways that we already have like you know secret courts and you know seek and warrants that for you know monitoring our communications and everything and systems to monitor like we already have lost this on so many fronts it's only a matter of time before no major platform can offer end-to-end encryption and and that we have to rely on like you know apps that kind of do it on a smaller scale for that kind of need i'm i'm more optimistic than you are i think the uh the things in the constitution regarding rights to privacy and everything will probably hold up in the long run despite backsliding um i know what you're about like national security like if there's any kind of like you know military conflict or like 9-11 type things that's whenever that happens and people are the most afraid that's when people pounce and put in all these terrible laws and then of course once they get them it's like a ratchet they will never give them back right oh this is only we only need this because of terrorism except we're now we're going to use it uh when people you know steal a bicycle in the neighborhood right so it's you know but still historically speaking i feel like the trend i feel like i I don't feel like they'll be able to breach the firewall of the constitution, assuming that document still stands and remains relevant, because there are such strong protections against some aspects of rights to privacy.

1:02:02The UK is already far. It's a very different environment. Like the amount of surveillance cameras they have in that country and they don't have the same type of constitution that we do. So that's why we have held up better than them. And I think we will hold up better than them. It doesn't necessarily mean that ADP is not going to get outlawed in the US. That could totally happen, but I'm slightly more optimistic that on the long scale, assuming the U.S. survives as a going concern and the Constitution remains roughly as it is now, that this battle will – not that it will be won, but that we will still be doing better than countries without the same type of Constitution.

1:02:38Hope you're right. We'll probably be dead by then, so don't worry about it. Great. Promising.

1:02:46We are sponsored this episode exclusively by Google Gemini. Now, you've heard me in the last couple ad reads show off the Gemini Live feature. What about conversational brainstorming, not just questions? Let's see what it can do. I've never asked it this before. I'm going to see how it does live right here in the ad break. So here we go. I make a podcast app that already does what most people expect from a podcast app. What other features might I want to add? Here's a couple of ideas to make your podcast app stand out. First, think about adding a feature that helps people discover new podcasts.

1:03:17Maybe it suggests new shows based on what they already listen to. Or maybe it has a quiz that helps listeners find their perfect podcast match. Also, you could add a feature that makes it easier to listen to podcasts with friends. Imagine being able to sync up playback with your friends so you can all listen together, even if you're not in the same room. Or you could add a way to discuss episodes with friends right in the app. Thank you. On a totally separate note here, what are some surprising things people can ask you that they might not expect you to be good at but you are good at?

1:03:47Okay, here's one. You could ask me to write different kinds of creative text formats. For example, you could ask for a poem, a song, a script for a play, or even a computer program. I can also translate things into different languages or create summaries of factual topics. All right. As you can see, there's so much that Gemini can do. There's so much I can offer you in your life. This barely even scratches the surface. You can't fit too much in a two-minute ad read, even though I did have it just basically write its own ad read there at the end. But anyway, try Gemini today. Go get the app. This was all with just the free app on my iPhone.

1:04:21Go check it out today. It's really amazing what it can do. So thanks to Gemini for sponsoring our show.

1:04:30There's been an incredible bit of news this week, a phenomenal, exciting bit of news this week coming from one John Syracuse. John, you put up another blog post. I'm stunned. I can't believe my eyes. Yeah, I launched my app, Hyperspace. For anyone who doesn't know, it is an app that will give you free disk space. There are lots of Mac apps out there that will find duplicate files on your system and then like give you back disk space by deleting some of the duplicates. The tricky bit about hyperspace is that we'll find duplicate files and give you back disk space without removing any of the files.

1:05:05I am, as I said in the blog post, a digital pack rat. And this appeals to me. I don't want to delete files. I do want disk space back, but I don't want to delete anything. Oh, you got the same file in seven places. Yeah, just leave it there. Can I just have the disk space back? That's what hyperspace does for you. It's been in beta testing for a while with ATP members providing a great testing service. It is now out on the Mac App Store, available to download. It's free to download, free to scan. You can find out how much space it will save you. If it's not going to save you any space, oh well, throw it away.

1:05:35But if it's going to save you a bunch of space and you want that space, then you've got to pay to get that space back. We'll put a link in the show notes to my blog post about it. if you've been listening to the show you know more than already is in that blog post uh that in turn links to my fairly extensive documentation um yeah fairly extent so just to interrupt you here for a minute is there more documentation than there is code for this app uh no i don't think so i can check though i mean code tends to be sparse like in terms of number of lines no in terms of number of characters i'll have to compare i haven't even really looked at how many lines of code this app is but SwiftUI does make things more terse but yeah I like that one of the things about the documentation um is that like it evolved it has evolved over the course of testing like everything in that document is there because some beta tester had a question about it or because I found myself answering the same question so I put the answer in there and I've been refining it over time saves so much time to just do this up front like and then on launch day if anyone has some question about something I could just link them directly to the part of the documentation that addresses it.

1:06:40So that's been going pretty well. As I said before to all the ATP members who are on the test flight, now that the app is out, the test flight will be ending. Probably by the time you listen to this, I will have expired the last test flight build for ATP members. Thanks for all your hard work testing. There were a lot of you. I'm sure you're probably sick of this app by now. But if you are not sick of being a tester and you actually enjoy testing it and you've been providing good bug reports or whatever and you want to be on the real test flight not the one for atp members but the real test flight to get on that you have to give me your email address because i don't have it even though you're on the atp members test flight that was done with the public link and so it's all anonymous i have no idea who you are right if you want in on the real test flight send an email to hyperspace at hypercritical.co and tell me you want on the test flight and then i will add you to the list Now, keep in mind, test flight means you get to use a broken application.

1:07:38I mean, I hope you all figured that out from being on the beta for like, it's the one that doesn't work right. It's the one that's weird and could potentially hose all your files. Like, but if you're game for that, like I had a lot of good testers and a lot of them already moved to the real test flight. So, yeah, sign up if you want. And if you have if you're on the test flight or not, but if you have purchased the app and you think it's good, app store ratings would be appreciated. I believe there is currently one rating and that's from me. i gave it five stars more than one rating would be great if you like the app please rate it uh yeah it's been out for one day now um well i soft launched it earlier in the week as you do i had version 1.0.1 out before i even posted about it um i had a little bit of fun with the app review uh the the very first build the one point very first 1.0 build i submitted i was watching it it's like waiting for a review blah blah in review it's like two minutes and 30 seconds later instantly rejected oh neat yeah and what was it rejected for it was rejected with a message from the reviewer that said your app says that it gets back free disk space without removing any files how does it do that good grief but it was like i'm paraphrasing but it was literally like two sentences those basically those two sentences and i'm like okay if you read the description which is only a paragraph, the app store metadata description, it links to the documentation, which explains this.

1:09:05If you launch the app, the first thing you see is a window that describes how the app works and links to the documentation, which explains this. If you select the help top item from the help menu in the app, it links to the documentation, which explains this. Like, I don't know how you could literally look at or do anything with my app without having the answer to the question that was asked staring you in the face. But what did they do? They looked at the app and I guess, I don't know, read the tagline and said, I don't get this. Reject. Boom. Good old app review. So I replied with a link to my documentation and said, if you read this, it will explain it.

1:09:41Great. And they let it through. Let me Google that for you. I should have said, if you launch the app and read the window that appears in front of your face and whatever. I didn't want to be rude about it. It was fine. It was a turnaround time of like an hour and then they put it back and review and then it went through and it was fine i did get rejected in my 1.0.2 thing and that rejection both of you should be able to tell me what it is based on the complete inconsistency of the app store plus your experience with the app store oh i have no idea you do know what it is but it's not occurring to you because it is so illogical a metadata rejection of some sort yeah but what specifically i don't know this is my first app with an app purchase uh privacy policy oh that's a good one that's a good one or is it that giant like disclaimer that you're supposed to have in your app description that's documented almost nowhere no it's exactly what you said you have to have a link to the terms and conditions and privacy policy in your app's description we even i remember all of us whining about this perhaps during call sheet um whining about this recently like a year or two back just to make things clear and I know we've been around this block once before, but it is so frigging bananas that we have to do it again.

1:10:55You need to have a URL in your app description to your privacy policy. Now, John, is that URL clickable on any of Apple's platforms? No, why would URLs be clickable? It's too dangerous. Of course not. So I don't know what freaking purpose this serves, but they will reject you every time if you do not have a URL pointing to your privacy policy in your description. Well, let me correct you there. They will not reject you every time because I, of course, I knew about this, this thing being in the description. I'd heard you guys complain about it many times is that, oh, when I have my first output in app purchase, I got to remember to do this thing.

1:11:32And when I was filling out my metadata, there's like seven places you put this in. It's in the app's interface on the store page. Otherwise, they'll reject you there. It's in the metadata. Like, it's not like the terms and conditions of privacy policy aren't in a million different places already. but because i had submitted 1.0 and it had gotten through i'm like i guess i'm good and then i submitted 1.0.1 and that got through i'm like boy i nailed it no you know aside from that one thing where they didn't understand how my app worked because they didn't bother reading anything i guess i got all the metadata right no on the third version the third submission then somebody says oh you got to have privacy policy terms of the decision i was fooled into thinking that i had covered all my bases and i didn't but the nice thing is they did actually let me do the thing of saying hey this is if this is a bug fix update you can do you can do that fix in the next update and so i said yes i'd like to do that oh great so that system actually kind of worked anyway app review as always is totally inconsistent like there's no way even if you play the game perfectly which i did not uh you will be confounded by the results um so there we have it um so far so good no big disasters as far as i know i did the typical thing that i always do is like as soon as 1.0 comes out it's like now i have a big change big dangerous change i want to make so let me start working on that so yeah i'm in the middle of testing a big dangerous change to the internals uh that i had put off i said let's not do this for 1.0 but but for the next day after 1.0 sure yeah let's rip out the guts because i had some different ideas about how i might do something and i stopped myself from doing this before 1.0 came out but now i'm doing it so i did a couple minor bug fixes and now i'm doing some major surgery uh for the real test flight i've already i've reverted to a build that doesn't actually do the reclamation for real but does everything up to that step just so people can test it better yeah a lot of people have reclaimed all their space uh and so that's a problem they have to do what i do which is have a system for making duplicate files anyway that's what it's like to be a beta tester just you know it's like oh great I want to be on test flight.

1:13:34Do you though? It's not an easy app to test and it might hose your file. So, uh, if you really want to, again, send me an email. Oh, and then one final thing, the, for all the test flight people, obviously when you're on the test flight, you can like quote unquote purchase the app for free. It doesn't really charge you. And what people were saying is, Hey, I downloaded the real app from the store. It's a free download. And when I launched it, it thinks I still own it because I bought the test flight and you know, cause test flight on mac os works perfectly all the time and the solution to that as far as i've been able to tell everybody who i've suggested this to has told me they follow these steps and it has worked for them is that step one delete all copies of my app empty the trash like get them off your computer just delete delete delete right two you probably don't have to do this but i was there in there for good measure reboot step three install hyperspace from the mac app store launch it and then go into the settings window and if the settings window still tells you that it thinks you own the app even though you know you didn't buy it for real click on the text that's telling you that it's like unlocked forever or whatever click on that text and if it prompts you to sign in with one of those janky apple sign in things sign in step four quit the app and step five relaunch it everybody who has tried those steps has found that now you have convinced that you don't own it but boy what a terrible system and to answer people's questions no there's nothing i can do about that i have no idea what back-end system or cache thing or whatever is making you think because i can tell you from experience in many many test flights buying the test flight does not entitle you to the finished application in any way shape or form even if mac os apparently can get confused about that fact for some period of time well congratulations john i how long did this take you roughly like four or five months which is not bad for the no it was a we talked about when i talked about on the show at the end of december i basically had gone from zero to a bare bones working app that week that we recorded so it's december until end of february wow that's really fast good for you no no it's not that complicated it's a little it's not a complicated app most of that time was spent just like being incredibly cautious about like you know as you know i only turned on the feature that this app supposedly exists for like in the last few weeks it's always It's just been a slow buildup, making sure lots of testing, lots of, you know.

1:15:50So, yeah, it's not too complicated, but it is an app that needs to be developed very carefully, and hopefully I have done so. So, again, fingers crossed. Yeah, and honestly, it's – so I ran it. I finally did my big reclaim today on my giant Synology NAS copy on my Mac Mini. I had 1.03 terabytes of duplicated files. Gracious. So today I paid John$10 to get 1.03 terabytes back. Do Lifetime Unlock, you cheapskate. Well, okay. The reason I didn't do Lifetime Unlock is because I want to actually just, like I did the one month, because I want to actually keep going back to this over time. because it feels kind of weird that I was able to reclaim a terabyte for just$10.

1:16:45No matter how much I was reclaiming, it was the same$10. Obviously, we talked about the business model options in earlier episodes, and Casey and I were unable to convince you to do a tiered set of space-based options about how much space you were recovering. But it does feel kind of odd that like I paid such a small amount to get so much value. So instead, I will just run it, you know, once a year on all my computers and see where I get. I mean, I don't think you're hopeful you don't have a new terabyte next year. Like, I don't think you're gonna need to run this again for a while. But no, all the more reason why you should have charged me more for my terabyte.

1:17:23Well, we'll see how it goes. Oh, that's one thing about the the press that it's gotten. Apparently, I mean, not surprisingly, the pricing things that I offer are confusing enough that people who write about it. all tend to make the same mistake, which is they think that the app is available for a one-time lifetime unlock or subscription. That's true, but there's a third option that is too subtle for people to know because Apple's UI for it is confusing. And I tried my best to make it clear, but there are auto-renewing subscriptions, which will keep charging you over and over again until you cancel them.

1:17:55Then there are one-time purchases, like unlock everything for whatever. and then there are also non-renewing subscriptions pay for one month of use that's what marco did he paid for one month and at the end of the month it goes back to being locked it will not renew it will not charge him again that is a thing that apple offers that seems like very few apps actually offer but mine does and in fact it's probably the best option and is one of the more popular options but everyone who writes about it is like oh it's a subscription or you can pay for it no there's there's another thing non-renew i know it's confusing a subscription that doesn't renew what is that and of course all the buttons in apple's ui say subscribe and people like oh i don't want to subscribe i just want to pay one time it's like i know i can't control that button says subscribe but anyway i try to explain it in the documentation which nobody reads but to be clear you can pay for a single month as a one-time purchase or a single year as a one-time purchase and those purchases will not renew or you can pay for a renewing subscription or you can pay one-time lump sum big amount to unlock it forever and ever and ever those are all the choices uh i'll probably end up eliminating some of these choices when i see which ones people don't like but the distribution for like day one purchases was about what i would expect um it's actually pretty even with the exception of the lifetime unlock which is obviously going to be super popular with the people who are buying the app on day one because they're like people listen to the show and want to support me and blah blah and i thank you all for that um but we'll see how this you know after the initial launch and all the people who actually you know listen to the show and are interested in the app by it we'll see what the long tail this is my expectation is that this app will be a slow type of thing because regular people honestly should really not be interested in this app until it's been out for a year and not destroyed too many people's hard drives right like it would have to like build up a reputation as a thing that it is safe to run and that you're aware of and it can't do that on day one on day one it's the most dangerous it's ever going to be it's i don't know why marco's destroying all his data with it but he did um so yeah tune in a year from now and we'll see like it really needs to build up trust in the community for it to be a thing that people turn to to use i think for the early adopters and fans of the show and fans of me yeah sure bye on day one but for people who've never heard of me or the show i don't expect them to even discover this app until next year so we'll see how it goes well again congratulations and good luck.

1:20:19All right. Let's talk interesting iPhone 17 rumor. This is for the entire family of iPhone 17s. There's a post on The Verge about this and I will read some of it. Leaker Majin Boo has shared CAD renderings of what are purported to be the iPhone 17, 17 Pro, 17 Pro Max, and the rumored iPhone 17 Air. With the latter three all featuring pixel-like rectangular camera bars. The new CAD renders show the rear camera bars on the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max models stretch to extend their currently square design, now reaching across the entire upper body. They still retain the rounder edges as seen on the current models.

1:21:01The iPhone 17 Air features a similar design, albeit with only a single rear camera lens. According to these renders, the camera module on the standard 17 model will be largely unchanged, differentiating it from the premium models so i'll attempt to paint a word picture here so imagine the 16 but the camera mesa copyright john saracusa extends the entire width of the back of the phone then the standard iphone 17 is the same basic idea as the iphone 10 where there's the two lenses one above the other with i think it's it's not lidar is it it's like the 16 is what you're saying not that no one remembers what the 10 looks like it looks like doesn't exactly the same as the 16 today no no the regular 16 maybe.

1:21:42Yeah, the regular 16. Two cameras, one on top of the other on a lozenge shaped mesa with the flash off to the right. I believe that's right actually now that you say that. Then the 17 Pro and Pro Max, the way this CAD rendering has been rendered is that what I presume to be metal is a gold color and I don't think that's indicative of... Yeah, this is just rendering these colors mean nothing. Right. So there's gold that runs through the Mesa area, but it also goes down all the way to the bottom of the phone. And I think that's metal, but there's a maroonish, reddish, brownish sort of section that's most of the back of the phone with the exception of the Mesa.

1:22:24And that appears to be a cutout or something for glass. So to To reiterate, the shell of the phone is all metal, including just a little bit of the back of the phone. But then there's a large glass section as well, presumably for Qi charging and MagSafe and for the radios and whatnot. Wi-Fi, stuff like that. Wi-Fi, yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so this may be a best of both worlds situation from a robustness standpoint, because you won't find it quite so easy, if I'm reading this right, you won't find it quite so easy to crack the corner of the back glass, because the corner of the back glass is actually the back steel or titanium or whatever the flavor du jour is.

1:23:07All that being said, and I'm very happy about the theories I've got here if they come true. All that being said, the enlarged camera mesa looks freaking ridiculous and i really don't like it yeah this is a couple interesting things here first let's start with the 17 air far left in this picture if you follow the link in the show notes it is disappointing to me that the cool back of the 16e is not uh copied by the 17 air uh the 16e has one little camera uh and it's just sitting there all on its own i don't even know if it has a Mesa. Does it have a Mesa or is it just poking out of the flat back of the phone?

1:23:46I think it's a Mesa because if we look at the right hand side of the phone or the right hand side is presented on this image, it looks like there's a little bit of depth there to me, but I hear what you're saying and I may have this wrong. On the 16E, you mean? Let me see. No, no, no. I'm looking at the... Yeah, I know, but I'm saying like the... I think the 16E does not have a Mesa. It has one camera. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. But it does not have a Mesa. I'm sorry. You might be right about that. My apologies. I thought we were talking about the 17E. right no i'm saying the 16e and the reason i'm comparing to 16e is 16 also has one camera so okay this is what a one camera phone can look like it's one of the best things about the 16e appearance wise it just looks so clean on the back it's just a piece of glass it's got one camera no mesa the camera of course sticks out a little bit but given what camera bumps have looked like for the past several years the 16e is a breath of fresh air so here comes the 17 air the super thin one it's also got one camera because there's not room for any more and blah blah whatever it's fine makes sense and then they put a pixel-like iPhone Mesa that spans the entire width of the phone which I think really takes away from the slimness of this is also some photos of what is supposedly the physical reality of the 17 air case and it doesn't look much better there there's someone's rendering uh I don't know I have a link to this but you two can look at it the rendering of what how big the air is supposed to be 5.5 millimeters as compared to the 8.25 millimeter 16 pro max like it does look slim but then there's the usual camera mesa and camera bump thing or whatever one of my questions about the 17 air is what's in the rest of that mesa like what could they possibly be filling that space with obviously there's the flash and the like light sensor or whatever and i see that but like that whole big mesa i don't think they can fit more battery in there is it the face id sensor on the front that needs more depth that's taking that spot like i do wonder what's there the whole rest of the phone is so thin i bet maybe there is some part of the face id component assembly kind of thing that's right in the middle there that maybe that is going to require that kind of thickness yeah maybe we'll see what the teardown looks like um and then on the the plane 17 it looks very much like the plane 16 uh it doesn't have anything extending across the full width of the phone it just again looks like the 16 with two cameras on top of each other and then we get to the ones that have three cameras the 17 pro and 17 pro max and i've been saying for years and years and years that they're well past the time where apple should stop pretending that their cameras are in the corner of their phone and instead do something that uses the whole width of the phone and if this is to be believed and i put this in here because i think we're kind of at the point where like the cad renders are probably like the real thing and not just like people making stuff up so if this is to be believed they heard my years of complaining uh you know hypothetically about uh pretending their cameras exist in the corner of their phone and they said you're right we should use that width you know how we'll do it we'll leave the cameras exactly where they are and just make the mace of the full width of the phone and you may be thinking to yourself well at least this solves the problem of the phone wobbling on the table right at least now you won't have this thing where there's a lump on one corner and it's just you know like a table that's not even or whatever.

1:26:58But no, you're forgetting that the camera Mesa is not where the cameras exist. They exist on top of the camera Mesa. So all of these phones, even the ones that have a camera Mesa that expands, extends the entire width of the phone, all of them have camera lenses that stick out from the Mesa. And those lenses are all shoved to one side. So they're still going to wobble on the table. what have we done here apple what have we gained these phones are uglier i mean i get what casey's saying about like the metal being sturdy around the edges and just having a small glass region for radio transparency but boy i'm not liking the look of the 17 pros like i just they just didn't just like they didn't do anything they left the cameras where they were and just made the mesa wider i guess that gives them some more space in there i wonder what they're going to use that space for because those phones aren't as thin as the 17 air so that they already had room for the face id sensor they didn't need that giant mesa so they but they extended the mesa anyway like what is that but just it's frustrating to me i'm frustrated with the way these phones look i was hoping all of the like the fake renders that people had on these stories based on descriptions i was hoping that they were just entirely wrong but now when when the quote-unquote cad renders come out presumably leaked from like case manufacturers or people who are machining in these cases or whatever at this point i'm starting to believe and yeah there's things you can do with service treatments to make this look less gross i am not a fan and honestly like it's making the plain 17 be the clear looker in this arrangement i was hoping the 17 air would be the looker but that stupid like pixel-like lozenge is really throwing off the the balance of the air to me so i guess i'm kind of glad that next year is not my year for cameras but really for phones but really it doesn't matter because if things go as they have gone for the past many years even though i'm not buying an iphone 17 when the 18 family arrives chances are good that the 18 family will look a lot like the 17 family because apple does not change their cases every single year or hasn't recently anyway you know assuming this is all true which at this stage is probably true um This whole family of phones looks, I think, fairly hideous from the back.

1:29:18But that being said, how often have I seen the back of my current phone? And it's not that often. I mean, first of all, I'm still using that leather magnetic snap-on back. So I'm not really seeing the back plate of the phone, but I do see the part where the camera pokes out. So, okay, if I get one of these, then the part where the camera pokes out will be much bigger and span across the whole back of the phone. How will that affect my life? It won't. Because when I put my phone down on a surface, it's face up. And when I'm using my phone, my hand covers the back. And I'm looking at the front. So there's pretty much no time where I'm really seeing the back of my phone.

1:30:05So as much as I can look at all these and say, ooh, that's kind of hideous, the way I actually use my phone, which I think is fairly common, with some kind of case on the back and almost never seeing the back, I think it's fine. We'll survive, and I would rather have the better cameras as possible. and you know in the case of the 17 air which at the moment i don't think i will get a 17 air but i think there's a chance that once i handle one i will have to have it uh so we'll see uh but um i anyway all that is to say like i think this will be fine and we will you know the same thing that we said when the camera mesa got bigger every time over the years like it looks hideous when you first see it and then you just get used to it and that's just how iphones look and so we'll be used to it it'll be fine yeah i think they should have slightly less wobble because the mesa does extend the full width so even though the camera lenses do jut out farther there will be it will be closer to being even than it was before but the other thing to consider on the 17 pro and pro max is there are now things important things in a region where there weren't before i see those two dots on the right side that are across from the camera lenses like right now on a 16 pro the like light sensor and flash thing are like above and below the third camera but within the little square that you could draw around them right uh but now like because in my current phone if i put my finger over like the area that's next to the camera mesa it's not blocking anything there's nothing there but now on both of these phones if you put your finger anywhere that's like across from the cameras that would previously be blocking nothing it will be blocking potentially the flash or the light sensor thingy and so you may have to do a little bit of uh change your grip on these phones to not do that i mean i never use the flash anyway so it's not a big deal but whatever that other hole is i'm assuming it's a light sensor or light no i believe it's lidar all right maybe it's not a big deal then because we don't wait we use this lighter for like the auto uh portrait mode thing doesn't it that's correct as far as i know yeah well anyway there's potentially another area on the back of the phone where you can't cover stuff with your fingers so be aware of that but yeah i'm sure it'll be fine my wife will get this phone if it has better battery life it'll be great the rumors about the camera that it's better but i'm just kind of disappointing that they didn't do i was i'm kind of excited about this year both because of the air and because of the rumors about them changing the camera arrangement i'm kind of really disappointed to see that it's just like a Photoshop stretch of the camera on the existing profile.

1:32:47All right. Then finally for this week, Apple has announced on their newsroom that they will spend more than$500 billion in the U.S. over the next, how many years you ask? Four. Hmm. Reading from their newsroom post, Apple Today, which was Monday the 24th, announced its largest ever spend commitment with plans to spend and invest more than$500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years. This new pledge builds on Apple's long history of investing in American innovation and advanced high-skilled manufacturing and will support a wide range of initiatives that focused on artificial intelligence, silicon engineering, and skills development for students and workers across the country.

1:33:26As part of this package of U.S. investments, Apple and partners will open a new advanced manufacturing facility in Houston to produce servers that support Apple intelligence, the personal intelligence system that helps users write, yeah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Apple will also double its U.S. advanced manufacturing fund to create an academy in Michigan to train the next generation of U.S. manufacturers and grow its research and development investments in the U.S. to support cutting-edge fields like silicon engineering. Cool. Go team. Well, if you go back four years, you will find a very similar announcement that adjusted for inflation gives similar numbers.

1:33:59With Apple saying from 2021-ish, I believe, in the next four years, we're going to spend$400 billion, blah, blah, blah. So this actually isn't particularly unprecedented, but I will say this about Apple's seemingly every four years announcement of how much money they're going to invest in the United States. They should be investing more. As we've harped on for many years now, Apple's reliance on China for everything is so problematic for multiple reasons, but one of them is that it's not an easy thing to fix. To fix it is going to take a huge amount of time and a huge amount of money. And I'm not saying Apple should switch to manufacturing everything in the United States.

1:34:41That's not going to happen. But trying to become less reliant on China means investing in places that are not China. One of those places is the US. And Apple has had these announcements like, oh, we're investing in the US. We're building these factories. We're doing this. We're going to make the Mac Pro here. We're going to, you know, do whatever manufacturer servers and for Apple intelligence. Like I would want to see on a graph of like Apple's investment in the US, I would want to see that going up by a lot as part of a strategy to reduce their reliance on China, right? And seeing a number that just looks like an inflation-injusted version of the number that they had four years ago is not reassuring.

1:35:27It's almost like they're just, I'm not saying$500 billion is trivial, but like it's not, I would like to see a trend line going up, right? And this is completely setting aside politics and who's going to use this as a political football. Just forget about all that and just say, if you're just in charge of Apple, from a business and technology perspective, having all your eggs in one basket, whatever that basket is, is not good. having all your bags all your eggs in a basket that is very not friendly to many things that apple stands for including encryption and other things that they're not allowed to do in china is also not good and apple has been branching out doing more manufacturing in india which also has its own kind of rightward lurching problems going on and more manufacturing in other countries and the u.s should be one of those so i'm kind of disappointed to see this uh announcement and it just seemed like business as usual with the usual rah-rah USA, here's another$500 billion, see you in four years.

1:36:27You know, Apple PR has a track record of issuing self-flatulence-inhaling press releases that mostly just try to promote in a new way things they were already doing or have already done. that's what this is and there you know this is a this is just a political statement they they make them all the time but i don't think like 500 billion dollars is not nothing though like they are doing something i don't think this is like oh we're just doing something for appearances 500 billion dollars is not doing something for appearances they're clearly like have committed to invest like 100 billion dollars ish a year for the past like eight to ten years right that's not nothing but it's also not an upward trend so it's like if they had done something like oh like a one million dollar program to help school kids learn to be advanced manufacturing people well that's nothing 500 billion dollars is not nothing i just my question is is like i don't even care with them trying to use it as a political football fine whatever but they're spending 500 billion dollars why aren't we spending 600 700 800 like why is the amount not going up over the years it It just doesn't send a message to me that they are like, it's baffling to me that they would be willing to spend this much money, but not have it be part of a strategy to increase their spend over time or decrease it or whatever, whatever direction they want to go in.

1:37:56They're not doing any of that. This is not really news because this investment was like, this is just what they were already going to do anyway for their own expansion. They didn't decide in the last 30 or so days for political reasons. They didn't decide like we're suddenly going to spend$500 billion because of this brand new plan that we have out of the goodness of our hearts and investing in America. No, they were going to do this anyway just for their own expansion. And here we have some candy coating on top of it to please the administration. Well, I mean so doing it for their own expansion like they can choose where they expand.

1:38:35Like, yes, they're growing over time. And, you know, making these announcements every four years makes it seem like it's an every four years thing. But it's just like you said, it's an ongoing thing. Every year they spend X amount of dollars on whatever they're going to do. And that X hasn't really changed that much other than ramping up with inflation. So you can make these announcements to try to make political hay out of it. But like. You're saying they're going to do this expansion anyway. They could have put all this money into expansion elsewhere. They could have put it all into India, but they didn't.

1:39:04they're taking 500 billion of their, you know, worldwide expansion money. And they're doing a hundred billion a year in the U S, which is exactly what they've been doing for like 10, 15 years. And that's like, but it's just, it's strange to me that they would put so much money in and do all these announcements every year without a trend in one direction or another, especially when I strongly feel that they should be going in one particular direction. So, you know, I don't, I don't fault them for trying to, you know, score political points with it. They did it in the last administration. They did it with the administration before that.

1:39:35They're going to do it in the next one. And I do credit them for investing$100 billion a year in the U.S., but I don't understand. I don't understand the strategy. I don't get it. Yeah, I don't either. And, you know, I was on Upgrade earlier this week filling in for Mike, and Jason and I talked about it. And his point was the same as yours, is that, look, Apple's been doing this for a long time in similar ways. And I get that, but I don't know. It's just, it still feels a little icky. Plus, I believe, I'll try to remember to put a link in the show notes, but I believe that some of the things that they swear they're doing, all outward indication is that they're not doing it.

1:40:11Like, there's some data center project in, like, North Carolina or something like that, that if I understand correctly, I don't think anything is really actually happening with it yet or something like that. check my math on that. I might be completely wrong. But anyways, it's just a little gross. It's gross when one of our guys or one of our people is president. It's gross when it's not one of our people. It's just, I don't know, it just seems silly. But all that aside, all the posturing aside. You think it's gross that a US company is investing in US stuff? No, no. Set aside the current administration.

1:40:47They did it in 2021. I don't think it's gross. I think it's insufficient. No, no, it's 100 % insufficient, but it's look at us. Look at us. Look at how good we are. Look at how good we are. Hey, listen, we want them to expand more in different places. We want them to invest more in the United States. So in 2021, when they say we're going to spend $400 billion over the next four years, I say, good, like you get to announce that and do the thing. Now make that investment and next year have it be substantially more. Yeah, I mean, I agree with you. I don't know. It's just, they're smelling their own farts.

1:41:17That's what Marco said. They're just smelling their own farts. It is a press release. Well, yeah, but even for a press release, it's an unnecessary press release. Just do it. Just do the thing. Just do the thing. Also, like with the North Carolina Data Center, like that's the problem with these big projects. Like there's always so much to them and they get so entangled with like local and state governments and, you know, changing investment landscape. Like just keeping track of all this money and where they actually end up spending and how it gets shifted around. Like it's difficult. like the problem with this is kind of like cell radios we talked about before like how incredibly complicated and difficult a problem that is uh advanced manufacturing like the stuff that builds apple products is not the type of thing where you're going to say oh we'll just build a factory and then we can make iphones in it no there's so much supporting infrastructure from every single manufacturer that produces the little screws and the machines that make the screws and the machine and the machines that make the machines that assemble the products that like and that's before you even get to the workforce and all the transportation systems and shipping and like there's a reason it's not so easy for them to get out of china and so if you want to get anything like that type of advanced manufacturing somewhere that's not china you need to invest so much money over so much time and if you're going to spend tons of money and tons of time maybe you want to spend some of that in your own country granted the cost of labor is much higher here and there are lots of other problems in terms of being far away from the people who make all the parts and so on and so forth but like you're never going to get there if you don't start right it's it shouldn't be totally an apple move to have like a multi-decade strategy of diversifying their manufacturing and it seems like they have that kind of they've been doing so much more in india and i think in some other countries around that area which granted are a lot closer to china and it makes a little bit easier but every time i say a u.s investment it's like are you in this are you out of it like do you are you are you trying to create advanced manufacturing with this like advanced manufacturing fund like is that just so those people can go get jobs in china like what what are they going to be using this advanced manufacturing skill what are they going to be building with those skills in the u.s uh the best we've got is like uh enticing tsmc to make two-year-old uh chips in arizona for us uh which there's a whole bunch of stuff about that lower in the show it's that who knows we'll ever get to but like that's an ongoing thing and uh it's the best we've got and in theory they will be building chips for apple products there they're close to cutting edge, but TSMC is not a U.S.

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1:44:31Casey wouldn't let him cause it was accidental it was accidental and you can find the show notes at atp.fm and if you're into Mastodon you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S so that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M the anti-Marco R-M-E-N-S-I-R R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast. So long. All right, John, any other hyperspace stuff we want to talk about? Let's actually talk about the icon. I freaking love this icon. Yeah, it is very good. I think people like the icon more than they like my app. In fact, some people have explicitly said, I don't even like your app, but I like the icon.

1:45:31Wow. Wow. That's very kind. Yeah, right. Icons. Icons are tricky. I am an icon aficionado. I have collected icons for my entire computing life because icons have been a thing since 1984 for me. I had a vast collection of 32 by 32 pixel icons in the classic Mac OS days. there were multiple classic mac os applications whose only job was to be libraries for icons not just one of them multiple ones and i had multiple of them um in the mac os 10 days obviously there was a big change from the 32 by 32 pixel app icons of classic to the what was then massive i think 128 by 128 in the first version of mac os 10 icons that were like photorealistic and just like it changed the whole landscape of icons it was no longer pixel art now you could have these other things and anyway um panic did panic make this app i know icon factory made this either panic or icon factory made an app i forget who yeah i think icon factory made it and then it changed hands to panic anyway it was an app called candy bar that was a modern mac os 10 version of an app that just collects icons and that app was eventually discontinued but then i begged them to bring it back uh and they actually let me hack on it a little bit to get it up and running and i did and then they took it back and hacked on it a little bit more now when you launch it it shows a dialogue that says candy bar is a 20 year old application don't expect everything to work and i'm like fine fine candy bar just keep my icons all this is to say is i love icons i have tons of icons uh and so when it comes time to make icons for my own mac apps i have very strong opinions if you go to my website and go to the the app section you will see my three apps my three weird little apps which is kind of an awkward arrangement because there's three of them instead of four maybe i'll fix that someday uh and the first uh app that i made it was an icon that i made myself and it was easy for me to make because it involved uh using pixel art from classic mac os which apparently is old enough that apple doesn't care anymore so front and center that's an icon that i made uh it's kind of amazing that i was able to make an icon out of the window ui of my previous operating system like i could fit i could fit like one-to-one non-scaled pixel accurate representations of actual windows for my previous operating system now it's the icon of an app i found that incredibly enjoyable uh my second icon was made by a talented artist uh at my request based on a design that i suggested uh that switch glass uh you will note that neither of these icons is the what was it big sir rounded rectangle thing that apple said that all mac apps should have uh front and center i think predates that but switch glass i think does not anyway uh i am against that i like it when uh mac icons were not all squircles right i liked it when they were outside their bounds so switch glass is kind of a squircle but it's tilted so screw you all right um and it looks lickable and kind of aqua-y that was done by brad ellis it's really good um and so then i had hyperspace uh and my the test flight icon was just a stock art picture of the milky way because i didn't have an icon yet i said the icon is temporary but i had an idea for the icon uh and i knew i wasn't going to be able to draw it myself and so i uh got icon factory to do it icon factory uh maker of some of those classic mac os apps that we use to collect your icons maker of tons of the free icons that i downloaded from their website and put into my icon collections uh and either the original maker of candy bar or the eventual owner of candy bar i forget which but anyway uh as the name says they make icons uh and so i i I came up with a concept document that was way too long.

1:49:32It said like, here's my app. Here's what it does. Here's what it's called. Here's my concept for the icon of kids. If you want to understand what this document, I showed them my Pinterest. That's what kids say these days, where you, you put up little pictures of things that inspire you about the kitchen of your dreams. While mine was like, here's some pictures of the icon. Here's what I'm thinking. Here's some, you know, it was, it was a ridiculous document. Uh, but this, the icon that you see was my idea. It was a, uh, a hard drive spaceship going into a legally distinct hyperspace. And my original idea was that the hard drive spaceship would have the same surface treatment as the Millennium Falcon.

1:50:14And as I said in the concept document, this may be a terrible idea because it actual icon sizes, all that detail may be entirely lost. But anyway, that was my concept. uh and uh working with icon factory on this was great i know some of those folks from years ago and they know us they did some art for one of our atp t-shirts the the big uh angel of death trash can mac pro one that was icon factory that did the art for that they're really great so anyway um work together with an artist at icon factory on this icon and going through many iterations and many concepts including we got to a point where there's a fork in the road where it like do we want to go in the direction of millennium falcon kind of greebles or greeblees it's pronounced two different parts both those words are apparently valid anyway the little nerly things that are on the top of the millennium falcon do you want to go in that direction or do you want to go in the shiny direction and in the end i chose shiny even though that wasn't my original concept just because as part of making the actual icon you learn what works and what doesn't and as i suspected it just wasn't going to read well um i did decide to make this one a squircle i thought it would work okay with the design it's this is the all my apps are weird but this is the most mainstream of any of my apps not saying much not very mainstream but you know it's a low bar and so i figured if ever i'm going to go normie and use the stupid squircle mac os icons now would be the time because i had a background idea like the hyperspace like the stars and everything that's the background so i have something to put in the squircle at least and as you might imagine we went back and forth when i say we i mean icon factory artist and me he's doing all the work and i'm just complaining about it so many iterations refining so many nuances of this that no one cares about and i hope i didn't drive them crazy but i think the result is what i wanted it to be and i think it came out pretty well uh it was difficult to make this design work at all as an icon because it is very busy and difficult to understand and visually grok but i'm happy to see that most people who have seen this icon understood it and got it and think it's cool and i think it works really well for my app and i like how it looks and i also kind of like how i have three apps with three icons that look nothing like each other yeah no it's fantastic i really like chef's kiss a plus and the icons yep agreed the app's pretty good too we had some other we had some other ideas too like i'm i'm a kind of like i wanted to do well again not for 1.0 but at some point maybe when i get back into doing like fun stuff mac apps can have alternate icons even if the mac os apis do not expose those icons to other apps there's multiple feedbacks about this please address it there's literal apis that say give me the icon of this running application totally ignores apple's official api for changing the icons anyway there are official icon apis for mac apps where you can change the icon ivory a mac app has a thing in its settings to say hey what icon do you want to use for ivory and i've picked an alternate icon and i like that feature so someday i might have in hyperspace an alternate icon feature which has nothing to do with reclaiming disk space and everything to do with just being fun just like the adver icon so i figured i would use the test flight icon which i have some fondness for even though it's just stupid looking it's just a star field but whatever i would put that in there i first put the real icon but there were some other concepts i don't want to spoil what they are but there were some other concepts that we explored early on in the icon factory engagement for this icon that i think would make a cool other icon so i may actually re-engage icon factory at some point in the future and say, hey, let's do one of those other ideas.

1:54:06And then I would have at least three icons to choose from and we would see how it goes. But one of the things with the launch in terms of how things do financially, like again, I don't expect this to be a big spell or whatever, but it was nice that on day one, the app paid for its own icon. So good. That's great. So I am officially in the black. Woo! Now we just need one more person to buy something. but no worth every punny because like honestly i'm as someone who's so obsessed with icons having a really good icon or at least an icon that i like for the app means just so much to me and even though people might look at my other icons and think they're just like ugly or nothing special i like them and that's what's important and i just feel like that is really like i don't know it's it's so important to to me personally but also i just think in general the first thing people see gives a good impression about your application uh and the icon does that and so yeah i think i think it's great it makes me happy to see it on my website it makes me happy to see it in my doc uh and i'm glad that people like it yeah and it's a great icon it really is there are other fun things in the application too if you uh look around for them i try not to spend too much time doing stupid stuff that has nothing to do with anything uh you know if you go too far down that road you end up at james thompson but of course he shot the moon and wrapped back around and made a whole separate app about his fun things uh i'm never going to achieve that level of awesomeness but i do in the very traditional mac sense enjoy adding fun little things to my apps i just have to like time box them and be like you are not allowed to spend more than 1.5 days on this before you get back to doing the actual app because nobody cares about this but it was something i use to distract myself during development and i may return to that well in the future we'll see oh again congratulations i'm really excited for you i'm proud of you you've done great work and uh the app is great so i am looking forward to a long future with it did you download it and add a rating casey not yet but i'm going to i've been busy man if you don't give me five stars they're going to kill my entire family oh well for it isn't that what everybody says to you anytime you you pay for any service it really helps people discover the show no that's a different joke the other joke is like you go buy a cup of coffee and then the person says to you they have my family hostage and they're going to kill them if you don't give me a 10 like every everyone like every single thing i buy someone says oh and by the way thanks well they do it in a practice way but it's like but just so you know it's real important that if anyone contacts you about this you tell them that blah blah blah and give me a 10 because like anything less than a 10 they're just gonna fire me right it's like i hate the system so i I give them tens.

1:56:44Like I want them to continue to be employed, but I hate it so much. So I, you know, I understand why people are not writing my rating my app. It's fine. But I guess I'm in the same situation. Well, you know, John, all that anti-Virginia slander. Now that's coming home to roost, my friend. One it is. I bought your app and rated it five stars. Just giving you a hard time. Just giving you a hard time. My app will never prompt you to review it. I'll promise you that. You say that. But, you know, I said that 10 years ago, too, and I had to stop saying it. Yeah, but you actually try to make money from your apps.

1:57:18I don't. These are just fun. I will never prompt you for ratings. I promise you. The only prompting you're going to get is on my podcast where I'll ask you to do it.