633: Moonshoot

29:26But I would hope Casey would buy it by asking me what he should do. And maybe if you listen to the TV segments, you'd know more about this. So anyway. I'm actually, John, you'd be surprised. I mean, I'm in a very enviable position right now where I have been spousily greenlit for a new home TV purchase. I just haven't gotten around to doing it yet because we've been busy with the restaurant. So I have. and because you know when we would we want to like wall mount it and stuff when we get it so it'd be a bit of a project so and i was like i just right now i can't deal with that but i i will be asking you what tv i should buy and i assume it's the sony a95 whatever but no we'll say the new tvs are out for 2025 oh are kind of up in the air at this point so you really need to give me more requirements um to nail it down because remember the a95l is now a two-year-old tv sony didn't even launch one last year because the n5l was still the best tv that you could get last year uh and this year we don't know they haven't launched their tvs at all but uh the lgg5 this year is pretty impressive because it uses the tandem oled from the ipad uh anyway that's not what this item is about but we'll talk well maybe we can do it as an after show or an overtime or something when you like if you can save it for the show we can have a back and forth but come but come with your list of requirements all right and we'll talk about that But this item here was originally a follow up item back when we talked about CES, but it just aged out of that role.

30:49And particularly when we were talking about in like the episode after we talked about CES, the Hisense 116 UX, which was this very large, very expensive television. It was a mini LED TV, but the LED backlights were RGB backlights. So instead of just having a white backlight, it had, you know, red, green, blue independent backlights. and if you turn them on yeah it's white but if you don't turn them on you can make the backlight match the color that you want the pixels to be and to be clear this still is not like a backlight per pixel this is like zone coverage like we have like in all apple modern monitors right exactly right it's a mini led tv and mini led is like oh the leds in the backlight are small yeah they're small like maybe an inch or two square but they're not pixels um but anyway the the big pitch here was that you got much better color volume it's one of the weaknesses of led lcd tvs it's one of the weaknesses of every oled tv that has wrgb pixels because it's got a white subpixel color volume is like okay so you can be real bright when everything's all white and whatever region you know your brightness is but what if it's all just red now how bright are you it's like well yeah because then now we only we're blocking light from all the subpixels we have to turn off the white subpixel block all the light from the white subpixel like or turn off the the old white subpixel or block all the light from the other color because we just let the red through all right so how red is the red well if you have a red backlight behind a red pixel that makes it more red than if you have a white backlight behind a red color filter or whatever so that's the idea behind this and the hisense tv at ces was like supposedly thirty thousand dollars or something and at the time i had mentioned that sony had an rgb backlight technology years ago back when i was looking to buy my first flat screen tv i ended up getting a plasma but i was also considering i couldn't remember the brand name at the time and now i've already forgotten what it is again but some maybe start with a q some uh uh sony uh lcd television back in the plasma days and its innovation was that it had rgb backlights that instead of just a white backlight it had red green and blue backlights again very chunky backlights.

32:58And those were very expensive TVs. They were more expensive than plasma, and it turns out they weren't as good as plasma. So I ended up getting a plasma. But anyway, so this is not a new thing. But apparently, it has been historically proven difficult to do. And Hisense had this TV at CS, and it was$30 ,000. But now Sony has made an announcement that they have their own RGB backlight technology. I forget what the brand name of it is called. But thousand nits uh and they're claiming that it like the color volume is close to qd oled so uh the verge has a story about it here uh which we'll link to um and a lot of people are really excited about this because like why would they care why do you why do you want this other thing well first of all making a mini led tv is pretty inexpensive at this point like the lcd panels are a well-proven technology and most of the innovation is happening in the backlight in the controller software uh and in particular if you want a really really big tv you just keep making the lcd bigger and bigger it's really easy to make the backlight bigger in fact it's easier because you don't have to jam things together as closely like you can make things bigger and then the pixels also get bigger because you're just making a 4k tv and you can print those lcd panels pretty cheaply so if you want like 115 inch tv your only choice other than like micro led which costs a hundred thousand dollars is a mini led tv you can't get an oled that big because oleds are expensive and difficult to manufacture and they just don't make them in that size uh but the problem of course with mini leds is the color volume is not as good as the qd oleds and also it's not per pixel light control you have a big chunky light behind thousands and thousands of pixels and if any one of those thousands of pixels is supposed to be lit up you got to turn on the whole backlight behind it it's a it's you know there's millions of pixels and maybe thousands of backlights um but the color volume is an issue like that's where the the apple uh sony's a95l and the samsung qd oleds are doing really well because they can produce the purest colors because qd oleds only have rg and b sub pixels and they are self-emissive and that's all the light that's coming directly from the pixels and you turn on and off individual pixels and they always win the color volume tests like whatever that uh rec 2020 color volume thing that other tvs get to like 60 percent of and that like the the qd oleds get to like 80 and the qd oleds can do like 100 p3 and lcd tvs struggle with that anyway people are very excited about this because you get a huge tv with great color volume and they're like and don't worry about the blooming and the backlighting but the verges view on this is not quite as rosy i'll put on the show notes to uh two youtube videos one from visual trends and one for hgtv test but uh and a lot of people are asking about this tv here's what it comes down to per pixel lighting or bust that's it like any tv technology that doesn't let you control the light coming from individual pixels exactly is never going to be like the future of tv tech i know people like it because you can make a big tv and the color volume is better and it's really bright and yada yada but it's like okay let's put up a star field where everything is black except for pinpricks of white light oh now it's not so good is it they're like oh but blooming you can't even tell the you can't the blooming is so well controlled you'll never even notice but like look if you watch these tv reviewers there are situations with real content where you can see oh yeah no put an oled next to it and even if the other tv is bigger and it's brighter and it's like quote unquote better and people would prefer it for from my perspective i care about poor pixel lighting control like i don't have it on my computer monitor and maybe someday i will but on a television when you're watching tv content that feel like should be the standard and so unless you absolutely positively must have a television that is bigger than at this point 83 inches still oh that's the way to go uh the scary thing about sony and sony talking about this and bragging about it is like people are thinking okay when sony rolls out its 2025 tvs are they not going to do an oled as their flagship tv are they going to claim that this rgb backlight thing that they have is their new flagship tv because it's brighter and has better color volume i hope not because they're going to lose in all the tv shootout tests because they'll be brighter and they'll have better color volume but they won't be able to handle uh light challenging lighting situations as well as a screen with per pixel lighting control um this is quoting from the verge um from people who actually saw this television and sony put it next to i think it's a 95l uh and this person said i would say the difference in color reproduction and viewing angles were a wash at best i generally prefer the picture from the oled in the most challenging comparisons and i think a lot of oled tv owners would probably agree that's not a ringing endorsement it's brave of sony to say here it is versus our our a95l the the the was awarded the king of tvs when it came out and a year later we didn't even produce a new tv because this one's great and we're showing it right next to our new tv and having people from the verge go there and look at it and go yeah it's still take the a95l not a ringing endorsement um but we don't actually know what sony's going to do i haven't been following the rumors that closely i'm just waiting for them to wait if you'll shoot a drop and for them to reveal what they're going to consider their flagship tv samsung did this a little while back too where samsung was insisting that their flagship tvs were their lcd tvs despite the fact that they had just produced a qd oled tv it's like well the company can say what their flagship is but the market decides in the end which is the best tv so anyway um that's coming down the pipe i think it is a boon for people who don't care about per pixel lighting control like i do because you'll be able to get brighter better tvs in larger sizes for less money so thumbs up I'm not down on this technology.

38:45By all means, continue to advance mini LED tech to get better and better. But as far as I'm concerned right now, the top end is still per pixel lighting control and OLEDs. And this is relevant for Macs, by the way, because 2026 is the rumors that you had OLED Macs and OLED screens in the MacBook Pros and so on and so forth. Right now, the Macs are mini LED and the screens are amazing. Will they get better with OLED? We'll see. Man, I can't wait for that. I love OLED so, so much. And I actually have – I've had OLED for a while on my gaming laptop. My Razer occasionally uses OLED in its 15-inch-ish class laptops.

39:25I know why people wouldn't necessarily want it for certain reasons, but for my preferences, it's amazing. And so I very much look forward to having that in a MacBook Pro and maybe even a desktop Pro display at some point. i don't think apple's ready to revise desktop monitors we got another five years to wait on that one but yeah that would be amazing like the real the real innovation here on the oleds and i hope apple does with the oled stuff is what they did with the ipad tandem oled um which we talked about when the ipad pro was introduced it's just basically sandwiching another light emitting layer in the oled stack so you drive all the light emitting layers at less power so you have less burn-in issues that makes so many things possible that's why the lgg5 this year is doing so well because lg g5 gave up the microlens array didn't go to qd oled they went to their tandem oled tech it's real bright it's got better color volume it's got pro pixel lighting control still not as good as qd oled and things some things like viewing angle and still not quite there in color volume i think but until we see all the comparison tests like this is annoying thing that sony does every year like samsung and lg come out with their tvs at ces and everyone just has to wait around to see what sony's going to do because there's no sense in doing a comparison of saying what's the best TV of 2025 until all the 2025 TVs have been out.

40:40And so you're just waiting around for Sony to release theirs. And then finally you can do the review. Okay. Because the contenders are always LG, Samsung, and Sony. Let's see who has the best one right now. I feel like LG has the best one, but Sony hasn't shipped yet. So stay tuned. If you were to buy a TV today, would you buy an LG given what you just said? I think I'd probably still get the NN5L just because of the viewing angle things. And my, my viewing situation has lots of people off access, including me sometimes so that's that would be my choice there but and also i don't have it's a pretty dimly lit room i don't have a lot of bright lights on it but the g5 may actually be the better choice for a lot of people than the an85 l at this point depending on their size preferences and viewing uh situation are we gonna are we in another situation where it's going to take somebody gifting you 100 grand to get anything but a sony tv or anything but hondo accord i don't I'm not brand.

41:30I had two Panasonic TVs before this. I am not sticking to any particular brand. I just bought the best TV. I bought the best TV available the year I bought my TV. It just so happens that in the following years, the best TV available is also a Sony, but might be an LG this year, depending on what Sony does. We are sponsored this week by Factor. Ready to optimize your nutrition this year? Factor has chef-made gourmet meals that make eating well easy. They're dietician approved and ready to heat and eat in just two minutes. so you can feel right and feel great no matter what life throws at you. Factor meals arrive fresh and fully prepared.

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43:37All right. There's been some reports over the last few months, predominantly from Mark Gurman, of course, about various different new kinds of Apple hardware, new shapes of Apple hardware. reading from a report that he wrote on December 15th. Apple designers are developing something akin to a giant iPad that unfolds to the size of two iPad Pros side by side. Apple's been honing the product for a couple of years now and is aiming to bring something to market around 2028. Apple's goal for a foldable device is to avoid the crease that current products have when they're in the open position. And the company has made progress on this front.

44:11Prototypes of this new product within Apple's industrial design group have a nearly invisible crease. but it's too early to tell if apple can get rid of it altogether samsung which launched its first fold foldable phone five years ago has tried unsuccessfully to remove the crease apple wouldn't be the first to try such a concept microsoft prototyped something similar with the courier more than a decade ago and then announced a dual screen tablet called the neo in 2019 the company abandoned both attempts and the conclusion of the neo cancellation was that consumers weren't clamoring for dual screen tablet lenovo has taken a crack at this concept as well Its Yoga Book 9i, which sells for less than$2 ,000, has dual 13.3-inch OLED screens that work side-by-side.

44:51Apple's approach would be different because it wants the screen to look like a single uninterrupted piece of glass. The Lenovo product has two displays attached by a hinge. Apple's version also would likely be more expensive. It's not yet clear what operating system the Apple computer will run. Just pause here. I love these rumors. i know this is a while ago and i know it's like a rumor about a thing that's going to come in 2028 but like the the story this was the origin of this item which has been in the notes for a while um giant thing like two big ipads it folds but we don't know if it's a mac it's not yet clear what i it's a pretty important detail don't you think especially given the current state of ipad os and the current non-touch operable state of mac os uh yeah there's a giant thing it looks like two tablets folding an os unknown maybe it'll run an audio os or tv os maybe it'll run vision os who knows this is the real sort of like you're gonna you're gonna see what you want to see type of rumor i mean i'm still looking at this and thinking well this just sounds like something to be toying with internally and surely this will be canceled because they can't even nail it down to os but like if this is a mac a bunch of stuff has to happen here now in 2028 to make that plausible and if it's not a mac then like why all the secrecy it's just a weird giant folding ipad anyway continue last week this was again in december a document alleging to show apple's display plans was posted on twitter it indicated the iphone maker aims to use an 18.8 inch foldable screen let me reread that 18.8 inch foldable screen between 2028 and 2030 that roadmap also suggests that the macbook pro will switch to oled screens in 26 with the macbook air following in 27 This aligns with what Mark Gurman has heard.

46:41Yeah, so that's from December and just I think just last this week, like the 2026 date for OLED screens has been repeated multiple times, including very recently. So the M6, I think by then M6 based MacBook Pro is from the OLED screen. Apple's taking its sweet time rolling out these screens. And it's kind of interesting that the iPad Pro has now kind of become the technological testbed for the most advanced basic technologies. it gets the the you know i think it looks like it's going to get the m5 chip first just like it got the m4 chip first it got the tandem oled what's going to turn out to be years before they appear on max it's a convenient way to roll out that tech i guess but it's it just seems weird to me that like that's that's the way the timelines have aligned because i don't know how many ipad pros they sell but surely they sell more macbook pros right maybe i'm wrong about that maybe they're just selling all macbook airs and they actually sell more ipad pros than macbook pros apple doesn't break that down for us very well.

47:34So it's hard to tell, but, uh, yeah, like it's gonna, it seems we're, we're out here waiting a while for OLEDs. We should, I guess we should just be glad we've had them on the phones for so long because they make such a difference and on the watch for so long because they make such a difference in those devices. And I really love them there, but tandem OLEDs, it looks great in the iPad. I love it. It would look great on a laptop, uh, 2026. Then Mac rumors rights in mid to late February, uh, another week, another alleged leak regarding Apple's fabled foldable iPhone. We've been hearing rumors about an iPhone that folds in half for over eight years now.

48:07While they have lacked consistency, they do suggest that Apple has tested various prototypes, with the hinge seemingly the biggest challenge Apple has been trying to overcome. Apple wants to eliminate an increase in the screen before bringing a device to market. Our latest information about Apple's foldable comes from Weibo-based leaker digital chat station, and it concerns the screen measurements. According to the Chinese leaker the device has a five basically five and a half inch outer screen that resembles the new oppo find n5 yes that is literally what the device is called the oppo find n5 but it's shorter and wider the inner screen is seven and three quarters inches and unfolds like an ipad apparently both displays have an unprecedented accent aspect ratio apple's foldable phone will launch next year or the year after that says the leaker next year the year after that okay great uh says the leaker with the foldable ipad also expected to arrive within the same time frame yeah foldable phone things are in there what is the common thing apple doesn't like creases apple really really doesn't want there to be of all the things to be hung up on like i know it's bad like have you ever seen someone who has these foldable phones like it's it's hard to have it for a long time and be folding and unfolding it and not have that part of the screen look and or feel not exactly the same as the flat parts of the screen so it is a challenge but uh yeah they're they're folding all the things over there it's just this entire lab like can we make a folding home pod you know folding apple tv just if it has a i guess if it has a screen let's try to make a folding version of it and i don't i mean look there is a huge benefit to if you can have a small device that then unfolds into a big screen when you want it.

49:48Like that is, we see that in the Android flagships now that do it. And that is pretty compelling, but it does come with significant trade-offs. I mean, I think number one trade-off is these phones are very expensive when they do this. And you better believe if, you know, if the Android brands are making their phones two grand-ish to be good foldables, you know Apple's going to be probably even above that. so i mean and to be fair to the android makers like as evidence because like they they actually are in pretty fierce price competition with each other they can't be that cheap because they're taking the most expensive part of the phone which is the screen and often tripling it because like the foldable phones have three phone size essentially three times the pixels they have a regular screen that looks like your phone and then when you open it up there's inside there the two halves are one continuous screen and so just there's there's no way around it it's like it's like electric cars and batteries given the current cost of screen technology you can't make a folding phone in that style that is not just so much more expensive than just a regular phone yeah exactly and and the trade-offs it isn't just cost there's also you know significant mechanical complexity there's significant durability challenges there's significant water resistance and dust resistance challenges because you're adding a lot more moving parts than a regular phone has.

51:13So it is significantly more difficult to make these. And there are major tradeoffs in buying and owning them. But the value, if you get it right, is high. But what the rest of the computing world has done when it comes time to try to get these things to market is they kind of throw their hands up and say, well, here are all these tradeoffs. We don't care. Hey, any of out there, if you don't care either, you can buy this right now. Apple is kind of allergic to that kind of thing. Apple does not like to expose certain types of trade-offs in their released products to the world. I think in the context of putting out a foldable phone, they're either going to have to be very patient or they're going to have to really hold their nose when they release something or both.

51:59There are certain aspects about this that I would be surprised if they could overcome and they might not have overcome certain of these challenges and trade-offs and they might just have to hold their nose eventually and say you know what we're going to release this anyway even though we know this trade-off kind of hurts us to release like the vision pro i mean that's kind of evidence that they are able to ship things that have trade-offs that they kind of have to hold their nose about but they're like you know what we're going to ship it like and i think the results kind of speak for themselves with the success of the vision pro but like they knew what the limitation it was big it was heavy battery life was not long uh i'm sure apple wish it could have been better uh i don't know if they wish it could have been cheaper because if it had been you know a quarter of the weight and twice the resolution i think people will be snapping them up at 300 100 bucks but this is the current state of technology and like in the wider world of android where there are many many competitors other many companies are motivated to you know ship what we have you know just get it out there try it and apple is essentially waiting on the sidelines letting other people iterate letting the technology advance meanwhile those companies are making money from these things because in in a wide market where there's not just one company where there's lots of different android phone makers there's going to be a company that says we're going to try it we're going to try the folding phone and it's going to be awkward and weird but because we're the first folding phone or the biggest or the best we'll get some sales that are significant to us and then we'll just keep trying keep trying and apple just keeps looking at it and saying it's not time for us to ship somehow they looked at the headset market and they said it's not time for us to ship not time not time not time and eventually said you know what it's time and i think they shipped a product that has exactly those compromises you were talking about that like that apple tends not to want to put out into the world but they decided they had to do it anyway because i don't know they just they felt like they wanted to be at the forefront of this or maybe they were scared by meta talking about the metaverse or whatever but uh yeah they shipped the vision pro so it makes me think that eventually you know in any in a year or two, they're going to ship something foldable.

53:56Well, and honestly, I do think they should, even though it will have those tradeoffs. Like, you know, sometimes those tradeoffs, you know, those nose holding tradeoffs, sometimes they just can't get past them. For instance, I know I use this metaphor a lot sometimes, but like when you go back to when the iPad was first being rumored and we were all talking about like, what's Apple going to do about text input? because so far text input on tablets kind of sucks. How do you deal with the text input? And when Apple released the iPad, they didn't deal with text input. They just punted. They're like, well, you all figure it out.

54:33Here's a mediocre solution. Good luck. I mean, it had an on-screen keyboard and you could buy a hardware keyboard for it. That's what it was. Right. And so it was two kind of hacks. It was like, well, this isn't ideal, but here are two ways you can do it anyway that both kind of work okay and have trade-offs. And the iPad was a successful product. Like, nobody wasn't buying it because text input kind of sucked on it. You know, we kind of just worked around that as kind of an inherent limitation. Yeah, okay, text input kind of sucks on the iPad, but, you know, we still like it for reasons 1, 2, and 3 over here.

55:09So there are similar trade-offs here with folding phones. There are certain inherent downsides to folding phones that we might think, I wonder how Apple has solved. Maybe Apple has come up with some magical solution. Probably not. Typically, if a solution to a substantial physical reality problem is not apparent to us before Apple has released a product into a category, odds are they haven't solved it either. Like if no one else has figured out how to do a good job of some kind of physical challenge here, odds are Apple hasn't either. They've just designed around it. So you look at, you know, what will an Apple foldable likely suffer from?

55:52High price, you know, mechanical complexity, fragility maybe, you know, this is what everyone else suffers from. Apples will probably suffer from those same things. And they will probably design with those in mind and say, okay, well, it's not going to have, you know, the water resistance or whatever. or it's not going to have certain... It's going to be thick when you fold it up and it's going to be pretty bulky and it's going to be pretty expensive. But for the people who are willing to tolerate those trade-offs, here is a big foldable... It unfolds into this big screen and I got to say, people who have those foldable phones and who use them all the time, who aren't just gadget reviewers, tend to love them because it is like having an iPad in your pocket that you can take out and unfold whenever you want.

56:34It is substantially higher value for like phone-based productivity. If you want to take out your phone and work on like a document or a spreadsheet or just watch a movie or something, yeah, when you can unfold that screen into a much bigger one, that's way more valuable to you. It's really nice. And that's why people are willing, not in massive numbers yet, but that's why some people at the high end are willing to buy these super expensive, very fragile, huge trade-off folding phones because there is that big value on the other side. And if Apple is going to have the iPhone be such an important part of their business as it is, I think they should do more crazy experiments once the market has shown like this type of thing is possible and it has a lot of utility to certain people.

57:23You know, I think Apple, we know that they came late to the game for big screen phones. You know, it took them a while before they got to that party because they at first thought nobody wanted that. then it turns out android covered it pretty well and apple's like oh hmm turns out everyone wants that and we're not doing it let's try putting out some bigger phones and they sold like gangbusters um i don't think the folding phone phenomenon is anywhere near that big or universal and i don't think if apple puts one out it's going to have anywhere near that kind of effect but they are the world's flagship cell phone company so if somebody else makes a really really good kind of cell phone and Apple doesn't have something in that category and it's proving to be like a pretty good idea for certain people, I encourage them to put out experiments and to try riskier things.

58:13The iPhone, the way it is now, is very good but kind of boring. They should put out cool stuff like that. And if other people can do it, they can do it too. And they can probably, if they put their minds to it, do a better job. So despite all of the inherent trade-offs and weirdness is about folding phones. The fact is, people use them, people love them, and they can be pretty good. So I want Apple to make one, and I'm glad whenever I hear these rumors that it seems like they're taking that seriously and will actually put one out, even though I know it will have massive trade-offs. That's the name of the game.

58:48The iPad had massive trade-offs, but I'm glad Apple released an iPad, and this is the same thing. Yeah, I feel like a folding phone is one of those things that, sitting here now, I'm like, yeah, I guess that's neat. I don't know if it would be for me or not, but I guess it's neat. And then especially, and I'm jumping ahead and I apologize, John, but John had put in those show notes a video that MKBHD did. Oh, don't jump ahead. You're killing me here. It's relevant. I know, but we can do two more short things before we get to that. All right, listeners, I've been told, breaking news, that I'm not allowed to jump ahead even to make a relevant point.

59:21So instead, I will plow forward as per demanded, or as it was demanded. All right, so Apple Apple's foldable iPad Pro prototype features under display face ID. Again, iPad Pro prototype features under display face ID. According to the Weibo-based leaker digital chat station, one of Apple's engineering prototypes features an 18.8-inch foldable screen with a, quote, metal superstructure lens, quote, that integrates the receiver and transmitter components of face ID for under display facial recognition. This is one of the, like, enabling technologies of, like, a folding thing. one of your problems you have is like, oh, now we have like less room underneath the screen for stuff.

59:59And this combines with all the rumors about upcoming iPhones having things under the screen. The notch gave way to the dynamic island, which would give way to a hole punch, which Android phones have had forever. But then what do you do with Face ID? Well, maybe we can get Face ID under the screen. Maybe we can get the cameras under the screen and finally achieve the goal of a complete screen iphone with no notch no hole no nothing anyway uh face id might just might not fit behind a folding phone or even a folding ipad i have no idea what a metal superstructure lens is uh but you know this uh how long have we been hearing about underscreen stuff and it exists on other platforms this is another place where apple has been sitting it out and saying other people are doing underscreen stuff but their underscreen stuff isn't as good remember the underscreen fingerprint readers on android phones and apple's like yeah we'll stick to touch id they're still sticking with touch id they don't have underscreen fingerprint readers they use the power button on things that don't have uh face id and uh cameras and other things uh behind the screen same deal they're like oh other people do them apple's not ready to go there yet uh but they're still trying i guess and they'll they might be forced to uh for uh a folding phone then six things you to know about apple's upcoming foldable phone i find this so funny because nobody knows what's going on.

1:01:19But apparently MacRumors does. It's like a, it's a good, this is like a recent. So we've read a lot of articles that have been months and months ago, but this is a summary of everything that, like the consensus leaks about the foldable phone as of like yesterday. Right. So six items. Number one, Apple wants to make it creaseless, you don't say. Number two, it'll open like a book. That actually is relevant because sometimes they open the other direction, so it's kind of like a tent, if you will. But no, it'll open like a book. Three, for size, imagine the iPad mini. Four, nine to nine and a half millimeters thick when closed.

1:01:52Five, it might have Touch ID due to thickness limits. And six, it will be expensive between$2 ,000 and$2 ,500. Yeah, so the thickness thing of it having Touch ID. So where do they put the Touch ID? There's not enough room for a Touch ID power button at these thicknesses. Is it an underscreen Touch ID? Or have they figured out some way with a middle superstructure lens to put Face ID underneath the screen of the thing? Now, finally, we come to the MKBHD video, and you can make your point, Casey. Oh, thanks, Dad. All right. So MKBHD put up a video about this Oppo Find N5, which seems to be a very, very well-executed Android folding phone.

1:02:33And at a glance, I wouldn't say it looks like an iPhone or anything like that, but you can tell that it was competently done. You know, it's very, very thin. And I think MKBHD said it's roughly the same thickness as a 15 Pro or 16 Pro Max, I believe. Well, most importantly about the thickness, because when we talk about the thickness of the phone, the most relevant thing is when it is unfolded, how thick is it? And why is that relevant? Because if the phone has a port on it of any kind and the Oppo Find N5 does have a port, you are limited by, here it is, we talked about it years and years ago, the thickness of usb c is the limiting factor in the thickness of the phone go look at the oppo find n5 in this video you will see when unfolded the usb plug plugs into one of the parts and it is literally the thickness of a usb plug with the thinnest piece of metal above and below it you can't make it any thinner that's it we're at the limit unless you go either go portless or you have some kind of like magnetically attaching dongle or thing or like but if you want to plug a usb c port in oppo has done it they have they have made it it's the thinnest stick apart now they can make the other half thinner i suppose to remove the overall thickness but that's that's something right and if you're wondering like oppo this is a shipping product not a prototype not a rumor not a thing it's a thing that you can buy with money right now uh and the beauty of it is when you do fold it up if you're watching the video it looks mkbhj makes this point because he's been reviewing these android folding phones forever it looks almost like a regular phone when it's folded up you're like it doesn't look like because the old ones will basically look like originally like two giant iphones stuck together like they were huge when they were folded sometimes they didn't even stick all the way together because the crease remember the one that like didn't actually close like the crease wouldn't close all the way as it was like a teardrop shaped when it was closed they used to be giant but the android folks have been working and working and Now the N5.

1:04:31it looks almost like a regular phone. And that's like now we're getting the territory where you look at that, you're like, OK, now Apple should feel comfortable because if they can do that, then Apple can do that. And that means they can Apple can ship a folding phone that basically looks like a regular iPhone, but happens to unfold. Yeah. And that's kind of the thesis of MKBHD's video. And, you know, as as he so often is, it's very astute. And the thesis is basically, look, when it's no compromise, the way I'm summarizing it doesn't make it sound very interesting, but he does a good job of coming up with something or distilling the thought of once it's no compromise, then that's when consumers will buy them.

1:05:11And, you know, right now it's Compromise City. And as I was starting to say before I was told I was not allowed to continue, that, you know, I'm looking at this Oppo Find N5 and it, again, is extremely competently done. I'm not sure that it's something I want, but it's clearly competently done in a way that I haven't seen folding phones done previously. And I can imagine finding an Apple version of this to be quite attractive, maybe not aesthetically, but in terms of like, I want one of these. I don't feel like I have a folding phone shaped hole in my life, but I think if this were to come out, you know, assuming the cameras aren't utterly crippled, which is tough because they might be because, you know, the, the, each of these halves has to be so darn thin.

1:05:55But assuming the cameras aren't utterly crippled, I would probably get this and at least have it for a year and see what I think. And maybe I'll decide, nope, not for me, but I would definitely give it a shot in a way that I do not plan to get the alleged 17 Air because the camera situation is so crippled. And I'm not willing to give up the pro cameras, whether or not I actually need them. I feel like I need them and I feel like I use them and I'm not willing to give those up. And so if and when the 17 Air or whatever it's called arrives, I don't plan to get one because I don't want to give up the cameras.

1:06:26And if this does have decent cameras, then yeah, I probably will give this a try. I mean, it's going to have worse cameras than the Air because it'll be thinner. like the halves will be thinner than the air i'm assuming yeah i mean i'm guessing it has the same camera situation as the air yeah it probably will so there's a bunch of enabling technologies you need to make this happen right one of them is you need enough to make this happen within the constraints that apple usually applies to their products right uh although again vision pro is a counterexample here but you would imagine and the rumors are for the for the ipad for the iphone air that apple doesn't want to massively compromise on battery life for having a thin one the rumors again the rumors about the 17 this the slimmer 17 iphone 17 is that the battery life won't be horrendously worse than the regular phones same thing with the oppo find n5 there have been advances in battery technology that allow for reasonable battery life in a phone that has three screens because first of all all three screens aren't lit up all the time and most you have or you know two screens but it's like three area wise anyway you're not looking at both the back and the front at the same time so i would imagine one of the screens is always off and that helps in the second i forget this new chemical formulation for batteries that helps give them higher capacity with a lower thickness the that's an enabling technology that needs to happen another enabling technology for casey to casey's point is if you don't want to compromise on cameras you need some way to get decent cameras into a thin case the rumors are that the iphone uh 17 or iphone 17 air or the slim 17 is going to compromise on camera because they don't have the ability to put as good or as many cameras in such a thin phone foldable is going to have to be thinner than that if it's not going to be a giant chonker you know thinner than the the air the n5 compromises on cameras it's so darn thin someone in the chat room said they should add a port bump like yeah you could if you wanted to add a bump for the port you can do that but like as you make the thing thinner, it makes your other problems harder.

1:08:27How do you deal with the camera situation? Like, oh, we can make it thinner and thinner. All right, it's great. It's now when I fold it up, it's the thickness of a quote unquote regular phone. What do you do about the cameras? It's a problem because you only have half that width or maybe you have like three quarters of that width if one if it's not uniform thickness when you open it up, it's like one side is thicker than the other. But that's a problem they have to deal with. And Apple also has to deal with face ID, which they were just talking about in that rumor about the iPad. What do you do about face ID?

1:08:52are you going to sell a phone with that face id are you where are you going to put touch id you can't put it on the edges of this thing it's so skinny are you going to have under screen touch id a thing that apple has never done or that they decided was never up to their quality standards so there are still like there's enough enabling technologies for oppo to put out this phone that i think is meets the criteria of like this is almost like a normal android phone except horrendously expensive battery life is okay the screens are amazing um the size and weight is okay it does unfold into a giant thing but android world doesn't have the same standards for uh face ubiquitous face id and or touch id of the quality and security of apples they've just never like that hasn't been a universal requirement they've been willing to ship phones without face id forms with fingerprint sensors that are not secure as touch id or whatever because it's a bigger market they don't there's not one company dictating the standards they make lots of things for lots of people so it seems like a valid you know android phone i'm i don't think right now 2025 is the right time for apple to ship a foldable phone because i don't think enough technologies are available and i feel kind of like the the slimmer 17 is like a trial balloon not just a marketing test of like let's test our ability to make things thinner let's test our thin battery technology let's see test our thin camera technology but also see do people hate this are they going to be like casey and say oh i would buy it but i won't compromise on camera like that will help them decide should we go with the foldable phone or not like are you know are the trade-offs uh desirable enough that the you know the market want the apple market wants it and to that end one of the most interesting things i thought was in this video is mkbhd musing on the supposed utility of folding phones based on his personal experience yeah you open it up and there's just this giant screen uh he had some angles i'm like okay what does android do with that giant screen and historically android apps have not taken advantage of all the space available to them it's one of the reason android tablets have never really caught on because there's not a lot of uh you know development and applications to to like make good use of the larger screen available even if you go from a phone all the way up to a tablet uh so with folding phones first of all you need all the apps to be at least aware enough that they have a much larger screen to deal with and scale to that.

1:11:17And second, they can't just take their phone interface and stretch it. That's not useful. Like why you have the screen, uh, you know, why are you, why are you paying this money for so much more screen space? If all you're going to do is take your existing apps and make them really wide, if anything, it might make the lines of text harder to read or something. Uh, but the second thing is as he opens it up, it's like, Oh, I don't worry about apps. I'm going to open it up and it'll be great as a consumption device. But if it looks like an iPhone or an Android, it just looks like a phone own aspect ratio rectangle when it's folded.

1:11:47When you unfold it, it doesn't become an iPad mini aspect ratio. It becomes an iPad mini in terms of area, like, you know, the square centimeters or whatever, but the aspect ratio is not the same. So if you watch, for example, a television or a movie like a 16 by nine or like a letterbox movie on there, there's a huge amount of wasted space. He shows it in the video. It's like, here's an actual iPad mini shung video on I'm holding it in landscape. And here's my N5 showing a video and I'm holding it in a landscape. And the video is bigger on the iPad mini, despite the fact that they're both similarly sized, because the aspect ratio doesn't match.

1:12:22And if you make the aspect ratio when it's unfolded, be suitable for like, like an iPad on its side, like watching videos on a plane or in bed at night, like I do, then when you fold it, it looks really weird. Like it's not, it's not phone shaped anymore. It's this weird shape. So you, that's another kind of compromise where I'm not sure what Apple's going to do there. Like, what is the, what's the correct size? I mean, I presume everyone wants to do what the N5 did, which is like, make it phone size when it's folded. But then when you unfold it, it's like, well, what do I do with all this space?

1:12:50Apple has an advantage there in that I think they'll be able to revise their applications, take advantage of that. There's more iPad apps available that might be able to sort of port their iPad-ness to the phone. You know, like, I think that Android has real problems in there for a lot of reasons that Apple doesn't. But watching video is an area that Apple can't control, I don't think an unfolded foldable iPhone will be as good a video viewing device as even an iPad mini, let alone a full-size iPad. Yeah. I think it'll be fascinating, as you've said many times, to see what trade-offs, you know, what levers Apple pulls and what levers they push, if you will, and to see where this goes.

1:13:27I'm excited, though, and as Marco said earlier, I think Apple trying new things is good. You know, I'm mostly a fan of the Vision Pro. I think there's problems and foibles, and Marco, I'm sure you're happy to jump in and explain some of them if you'd like. I've well covered it, I think. I'm a fan of the Vision Pro. And I think that whether or not you, the listener, are a fan of the Vision Pro, I think we should all celebrate that they're trying something. And this is what Marco was saying earlier. And I'm really interested to see what they try here. And not trying anything is one potential answer or option.

1:14:02But I think they will try something, and I think it will be sooner rather than later. And I think it's going to be really interesting and exciting. Same thing with the iPhone Air, whatever it's called. I'm excited for them to try something super thin. And let me tell you, I still miss my, to a degree, miss my Motorola Razr from the early aughts or maybe it was mid aughts. You know, that thing was so small and so thin for the time that it seemed impossible. And, you know, I'm sitting here telling you, oh, I don't want an iPhone Air because I don't want to compromise cameras. But man, if it's as cool looking as I suspect it may be, it's going to be tough it's gonna be tough but we'll see what happens so what do you think about i know we sort of ran through it a little bit here but what do you think about the gigantic 18 inch folding ipad thing because that i think is a product without much precedent in the market mostly because android tablets aren't particularly possible and i know there's that we mentioned it in the other store like there's laptops that are like that essentially windows laptops that are one big giant screen that you fold but even those i think are not the of the sizes being rumored here what what is that is that just like random stuff apple is doing internally is that a real product is that a macbook pro with a screen keyboard which used to make jokes about with the butterfly keyboard days that they're just going to make it all screen and you open it up and there'll be a software keyboard like what what is that product and do you find that kind of product enticing in any way in the same way that you might a foldable phone i mean i think The problem with that is like, does iPad OS allow enough utility to take advantage of that larger size, first of all, and then to be worth carrying it and paying for it and all these other like so, you know, every device you add to your life has costs.

1:15:41You have to, first of all, you know, monetary costs are huge. Like you have to buy these things and iPads are already like the high end of iPads are already very expensive. Let's double the screen size. Right. Exactly. And add all this like, you know, crazy folding stuff that's going to be like very cutting edge. And, you know, that's definitely going to impact costs in very large ways. So like, you know, a huge folding iPad, that's going to cost a lot. That's going to have to have a lot of utility to people to make it worth the money cost alone, let alone the cost of carrying it around. You know, where does this go in your life physically?

1:16:17Does it replace a laptop? Maybe, maybe not. is it a desktop device in which case why does it need to fold there's all sorts of questions here but again I'm glad Apple's trying these things but I think this is possibly going to be an area where Apple's hardware prowess for the iPad family is as always kind of waiting for the software side of iPad land to provide more utility to more people unless it's a mac again it's not yet clear what operating system is if it runs mac os and it's basically like the m7 macbook pro fold uh and like that's that's the thing that i'm thinking about is like okay i can see that product you don't have all the problem you have to make mac os be touch base but who knows maybe they're doing that in the big redesign we'll see anyway um assuming you sort that out what is the utility uh and i know there's again there's windows laptops that do this already like what is the utility of having the keyboard part of your laptop essentially be replaced by a screen well one of the utilities is if you pick it up and unfold it and it has like a kit stand you can have a much bigger screen and then you just bring like a portable keyboard like a an ipad type keyboard with you know so it's like it folds up in your backpack but when you're setting up at a table instead of having to look at a 13 inch screen or a 15 inch screen you can look at basically a 19 inch screen or a 20 inch screen but when you fold it up it's the size of a 13 inch laptop when you don't have it folded that way do you want to use a software keyboard on the screen part that's laying on your desk no like when it's just open as a regular laptop i don't i don't want to use a screen keyboard like that um so i don't know if that compromise is going to really be worth it for anybody like if you really really need a portable computer with a 20 inch screen i mean they sell 20 inch laptops i guess but they're huge like it's just so difficult for me to see like what problem is this solving is someone out there right now and they're saying well i really hate working on my laptop i wish i had a screen that was you know five inches bigger diagonally and in exchange for that i'll give up my hardware keyboard most of the time i don't know that this is such a fascinating rumor because it doesn't make sense to me as an ipad product uh and it also doesn't make sense to me as a mac product but maybe I haven't seen the vision yet.

1:18:39Yeah, I mean, that's, that's like, it would be very specialized. This would not be mass market because it's like, honestly, I think the high-end iPad Pro is already somewhat specialized, merely for price reasons alone. And, you know, once you start going, you know, this was, I'm sure this would, you know, definitely be above two grand and possibly even above that. And, you know, you start looking at like, okay, well, who is such an iPad power user? that they would be willing to spend that and carry that around and have all the trade-offs that comes with that. I mean, those people do exist. They sell the Mac Pro.

1:19:15It's probably a smaller market than the people who buy the Mac Pro. The problem with the iPad Pro, folks, is don't a lot of those high-end ones use it as a graphics tablet with the pencil? And now the crease concerns come into sharp focus because try drawing on a screen that has a subtle crease down the whole center of it. That'd be real annoying. yeah i mean that's why like i i this this is this i think is even much more of a moon shoot than a foldable phone a moon shoot moonshot moonshot yeah okay we'll try not to make that title no promises anyway this is so much more of a risk than than the foldable iphone because the foldable iPhone, we already see foldable phones out there that have high utility, that are worth their price to a lot of people.

1:20:09I don't think we've ever seen a device like this dual screen laptop thing. I don't think we've ever seen anything like that that had any success whatsoever in any market. Yeah, I don't think I have a place in my life at all for a giant iPad. And I know that there are people that very much want this. And, you know, I'm happy for them. I mean, it's just, I don't think I want that in my life. Now, if this was a foldable Mac, that has at least piqued my interest. But as you said, John, I do not want to type on a screen regularly. Like a little bit, tiny bit here and there on an iPad or Mac-sized device, sure.

1:20:46But regularly, not for me. It's like revenge of the touch bar, you know? You didn't like me and you banished me from your laptop. So guess what? I'm back and now I'm taking up that whole section of the laptop. It's all just a giant touch bar. How do you like me now? We are brought to you this week by Wild Grain. Wild Grain is the first Bake from Frozen subscription box for artisanal breads, pastries, and pastas. Wild Grain's boxes are fully customizable to your taste and dietary restrictions. In addition to their classic variety box, they recently launched a new gluten-free box and a plant-based box that's 100 % vegan.

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1:23:02All right, you want to do some Ask ATP? Yeah, let's do it. All right, let's start off this week with Anonymous, who writes, It seems like everyone likes to rail on Apple feedback for lack of transparency, but it isn't just Apple. Anyone who has ever sent feedback or a suggestion knows the pain of the feedback black hole. My suggestions and bug reports for Overcast Call Sheet and even Witchsmith have gone to DevNull. Should users have any expectation of support? What is one thing you would want your customers to know about support? And then additionally, Tony writes, How do you all as individual developers deal with feedback or bug reports for your applications?

1:23:32For each of you, what is your preferred method of receiving feedback? How do you triage the issues reported or enhancement requests? What systems and or applications do you use to do so? Do you target a specific cadence for bug fix releases? How do you prioritize bug fixes with feature enhancements? This is a lot of questions I want to ask ATP, Tony. I'd be interested to know how each of you deal with such things since your apps are very in size, complexity, and platform. For me, I don't think that's a fair comparison to compare the operations of single individuals to one of, if not the richest company on the planet, that's a very false equivalence.

1:24:07And I do understand what Anonymous is saying, but for what it's worth, I would say whenever I am sent a question about CallSheet, I typically try to answer it. And if I'm sent a bug report or suggestion, I note it and to answer Tony's question, if it's something I think is actionable, I'll make a new GitHub issue for it, and I will track it. But if all I did was work on support, I would never advance the app. But that's because it's just me. Again, it's just me. There's not time in the day for me to treat support the way I wish I could treat it. I wish I had the time to be able to treat it with the respect that I want to, but I just don't.

1:24:56And I got to assume that Marco you feel even strongly the same way even more strongly the same way yeah I mean there's there's a lot of differences here I mean number one yes it is a massive question of scale and and you know it to be brutally honest there's also a question of lifetime customer value versus the time it's going to take and you know what is it worth how much of our time is it is worth how you know trying to like handhold one person through a problem. When you look at traditional, what we consider support, typically that can range from, I have a quick question and I can type out a four-word reply, or more frequently, I have a long thing that's going to take you a while to read and understand, and then you might have to do some work to answer it, and then that's going to take you a half hour or something.

1:25:47And then when you look at the maximum lifetime value that you're likely to earn from that customer, the more of those emails you spend that kind of time on the more you are losing losing losing money people i think develop a sense of customer support based on products and services in their life that they're paying a lot more for frankly you know if you have a problem with like you know your cable service well you're giving them 80 bucks a month uh you know the lifetime value of you as a customer is pretty high to them so they can afford to have somebody answering your questions for you. When you're looking at an app that you got for free, or maybe you're paying a few bucks a year for, that's a lot harder for that developer to be able to afford to walk you through things or to answer questions individually one by one.

1:26:37So there is that significant difference in scale and in just plain old dollars and cents. And as Casey said, as one person, there's a total amount of time that we have to spend on work every day. And when you are answering individual emails, that is not a great way to leverage the limited time that you have. You're better off kind of taking all the emails as an input and saying, hmm, a lot of people are finding this button confusing or whatever. Let me fix that design. And then you make the product better for everyone. And that's kind of an indirect way to fix it. Is that ideal? No. You know, obviously it'd be great if we had time and resources to answer everything the way it deserves to be answered.

1:27:22But when you're dealing with individual one-person types of businesses where they stand to make very little money from each person and they have a lot of emails, it is not a great use of their time to provide individual support. The way I kind of square this in my head is I set expectations accordingly in the app. That I think is very important. It'd be one thing if you said, email me with any questions you have. Come on, I'll answer them. And then you never did. That's kind of crappy. And if you look at the Apple feedback system and what we are told about it, the problem we have with it is that we are repeatedly told over and over again by lots of people on Apple, you have to file bugs, please.

1:28:03It makes a big difference. They really do matter. And then the reaction we get when we actually do file bugs is crickets. and the system shows us it's wasting our time. Whereas I think what I'm doing by not responding to most emails to Overcast, I think it's different because I'm setting the expectation right up front, right in the app, right where the email form is. I'm saying I will read most emails but will not respond to most of them because I don't have time to respond to most of them. So I'm setting the expectation before you've even emailed me and you can, of course, get to that screen before you've paid me a dime.

1:28:39I'm sitting right there in the app I'm probably not going to respond to your email and so I think again in a perfect world yeah everybody would have time to respond to everybody and everybody would get what they want in the actual world that we're in as indie businesses where we can't afford to respond to every single thing and give people the support that they sometimes want I think the best way to do that to handle that is expectation setting so that people are told right up front before they've invested a bunch of time, you know, going through your process, you can say, hey, you know what, I'm probably not going to respond.

1:29:15And they can choose, they can say, oh, you know what, this app isn't for me then. And sometimes I will tell people who get very mad at me, sometimes I'll say like, listen, it sounds like you want a level of support that I can't provide. So you should probably use a different app, like that provides what you want. And I'm fine with that trade off. I know that not everybody is, you know, willing to accept my point of view on this. And for those people who demand a more engaged developer or team behind their apps, there's other apps out there that offer that. And I accept the reality that I'm going to lose those people to those apps.

1:29:52That's fine. I accept that. To me, I've made that cost-benefit analysis and decided I'm not going to change the way I operate my entire business for what seems to be a fairly small percentage of the audience that really can't take the way I do it. yeah the thing i'd add is uh i would imagine when people hear us give the our usual answer this is like well apple's the biggest company in the world and has billions of dollars and we're individual people uh they might think themselves okay but also apple has way more customers than you so isn't doesn't it all even out like because they may be huge but literally billions of people own their products so it seems like it should be the same and this is what i would say like if you are an individual developer like you don't have a company you don't have any employees you're hiring to do support or anything it's just a single person um if you are successful enough with your app sales for it to be any kind of reasonable income or any kind of reasonable augment to your income like if that you know if you if you make maybe not enough money to just live off your app but like enough money that it's not just pocket change like you're really helping support the household with with your app that means that you have too many customers to support individually so like the ratio like if you are even remotely successful as an individual you have too many customers that you can't spend your time responding to them like there's no business unless you sell like i don't know you sell it out for fifty thousand dollars and you sell it's like two copies of it or something like there's no there's no business that you could have as an individual where the number of customers is tractable where you do have time to give people individual support and also that your business is successful.

1:31:33Because if you have an app and two people download it, you can spend all day emailing with those two people and supporting them at a very personal basis. But two customers is not enough to support you unless your app is tremendously expensive. So and I know because I'm usually on the other side of that because I have three apps now. They are not particularly successful, which means that I don't have that many customers, which means when customers email me, they're much more likely to get a response. And it's not because I'm nicer than Marco and Casey. It's because I have fewer customers. I would love to have the opposite problem.

1:32:05Yeah, you're also nicer. Yeah, but no, but this is the real thing, right? But still, even with the amount of customers that I have, I have to make the same exact trade-offs, which is, you know, some customers who email me about apps, like they gave me$5 once five years ago, and I've spent just, you know, dozens and dozens of hours going back and forth over the course of months helping them debug a problem. Why am I doing that? Is it out of the goodness of my heart? No, because one of the things that you have to do as an independent developer is like Mark was saying, figure out how best to spend your time.

1:32:36And if there's some problem and some bug that never happens to you that you can't reproduce, but that you know some portion of your customer base has. if you get one person who who like contacts you about that bug and they're willing to be like your remote debugging buddy the time you spend with them is going to pay dividends for all your other customers and maybe for a future version of your app or whatever like you're spending a lot time with them not to help solve their problem but because that person is helping solve a problem that lots of other people have experienced uh and it's basically the interactive version of what margarine was talking about it was like if you take your feedback in aggregate you can figure out where the pain points are and concentrate on them but if you're trying to find a problem like oh i know this is a problem on my app i can't debug because it never happens to me but i know it's happening to customers out there what you need is like one hero to come through and like someone who is just they want to get it figured out too why are they doing it it's not that's not their app they're not going to benefit from this bug being fixed or maybe they just want to participate in bug fixing and i treasure those people because sometimes you need just one person out there who's got a problem who's gonna pull the logs for you and go back and forth and figure it out that you figure out like what is the problem why does this not happen to most people but happens to something when you just narrow it down um and that's that's the the trade-off that i do with all my feedback it's like if it's a two-word answer fine if it's just you know if it's 17 pages of me trying to debug their entire life they're just not gonna get a response at all but if i know there's some problem somewhere or there's some issue or whatever like in switch glass i had such problems with like screen identification of like you know figuring out which screen is this uh for a variety of both hardware and software based reasons hardware having to do with uh like identical monitors lying about their serial numbers and software having to do with how apple exposes which monitor is which and this is like a core functionality of my app assign a different palette uh you know switch glass thing to each individual screen and you want it to always remember this is the screen on my left and this is the screen on my right and from a user perspective you're like how dumb is this app i can't tell this screen on my left and this is a screen on my right but from a software perspective it's like i don't know where your screens are man i just got to call apis and hope i get ids back and getting someone who could debug that with me like what screens do you have can you take a picture of the back of your screens can you run this test program for me that dumps a bunch of information from the io registry and like that really helped me fix some problems early on in switch glass and all the switch glass users benefited from from that uh problem being solved um so yeah like a lot of people especially listen to the show they think like apps are just like a you know a fun thing or like a privilege to be able to make them and that is all true but like marco said it is also a business or in my case attempting to be a business and so you have to think like a business person and budget your time and money wisely and sometimes that means massively over engaging with one or two people and sometimes that means ignoring a whole bunch of them and sometimes it means figuring out what you have to do to improve your app so that you actually do get more customers so then you have so many that you have to ignore them it's it's not easy being any developer there's it's trade-offs all the way down but uh yeah anyway i just want to say is that the the trope about apple is big and we're small so we should be excused even acknowledging that they also have more customers the math just still doesn't work because to become successful as an individual you have too many customer support.

1:35:54And there's this gap, by the way, when you have enough customers to be significant, but before you have enough customers to hire a support person, there's this gap where it's like, we really should hire a support person, but we can't because we don't have enough customers. And eventually you get enough customers that you can hire someone and should hire someone to do support for you. But I don't think any of us have really passed that threshold. So yeah, business is tricky. Tom Bullock writes,

1:36:47whether we've traded away something important in order to get more stability. I hear Tom's point, but I think I prefer it this way. I like having incremental releases, and we're actually going to talk about something that I'm going to be releasing real soon in the after show. But it doesn't mean Tom is wrong by any stretch, but I kind of like the status quo. I don't know. John, what's the right answer here? Yeah, so are we missing out on Delight as a priority? Like the experience of having a big new version with cool new features in it? the thing about the like big bang releases and like just a release where you change a whole bunch of stuff is that is not a formula for delight for the end user really that is a formula for you broke tons of stuff that worked before and all the new things you rolled out are buggy uh there's the essay from jill spolsky from 2000 um talking about things you should never do part one uh quoting from that uh netscape made the single worst strategic mistake that any software a company can make.

1:37:45They decided to rewrite the code from scratch. As developers, we all know that instinct. Look at all this code. It's cruddy. It's been scruffed tech debt. It's built up. It needs to be redone. Let's redo it all. That is sometimes a good instinct, but the right way to do that is still in incremental pieces with the goal of eventually replacing it all and doing important parts first or whatever. But you can't do all that work internally and just like say, we're working right here and we won't release until we rewritten everything from scratch. And then one day we'll have the old thing. And the next day we'll swap out the old thing and put it in a new thing.

1:38:20Just ask Sonos. If this is a formula for delight, but it's not, but it's not just Sonos. Like it's so hard to do that and not end up angering more people than you delight because the old code has all the bug fixes in it. And it has all the wisdom of all the people who've left the company. You can read the Joel Spolsky article. Like that's why it's accepted wisdom that you shouldn't give in fully to the desire to just wipe this slate clean and start over unless you've made the wrong app in which case make a new app or whatever like obviously doing a pivot or going in a new direction or whatever like there there are ways that this can work that's one of the things that i hated about the spolsky article back in 2000 like but this is wrong there are cases when you should do this but his larger point was like even and he didn't hedge about this which is what you didn't hedge back in the 2000s when you were a blogger anyway uh you should never ever do this that's the wrong lesson the lesson is you will want to do this more than you should that's the lesson that's that's the sort of like uh more accurate less sensational early 2000s blogger thing you know you want to do this especially if you're a programmer but you should resist that and only do it in careful ways under certain circumstances yada yada yada and that is a very boring blog post to read so it's much better better to say this is the single worst mistake you should make you should never ever do it and as evidenced by 25 years later people will still quote this article and say well joel supposed to say you should never do it therefore you should never do it there are cases where you should do it maybe series should be rewritten but but like it's so much more prevalent it's so much more desirable it is so hard to resist that you should narrowly undo it and it's because rewrites like that do not delight your users they don't delight you either everyone is sad everything breaks stuff that used to exist doesn't exist anymore all the new stuff you rolled out isn't as good as you thought and it's all buggy as hell and you gotta you sign yourself for another decade of finding and fixing bugs that you already found and fixed before you get to the point where you can find and fix the bugs and the new stuff you added.

1:40:14So I disagree with this questioner. We are not missing out on anything. If anything, Apple should be more judicious with the features it rolls out and maybe more judicious with the features it announces because the real way to surprise and delight users is to take the features they know and love and use every day and make them better and better and better over time. Polish them. Remove longstanding bugs. Make the performance better. Like just, there are, you know, people use features every single day, day in, day out. Make those better. That's how you delight users. Also, I mean, in all fairness, you know, I think Tom's question here, it isn't just about like big rewrites.

1:40:53I think it's more about like the features that we're already delivering instead of staging them out, like on every, you know, 18.1, 18.2, 18.3, like, you know, having each one of those deliver a chunk of what was announced at WVDC instead like have the one big release in the fall deliver everything that was supposed to be in that OS you know major version as opposed to like you know month by month by month so there is certainly a question of you know whether you know dropping everything all at once in a big bang is better and in certain in certain ways that is better that is definitely better for making a big splash in marketing if it's hard for you to get a lot of attention otherwise so like it isn't hard for Apple to get attention.

1:41:38Apple can fart and they'll get attention from all the major press outlets. So they can do whatever they want. They can stage their fat. And when you have that kind of status, it's actually good to trickle things out because then you kind of stay in the press constantly. There's always something that you are doing that's new in the press. Whereas... I don't think that's why Apple does it because Apple used to do the thing where all the OS features were supposed to launch in the.0. But I think that there was a reason and the.0s were just way buggier. Like, so clearly, they used to release features that were at the same doneness state as the ones they don't release now, but they just released them anyway, and guess what?

1:42:15In the.0, it was buggy. In the.2, some bugs were fixed. In the.3, some bugs were fixed. In the.4, it finally worked. Now they just hold it for the.4, which I think is the right decision because I think the Big Bang release, despite us being excited by seeing it at WWDC, like, ooh, we're all going to get this as soon as the.0 is out, and we're so excited for it. But when we get it, it's disappointing when the stuff is buggy as hell until the point three just hold it for the point three yeah but so anyway like if you have a like one strategy for marketing is trickle stuff out to constantly remind people about you this is why you can buy like a single sock from a website once and they will start emailing you literally every single day after that telling you all the breaking news in their sock specials before your sock even arrives you've got nine emails from them reminding you of all the great news happening in stocks but you don't think that's why apple like marketing is not dictating that apple holds things to the point three right i guess that's engineering for sure right um probably but but i think apple appreciates the benefit that it like i don't think they are artificially holding stuff back to trickle stuff out you are probably right that it is engineering driven however um i i do think that that this is a benefit they enjoy that it it does spread the press splash for their stuff throughout the whole year rather than just happening in the summer and fall.

1:43:34But when you are an indie and you don't have the kind of attention that Apple gets from the world with everything you do, there is some value to having those big splashes. Like when you are pretty much anybody who's smaller, even like a medium-sized company, like if you have like Evernote, I think they're dead now, but something like that size company of like, Like, you know, if you can make a big, you know, 3.0 or whatever and have a whole bunch of stuff all drop at once in that one big version. And everything John just said about, like, you know, having a big release, also having a bunch of bugs, that is true.

1:44:12But that does get a big PR splash. So there are times where you would want that strategy for sure. but when it comes to delighting users i mean maybe this is just my style as a developer my favorite ways to delight users are with small features they might not even they might never see an announcement for it but they might run into it in the app sometime that is you know if you're optimizing for delight that that's a little bit different from like wowing people i think the big PR feature drops that's to wow people and maybe get new attention to your app but if you want to delight your users I find it way more fun and way more delightful to offer them something helpful or nice or fun at a random time that they weren't like necessarily looking for that but something helps them and like oh cool so an example of this would be like my undo seek this has been like when I did the big overcast rewrite that i should never have done thanks to jill spolsky um when i when i did that the big rewrite last year i improved so much about the app the thing that people love the most they constantly tell me they love the most is undo seek because a lot of times it turns out people accidentally seek in a podcast by dragging the bar accidentally with their finger whatever and then the having the undo thing pop up right there undo seek and you tap it you undo it that's a very delightful feature to people it was not a big pr splash but it's something that they run into when they are using the app and as you are you know developing an app and serving your users over time you can add little things like that whenever you want and you know the sooner you get it in there the sooner people are going to start being delighted by it so i think there there is a way to optimize for designing for delighting users and it doesn't actually require big bang big drop releases you can do it incrementally by slowly adding that kind of thing over time i think the delight that tom was asking about is like uh like the christmas morning feeling of like watching the uh the announcement video and say look at all these goodies and i'm gonna get all of them and you can continue to think that and just know that they're gonna spaced out but it's just so nice like now finally i'm installing ios n plus one because it's been publicly released and now i get everything that i saw in that video and uh yeah that's not that that was never really a realistic world your choices were exchange that great feeling for a buggy point oh or uh you know just have they could just simply announce fewer features and release them all on day one and just release fewer things throughout the year i think what they're currently doing is a reasonable ish compromise which is announce all the things in your big video and then release them over the course of the year as long as over the course of the year a actually fits within the year which hasn't worked out that well for apple's intelligence stuff and And B, that you don't get like the last bushel of things in like the end of December.

1:47:10And it includes like really important features, like spreading it over the year. Maybe try to spread it over the first half of the year. Because honestly, if you're if you're planning features and they're taking your whole year to roll out in any reasonable form, you probably put too much into the year. But but yeah, like I do think polishing existing features and I would say the the seek undo. That's an example of polishing an existing feature seeking. That was done in one point. No, whatever needs to be done with seeking. But people use seeking all the time. Is there something that needs to be polished in seeking?

1:47:36Well, it works fine. Seeking is fine. Like what's nothing is wrong with seeking. It's like, but let me really think about seeking. Is there any part of seeking the experience could be better? I'm going to go revisit the seeking feature, which I've never needed to touch because it works perfectly fine. And you find something to add. And guess what? People love it. Not because seeking is a new feature, not because it lets them do anything they couldn't do before, because you could always just slide it back and figure out where you were. But it makes some part of seeking better. It acknowledges the reality of seeking, which is sometimes you do it by accident.

1:48:05Let the app help you out there. Polishing existing feature like that. I wish macOS had it. I wish it so bad. Like every single thing I do every day in macOS is like, this has been this way for 10 years and has not improved. Please, just somebody work on this one feature. You know, I mean, my bugbear is like file sharing in the Finder. Those dialogues, that whole interface, that whole experience has not gotten better in so long. and I do it every single day and I wish someone would come and give me the Finder file sharing equivalent of Undo Seek. You know, bringing both these AskATPs together, my favorite support email to get, which I always respond to, is, hey, just FYI, you know, you have all of these ages for these actors on, you know, this movie, but they're all wrong because, you know, Pierce Brosnan isn't 35 anymore and that's what it says he is in, in, you know, Goldeneye or whatever.

1:48:58I'm making all this up. And I get to respond and say, no, no, no, no, no. That's how old he was when it was released. But that's a design bug, I feel like. If people are misunderstanding it, you need to make that clear in the interface. Thank you for ruining my moment, Josh. It's both. It's good that you get to delight them, but like, oh, that's really useful. And now they know that, and from that point on, they will be delighted by that aspect of your application. But also, it shows that there's a part of the application that's confusing. Maybe put, like, a little tiny text above that says like then then 35 it's not an easy um if it was easy problem to solve you'd already solved it like there's every all of our apps have situations like this which is like how can i make this clear without cluttering up the app with a bunch of instructions that once you know it you never need this again because i don't need that instruction i know about it but i know about it because i talked to you like but if i had just seen it without any information what i have known this is one of the problems of app design uh that are you optimizing for the first user who knows nothing or the user after that, or do you want your application to adapt to it?

1:49:56You might have already made the right tradeoff, which is don't put anything. And if anyone doesn't understand what it is, they'll write you and you'll tell them and they'll be happy. But, you know, it could be better. Well, and actually, now that I think about it, I embraced TipKit just the teeniest bit when I did the big multiple lists. I almost said rewrite. It wasn't a rewrite necessarily, but the multiple lists feature. and so now that I've gone down the tip kit line, for lack of a better word, perhaps the right answer is to add a tip for this. So the first once or twice that they see it, they'll get the little pop-up that says, hey, this is how old these actors were when the movie was released and then they never see it again.

1:50:33And then they send you an angry email. Why is this thing popping up tips in my face? I don't need you to tell them to use my app. Get this thing out. It's hard to please everybody. I got one of those. It was so obnoxious. It was so obnoxious. It was on Macedon. it was just hilariously obnoxious if you want to see obnoxious like i posted a mass that i'm asking about a shopping list app or whatever and a bunch of people sent me suggestions uh most of which i already tried but anyway in the course of trying all the suggestions uh i saw just how aggressive like the average ios app is about sending you bs notifications like install the app and i would be like allow notifications just because like i want to see how the app works you know if notifications are part of the app if if i was going to use this app i would enable notifications so i install the app enable notifications use it for two seconds close the app go back to the app store one two three bloop notification from an app instant delete like i don't even know what those notifications are saying it's like i've barely even used your app i just installed it like like less than 60 seconds ago and you're already sending me notifications like no n-o-no delete uh i think tip kit is way below that threshold but yeah apps just apps that don't respect their intrusion into your life.

1:51:47It's madness. Alright, thank you to our sponsors. This episode, Wild Grain, Factor, and Notion. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership is called ATP Overtime. This is our weekly bonus topic. Every episode of the show gets ATP Overtime. There's about 15 to 30 minutes usually of a whole other topic that you aren't hearing if you're not a member. So if you want to hear all these, if you just, after hearing, you know, two hours of us, you're like, the one thing I need is to hear more of these people BS about computer stuff.

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1:53:11And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-G, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A. It's accidental. It's accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast so long. So in the realm of delighting users, kind of, sort of, there's been a handful of features that CallSheet either hasn't done or hasn't done the way I want. And I've been kicking the can down the road on a lot of these in some ways because I was scared of them, in some ways because I just didn't think it was the right time, in some ways because other things were a bigger priority.

1:54:07The number one on the list was having multiple lists of pins. And we've talked about that already. It launched, I think, a month ago or something like that. And another one that I probably should have prioritized higher, but honestly, I was a little scared of, was universal links and a web presence. And I don't mean like a marketing page. I still don't really have that. But what I mean is when you go to share like a movie or a show or a person in CallSheet, I present you with a prompt in the released version of the app that says, do you want to share a CallSheet link, which is the CallSheet colon slash slash URL scheme that only works if you have CallSheet installed on your device?

1:54:49Do you want to share a movie database link where you just go straight to the movie database? I feel like there might have been one other option, I don't recall. But the user has to make a choice, right? And if they send a call sheet link, like, you know, say my close friends and I share a link for a movie, what's getting sent in like an iMessage is call sheet colon slash slash, you know, in some URL, which is presented as a completely useless URL in messages. There's no web component to it whatsoever. So there's no poster, there's no title, there's no anything. I have no idea what I'm looking at other than looking at the URL and knowing if it's a movie, a show, or a person.

1:55:33And that kind of sucks, and it's always kind of sucked. And even leaving aside the growth hacking of having a nice web link to point people to, it's just icky to look at messages. Like even for people who love the app, you know, I really like the app. And when I send these links to like Aaron or my friends or what have you, they're gross. And so what I knew I wanted to do was have some sort of universal link and like web presence such that when you share a link, instead of sharing callsheet colon slash slash, you're sharing a link to some website. And then when you open that link, it will at the very least, you know, show a presentable version of that website that you can then from that web page, click a link that sends you into call sheet or for double bonus points, you open that URL, say for messages, and it immediately hops you right into call sheet, deep links you to the particular thing that you were looking at.

1:56:37So as an example, if I sent to the two of you the link to the Hunt for Out October in iMessage, I would expect to see the poster for the Hunt for Out October. I would expect to see the title. I would expect that if you tap on that link, you know, we'd open call sheet and dive directly to the Hunt for October. And on the surface, this shouldn't be that complicated. But the complicated thing was, I, and slightly because of Marco, but mostly because of me, I have a deep aversion to running any sort of server component at all for any of my apps. I don't want to bother with it. I don't want to mess with it.

1:57:13I don't want to deal with it. I don't want to scale it. I don't want to think of it. So that's a large part of the reason why I've been kicking this can. And the obvious answer is, well, you dum-dum, you already run a server for your website. Just tack on the side of that. And yeah, I could, but my website is old and creaky. See the recent, I remember special. And although it works perfectly for the needs I have of it today. I think extending it for this purpose is not really the right idea. So then I need to like stand up a whole new thing and do I want to stand up an entire new like Linode, Nanoed and you know another VM in the cloud somewhere just to service this and like I don't know I don't.

1:57:53Well I think yes but anyway. I don't. And so I just kept kicking this can down the road and I kicked it and I kicked it and I kicked it and I kicked it and then lo and behold and this is the lesson that Marco and I have both learned many times and keep trying to unlearn and then keep getting reinforced that we should continue to do it. Procrastination has saved the day. So an extremely kind listener who I did not get blessings to use their name one way or the other. So I'll just call them Josh S. An extremely kind listener late last year said, hey, I'm tired of sending links to people for call sheet that are so hideous.

1:58:30So I stood up my own little baby setup that does it for you. And so what Josh had done was had set up, I forget exactly where he had put it. I want to say it was on Cloudflare, but I'm not 100 % certain. And basically these were single serving pages sort of kind of. And what it would do is it would mimic the call sheet colon slash slash URLs, but it was an actual website, right? And it used the movie databases API on the client side to load details about the film or the show or what have you. So you get this really nice landing page for the hunt for October and it has the poster and in the background of the page is like a faded out like image from the movie.

1:59:13And it was just really, really good. And I don't have a link in front of me and I don't want to swamp his setup and I don't know how long it's going to last anyway, but it was incredible. And I immediately reached out and was like, holy crap, may I steal this, please? And again, procrastination to save the day. and Josh was extremely gracious and courteous about it and was like, yeah, absolutely steal it. Have fun. And that was months ago. Over the last week, I finally decided to get off my butt and actually try to implement this. And to make this a little broader and not all about me, me, me, I feel like I learned a really good lesson from this experience because I knew I didn't want to listen to John and stand up a new VM in the cloud.

1:59:59I wanted to do something serverless, which is a buzzword that I've heard more in the past a little bit, not as much recently, but I've heard plenty of times. And I don't really even know what that means, but I know that it means I don't have to deal with like a full on server. I mean, surely somebody's servers are running these. Sure. No, no, you're exactly right. That's what I was getting at when I said, yes, you want to do that because I wanted you to have a website. But like what you're talking about now is an implementation detail, which is like, OK, what answers? When I make an HTTP request, what is on the other end of this thing answering my question?

2:00:32And it could be a computer in a rack somewhere. It could be a virtual machine inside a computer in a rack somewhere. Or it could be a quote unquote serverless endpoint, which is a bunch of software running on a computer inside a rack somewhere. But it does change like your perspective in that like, am I responsible for running a machine? Am I responsible for like instantiating and running a VM? or am I not responsible for any of that? And instead, my responsibility begins and ends with me uploading a blob of code or an executable into this magic bucket. And then I'm not responsible for anything that runs it.

2:01:07And the only thing that can be my fault is there's a bug in the code that I uploaded. So I should upload a new version of it. But everything else is essentially not my fault. And that is what it sounds like you're looking for. That is the quote unquote serverless is like, I don't want any of this to be my responsibility. But there are other trade-offs with quote unquote serverless, which have to do with things that aren't your problem may become your problem if there's something like you can't fix them if there's a problem so you want it to be reliable and also surprisingly costs sometimes serverless can save you save you huge amounts of money depending on what you're doing if what you're doing is let's say extremely simple and low traffic, putting it as a tiny little thing on some existing VM you have could save you more money than paying per request to a serverless thing.

2:01:52So I get you wanting to do it because it's like cool and you haven't tried it before and you should check it out. And it might be the best choice for what you're doing. But also it might end up being way more expensive than putting a static page on the cheapest static hosting you could find. Yeah. And you hit the nail on the head that I wanted to I wanted to leverage as much of somebody else's infrastructure as possible and just care about the thing I actually care about. And I think, you know, I'm stealing a little bit of Marco's thunder, so to speak, in that you've said this many times, I believe, Marco, and summarized it probably better than I'm about to, in that, you know, our value add is probably working on the native app.

2:02:31And being a Linux administrator is not really what you or me or John is. Well, maybe John, but not what Marco and I are meant to do. And so I don't want to do that for this particular context. And so I decided to bite the bullet. That's probably a terrible turn of phrase. I decided to learn how to do this. And what I ended up doing was looking at Cloudflare pages, which from what very little I know, and I'm sure I'm going to get some things factually wrong here. But the gist is that you can send them static HTML or you can use some very, very, very basic, I guess, web frameworks to do very, very, very basic websites.

2:03:12I think this is kind of spiritually similar to GitHub. What is it? GitHub Pages? GitHub something or other that they'll host a website for you as well. So it's Cloudflare's cut of that. But the problem is, is that I wanted this to be dynamic, and I'm putting huge air quotes in there, insofar as I don't want to have to, and I don't have any mechanism really, of sending all the data to this page. Like I could send a title as like query string or whatever, but that would look ugly. And how am I going to send an image? What am I going to base 64 and code an image and put that in a URL? Like that's gross.

2:03:45That's not at all what I want. So what this website slash web page or what have you would need to do is make its own request to the movie database and get the data it needs based on just an identifier. And that's what I did. And so it turns out Cloudflare Pages also offers Cloudflare functions, which I guess in turn are just like slightly rejiggered versions of Cloudflare workers, which all of that is to say you can basically push HTML and JavaScript to Cloudflare. and as long as they're not super intensive and as long as you're not getting a gazillion hits it's as far as i know it is literally free for me to host this so far i haven't paid for an ssl cert which i know is not that common anymore i haven't paid i mean i already paid for the domain like a year and a half ago but um i'm not paying for hosting yet uh obviously there could change and i might need to you know i might get so much traffic that i need to um start paying them but the the free limits are extremely generous i don't remember offhand what they are but they're very, very generous.

2:04:46And now you can go to callsheetapp.com slash movie slash 1669 as an example, and you can see The Hunt for October. And you can do that for people. You can do it for TV shows. You can do it for TV shows, TV show seasons, and TV show episodes. And I'm really, really pleased with this. And the look and feel of it is 98 % Josh S. I did change a couple of majority of it was Josh. The JavaScript, again, mega air quotes, back-end code, so to speak, most of that was Josh. Again, I tweaked it and changed it and so on and so forth. But what I think a couple of big lessons for me that may be relevant to everyone, I guess I'm trying to channel under the radar here a little bit.

2:05:32First of all, this was something I deeply feared, and I was able to put it together in a few days. Similarly, I deeply feared lists of pins, And that took longer. But as it turns out for both of these, I was capable of it. Like I didn't think I was, but I was. And I think what I need to take from this and maybe someone else listening is in a similar position. Like I've been doing this for a long time. I shouldn't, I shouldn't doubt myself the way I have been on a couple of these things. Like normally everyday stuff, I've got that. No problem. But some of the stuff where I'm outside my comfort zone, I don't need to be doubting myself as much as I do.

2:06:08And I'm pretty decent at my job and I can figure stuff out. Like, as I've said probably on the show before, and I've said certainly many times in the past, you know, when I went to school, and I think I speak for all of you probably, when I went to school, I did learn some marketable skills. but ultimately what I learned was how to learn and I can learn things. And I knew this intellectually, but I don't know, for whatever reason, I just got so scared about this and I didn't need to be. And, you know, then I, I was able to put all this web stuff together again. Thanks so much to Josh S. Uh, and then I was able to, again, thanks to some tutelage from him, get it so that I, you know, when you open these URLs, if the app is installed, it will automatically deep link into the app, which was not challenging, but was something I'd never done before.

2:06:54And you have to get, you know, a certain file on the web server in a certain spot. And Marco's probably done all this 15 times, but you've put a certain website or a certain page on a certain file, excuse me, on the web server in a certain spot. Then you got to report into Apple about, you know, what domain do you bless? And does the, does the blessed domain, does the domain bless you back? And so on and so forth. But ultimately I have feared this for months, probably a year now, a year and a half now, and I ended up conquering it in just a few days. So if you're in a position where there's something, be it a work issue or a programming issue or a life issue that you've been fearing, stop kicking that can.

2:07:28Don't be like me. Don't procrastinate, except when it's useful, but don't procrastinate and just give it a shot because you'd be surprised what you're capable of. And I'm sure there's problems with this. I'm sure someone will find a bug and I'm sure there will be an issue, but ultimately it's there and at least in the happy path that works, I'm really pleased with it. And the best part of all gentlemen is if I need to change something, I change it, I upload it and I wait about 15 seconds and then it's live, which is so frigging refreshing. And I know that this is so obvious, but I'm so used to living in native app land where even a test flight takes like 10, 15 minutes to go through.

2:08:06I am so loving the world of the web where when I upload something, I wait a minute and then it's live And it's delightful. Some listener out there is very upset that we've had this entire conversation and not once said the phrase AWS Lambda. So now we've said it so you can all exhale.

2:08:26That's true. And, you know, I know that there are plenty of other technologies that would work for this. I don't know why I chose Cloudflare, to be honest with you. I just had heard of it. Sounds like they have a cheap deal. Yeah. And I mean, that's the other thing. It's like AWS scares the piss out of me because there's so much to it. There's so many nooks and crannies that I, and I know almost nothing about any of them. Plus it seems like so much of the terminology is so like domain specific that I would just not even, I would take so long for me to even understand the terminology I needed to ask the question that, um, I don't, I don't think I would ever turn to AWS.

2:08:58Now, John, if I recall correctly, you have plenty of experience with AWS. So maybe for you, if you were to go down this route and if you wanted quote unquote serverless, maybe you would jump directly to AWS and AWS Lambda. No, because AWS as the market leader is not incentivized to offer as generous a free plan as you seem to be experiencing from Cloudflare. So I will never be at the scale where AWS will make the most sense for me, I would imagine. Marco probably already is at that scale, and we've discussed that many times in the past. But it is terrifying. You are right to be scared. And that's the sort of competitive niche that companies like Fastly and Cloudflare, Like they are able to offer services that are aimed at people like you, like people who are, you know, potential customers of many of their services and may eventually pay for them.

2:09:44But right now are like needy kind of a user friendly on ramp and maybe don't have a lot of traffic to begin with. And they want to get those because they're below the concern of AWS.