639: Crimp the World

36:23You've got to bring things near water. No, it would be above the water, not below it, so it's fine. You can put it outside and combine both of our forces. Yeah, put it in the roof of Marco's porch. Right, right. There you go. So then, breaking news, moments before we started recording, another kind listener had sent me two Lite 8 PoE switches, which is, I think, four PoE ports, four non-PoE ports, and a Flex Mini, which is a USB-C or PoE-powered little baby hub, or switch, I should say. I installed one of them downstairs, the Light 8 downstairs. I installed the Flex Mini on my desk. And mostly I'm happy with all this.

37:08However, I had heard horror stories about getting Sonos to work with Ubiquiti. And let me tell you, my brief experience in the span of 20 minutes before I'd run upstairs and record was that most of those horror stories were mostly accurate. because as soon as I replaced dumb, unmanaged switches with ubiquitory switches, everything was upset. Now, I think it appears to be that the going advice is to go wireless and wireless only on your Sonos devices. And it was the case that my two Aero 100s on my desk in my office were connected to a little baby switch on my desk. The Sonos Arc, which is the main soundbar, was connected to the switch in the living room and the Sonos port, which is what powers the porch and as well as takes input from the turntable, that was also connected via Ethernet.

38:01And I knew that I was probably in for a little bit of an adventure. And it appears the moment I switched from unmanaged to the Ubiquity managed switches, everything took a turn for the worse. Now, I reset up the main living room situation, and that seems to be fine. I haven't reset up the port yet. And the office just fell right back onto Wi-Fi. I think I had explicitly disabled it on the ARC way back when. So far, so good, he says, with not a ton of confidence. But if I recall correctly, part of the reason, a lot of the reason why I started wiring all this stuff was because getting it to play Spotify or Apple Music or what have you off of Wi-Fi back when I had the Eros was very, very finicky and spotty.

38:46And then And with the desktop ones, the two Air 100s on my desk, one of them would fall out from time to time. Now, given that my office is now about as far away from an access point as I can get as I sit here right now, we'll see how tomorrow goes. But sitting here now, I think I've gotten through it, but it was definitely like the Sonos app was pissed. The Ubiquiti app was pissed. Like everything was upset. Sorry, British people. But anyways, everything was upset. And so we'll see what happens. And if I can get all this squared away, then the next mission is I really, really want to start getting some cameras in and well, mostly around the house.

39:25I don't think I need them in the house unless I want to stalk Penny when we're out. But I want to get some cameras around the house. So I got to figure out what my plan is for that, how am I going to get data to them, how am I going to get power to them? Because of course, any of the places I want data and power, neither of those things exist at the moment. And yes, I'm aware of PoE. That's what makes PoE great. But I still got to get that Ethernet. That's the E. I got to get that Ethernet to where these Phantom cameras would be. So I got to think on that and work that out. But if people have recommendations for cameras, ubiquity cameras that they really like, and or doorbells or what have you, do let me know.

39:57I can tell you we have all ubiquity cameras at the restaurant. Well, what should I get as a person and not as a business though? We have a large number of G5 turrets, which have just since been replaced by the G6 turret. It looks like they still might sell it as G5 turret ultra. for$149? Yeah. So we have a large number of the G5 Turret Ultras which are pretty much universal. They're kind of like the everything cameras. You can put them in many different locations, many different mounting situations. Most of them we have directly mounted to the wall. You can route the cable through the wall behind them or you can route it out the side.

40:37The only weird thing about them is that they have this little blob that converts the cable it's like a breakout cable it converts the cable from their little proprietary thin thing it goes into the camera to ethernet and you can you can like you know wrap these things around it to seal it up and everything but that means that like six inches away from the camera you have like what looks like a large like ferrite core thing um but it's that's like converting your cable type if you get one of their mounting boxes you can shove all that into the mounting box but then it makes the whole thing a lot bigger and uglier so it depends on you know where you're putting them how you're writing the cables and everything, but it gives you a lot of flexibility.

41:15The image quality of their turret line is, well, of all their cameras is very good. The G6 turret goes up to 4K. So it's like a step up in resolution and image quality. But for most cases for like a standard home camera, you won't really need that kind of resolution. And the only other ones, we don't have any of the domes or anything. We do have a couple of the 360 cameras for like covering big areas. I will say a 360 camera is not amazing if you actually want to like, you know, look and see in detail what's going on. It's more of like the 360 camera is like a just-in-case camera. Like if you want to cover a very large area, just in case like, you know, there's some kind of incident that you want to look up footage for later that you don't care that much about the precision of it.

42:05It's not great for detail, especially around its edges. And it's really hard to view the feed very large because the feed is a circle. When you put it up in a window or on a monitor, it takes up a huge amount of space to display relatively little of the useful information. So the AI 360s, again, we have a couple of those for big areas of the restaurant. I kind of regret those, but all of the turrets, the G5 turrets, and I got a couple of G6s when they came out, those have all been great. They're rock solid. I have no regrets. At the beach house, when I did those, the turrets didn't exist yet, I don't think.

42:46So at the beach house, I mostly have the bullet style of camera. Now, when you look at the specs and everything, for the most part, they're all basically the same guts or the same small number of guts. It's just a question of what physical form do you want the camera to take. You can get fancy with the super zoom ones, but I don't think it's necessary for almost anybody. um so again it depends on what you're doing so at the beach i have mostly the bullets um i think i have all the bullets actually um most of them are the cheap little g5 bullets i do have a couple of g5 pros where i needed like more resolution and lighting but for the most part that's pretty like stick with like the the turret and the bullet and you're fine um i i have also tried in a couple of contexts the little compact instant ones i believe they're g4 instance or g6 i forget no they're g4s the the instance are really inexpensive really basic not very good you kind of get what you pay for they're good if that's all you can fit in a spot but usually if you can fit the turret kind it's better so there you go we are brought to you this episode by mac Weldon, my favorite and most worn brand of clothing.

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46:07It turns out that one John Syracuse has written a blog post, and let me tell you, it started with an upside down flag, and that is setting the tone, as they say. So, John, what's going on, man? I've been like four this year, haven't I? I don't know. It's been a lot for you, for sure. I've blogged in three totally different months so far this year. It is a miracle. I've done a total of four posts. So, yeah, I'm doing pretty well this year. Yeah, so what I posted, this is something I've been thinking about probably since we started talking about the DMA stuff ages ago. I don't even know how long ago, like last year sometime.

46:48And I just figured I need to just get it out and write it. That's usually how things go on my blog. I have a, I usually, it starts his life as a blog idea and my blog idea note. And it's just there for months, usually sometimes years. Uh, but if, if I feel like it's kind of like burning a hole in my pocket that I just need to just, don't worry about how you're going to write it or what you're going to say, just get something out. And I kind of reached that point with this, uh, topic, uh, about a week ago. Uh, and if you listen to the show, there's not really anything in the blog post that's going to be surprising, but the kind of the role I see of posts on my blog is like, a succinct summary of the stuff i ramble for hours about on on a podcast and also it's more accessible like it'll be crawled by search engines it takes two seconds to read instead of having to listen to hours and hours of podcasts and find the part where we talk about this or whatever so that's that's kind of the role i feel like for for blogs and in my life or you know and see our recent episode about our websites about why it's important for me to have a website and a domain and a place where i can put this stuff so there you have it um and so what is the topic um it's about uh the sort of the the the place where uh apple finds itself these days and in particular was spawned by when i was thinking about discussing the dma stuff i always thought about as i always am what kind of things should apple do differently right apple should do x apple should do y apple should do z like it's you know it's a large part of my career it has basically been that thinking about where apple should differently and the thing that change for me is so many things that i would think about that apple should do differently i would end up running into this dead end and saying well but they're not going to do that thing until different people are running the company and the more and more i ran into that the more i thought like this is it seems different than all the past times when i was saying apple should do x y or z i gave a couple of examples in this post here but like i mean which example did he i think i talked about uh the bad keyboards right they made computers with bad keyboards right but But even just like way back in the day, they need to have a new file system.

48:50They need a new memory safe language. They need a new operating system even farther back than that that has memory protection and preemptive multitasking. It's always been these things like Apple needs to do this because they are not doing as well as they should. And if they do these things, they'll be doing better. And they need to do this. And usually eventually Apple does. They need to make a way to share photos between multiple people in the same family. And a decade later, they do it. and in all those cases it was like i always had in mind this is the thing that apple should be doing but i never thought to myself but of course apple is not going to do that unless different people are in charge that thought never entered my mind i was frustrated that it would take them a long time to do it even even back in the day when we were complaining about oh the johnny i've made these laptops that don't have any ports on them i didn't think like the only way they can fix this is to fire everybody who made these laptops and make different ones like or certainly I didn't think like, you know, the CEO of Apple needs to go and be replaced to fix the laptops.

49:45Like they make mistakes all the time and they're slow to fix them, but eventually they do. But there's this one class of problems that they've been running into in the past decade or so that every time I think about it, I'm like, I don't think that's going to ever going to change until new people are in charge. And the more I would think about it, I would say, well, what, what do you mean by new people? Like if Phil Schiller retires, does that fix it? Well, no, probably not. well like that you know the if if those lieutenants you see in the leadership page who've been there for decades if they leave and new people come in will that fix it well maybe but i'm not sure it's always been a you know how much does tim cook delegate or whatever but in the past several months and you know or six months or a year it's become increasingly clear that even if you changed the ranks of everybody in the c-suite at apple but still left the ceo there you'd still have the same problem because so many of the worst decisions when you run them up the flagpole you find out no tim cook as you would imagine as ceo the buck really did stop with him and when it came time to choose between competing theories about which things to do tim cook would be the ultimate arbiter of what goes and with the laptops and the keyboards and stuff like you know there's people under him like johnny ive says this is our new laptop tim cook says yeah sure fine you're the product guy i'm sure it's great uh when the keyboards are breaking uh and they're having customer complaints he'd say what's the deal with the keyboards and if engineering says no we can fix it we're going to put a membrane on it tim cook goes all right well fix it and then they put the membrane on it doesn't fix it and tim cook says what's the deal you told me you're going to fix it no we're going to fix it like that that dynamic makes sense at no time during the any of those things like they need to make a new mac pro successor that you know the file system the the operating system the ports on the laptops and all these big crises that can make people say that's it i'm fed up with apple they're not doing what i want at no point did i feel this helplessness that somehow you needed like leadership change at the very top to fix this because i always assume that you know well timcoe's gonna make mistakes he's gonna you know people are gonna tell him what he wants to hear sometimes uh you know gonna go off and do the car project whatever like in the end you make mistakes but you move on but this class of things that tim cook in particular seems extremely married to and so do many people under him just really seems like it's not going to change unless leadership changes and so here's the post saying like look i'm not mad that they're making decisions i don't like i'm not mad that they're making products i don't like i'm not mad that they haven't updated the mac pro well i am kind of but like like that's not i'm not saying you didn't make a good mac pro therefore that you need to tim cook needs to leave the company i'm saying that there are things that apple has been getting into lately that they just seem entirely hopeless that like this is never going to change as long as tim cook is still there because he has proven that no matter what the people beneath him say and debate and offer or whatever in the end he's going to make as the judge said he's going to choose poorly he's going to make the wrong choice and as i said in the post here people can change their minds steve jobs did all the time but you make a terrible mistake you change your mind that's what kind of what i've been hoping for for years it's like okay well it seems like this is never going to change unless leadership changes at Apple.

52:51But you know, maybe just something sufficiently dramatic has to happen. And I kind of that's where this came from the DMA thing. I kind of thought when the DMA thing comes to a head to like, finally, they've been pushing this as far as they can go, they think they're, they think they can avoid this regulation. And here come the regulations, and we see what they are. And then they fight. And it's just like, this is going to be it. This is going to be the crisis that finally drives them to say, Alright, we we fought this as long it as hard as we could but in the end we we need to change direction and no they didn't change direction they they saw the dma and they just dug their heels in harder and harder and harder it's like wow that was that was kind of the crisis point that i always expect them to turn on like they shipped those stupid butterfly keyboards for so long they pressed it as far as they could but they get to the crisis point and eventually they changed their mind they foisted those laptops on us with no ports on them for so long for so many years the touch bar the whole thing but they come to a crisis point and they turn and i feel like the dma was the crisis point for all of the app store stuff and the the rent seeking and services and all that other stuff and they didn't turn and so i'm like well that's it that's that's the ball game now you know and you know just reinforced by the more recent u.s things or whatever but it's like there is no crisis that's going to happen that's going to change the minds at the top of this company about what they should be doing i've thought what they were doing is wrong for a long time but eventually i essentially lost faith that anything could happen that will change their minds and they just continue to be wrong and you know we touched on it in the in the follow-up section like they're just digging in their heels so they're welcome to prove me wrong better late than never if they finally you know think about what they want to change and i mentioned last week about potentially doing a member special or something on this because i think it would be fun to say if you could change stuff at apple without regard for like if you could change leadership and get someone in there as like a turnaround artist which just sounds dumb when you're saying you're going to turn around the most successful company in the world you know what i mean like if you could fix the things the long-standing problems that apple had get in there and fix them what would you fix what would you do how would you change it but it is kind of like that scenario where you need new people to come in uh and say okay whatever the old administration slash regime did i forget about that a new day has dawned kind of like you know um uh satya nadella at microsoft it's like not like microsoft was bad before but he had a new plan for the company and he executed and you kind of need a new person to do that what does that plan look like for apple so maybe we will talk about that maybe it won't be a member special maybe they'll just be on the show but anyway uh that's my thought with this post i tried to really just boil it down and be as precise as possible and just hit the specific points not get too bogged down into argument reasoning and examples and all the stuff that i just got bogged down in when discussing the post i you know it's it's pretty tight every paragraph every line is there for a purpose that makes a point it makes i'm trying to make the specific point that i'm actually making with the words that i chose not tangential points that would use different words which is always the challenge with uh things like this and i you know i and i knew i would be able to expound on it in the the podcast or whatever um and i think this is capturing a popular sentiment uh you know sometimes people complain about when we talk about you know complain about apple on the show which i still argue is one of the main purposes of the show but like oh you know isn't there anything nice to say about apple um and as we said over the many years we've gone through this cycle multiple times when things are going great for apple it's all fun and roses on this show when things are going poorly it doesn't sound as great it's that the you know it's we can't impose a reality on on apple the things they do influence the discussion of them and i made this post which is probably the the most pessimistic and damning post i've ever written about apple and got basically zero pushback i'm gonna say basically i got zero pushback no one read this and say you're off your rocker apple's great everything's fine what are you talking about nobody zero people and And that usually doesn't happen because usually there's just someone out there who says, you know, who's just really committed to the cause.

56:58But obviously the circles I travel and are most inclined to and the people who would even know my site exists, let alone read it, are most inclined to agree with me because there are lots of developers and stuff. But, yeah, it just seems like Apple is not getting the message on the whole, you know, anti-competitive rent-seeking app store stuff. And I linked again for the billionth time for the last time I took a run at this topic, which was the art of the possible post, which was like, look, Apple seems to think if they just hold the line on this, that the world will bend around them. And I don't think that's going to happen.

57:30And they need to change. I forget how long ago that was a year or two ago. But yeah, as it's all come to a head, like they've Apple continues to believe we're just going to fight as hard as we can. And in the end, it will be fine. And no evidence supports that. it's not you know the on the outside the people who oppose them are not having their minds change nor are they being strong-armed into compliance instead governments are stepping in and strong army apple into compliance and still apple is fighting them so yeah you know like uh i don't want to steal marco's thunder for being like fire tim cook or whatever and like in the end he's going to retire in a few years anyway so this is a problem that will solve itself but it's just I really feel like we've reached that point where there are so many things, so many important things that Apple should do differently that I now feel they will not do differently until there is new leadership.

58:22I think for me, and I'd like to hear Marco's take, but for me, the thing that was most surprising, even having been a part of, much less listen to this show, although as we all know, do I really listen to the show? But anyways, it was surprising for me to hear you or see you plainly say it's time for cook to go because to my recollection you've come up and towed the line on that on the on atp but i don't recall you ever saying no really he's got to go last show casey all right fine um but no in case it defends this is a very recent thing it's but it's not though like it's it's it's the thing like it's the problem with posts like this is they very often read like that's it apple has gone too far they removed the sd card slot from the macbook from MacBook Air.

59:08That's it. I'm off. I'm no longer an Apple customer. That's what all these things read like. Like, it just seems like it's just a series of things, a whole bunch of little annoyances, and just one annoyance too many. And that brings me over the limit. And just in a rage, I'm now anti-Apple. And what I tried so hard to say on this is, that's not what this is. All of those things are a different class of things where you say, like, they should change this.

1:00:00and they're not doing it, I'm now convinced that this will not change until leadership changes because they've proven it to me over so much time that there's no crisis that will motivate them to change. And I can go a real long time. Like how long? Like I still believe that they could fix the laptops. How many years? How many years were their laptops messed up? Right? How long did it take them to get a new operating system that was any good? I still believe. I'm like, you know, I had complaints about it. I wrote all those reviews for years and years. I'm like, you need a new operating system, but you're not doing it right.

1:00:30They eventually got there. But with this one, I've just lost faith. And so that's why it's not an angry, punitive, Tim Cook needs to be punished thing. It's more of a recognition that I no longer believe things will change without new people. First of all, I think you're right. And it's also like when I saw this blog post, I was like, oh, my God, John flipped. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Keep in mind, in the last few weeks, we've seen some pretty important Apple fans and Apple defenders and people who have really smart views and measured views. I heard on Dithering, John Gruber and Ben Thompson are both now wondering aloud, maybe it's time for new leadership at Apple.

1:01:17Like that's huge for for the types of people who are now either saying aloud, like maybe it's time or who are actually saying, no, it's time now. That is a big shift. And that's that's like a big threshold that has been crossed in only very recent weeks. And that's that's really something. Yeah, because it's like in all those cases, it's it's not the sort of knee jerk reaction to particular events, because how many events can we all name that are just so objectionable to get people so angry? but those are just if you've been in this game for a couple decades you're like those things happen they come and go you get angry about them things change you move on or whatever it's like but what does it take for you to like stop believing that these things are going to get better like that it's not just a matter of time it's not just a matter of making your case in public it's not just a matter of there being a crisis and i think that's where people are getting and honestly all the discovery in the court cases has really accelerated this i think for everybody because you no longer we always say well who knows what's going on inside apple well we don't know what's going on inside Apple, but we have actual, like, literal evidence of some of the things that are going on, actual words from actual people.

1:02:24And those things did not help make people get more optimistic about the company. Quite the opposite. So anything you were able to believe before, and it's like, well, here's the people saying the stuff. So does this help or hurt your faith? And really, I think I honestly, you know, not setting aside whether the wisdom of the court cases and how they're going to turn out. If you've lived through the Microsoft antitrust trial, you know, these things don't necessarily go the way you think they will, even if you're heavily in favor of them. But just the discovery process has revealed stuff that we didn't know before.

1:02:55And all of it has been in support of the idea of like, these people are not going to change. No. And, you know, you can look at the, there's a number of, you know, counter arguments to this. People say like, well, Tim Cook is making the company a lot of money and has made the company a lot of money. He has grown the company tremendously from when Jobs died and Cook really took over fully. The company has grown tremendously. The whole market has grown. Apple has expanded its dominance in so many ways and has expanded its scale in so many ways. That's all true. I've made the comparison before, so I won't dwell too much on it, but so did Steve Ballmer for Microsoft.

1:03:37Tim Cook has done so much better than Steve Ballmer, just in terms on as measured by Steve Ballmer metrics. He's like, I don't know, 100 times better. So you're right in this. If you're just looking at those specs, they're of a similar type, if that's what you care about. But the scale is so much bigger. He's been tremendously good in that Steve Ballmer way. Exactly. He has been a better Steve Ballmer than Steve Ballmer was, but he's still a Steve Ballmer. I wouldn't call him the Steve Ballmer, but I would say along those metrics of financial metrics and expansion of the company, he's done amazingly well.

1:04:08he also for you know in all fairness to steve volmer tim cook also inherited a much more a much better ship i think but he did like i don't want to like you do a post-mortem on maybe we will and eventually leaves but i think like if you look at the size of things like uh ben thompson was talking about this and dithering a little bit this week too like the company he inherited had so much going for it but it had not as many of the things that we currently tribute to Apple. The company that he inherited was not in a position to make as many iPhones as they make now, let alone sell them. And it wasn't in so many businesses that they managed to enter.

1:04:45So there was a lot of work that needed to be done to get where we are. I don't have a lot of objections to most of the things that Tim Cook has done with Apple. It is particular stances and policies, and as I said in the post here, losing sight of the fact that what has made Apple successful is doing what nobody else wants to do, which is just concentrate on making great products and have faith that money will come from that. That's what brought them to where they are today. And losing sight of that is a terrible mistake. Right. And I think you can look at Tim Cook's entire time as CEO. There are some things he's done well, the scale.

1:05:24Although I will also point out, people often say that the scale of Apple today is all because of Tim Cook. like, you know, the scale of manufacturing in China, which I'll get back to in a minute. But like they ascribe all that to Tim Cook because before he was a CEO, Tim Cook was the COO and he was famous for all that scaling stuff. When people say that, they're usually saying in the context of, well, we need Tim Cook now more than ever because he's the operations person. And with all the possible tariff stuff or instability with China, that Tim Cook is the one we need right now, the leader we need right now to get us out of this mess.

1:06:03And I would point out like the CEO has a lot more on their plate as a role than all the operational details. We have Jeff Williams doing that role. And Jeff Williams is probably the one who is most responsible for that kind of operational stuff these days. So I would say we don't necessarily need Tim Cook for that reason alone. But getting back, so Tim Cook's tenure has been great for operations. It has been great for profits. It has been great for growth of those profits. It's been great for expansion into new profitable areas. It has been a mixed bag for products. Right at the beginning, Tim Cook had said in interviews and people said, he's not a product person.

1:06:49Okay, well, Well, the outgoing CEO, Steve Jobs, was like one of the world's greatest product people who left in his wake one of the world's greatest product companies. When he passed away, that left a huge vacuum. Tim Cook was the worst person to try to fill that part of the role. So what did he do? Well, he for a while, it seemed like Johnny Ive was kind of the head of products. maybe a maybe a little bit marketing phil schiller maybe was it but like right now who is the head of products at apple i don't know like who i who is the big product thinker who is the product lead i don't know if you need one person for that like he's always been delegating into his various product leads which is part of why we got into trouble with like the the bad laptops and the not enough ports and the and the the uh the mac round table like at various times he's allowed the company to go in bad directions on product because he can't make the can't and didn't make those calls himself and he delegated them and the people he delegated them to made bad calls and it took a while for like the uh the you know the the right compiled debug loop to solve that problem that's why you had these big like we're going to revise the laptops and we're going to have the mac round table and say we care about the mac and we're going to do a real Mac Pro like there had they came to crises but they were able to resolve them and obviously if you have someone at the very top with better product sense you don't let that go to a crisis as much but I don't think know that you need one person who's in charge of it you just need somebody with who's either more a little bit more engaged or has a little bit more faith in their own taste in that regard to not essentially delegate it and delegate it as much as he had to delegate it like I to his credit he delegated and also to his credit he was able to write the ship several times after running at a ground after after the people he delegated to ran at a ground you know what i mean like that's why i don't get so mad about those things because those go in cycles but like now he's the one running at the ground on the whole like stubbornness about all the anti-competitive stuff well and i mean look i can point to a lot of things in the tim cook era that show that he made poor decisions at the end of the day he is a bean counter he's a really good bean counter, but he's a bean counter nonetheless.

1:09:06He does not understand the products that he makes from a product standpoint. He understands them from a profit standpoint. He understands from a business and operational standpoint. He does not understand them from a product standpoint. Over time, we've seen various ways this has manifested. Simply, number one was putting Johnny Ive in charge of software design showed a pretty large lack of understanding of software design having johnny go a little bit too nuts with some of the product decisions of like making things like too thin at the cost of reliability that was again like poor product sensibility or poor product delegation by tim cook uh we heard many times that tim had basically abandoned the mac in favor of thinking the ipad was the future of computing for a few years there and the harder reflected that because, again, he didn't really understand the Mac, which is a pretty big part of Apple's product line.

1:10:06He also, you know, when the butterfly keyboard thing happened, what we heard from a few different people over the span of that, which lasted, again, way too long, what we heard is basically like that they were too cheap to change the manufacturing line too soon. They wanted to get their value out of the manufacturing line they had built. And that's, again, that's Tim Cook. What we heard from multiple sources was that went right to the top. I don't know. What I heard about the butterfly keyboard is mostly that people kept telling Tim Cook that we're going to fix it this time, and he believed them like three too many times.

1:10:38That's less than like we wanted to get our money's worth out of the line because I feel like he was saying, what do we need to do to fix this? And if they told him we need to make a new keyboard, he would have done it. But if someone told him, actually, we don't need to make a new one. We can fix this. He just kept believing them. And maybe he's motivated to believe them because he wants to recoup costs on the manufacturing line for the keyboards. It's a mix of them combined. So there's enough blame to go around. But in the end, it's on him, the fact that it lasted so long. Right. And let's look at some bigger picture things.

1:11:04Bigger picture, iPhone sales have been great, you know, but it's not like, you know, growing anymore. So what have they done? Well, they tried to make a car. they spent a long time tons of talent billions of dollars trying to make a car which seemed like a bad idea right from the start it seemed like an organizational nightmare it seemed like it was all over the place with its goals and all sorts of problems that reflected a lack of i think reality on tim cook's side um they also spent a huge amount of resources time and money making division pro They actually shipped that, but I kind of think they shouldn't.

1:11:42They shouldn't have. There's a lot of problems with that product as well. You can point to a lot of big and small releases or decisions Apple has made over time that shows that at a big scale, Tim Cook was really weird at product decision making. And at a small scale, they seem to very frequently under his leadership profoundly misread the room or fail to read the room. For a large corporation that's making a bunch of money, it's easy to overlook all those flubs because you can say, well, they're making a bunch of money. And the scale at which the money matters is quite large. When you look at how much of the world economy is invested in Apple, like if Apple shares take a hit, that affects like people's retirement funds all across the world.

1:12:29Like the amount of money involved in Apple and the effect they have on the global market is not insignificant. So to grow it into that financial state is a remarkable thing. But as Tim Cook grew into that financial state, he did it with two massive strategic risks. Number one was an incredible over-reliance on China. And no one for the last 20 years has said, we should definitely pour more reliance into China. Like, that's not a great idea. And it's always been a risk. They knew it from the start and they decided for various reasons, maybe it was necessity for a while, but it probably hasn't been necessity for a long time if they actually made the right investments earlier.

1:13:16Maybe they had to to some degree, but they didn't have to to this degree. That's a huge risk that he took that he has built up over all this time. and now Apple is very vulnerable in key areas because Tim Cook took way too much of a risk with over-reliance on China. I've said that years and years ago when we were talking about that. I said, you know, America has a China problem and Apple has a China problem. I think I phrased it all those years ago. But on that front, this is a case where I would say it's kind of like the butterfly keyboard, but even more so because I feel like, yeah, he's done that.

1:13:53He went to China. was it was at the time the only option and he invested heavily in it led to apple's success that it has today but if i had to pick a single person to both recognize when uh apple needs to start diversifying away from china and to execute that i'd pick tim cook he's the best position person to fix his own mistake because this is what he's the best at and you know to we have some items that may be in future shows but apple is trying to fix it in various ways like trying to say that every every new iphone they sell next year is going to be not made in china every new iphone they sell in the u.s is going to be not made in china to avoid tariffs and stuff like that but anyway like i agree with you that it was it was a risk and they went too far and they took too long so i'm familiar it took too long to notice that they need to change but i would pick him as the person to fix this problem because i think this is the kind of problem that he does see and does recognize and is not digging in his heels and saying no we're never going to manufacture any place except for China.

1:14:51In fact, we're getting even closer with China. No, that's not what they're doing like that. So that's why as much as that concerns me and bothers me and as a huge problem as it is for Apple, Tim Cook is the best equipped person to fix it. I don't know that I agree because I think we see that Tim Cook is not great at evaluating long term risks. He tends to prioritize the short term profits over the long term risks. That's why he's in that situation in the first place. Like I said, I think he prioritizes the long-term profits because that China investment is decades long and it gave so many profits.

1:15:26It was so huge and important strategically and they are turning it around now just a little bit too late and it's going to be a long time and it's going to be hard to do. Yeah, and how much are they turning around? Is it going to be enough to matter? Is this another butterfly keyboard gasket? We don't know. Speaking of long-term risk, look at Apple's financial performance. There was a great segment on Upgrade this week. Thanks, Jason. Jason went through and ran the numbers of basically what percentage of Apple's profit, not revenue, what percentage of Apple's profit is likely to be tied to the Google search default deal and App Store revenue.

1:16:04And it's a pretty high percentage. I believe the ballpark he came up with is possibly like a third or a quarter of their profit. Like it's a large chunk of their profit. But what that means is that Tim Cook has, over the last 10 years, whatever it's been, by pushing the services narrative, which, as I mentioned last episode, I think is a misnomer. And I think it is misleading the shareholders in an interesting way. They want to tell you that all this money is from Ted Lasso, but a huge chunk of this money is from fees and commissions they collect based on their market position. And so I think it should be called fees or maybe commissions and services would be a better, more accurate title for this category of revenue.

1:16:48And when you look at fees and commissions, well, those can be a little precarious because why are they getting this big Google default search deal? Well, the Department of Justice has some things to say about that, and that might have to go away. Why are they getting all this App Store money? Is it because they're making amazing products for their customers? No. That's a side effect. They're making amazing products for their customers and developers tolerate this giant tax that they put that kind of strangles the market and constrains what we can build and constrains the type of business that can even exist in the modern computing world.

1:17:26Those are all the hallmarks. If you look throughout time, you can say like, yeah, they built their own platform. Well, but the railroads built their own tracks and the power companies built their own power lines. Many utilities and critical infrastructure companies are either regulated or literally taken over by governments. because once they get so large, they start to serve such an important role to all of commerce that the private companies who own them would abuse them in a regular, unregulated system. That's why you have things like the AT &T breakup. All the phone lines that were everywhere, AT &T ran those phone lines.

1:18:03And so they could say, well, we demand whatever terms we want on the phone lines across all of America. The government said otherwise because it became too important. You look at any large infrastructure or platform in history before the era of the personal computer. And that's how things worked. Like monopolies would occasionally develop and governments would step in to regulate them because they became so big and society became so dependent on them in such a large scale that regulation was necessary to prevent the owners from being abusive and putting too large of a tax on society. Apple clearly has reached that point with the App Store.

1:18:38You know, the Apple and Google duopoly has really put this in a position of like, yes, This is obviously something that needs to be regulated by the government for all of those reasons that all those things in history were always regulated. It's an obvious parallel to all of those. So what Tim Cook has done, he's led his company into a huge risky position with China and a huge risky position of having a huge chunk of his profit and much of their growth as a company, as a stock, is now relying on these incredibly precarious revenue sources that both are likely to be regulated down or out of existence.

1:19:18and also have nothing to do with making the product better for the users. So this gets back to what you were saying, John. The problem is Apple's incentives now, and this has been this way for a while under Cook, the incentives are shifting away from making the right decision to make great products. And it's more towards capturing more, harvesting more from the ecosystem around us. What can we take by force? and i love like the comparisons that we've been hearing with the app store uh ruling and the in app purchase uh stuff the comparison we've been hearing have been saying things like you know well if apple like loses all this money from the app store and and almost with the presumption that of course they're going to lose like of course once people can link out to the web to make purchases of course they're going to lose 100 of their app store revenue the reason people say that is because the idea that apple might just compete is so remote and laughable to us now what does that say They have put themselves in a position where they're super dependent on risky conditions that Tim Cook himself built and the company now relies on.

1:20:25And all of that is not with aligned incentives towards making the products better for the customers. Because you know what? Where else they can get growth? Making better products. That's a different source. That's a different path they could have taken. But Tim Cook chose not to. And I think it's because he's not capable of it. He did exactly what he knew how to do. He's a bean counter. He squeezed everything as much as he could. He made the profitable decision every single time. He did exactly what he was an expert at doing. Steve Jobs picked the wrong guy. It wasn't the first time. I'm trying to steal my thunder with the wrong guy thing.

1:21:03You'll be hearing from my lawyers in that one. Right. I think between the two of you, I come down closer to John than Marco. So I think knowing what Cook knew when he took over Apple, I think he did exactly what he should have done. I think the problem is that either he didn't realize the error in his ways, particularly with regard to China, or he didn't realize quickly enough. So that now, with this madman at the helm of the United States again, now Cook needs to figure out how to work around that. And I would have hoped that he would have already had one to two to 10 backup plans ready to rock, you know, such that a switch just needs to be flipped.

1:21:49I know it's not actually that simple, but it sure seems like I have only heard in the last couple of years that, oh, we're talking about Indonesia and we're talking about India and all these other places where we can assemble iPhones. And yeah, they're not as good as China, but they're sufficient. And I feel like Cook firing on all cylinders would have perhaps fired up these alternative approaches years before when the oh crap moment happens. Well, we'll see if he follows through on the supposed rumor that there are. I don't know if it was rumor or just flat out stated, which is like, hey, the next iPhone that we sell, like in September, every one of the ones that we sell in the United States will not be built in China.

1:22:28That was a plan that is floating around out there. And if he does pull that off, that shows that there was lots of forethought and planning because that's not the type of thing you do. That's not a trivial amount of iPhones. I know the rest of the world is big, but U.S. is a really big market for Apple. So if they can if they can actually pull off, oh, we got a new administration somewhat surprisingly and suddenly selling things made in China and the United States is undesirable. So for our next phone, we're just going to make them all in Brazil and India and Vietnam and Malaysia or whatever. Like no phone sold in the U.S.

1:23:00will say made in China on it. That would be amazing and shows that there is actually a plan A, B and C and D. Now, I agree that it has gone on too long and he has not hesitated about it's enough, but like that is a difficult problem in that like there's no obvious alternative and building up alternatives is expensive and time consuming and is probably going to take just as long as the buildup in China did. So I'm willing to give him some leeway there. But yeah, like it's it's not like he didn't think about it or didn't have backup plans. And it's not like it's, you know, we all agree that like this is a fairly unprecedented, dramatic term of events policy wise in this country, because as you noted of the new administration being ridiculous.

1:23:41And still, still he's finding a way to navigate that. Like this is what I think Tim Cook is actually the best at, even if he goes a little bit too long and too hard and too heavily into China. and that is his big mistake. I think he is the best person to get out of it, but that's not why I'm saying he needs to go. It's all the other stuff that like, it was like what Marco was saying, like making decisions that aren't trying to make the product better. Like putting the cart before the horse or whatever the phrase is. Like I put this quote from the Ambrosia software page as the sort of the centerpiece of my post.

1:24:11I don't even know if it's a real quote because who knows, it would probably be in a different language anyway, but virtue does not come from money, but rather from virtue comes money and all other good things to man. the idea is you if you chase money if you try to do the thing that's going to make you money you'll fail you need to try to do the thing that makes good products that makes your customers happy that makes people want to buy your stuff if you try to do that the money will come you can't like i know you i know you want the money you want to be successful like that's what you're supposed to be like i want to i want it we want to be a successful company but you can't try to be a successful company you have to try to be a company that makes things people want and have confidence that if you just do that and to tim cook's credit he has followed through on that philosophy from steve jobs for just years and decades like even like stuff like the car program do the thing that you think is going to make a great product that people really want don't worry about how much it's going to cost put all the money into the big spaceship thing you know building do 10 billion dollars in the car because if you i mean it could turn out you're wrong you know you're that wasn't a thing that was successful but if you're chasing that you'll eventually get where you want to go the second you start saying but over here actually we're not going to chase that actually what we're going to chase here is we're going to chase the money and every one of those decisions is peeling things off the course and is china putting investing in china chasing the money in some ways yes but in other ways it's a recognition of this is where we can make the best products it's not just that they cost the least money like literally they make them better than everybody else still so that's maybe a half and half thing but yeah like i i i give him a lot of leeway to pursue attempts to you know to pursue uh virtue where he thinks it can be found even if he's wrong a lot i but i don't give him as much leeway to pursue money and yeah we can name like it's not hard to name the places where apple as led by him is clearly pursuing money at the expense of the virtue from the Socrates quote.

1:26:16It's just so many instances. And the more information we get about them, the worse it looks. And that's the place where I feel resigned. And I think it is not a small thing that the industry has just, over the last few years, exploded with disruption and promise and development and excitement in this huge new area of AI. and Apple is nowhere in it. He missed it. He blew it. All of these companies are doing such cool stuff and Apple is struggling to ship such basics way later than everybody else is. I can't help but think in large part, they would have been better off doing what I believe Ben Thompson suggested a few months back of just like, just be a better platform for these other companies.

1:27:06Like, you know, be, like have all these things run on the iPhone through extension points or through official APIs to replace Siri if you want to, the same way you can replace a web browser. That would actually have been a better path than the path they took. But all those specifics aside, the fact is Microsoft missed mobile and that really hurt them and that really limited their future directions as a company. Apple has missed AI. They are going to try to catch up. I don't see any evidence that they are able to do it at any reasonably competitive level. and that's again that's on cook like he all this time they spent investing in cars and vr helmets they could have been building this up and they didn't i don't i don't connect those two things at all i like they're separate they're yeah but they spent a whole bunch of time and money on larks that really didn't have much of a chance those people were wouldn't have been doing the stuff yeah i agree that they're late they're behind an ai they're late an ai but i don't blame the vr helmet or the car for that at all no it's it's more like it's more like apple was they were willing like he was willing to invest in huge r &d projects but because he has such terrible product sensibilities they just picked the wrong ones they picked r &d projects that seemed really cool to i guess johnny ive and maybe mike rockwell i don't know who i don't know how It seemed like Tim had a profoundly bad product sense.

1:28:35They took big swings. They just took the wrong big swings. And meanwhile, here's this huge new world of tons of opportunity and development and potential disruption to their core products. And they're just not competitive at all in that world because they didn't take it seriously early enough and still seem to not be investing enough in it. Yeah, they didn't take it seriously early enough for sure. but i do think the strategy as articulated last wwc i think the strategy actually is a good one they just have utterly failed to execute that strategy which is kind of an important part of the strategy is the execution of it so like but like the idea like so setting aside like oh do you just want to be a platform where other people's olms versus doing it yourself the idea of you know to recap the apple intelligence strategy is like look apple has all this information about your phone and it has local processing power uh and we have you know ways to talk to all the apps if we can leverage all of that as the platform owner we can do a more private uh more secure version of lm powered stuff and i've heard people say like oh they're trying to do it all on device that's that i don't think that's a strategy at all the whole private cloud compute thing is the idea and also we don't have to do it all on the device we can transparently do it securely in the cloud and this is a more privacy focused thing where we're not scraping up all your information and chucking it over a third-party company and yada yada but that's just what they announced they haven't shipped that so they have a good idea and a good strategy and they were late with it and they haven't executed on it at all so it's a bad situation but on on the af front like this is i i feel like the afron is kind of like all the other things that i said of like they're they're in trouble and you know aren't doing well but not not too many things related to ai actually run afoul of the um uh the the core rot at the center of apple that i'm saying is It's not going to change until leadership changes.

1:30:27With the one exception of the thing that you mentioned about like, well, why don't you just become a better platform for AI and let other people plug in? That's where you start touching the third rail of Apple leadership, which is like, oh, when we integrate with third parties, you know, we got to get our money. It's like, no, no, stop. Just step away. Step away from the money machine and say, you should be doing this because it makes your product better for your customer. Nope, nope. Integration with third parties, money. What percentage should we get? Is this going to replace our Google revenue?

1:30:53It's like, stop. Stop chasing the money. not that that apple that has been apple strategy at all so far maybe this year they'll say and our new strategy is we're the best hosts for other people's ai stuff because ours sucks uh but as of now that's not their strategy but if it was their strategy everyone would be looking at it and saying oh well who's gonna plug their llm into your phones if they have to give you x percent of their money or whatever right and and ultimately like i think i think ai is going to be important enough i mean look it already is but i think this is going to prove long term to be important enough and that Apple has such an inability to do it well themselves that I think long-term what's going to happen is Apple's going to acquire one of these larger AI companies at just an extraordinary cost.

1:31:37It's one thing they've got is money. It is, but they're going to end up, I think, having to spend a lot of it to acquire or merge with a good AI company because I don't see any sign that they can do this themselves. Whatever that costs them, you should deduct that from what you think of Tim Cook's expertise. Because that's 100 % on him. But they'd be paying for it with Tim Cook dollars. Yeah, that's true. That's true. I wanted to call attention to another similar post. This is Apple's Diet of Worms by Joan Westenberg, who is a writer that I was not previously familiar with. It's a pretty short piece, but I wanted to read two paragraphs to you.

1:32:16It's not the mistakes that matter. Apple's made them before. The Newton, MobileMe, the butterfly keyboard. What matters is the posture. A company once defined by joyful provocation, by thinking different, is now defined by its defensiveness. Its leadership acts not like inventors, but like stewards of a status quo. They protect margins like relics. They fear dilution. They optimize at the expense of surprise. Apple's fate isn't sealed. It has the resources to adapt, the talent to reinvent, the reach to still shape the culture. But none of that matters if it won't change its mind. Empires don't fall because they run out of gold.

1:32:52They fall because they mistake orthodoxy for durability, because they think the pageantry of power is the same as the legitimacy of it. Very well written. If you don't like my matter-of-fact writing style, then you want a more flowery approach. Apple's Diet of Worms is for you. Although I can't believe that you put the Newton in it. So many people were cranky about that. How dare you? The Newton was such a pile of garbage. It was not. It was amazing. It was just a little bit ahead of its time, but like such great ideas, such great people who went on to do great things. And eventually it kind of circled back around when Apple did the iPhone.

1:33:27I feel like that's kind of like the return and triumph of the Newton project is essentially the iPhone. It's like, finally, we have the technology to do what we tried to do way too early because the Pepsi guy told us to. All right. Before we go, I wanted to turn this round upside down. Um, there's a couple of fun pieces of Apple related Apple adjacent media that I wanted to call people's attention to. A lot of people have been talking about these over the last week, uh, because Hey, guess what? They're, they're really good. Uh, first of all, the search engine podcast, which I don't currently make a habit of listening to, but on the occasions I listened to it, I always really enjoy it.

1:34:02Uh, they did a episode on the Dave and Buster's anomaly where it was discovered that if you do a voice message, like an iMessage where you're just recording your voice, you're not doing transcription, mind you, you're just recording your voice and sending a wave, so to speak, or wav over your iMessage, then if you say the words Dave and Buster's, the recipient would never receive that audio file, which is bananas. And they go through and talk about what was going on and eventually figured it out or had a pretty good theory about it. And then friend of the show, Jogi Rambo was listening to this, apparently stopped listening to it and did some spelunking in order to figure out what he thought the, uh, the situation was.

1:34:47And that is a much more technical, uh, write up, but also excellent. So I wanted to call that, uh, to people's attention. And then additionally, uh, I think Gruber wrote about this. I'm pretty sure this is where I got it from, but there's a conversation between, uh, Patrick Collison and Johnny Ive. I guess it's some stripe thing recently and i'm only about halfway through it so far but hey guess what it's really freaking good and for all of the things that i blame on johnny ive of which there are many including but not limited to the butterfly keyboard he's really smart and really good at what he does in the broad scheme of things so yeah uh both of these i think are worth your time but he's a slow talker oh my god yeah he really needs an editor and smart speed yeah you do i i don't know like johnny i've obviously his his resume is you know basically you know it will never be equal probably in terms of how important like he's amazing work right but every time i see him talk i'm like yeah this is why i wouldn't let an an unencumbered johnny i've anywhere near a product that i wanted to make because he's he's got amazing talent and he's got great ideas and he's got good instincts but he's also got some really bad instincts and ideas i feel like i don't know if that has changed about him as he's aged or there was always like that and he was always constrained but uh he is a powerful force let's put it that way and you got to be careful when you're uh when you're employing a powerful force to do anything but yeah it's a good interview and i'm glad he's not at apple anymore all right uh maybe i should have saved that for after this next segment um but i don't have too much to say about it we should try to at least plow through it real quick because i promised we would last week backblaze drama so a couple of weeks ago uh there was a post by morpheus research uh backblaze a loss making data storage business mired in lawsuits sham accounting in brazen brazen brazen how do i pronounce that brazen there we go uh insider dumping uh reading from this post from morpheus research which we'll talk about who they are in a second uh since it's november 2021 ipo oh i'm sorry i should interrupt myself.

1:36:53Backblaze is a former sponsor. I think all three of us are paying customers to Backblaze. I did look and they are not currently slated to sponsor again, or at least I didn't see them in the docket. But just for what it's worth, they did sponsor many, many times in the past. Anyways, since it's November 2021 IPO, Backblaze has reported losses every quarter. Its outstanding share count has grown by 80 % and its share price has declined by 71%. In October 2024, two former senior employees filed suit against backblaze alleging accounting fraud inflated projections and whistleblower retaliation one lawsuit was filed by backblaze's former vice president of investor relations james kaisner while the other was filed by former senior director of financial planning and analysis or fpna hughie hall to keep its stock price afloat backblaze pressured employees to certify inaccurate financial statements according to former director of fpna hall throughout our investigation we found backblaze's track record reveals a management team lacking transparency and willing to take aggressive and possibly illegal steps to create an illusion of financial performance to support their own exit liquidity.

1:37:54After extensive research, we believe the evidence justifies a short position in shares of Backblaze. Morpheus Research holds short positions in Backblaze. Ding, ding, ding. And Morpheus Research may profit from short positions held by others. Ding, ding, ding. This report represents our opinion, and we encourage all readers to do their own due diligence. Please see our full disclaimer at the bottom of the report. I am way outside my depth, to be completely honest with you, so take everything I'm about to say with copious amounts of salt, but this smelled kind of fishy to me in the sense that people who want, people who wish for backblaze to perceive badly say, Hey, backblaze should be perceived badly.

1:38:29Like, uh, I don't know this, this didn't smell good to me. How short selling works is essentially you are betting that a stock price will go down and it's, there's always the two sides of this. It's like, okay, well, if you're, if you are betting that a stock price will go down, and by the way, short positions have like an unlimited downside practically. So you better hope it doesn't go up. You really need it to go down. You obviously want it to go down. But also, when you pick which company to short, you're looking for companies that you think will go down. So it's not like, oh, you just pick a company out of a hat and say, I'm going to get a short position on them.

1:39:04And then I just trash talk them, right? No, you look for the company that you think is going to go down. And then you explain to people, we got a short position on company X, because we think it's going to go down and here's why and so which one of those again cart and horse which one of those is driving you know there is always if you're running a company you're always like these short sellers they just latch on to us and then they say terrible things about us because they just want the stock price to go down and everything they're saying is wrong and it's not true uh tesla always does that or whatever oh it's all anyone has complaints about the company it's just short sellers trying to make the stock price go down but on the flip side is like well what do you think short sellers are doing they're out there trying to find a company that they think the price is going to go down and they do research on them.

1:39:44They say, look at this company. They have lots of problems and I think their stock price is going to go down. So, you know, again, I'm no financial expert, but be aware that both of those forces are in play whenever there is a short position. And the things you just read are very clearly from a company that probably honestly thinks that the stock price is going to go down, but also really, really needs the stock price to go down. Yeah, like, so it's probably, like, it is a huge grain of salt, even bigger than Casey said. Yes, not only do they need the stock to go down, the more the stock goes down, the more money they'll make.

1:40:23So they directly financially benefit from if everyone else makes the stock go down too. So it is a pretty biased position to try to take their advice. however it does indicate like yeah there's there's some shenanigans going on in this company like there's some problems and you know yeah i don't 100 believe almost everything that they say there like these are problems with the company because these are problems that lots of companies have it's not unprecedented that you know oh it's being mismanaged the people the top just wanted to get their money and cash out and people you know fibbing about how well the company's doing and trying to hide how it's doing badly.

1:41:05Like every company does that. And you know, what you have to look at is like, okay, is this company in trouble? Do they not have a sustainable business? Have they been hiding some deep, dark secret that's going to come crashing down? And then these people are the first people to see it. Like you just have to make those, you know, judgments for yourself. So Backblaze initially responded to Ars Technica and Patrick Thomas, Backblaze's VP of marketing said the report is an accurate misleading based largely on litigation of the same nature and a clear attempt by short sellers to manipulate our stock price for financial gain.

1:41:34Which is what companies always say. Which is 100 % what companies always say. I did not get a chance to read this before recording, so I apologize. I totally missed this in the show notes. But there is an actual full-on formal blog post from Backblaze. John, I presume you put this in here. So did you read this? Is there a TLDR you can offer? Yeah. I mean, you can just look at it. They bolded things. They basically say, yeah, there were some bad things going on, but we hired third-party people to check out our accounting and we've been cleared of all wrongdoing and we're doing great and I know there's problems.

1:42:01It's just, you know, like neither one of these things is the whole truth. The short seller's description is not the whole truth and backblazes everything is going great is also not the whole truth. The whole truth is a combination of those two. But anyway, I just, you know, if you wanted to see the company's response, they have one. We'll see how it goes. And MJ Sy has a roundup of different things with regard to this as he always does. One of the quotes that MJ quoted was, however, linked financial results do confirm that the company lost about$50 million in 2024 and about$60 million in 2023.

1:42:35It also says that the number of computer backup customers has decreased. B2, which is, isn't that like, what's the S3? It's S3, but way cheaper. Okay, there you go. B2 is now more than half the business, and the APRU for B2 customers is$645 versus$159 for the computer backup customers. Additionally, Corn Chip writes, Backblaze doesn't break out profitability by product division anymore, but when they did, computer backups were profitable. B2 wasn't. The cost of revenue largely comes from the B2 side because S3-compatible object storage intensely competes on price per gigabyte, whereas computer backup competes on perceived trust, UI, etc.

1:43:15They consolidate fixed operating costs for now, but the R &D is largely for B2 as well. Yeah, so those are the two halves of their business. One is the one we're always talking about, which is like get backblaze, put it on your Mac and have your Mac be backed up over the cloud for an unlimited amount for each Mac for a very low price. And the other thing is B2, which is like S3, which is like, do you have some data you want to put in the cloud? We'll charge you per gigabyte. And those are two different businesses. And as as corn chip notes, the B2 S3 thing is like it's just a commodity. It's like what who has the cheapest price per gigabyte that gives you the performance and durability that I need.

1:43:48S3, Amazon has a thousand flavors of S3 storage. You can probably find one that is suitable for your needs. But if not, B2 is out there saying, we offer this very simple solution. We undercut S3 on price. If our durability and latency and throughput things meet your needs, maybe you should go with that. And that's a very different business than, here's some software that you put on your Mac to back it up to the cloud. So the reason this is in here at all, it's not because we care about Backblaze. Like I said, they're not even a sponsor anymore, although they should be because I still think they're good.

1:44:17Spoiler. um yeah i'm still a backblaze customer yeah people are asking us okay given all this backblaze drama what do you think should we not be using backblaze anymore and my answer is you should still be using backblaze it's it's the best product at what it does and by the way crash plan one of the competitors to backblaze is apparently back it like left the consumer business and it's back still with a java client but anyway the thing about backup services if backblaze goes up in a ball of flames and the company goes under and the ceo loots the company and just falls to ashes or whatever oh well i'll pick a different backup service like i know you say like oh but you're giving them your data and you know even though it's it's sealed with an encryption key technically that encryption key you're sending it that could be sent it's not you're not it's not staying client side it's going into the server like there is the thing of like look if you really think this company is like bad news and has been infiltrated by hackers or the ceo is trying to steal all your data and sell it then yeah you should stop but i don't see that here what i see even if i take the short sellers word 100 % like everything they say is 100 % true.

1:45:14It's just a company with a bunch of people who are trying to make money and not doing well at it and want to get out with their golden parachutes and are lying about how well they're doing. Right. And none of that makes me feel like, oh, they really want to get my data. They really want to crack open all my files and look at it because that's their path to riches. That's not their path to riches. My files are not going to give them any path to riches. They're not even there's not even rumors that they're like trying to train AI and all my files and stuff. And my tax returns are going to come up and chat GPT something like if that was the rumor i would say maybe pull your stuff out of backblaze but even if you take a hundred percent of the worst things people can say about backblaze from what we know now i would say keep using them until they go out of business because they are the best at what they do in terms of price and performance i ran crash plane for years and years and that java app was a nightmare backblaze i barely even know it's running on my computer it just does its job so i personally am still using backblaze i think they should sponsor the program again because I highly recommend them because honestly, if they go away and die, I don't know what I'll do.

1:46:12I know people are going to say you should use Arc and you have lots of other, there are alternatives that Backblaze is just so low cost, fire and forget, low effort on your computer and they update it and the people who wrote their software know what they're doing on macOS. So I still recommend it. You can read all these links and make your own decision. I'm still going to keep being a Backblaze customer because I mean, look, the company's finances, like honestly, you know i know this this might sound a little bit callous but like the company's finances are not my problem yeah and so if they've worked this out if they are still in business fine it's i i don't need to know their finances it's not my problem and if it becomes your problem because they go out of business you'll just you'll you know try arc or another server so you'll try crash point like you'll go to a competitor because it's not like a type it's not like like i've invested all my what system am i using for my family photos i've invested all this in apple photos what if they go down oh no i have a big problem if a backup service goes away delete all your data off it hopefully delete it all and you start backing up to a new service like it's the type of thing where you can jump to a competitor without too much fuss yeah exactly and we have fast upload connections that that matters all right thank you to our sponsors this week better help and mac weldon and thanks to our members who support us directly.

1:47:30You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership, besides all of our awesome specials... Did we forget to plug the special? Oh, shoot. We did forget to plug the special. We 100 % did. Oh, no. Oh, no. Is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week on Overtime, the bonus topic for members will be about SSD longevity and long-term data storage and how we do that and some interesting new developments on SSDs and they're kind of bad at long-term data storage. We'll talk about that in ATB Overtime. Join us at atb.fm slash join. Thanks, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week.

1:48:09Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental. Accidental. Oh, it was accidental. Accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental. Accidental Who is accidental Accidental And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM And if you're into Mastodon You can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's K-C-L-I-S-S It's accidental. It's accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast so long. I was hoping to revisit some restaurant tech MVPs. Oh, yes, please. This is a topic I began a few weeks ago, and we basically just got through Ubiquity and stopped because it was so long.

1:49:22So Ubiquity remains awesome. I had an interesting failure on that. But what failed was I had connected an SFP third-party module to get 10 gigs out of one of the switches over Ethernet to a different switch. And that third-party SFP module flaked out and failed. Everything Ubiquiti made was fine and has worked continuously. And the one part of my network that they didn't make flaked out and failed already. Anyway, what connects all of these network things together is a whole bunch of network cable, of course. And this, I actually finally evolved my skills in this area. So I have, long-term listeners might know that I have tried in the past to crimp my own ends onto network cables and have failed every single time.

1:50:18I thought that got a lot better since I did it in my high school home, you know, in the late 90s. I thought there was some pretty easy ways to do it these days, but are there not? I mean, there were then, too. So for whatever it's worth. This is just your one-week spot. Yeah, this is my one-week spot. And so what I did was basically go on Amazon. I took a bunch of measurements of how long does this cable need to be? How long does this cable need to be? And I ran a whole bunch of pre-made Cable Matters cables. And I got Cat 6A for the important runs. Cat 6 for the kind of sub runs. And I just ran a whole bunch of very long Cable Matters cables.

1:51:01And so one of my restaurant tech MVPs is Cable Matters. This is a company that makes a whole bunch of cables. And they matter. I don't know what else to say. They're good cables. However, at one point, so there is an ATM in the restaurant. Because you're on an island, there's no banks. So a handful of the restaurants have their own ATMs. At some point, the ATM stopped working, and I realized it was because one of the wires that I thought was no longer in use and had cut was in fact the ATM's Cat5 wire. So I'm like, all right, how do I fix this? I have a dangling Cat5 cable. I still had some slack in it.

1:51:48it was it would have been a very big pain in the butt to rerun that wire so i'm like i really should try to use the one i have here so i got one of these kind of generic brand cable crimpers to to crimp on cat 5 or cat 6 ends onto ethernet cables and it's you know it's an amazon kit for like 35 bucks and it has like the crimper and a tester and a whole bunch of boots and cable ends you know there's a thousand no-name brands that make this kind of stuff and then they have for a long time and because i had to get it to work i got it to work it took me like three tries to get the first one but i did eventually successfully crimp on a new end to an ethernet cable i thought that was going to be your story that you were so bad at crimping but then when you had to do the restaurant you had to do it so many times that eventually you got good at it but no you bought pre-made cables which boggles my mind uh but i'm glad you were forced by your uh pasty cutting of the atm to practice it a whole three times before you did it successfully and so and look it's still now i should say like so i i fixed the atm and then i'm like well now i have a tool at my disposal now i'm mad with power now you're ready to crimp the world so this was at this time i had not yet decided that I was going to replace the cameras like this year.

1:53:18It was still going to be like a maybe next year product or project. But then like as I was tearing stuff out, I'm like, you know what? It would be a lot easier if I do the cameras now as I'm working with all these wires and as I'm tearing all this stuff out and then I can get rid of those wires and all this other stuff. So I decided like kind of halfway through the spring, I'm going to also replace the cameras. There were a number of camera mounting points where I had to run wires through holes that went like from the inside of the building to the outside of the building or through thick walls in the building where the hole was drilled by you know some previous technician years ago to only be the diameter of a wire so an end of a cable would not fit through those holes no now a couple of those holes i just made wider with a drill i just shoved them in through them so your fear of crimping is so much that you're like no let's make the hole bigger right but some of them that would have been so incredibly destructive or impractical or impossible i was like you know what i really if i'm going to use this cable i'm going to have to like you know either either use a cable it's already there because they were all these like ancient cat 5 or cat 5e cables or you know they're super thin and like some of them are flaky i'm like i don't i'd rather run new cable like run brand new nice cat 6 or you know 6a cable um but you know so i I could run it through these holes, or more commonly they were coax wires in the hole.

1:54:43So I had to replace a coax wire with a Cat6 wire. So I would do things like cut off the coax, tape the wire to it, and kind of pull it through. But I still only had the width of the hole to deal with. So I had to crimp ends on a few. And so I just started doing it more. And I learned a couple of things. Number one, I learned with practice and not even that much practice, I actually was able to start doing them more consistently and more reliably to the point where now most of the ones I do, I get right on the first try. Not always, but most of the ones I do. I have definitely wired some backwards, but I had to fix those.

1:55:26But for the most part, I get it right the first time and it works. and the the best thing i learned though is all this time using my trusty cable matters cable it matters a lot when you're using a high quality cable it makes it a lot easier to crimp the ends on because the wires in it are themselves higher quality like they're a little bit you know thicker or more rigid you can they they go through the connector more easily they they don't you know accidentally get cut when you're cutting the cable. There's all sorts of, if you bend one, it doesn't snap off. There's all sorts of little upgrades.

1:56:04So actually, I still am using Cable Matters cables when I'm making custom ends. I still use them because most of the time I can still keep one of the stock ends on. So I would just cut off one end of the cable, run it through wherever I had to run it, and then put my own custom end on the other end. And I did all of that with this stupid cable kit from Amazon from no name. And it worked. And I stand by this as a strategy. Because I wasn't, I mean, look, at the end of the day, it was not that much cable. It's not like I'm wiring up a whole office building where the cost would be a significant difference.

1:56:42I was just wiring up a few cameras and a few network switches. And so it actually ended up being fairly easy to still use stock cables for almost everything and just cut off one end of some of them to get them into into funny places did you verify that um remember john do you remember when we talked years ago about how there's like two different internal wiring mechanisms yeah i did a uh prototype t-shirt design based on that did you tell us that i don't remember that part i'm i design a lot of t-shirts that never see the light of day it's just believe me if you don't see them there's a reason any well fair anyways marco i bring this up to say do are you team one or team the other i don't even remember what they are anymore they're they're t568 a and b and in looking at the diagram so i i am team whatever the big picture in the instruction manual of this thing is whatever the piece of paper that came with the crimper said it's what we did from memory i'm looking at the pinouts now i think i am i think it's a no maybe it's maybe i'm b i think i'm b You're probably on the newer one.

1:57:52I think I'm B. I think the green, because I remember it finishing with orange. So yeah, I think I'm B. When we last covered this, it was like one of them was meant to be backward compatible with like regular phone lines. The other one cared less about that. Well, you can go find that episode of ATP because we linked to the Wikipedia page and the explanation and we talked about it on the thing, but it was so long ago, I don't remember which was which. Yeah. And basically what it came down to was like, it doesn't matter that much. Just make sure they're all the same. And so I think I'm pretty sure I am looking at this diagram.

1:58:17I'm pretty sure I was B. but it's like i was just matching whatever was on the other end of the connector yeah i mean in the end that's all that matters if you if you get them mixed up you're in for a bad time but you gotta have the stripy ones the solid color ones which color goes where or whatever like there's no like performance difference or anything between them it's just they're just it's just standards yeah exactly so yeah making your own cables sort of or making half of your own cables turns out occasionally useful Beep, beep, beep.