00:00:00 ◼ ► I have more issues than that. You can see in the after show. I can tell you about them if you want.
00:00:13 ◼ ► Yeah, we gotta hurry this along. We got a pile of follow-up to get through. Should we just...
00:00:20 ◼ ► All right, thanks to Linode, Mint Mumble, and Backblaze and our members. Okay, so John, let's talk after show.
00:00:33 ◼ ► Uh, hey, all joking aside, I don't know what to say or what we should say or if we should say,
00:00:47 ◼ ► but I think we should say something to reiterate. Hey, black people are people too. Black lives do
00:00:55 ◼ ► indeed matter and it would be super cool if like police stopped attempting to murder them all the time.
00:01:03 ◼ ► And often, and often succeeding in murdering them all the time. Like, why is this still a thing?
00:01:09 ◼ ► I just, I just, I know I'm being incoherent and I apologize because I feel wholly unqualified to
00:01:18 ◼ ► talk about any of this, but it's, well, I was going to say it's flared up again, but it never really
00:01:24 ◼ ► went away. It's just people are paying attention again. And I just, I feel like it would be wrong
00:01:30 ◼ ► not to recognize and reiterate that I speak for all three of us in saying that we believe that
00:01:37 ◼ ► everyone, irrespective of the color of their skin or where they come from or what they believe,
00:01:44 ◼ ► everyone is a person. Everyone's life is valuable and it is inappropriate for any police officer to
00:01:52 ◼ ► unilaterally decide to end somebody's life in almost every circumstance. And, and I'm really
00:01:59 ◼ ► disgusted that this is still a debate that we have to have and still something that we need to talk
00:02:03 ◼ ► about. And I don't know, Marco, if you need to cut all this out because I'm making no sense, I totally
00:02:06 ◼ ► understand. But I feel like I need to, at least for me, say that this grosses all three of us out
00:02:21 ◼ ► Yeah, this is not something that's going to just go away. Like it's not, I mean, that's part of the
00:02:36 ◼ ► and, you know, misconduct and everything. Like that, it doesn't just go away with a couple of
00:02:42 ◼ ► weeks of being in the news. Like it's a, it's a systemic, deeply rooted problem with lots of
00:02:48 ◼ ► facets that all have to be addressed. And it's good that people are still protesting. It's good that
00:02:55 ◼ ► this is still, you know, on people's minds enough to actually make noise about it because it's not
00:02:59 ◼ ► solved. It didn't get solved in, what was it, June? It didn't get solved because it can't get
00:03:05 ◼ ► solved that quickly. It's a very complicated set of problems. And this is not news to black people.
00:03:11 ◼ ► They know, they know very well, too well, that this is not something that's just going to go
00:03:17 ◼ ► away in two seconds. And so I think it's important that we keep the spotlight on this, you know,
00:03:24 ◼ ► keep the spotlight on any kind of racism or bias or violence that we see like this, that,
00:03:31 ◼ ► that we don't let up. We don't like move on to the next hot thing in the news and forget about
00:03:39 ◼ ► all this stuff. That's, that's still very much a problem and it's not going to have a quick or
00:03:47 ◼ ► Jared I had to look this up because I didn't know the source and I didn't get the exact wording. I
00:03:51 ◼ ► didn't know the exact wording off the top of my head, but here's Frederick Douglass. This always
00:03:54 ◼ ► comes to mind when I see these things. "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did
00:03:58 ◼ ► and never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found the exact
00:04:03 ◼ ► measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them." So yeah, we can't be quiet.
00:04:13 ◼ ► out for everyone who is, who is living this. I mean, we are, the three of us are very lucky
00:04:18 ◼ ► for a plethora of different reasons, but in no small part because of the color of our skin. And
00:04:22 ◼ ► that's really kind of messed up, isn't it? If you think about it, like it's just, it's just wrong
00:04:26 ◼ ► that that's even an issue. But here we are. We have a whole bunch of follow up to go through.
00:04:30 ◼ ► In fact, I'll be impressed if we make it through the follow up and anything beyond that.
00:04:36 ◼ ► But a lot of this stuff I think is important within the sphere of our little world. It's
00:04:44 ◼ ► our little corner of the universe. First, and maybe not importantly at all, I was going to say
00:04:49 ◼ ► most importantly, but that's not true. But first off, I'd like to just briefly mention a couple
00:04:53 ◼ ► things about our post show neutral last week. John "Slick" Baumgartner First and least importantly.
00:05:00 ◼ ► we forgot to mention, one of the advantages of driving a stick is that you can bump or push
00:05:05 ◼ ► start it, which is to say, in certain circumstances, particularly with older cars, where a lot of this
00:05:12 ◼ ► was less computerized, you can actually push the car, physically push the car or, you know, send
00:05:17 ◼ ► it down a hill, and then pop the clutch if you're in second gear and cause that to start the car.
00:05:23 ◼ ► And I'm leaving out a few details here. But that's a really neat thing that we didn't mention that I
00:05:27 ◼ ► think you should look into if you're at all interested in that sort of thing. Additionally,
00:05:32 ◼ ► I think a lot of people and maybe this was our fault, I didn't listen back to the episode, but
00:05:36 ◼ ► a lot of people took what we were saying, John and I particularly was saying as this is the only
00:05:40 ◼ ► proper way to drive a stick. And that certainly was not my intention. And I don't think it was
00:05:46 ◼ ► John's either. We were saying, hey, you know, we were asked, what are some ways you can level up,
00:05:50 ◼ ► you know, being a driver of a manual transmission car? And here's some things you can consider,
00:05:55 ◼ ► you can consider engine braking, you can consider heel toe, and things of that nature. A lot of
00:05:59 ◼ ► people seemed very fired up that we thought that heel toe is required. No, of course not.
00:06:04 ◼ ► Absolutely not. But it's just something that you can consider if you would like to level up driving
00:06:10 ◼ ► a stick. So any thoughts on that, John? I feel like people in Europe just need us to acknowledge
00:06:16 ◼ ► that yes, we know manual transmission cars are more common there. I guess that's not clear from
00:06:21 ◼ ► the history of the show. But maybe we didn't mention enough. We know there's more than there.
00:06:24 ◼ ► I wish there was more here. But there's not. We live in a very automatic field world. But anyway,
00:06:30 ◼ ► lots of people from Europe and other areas told us not only stick shift transmission is
00:06:33 ◼ ► very common there, but you get a different kind of license if you can't drive one, you get like
00:06:37 ◼ ► a more limited license. And a lot of the things that we were talking about, I know you just like
00:06:41 ◼ ► Casey like, oh, these are things you don't have to do. But some of the listeners were going to
00:06:45 ◼ ► tell us if you don't do, for example, downshifting or engine braking, you will fail the driving test
00:06:54 ◼ ► with my stick shift cars, one of the last holdouts. You and me both, my friend. Moving on,
00:07:01 ◼ ► an Ask ATP last week was with regard to design resources for developers. So, you know, hey,
00:07:07 ◼ ► I'm a developer who wants to make better designs, but I'm not innately capable of it. What can I do?
00:07:16 ◼ ► supporting developers as a hobby. There are a bunch of people like me lurking on subreddits like
00:07:21 ◼ ► UI_design, we'll put a link in the show notes, where we help improve people's designs. There
00:07:25 ◼ ► have been several occasions where I've taken on unpaid app redesigns by developers following
00:07:35 ◼ ► experience with either of these things, neither UI design nor a couple of people that recommended
00:07:40 ◼ ► refactoring UI, which is at refactoringui.com. Again, it'll be in the show notes, which apparently is,
00:07:46 ◼ ► learn how to design awesome UIs by yourself using specific tactics explained from a developer's point
00:07:51 ◼ ► of view. So that is something you can check out as well. And we'll put it in the show notes.
00:08:03 ◼ ► endorsed it or mentioned it that I haven't had a chance to look at it yet. But I think we,
00:08:12 ◼ ► I looked at it a little bit like, and I think the reason it got so many recommendations is because
00:08:16 ◼ ► it's like broken down into bite-sized pieces. It's not like you have this big thing dumped on your
00:08:20 ◼ ► head. Like you can go there for 30 seconds, click on one thing and learn something you didn't know
00:08:24 ◼ ► about design and be like, wow, I learned something and it took like 30 seconds, right? I don't know
00:08:29 ◼ ► how deep that rabbit hole goes and how much content there is there. But yeah, I would suggest checking
00:08:34 ◼ ► it out. It seems like an easy to consume resource that a lot of people have benefited from because
00:08:39 ◼ ► the people who are recommending it have used it and they say I did this thing and it helped me
00:08:52 ◼ ► If you're still using one of the big wireless providers this year, have you asked yourself
00:08:56 ◼ ► what you're paying for? Between expensive retail stores, inflated prices and hidden fees,
00:09:02 ◼ ► you're being taken advantage of because they know you'll pay. Enter Mint Mobile. Mint Mobile
00:09:08 ◼ ► provides the same premium network coverage you're used to, but at a fraction of the cost because
00:09:13 ◼ ► everything they do is online. Mint Mobile saves on retail locations and all that overhead and they
00:09:19 ◼ ► pass those savings directly on to you. And Mint Mobile makes it easy to cut your wireless bill
00:09:24 ◼ ► down to just 15 bucks a month. And every Mint Mobile plan comes with unlimited nationwide
00:09:31 ◼ ► talking and texting. With Mint Mobile, stop paying for unlimited data you'll never use.
00:09:37 ◼ ► You can choose between plans with 3, 8 or 12 gigs of 4G LTE data. You can use your own phone with
00:09:45 ◼ ► any Mint Mobile plan and keep your same phone number along with all your existing contacts.
00:09:51 ◼ ► So ditch your old wireless bill and start saving with Mint Mobile. To get your new wireless plan
00:09:57 ◼ ► for just 15 bucks a month and get the plan shipped to your door for free, go to mintmobile.com/atp.
00:10:04 ◼ ► That's mintmobile.com/atp. Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.com/atp.
00:10:15 ◼ ► Moving on, Jason Stanfill writes, "As a Fortnite player, I thought I should mention that there's
00:10:23 ◼ ► a deadline of sorts with regard to the whole Epic Apple thing. Fortnite has seasons that last a
00:10:28 ◼ ► couple of months. Each season has an updated map and the goal of getting to level 100. You start at
00:10:32 ◼ ► one each new season. The current season ends as we record this tomorrow, which is Thursday, the 27th
00:10:38 ◼ ► of August. Each new season requires an update. Without being able to update Fortnite on iOS,
00:10:43 ◼ ► it will become virtually useless at that point, which I did not know and I appreciate. I think
00:10:48 ◼ ► Jason was the first to write in about it, but certainly others have written about it as well.
00:10:51 ◼ ► I knew that and should have mentioned it because Destiny and many, many other games use the same
00:10:55 ◼ ► model. In fact, Destiny was a late adopter of this model. It has lots of different names,
00:10:58 ◼ ► but the idea is to keep the game fresh, that there's some kind of cycle according to the
00:11:05 ◼ ► calendar where everyone gets reset back to a certain position or there's a progression.
00:11:09 ◼ ► It doesn't really matter. Either there's a new progression up to a higher level or you get reset
00:11:12 ◼ ► and then you work your way through this ladder during the course of the season and you get a
00:11:17 ◼ ► bunch of stuff during the ladder. Anyway, it's a way to keep people engaged. But what that means is
00:11:21 ◼ ► there is a timed cycle for new content. And in the case of Fortnite, as we'll see in a little bit,
00:11:27 ◼ ► it's not just a low bit of new content. It's like if you are not on the same season as everyone
00:11:31 ◼ ► else, you can't even play with them. But we'll get to that a couple items lower. Lots of Epic stuff
00:11:35 ◼ ► in the follow-up. Surprise. So Epic has said, "Apple is blocking Fortnite updates and new
00:11:41 ◼ ► installs on the App Store and has said they will terminate our ability to develop Fortnite for
00:11:44 ◼ ► Apple devices. As a result, Fortnite's newly released Chapter 2 Season 4 update, which is
00:11:49 ◼ ► apparently version 14, will not release on iOS and macOS on August 27th." Sad trombone.
00:11:55 ◼ ► And macOS. Now, Fortnite for macOS you download from the web. There's no App Store stopping you
00:12:03 ◼ ► there. But Epic, for some reason that may or may not make sense, is also saying, "Yeah, and if you
00:12:09 ◼ ► play Fortnite on your Mac, you're not getting the new season either." I don't think there's a
00:12:15 ◼ ► technical reason for that to be the case, but there may be a kind of "screw you" reason or a
00:12:21 ◼ ► legal reason. Anyway, we'll continue. But that's just bad news if you play this on the Mac, that
00:12:26 ◼ ► you're also getting sideswiped by this whole iOS incident. Even though there's nothing stopping
00:12:31 ◼ ► Epic from putting, I think, from just putting the new Mac version up on their website and you are
00:12:36 ◼ ► pulling it down or updating or I don't even know if it updates in place. Whatever. That's kind of
00:12:41 ◼ ► bad. Indeed. The Verge writes, "Players on iPhone, iPad, and Mac will also lose cross-play Fortnite
00:12:47 ◼ ► multiplayer with non-Apple platforms Epic confirms to The Verge. That means that players on Apple
00:12:53 ◼ ► platforms will be stuck on the current version of Fortnite and they'll only be able to play with one
00:12:56 ◼ ► another." Womp womp. Yeah, so they won't have all the new stuff for the new season, and they can't
00:13:02 ◼ ► even play with the people who do, so I guess they can play with each other if you still have the
00:13:06 ◼ ► game. And maybe keeping the Mac on the old version too means that the Mac people will be able to play
00:13:10 ◼ ► with the iPhone people, and that makes the pool of people bigger so there's more players for matchmaking.
00:13:15 ◼ ► I don't even know the logic behind it, but anyway, that's, yeah, that's, these are the sort of,
00:13:20 ◼ ► we talked about this before, like, well, as this court case winds on, Epic's got this, you know,
00:13:26 ◼ ► this non-compliant version of Fortnite in the App Store that lets people buy things bypassing
00:13:31 ◼ ► Apple's in-app purchase system, but the viability of that thing rapidly diminishes once it's not
00:13:39 ◼ ► keeping up with the rest of the players, and I don't even know if there's going to be that many,
00:13:43 ◼ ► you know, normally new seasons come with new things to buy with those V-Bucks, so maybe you can still
00:13:47 ◼ ► buy old stuff with the V-Bucks, but the value of having Fortnite on the store for as long as this
00:13:56 ◼ ► - Yeah, and, you know, a couple people are pointing out in the chat, you know, maybe it's
00:14:00 ◼ ► with regard to code signing on the Mac as well. - We'll get to that in a little bit in the follow
00:14:05 ◼ ► up, but right now, as we're sitting here right now, I believe there is nothing stopping Epic from
00:14:11 ◼ ► properly signing the Mac OS version, like on August 26th, they still have their developer
00:14:16 ◼ ► account, and I think they could sign the new version of Fortnite and give it to Mac users.
00:14:21 ◼ ► In the, you know, weeks or months in the future, that may change, but anyway, we'll keep going.
00:14:30 ◼ ► "Apple has said that they will revoke all of Epic's Apple SDK access for game development
00:14:34 ◼ ► on Friday. If they do that, we won't be able to update Fortnite on the Mac. We understand from
00:14:38 ◼ ► the court that Unreal Engine and other non-game efforts will continue to have SDK access." Again,
00:14:42 ◼ ► this is three hours ago as we record this from Tim Sweeney himself. - But today's Wednesday,
00:14:50 ◼ ► I understand the whole, anyway, we'll get to it, the whole, you know, app store versus your entire
00:14:56 ◼ ► developer account. That's a whole different thing. - All right, so tell me, John, about Epic console
00:15:01 ◼ ► makers and corporate relationship management, Marco's favorite thing in the world. - That's
00:15:05 ◼ ► such a great phrase. - Nutbunny's on Twitter. By the way, if I use your weird Twitter name,
00:15:10 ◼ ► it's probably because I couldn't find your real name or you didn't have a real name listed or
00:15:14 ◼ ► your real name is too obscene to read on the air. But anyway, Nutbunny's on Twitter correctly found
00:15:18 ◼ ► the thing I was trying to think of the last show, which is like, I know Epic has sparred with
00:15:22 ◼ ► console makers over issues like this too. And my example is just like the console makers had found
00:15:26 ◼ ► a way to work out their differences without triggering in a lot more with Epic. So we'll
00:15:33 ◼ ► put a link in the show notes to two examples of during the flare up that I was thinking of,
00:15:38 ◼ ► and it's related to cross-play. So here's an article from March, 2018. It says, Microsoft
00:15:42 ◼ ► says they're working with Epic on possible Fortnite cross-play for Xbox One. Cross-play is when
00:15:46 ◼ ► people on a particular platform, like people on Xbox are able to play Fortnite with people who are,
00:15:52 ◼ ► who have Fortnite for the PlayStation, right? Obviously console makers, especially the dominant
00:15:58 ◼ ► console maker don't want that to happen because they want you to get a PlayStation and get Fortnite
00:16:04 ◼ ► and tell your friends, Hey, you should play Fortnite with me. And you, and they say, Oh,
00:16:08 ◼ ► well, the only way you can play Fortnite with me is you have to get a PlayStation, right?
00:16:11 ◼ ► And so they want more people to get PlayStations. But if you're, if you're just a customer,
00:16:15 ◼ ► that's not good for you. You want to be able to play Fortnite, even if your friend already has an
00:16:18 ◼ ► Xbox, you don't have to tell your friend, Oh, you have to buy a whole new console, right?
00:16:20 ◼ ► This is still a problem on destiny, by the way, I have friends who play destiny on Xbox,
00:16:24 ◼ ► and I can't play with them because I play destiny on PlayStation. That's supposedly changing next
00:16:28 ◼ ► year. But anyway, that's what cross play is. Epic obviously wants cross play to be a thing,
00:16:32 ◼ ► because the more people can play with each other, the more likely a group of friends with different
00:16:36 ◼ ► consoles at home are to get Fortnite and become customers and all play the game together. It's
00:16:41 ◼ ► actually surprisingly difficult to get any kind of reasonable size group of friends to sort of
00:16:46 ◼ ► decide on mass to get the same console. Not most people don't buy every single console.
00:16:51 ◼ ► Most people just buy one. And, you know, in the current, depending on the console generation,
00:16:56 ◼ ► there's usually one console that is more popular than other, but it's still significant percentage
00:17:01 ◼ ► of people are gonna end up with the other console, right? So here is a couple months later,
00:17:04 ◼ ► in September 2018, an article that says Fortnite cross play on PS4 ushers in a new era of the
00:17:10 ◼ ► console wars. And in the in the body of the Texas, after months of bullish denials, Sony capitulated
00:17:17 ◼ ► and will soon allow PS4 players to link up with people on Xbox, which in mobile platforms,
00:17:21 ◼ ► right? This is a thing that epic wanted that the console makers didn't. And behind the scenes,
00:17:28 ◼ ► much pressuring and arguing and perhaps even exchanges of money and promises and things
00:17:32 ◼ ► happened. And eventually, essentially, epic won that battle and force both console makers to
00:17:37 ◼ ► enable cross play. Now, Microsoft probably wanted to enable cross play because there are fewer Xbox
00:17:43 ◼ ► players than PlayStation players. They're in the minority. And so they don't want, you know,
00:17:47 ◼ ► those people to feel like, oh, well, you know, law of averages, most of my friends play Fortnite on
00:17:52 ◼ ► PS4, or, you know, whatever. And I feel left out with my weird Xbox, so I gotta get a place in it.
00:17:58 ◼ ► But Sony was the big holdout of saying, we're dominating this generation, why should we
00:18:02 ◼ ► allow Xbox players to play with us? Anything we can get to encourage even more, you know,
00:18:05 ◼ ► we want to really lean on them when we're in the lead. But the end result was, epic basically won
00:18:11 ◼ ► that and got cross play, at least for their game and a few other games across all consoles. And
00:18:16 ◼ ► that in turn opened the door for other, you know, vendors like other software makers like Bungie,
00:18:25 ◼ ► they didn't even mention it. And then when epic pulled this off, bungees, I think, started to get
00:18:29 ◼ ► the idea that, you know, this is the thing that we can do. And they started negotiating with the
00:18:33 ◼ ► console makers. Anyway, this is an example of corporate relationship management. There's
00:18:42 ◼ ► like not being able to buy comics and the comixology app on iOS for some strange reason.
00:18:46 ◼ ► Why can't I play with a friend on Xbox? It's the same freaking game, right? And the other two
00:18:52 ◼ ► parties were the platform vendor and the third party application maker. And they were fighting
00:18:57 ◼ ► with each other over this. And in the end, the situation was worked out such that apparently,
00:19:05 ◼ ► and the users got the benefit. That's corporate relationship management. Apple should go to that
00:19:21 ◼ ► remember we worked out that deal where, you know, well, we sold you Gears of War, and you paid us a
00:19:26 ◼ ► lot of money to develop stuff for your platform. And we, you know, this is the money going back
00:19:30 ◼ ► and forth between epic and all these companies, a whole bunch doesn't mean they're super big
00:19:33 ◼ ► friends, it just means they know that they need each other. And in this case, Microsoft, you know,
00:19:38 ◼ ► filed this brief that said, like, they didn't say anything about the App Store or anything about
00:19:42 ◼ ► that. But it said, basically, Apple threatening to revoke app epics developer, you know, account,
00:19:50 ◼ ► basically stopping them from developing the Unreal Engine and everything. That's bad for us, because
00:19:54 ◼ ► we Microsoft also have a bunch of games from third party developers that use the Unreal Engine. And
00:20:01 ◼ ► anything that damage the damages the viability of Unreal Engine in the market also potentially
00:20:05 ◼ ► damages games that people are making for our stuff, because it's well, we were going to use
00:20:09 ◼ ► Unreal Engine, but now there's all this doubt around it. So maybe we have to retool and use
00:20:12 ◼ ► a different engine. Or if we if we if we make it with this engine, maybe you have to pay us
00:20:16 ◼ ► more money, because now we can't we can't ever port this to Apple platforms, because you know,
00:20:20 ◼ ► Apple won't allow it on there. So suddenly, the stuff we're developing is less valuable to us. So
00:20:23 ◼ ► we have to renegotiate our agreement. So that's why Microsoft is chiming in here. Right? You know,
00:20:28 ◼ ► I don't think they're super buddy buddy with epic, but they recognize when their interests are
00:20:33 ◼ ► aligned. It's bad for everybody in the industry. It to some degree, if Unreal Engine becomes
00:20:39 ◼ ► unviable on Apple platforms, because anyone developed the whole point is these engines is
00:20:52 ◼ ► that a judge has ruled in the Apple epic temporary restraining order. And I think you will probably
00:20:59 ◼ ► have more to say on this. But my understanding is that Apple cannot prevent epic from doing work
00:21:07 ◼ ► that relates to Unreal Engine. So in support of, you know, other companies and stuff like that,
00:21:12 ◼ ► but they are perfectly allowed to tell epic to go outside and lay hide and go screw themselves
00:21:18 ◼ ► when it comes to Fortnite. Since epic made that mess, and they made it for themselves, they get
00:21:23 ◼ ► to clean it up themselves. So that seems to be the short, short version, which I think makes sense.
00:21:29 ◼ ► I don't know. I keep going back and forth on all this. And I probably will for a while. But I think
00:21:33 ◼ ► that that makes sense to me. Yeah, I mean, I don't know all the legal stuff. But this is the type of
00:21:38 ◼ ► thing where Apple was going to make changes. You know, they had a deadline for terminating the
00:21:43 ◼ ► account, and they pulled the app or whatever. And epic did whatever the thing you do in court,
00:21:47 ◼ ► this basically says, "Judge, tell us like before we're going to have a court case eventually,
00:21:51 ◼ ► those things take forever. But before that happens, like while we're waiting for the court case to
00:22:02 ◼ ► "We want our app back in the App Store. And we want not to have our account date." Yeah,
00:22:06 ◼ ► epic asked for everything. And the judge said, "Some of your requests are reasonable." Apple,
00:22:10 ◼ ► where's the quote? Let's see, this is a paraphrase of the judge's opinion during the hearing.
00:22:17 ◼ ► "With respect to Unreal Engine, that seems like an overreach. The contract with Epic International,"
00:22:21 ◼ ► I'll get to that in a second, "is not in breach, even if the contract with Epic Games is." She
00:22:25 ◼ ► says that it looks retaliatory to her. So the judge thought, as we said, that Apple was being
00:22:31 ◼ ► a bully. And this is like a retaliation for, you know, the actual issue is let's talk about
00:22:35 ◼ ► Fortnite and what it did wrong and everything like that. But just because Apple can punish Epic in
00:22:40 ◼ ► this way, it seemed like it was just retaliatory. So again, this is not a decision about like,
00:22:45 ◼ ► what is going to happen? This is just while we figure out what's going to happen, while this
00:22:48 ◼ ► court case winds on and on. For now, Apple, you can't kill Epic's developer account. Now, that's
00:22:56 ◼ ► why I'm confused by the Tim Sweeney thing because I know this temporary restraining order, you know,
00:23:00 ◼ ► this isn't a decision on anything. It just says, while we figure out what the real decision is
00:23:04 ◼ ► going to be on these things, Apple can't terminate the account. That's my understanding of it anyway.
00:23:09 ◼ ► So I'm not sure why Tim Sweeney still says, "Oh, they said they're going to take away our stuff."
00:23:13 ◼ ► The nuance that in this decision, we'll put PDF links if you want, they're actually possible to
00:23:19 ◼ ► read. Like it's in regular English and not weird legally, so you can actually read them and
00:23:22 ◼ ► understand it, is that there actually is a separate legal entity for Unreal Engine. And there's these
00:23:29 ◼ ► companies with different names that, you know, combine them or whatever. And anyway, Apple's
00:23:33 ◼ ► argument is that Unreal Games, Unreal International, we understand this is all the same company behind
00:23:39 ◼ ► the scenes. And maybe you have two different developer accounts, but as far as we're concerned,
00:23:42 ◼ ► we take it as all the same thing. And the judge's opinion is like, "Yeah, that's whatever. I
00:23:47 ◼ ► understand what you're saying, but your beef is with this particular game Fortnite that broke
00:23:52 ◼ ► your rules. You can't just sort of do this, you know, and now we'll do everything bad we can
00:23:57 ◼ ► possibly do to you to retaliate for it, at least not until some sort of court decision comes down
00:24:01 ◼ ► and that's going to take a while." Right. And some other interesting facts out of the arguments that
00:24:05 ◼ ► lawyers put forth. I would suggest reading Sarah Jung's tweet thread about this because she's
00:24:11 ◼ ► there just reporting what the different lawyers say so you can kind of hear their arguments.
00:24:15 ◼ ► And one of the arguments from one of Apple's lawyers, Richard Doran, he said, and I think
00:24:22 ◼ ► it's also a power phrase, "Most of Epic's business has nothing to do with iOS. The iOS platform is
00:24:27 ◼ ► about 12% of Epic's revenue. Most of their platforms are elsewhere. Epic only went mobile
00:24:31 ◼ ► in 2018 and they did so on Android and iOS." All right. So that was one of the questions of like,
00:24:35 ◼ ► can Epic afford to just stick this out and say, "We're not going to fix our game. We're not going
00:24:42 ◼ ► to put an app or just back. We're just going to wait until we see the result of this court case."
00:24:46 ◼ ► Right. Even if our season ends and it becomes useless, not useless, but much less useful for
00:24:51 ◼ ► people on Apple's platforms. Mobile gaming is huge. Mobile gaming, I think, is the majority
00:24:56 ◼ ► of gaming revenue at this point, like globally. Right. But as far as Epic's concerned, they
00:25:01 ◼ ► started as a PC developer and became PC and consoles and only recently entered mobile. So
00:25:07 ◼ ► even though iOS and mobile are both huge, iOS specifically is only 12%. And that's, I mean,
00:25:14 ◼ ► that's a big chunk of revenue, but it's not like it's 70% of their revenue or it's not even 50%.
00:25:19 ◼ ► So that I think explains, I thought it was much more of their revenue. I didn't realize that their
00:25:24 ◼ ► entry into mobile was so early. And presumably Apple's lawyers would know how much it is of
00:25:29 ◼ ► their revenue because they know how much they pay Epic and they know how much Epic's revenue is from
00:25:33 ◼ ► their filings and they can figure it all out. But anyway, tidbits like that are littered throughout
00:25:49 ◼ ► Apple in any way, whether it's a lawyer or one of their execs or a stupid study they do on the
00:25:56 ◼ ► website, every time they try to defend their behavior around app store rules and money hoarding,
00:26:02 ◼ ► they basically set developers on fire. They have such incredibly tone deaf characterizations and
00:26:10 ◼ ► phrasing, you know, like their thing last month about, you know, or whenever that was, but the
00:26:14 ◼ ► hey about like how they didn't contribute to the app store with Basecamp. Like the wording they
00:26:19 ◼ ► choose to use, the arguments they choose to make, it makes me ashamed to be a fan of this company.
00:26:25 ◼ ► And it makes me extra ashamed to be a developer for this company and for this app store. And
00:26:31 ◼ ► I love Apple so much in so many other ways for so many other reasons. We're all such big fans of
00:26:38 ◼ ► them. And it hurts me to see this company that I'm such a big fan of, and that I'm so involved with,
00:26:46 ◼ ► be such a jerk in this other way. Like they have such an incredible failure to read the room.
00:26:53 ◼ ► They have such an incredibly like tone deaf and a flat out wrong view of developers and their role
00:27:01 ◼ ► in the app store and the app store's role in contributing to the iPhone. It makes me so upset
00:27:09 ◼ ► to see any of this stuff. And they just keep digging and digging and digging. Apple's arguments,
00:27:14 ◼ ► and I'm not even talking so much about like the particulars against Epic, because Epic's being a
00:27:20 ◼ ► jerk in different ways too. I don't care about Epic. That's not the thing. I'm talking more
00:27:25 ◼ ► broadly about their incredibly increased aggression towards in-app purchase in the last few months and
00:27:33 ◼ ► what they did with the WordPress app. That's terrible. Apple has been so much more aggressive
00:27:47 ◼ ► around like squeezing more and more out of in-app purchase exceptions and rules. I can't stand to be
00:27:55 ◼ ► associated with them right now. I just can't stand it. They are ruining their relationship
00:27:59 ◼ ► among an entire generation of developers. This relationship's always been strained. The app
00:28:06 ◼ ► store has always, the whole concept of requiring app review and having all these rules and having
00:28:16 ◼ ► inconsistency. This has already been a strained relationship ever since the app store began
00:28:21 ◼ ► 12 years ago, but they have just taken a turn for the worst recently, so much so that I've
00:28:29 ◼ ► considered the possibility, I know this sounds crazy, I've considered the possibility that
00:28:34 ◼ ► what if they want to get rid of some of these rules because they think it's a little much and
00:28:39 ◼ ► a little wrong too, but they know that if they just do it, they might face like a shareholder
00:28:45 ◼ ► lawsuit. So what if they are like provoking government regulation by going so over the top
00:28:53 ◼ ► that they are regulated and therefore then they can tell the shareholders, "We had to do this."
00:29:05 ◼ ► is so ridiculous in this area recently. It's so over the top. It's so insanely greedy and
00:29:13 ◼ ► aggressive and hostile and just they're doing everything wrong from a developer relations
00:29:20 ◼ ► point of view, from a corporate relations point of view, from avoiding antitrust regulation.
00:29:25 ◼ ► They're doing everything as wrong as possible in this area. So over the top ridiculous,
00:29:32 ◼ ► so offensive, so like just abrasive towards everyone and so just unabashedly, shamelessly,
00:29:46 ◼ ► I can only conclude as like a hopeful point of view where I hope this company has not gone insane.
00:29:52 ◼ ► I hope that this is all some big strategy to get themselves regulated because the more likely
00:30:00 ◼ ► alternative is that they just are these massively greedy, horrible jerks now. And I just can't
00:30:08 ◼ ► Yeah, a lot of the arguments when it comes to legal cases, like it's a lawyer's job to find
00:30:13 ◼ ► every possible argument and to use the ones that are most effective given the legal precedents
00:30:18 ◼ ► and everything. So if you see an argument in a court case and it seems really terrible,
00:30:22 ◼ ► in some respects, it's like, "Well, but that's what court cases are about." Like you kind of
00:30:26 ◼ ► have to check your shame at the door and say, "Look, do you want to win this court case? That's
00:30:29 ◼ ► why you pay me. I'm a lawyer. I'm telling you this is your strongest argument. Go with this."
00:30:32 ◼ ► And so they make arguments that from the outside look ridiculous or silly or ineffective or put
00:30:38 ◼ ► Apple in a bad light, but legally speaking, may give them the victory they want. And in general,
00:30:42 ◼ ► that's a calculated risk to say, "Well, most people don't follow the details of court cases,
00:30:45 ◼ ► so that's fine." The problem in this situation is a lot of these arguments that Marco is having
00:30:49 ◼ ► a strong reaction to were made before a court case existed, before Epic sued them, before any
00:30:53 ◼ ► of this happened. So you can't say, "Oh, Apple was doing that," because in a court case, you
00:30:58 ◼ ► use all the tools at your disposal. Apple itself directly made these arguments essentially to the
00:31:03 ◼ ► public as a form of PR, and that's back when we were saying, "Apple, this is not good public
00:31:08 ◼ ► relations here. You don't realize how you're coming off maybe to developers. I mean, maybe
00:31:12 ◼ ► you're trying to appeal to users, but developers see the same thing, and in fact, they're paying
00:31:15 ◼ ► more attention to it." So that's a lot of the problem here. And it's a lot of the exact same
00:31:19 ◼ ► arguments. Like I think at one point there was a quote from somebody, it might have been Phil
00:31:22 ◼ ► Schull, I don't remember, talking about how Epic uses Metal in their games and how Epic was on
00:31:30 ◼ ► stage with Apple, saying how great Metal was, because we've seen that at various WWDCs and other
00:31:35 ◼ ► conferences, and how Apple doesn't charge anything for Metal. And as one developer pointed out,
00:31:41 ◼ ► it's like, "It's not compelling. It's not compelling for you to say, 'All these APIs we
00:31:46 ◼ ► give you, we let you have Xcode, we let you do these APIs, and we pay to develop them.' It's like,
00:31:49 ◼ ► 'Yeah, you're a platform, and we're third-party developers. That's how it works. What do you
00:31:54 ◼ ► expect to happen? If you thought you could charge for them, you would, but it's a competitive
00:32:05 ◼ ► thing, you deprecated. Of course we're going to use Metal, because you get rid of the API.
00:32:09 ◼ ► You can not make a game. It's like, see how they love Metal? The whole conversion to Metal,
00:32:16 ◼ ► that's an example of good corporate relationship management. Apple has strategic goals. They want
00:32:20 ◼ ► to switch to Metal, because they're going to make their own GPUs, their own system-mounted chips,
00:32:23 ◼ ► and they want more control over their graphics destiny. But they need developers to go along
00:32:27 ◼ ► with that. So they found a way to work out a situation with the big game engine developers
00:32:33 ◼ ► to say, "We need you to get onto Metal. I know you don't want to do it, because your engine works
00:32:36 ◼ ► okay in OpenGL now. But here is, the stick is we're going to take away OpenGL eventually, and the
00:32:42 ◼ ► carrot is, hey, you can be on stage and we'll show your games and whatever." There you go. You did it.
00:32:46 ◼ ► See? Win-win-win. Of course, now when they're in a fight, that comes flying back and says,
00:32:51 ◼ ► "You seemed to like us when you were doing the Metal stuff, and we didn't charge you for Metal,
00:32:54 ◼ ► aren't we awesome?" It's like, that's not a good argument. It doesn't make you look good,
00:32:58 ◼ ► Apple. Again, maybe in court that's good, but they made that argument before court of how great
00:33:02 ◼ ► Apple is that they would provide these APIs for you. We spend all this money to make these APIs,
00:33:11 ◼ ► It's not a good argument. Maybe it's a good legal argument. I don't know. We'll see. But it certainly
00:33:17 ◼ ► doesn't play well with developers. And I think users, users who aren't listening to tech podcasts,
00:33:23 ◼ ► probably have no awareness of any of this other than Apple and Epic are fighting and Fortnite
00:33:37 ◼ ► big Fortnite players, I don't think we fully understand the impact of that. And I'm glad that,
00:33:42 ◼ ► you know, listening for it and to explain things like the season, which I didn't know about.
00:33:45 ◼ ► But like, I think often, like, you know, right, you know, my kid has an iPad, he uses it constantly.
00:33:51 ◼ ► The two things he uses it most for are YouTube and Minecraft. If, you know, he hasn't discovered
00:34:00 ◼ ► Fortnite yet. He's a little young for it. But I thought like, what if this happened to Minecraft?
00:34:05 ◼ ► What if Minecraft stopped being available on the iPad? And, you know, it stopped getting updates,
00:34:11 ◼ ► you couldn't play online anymore. And maybe it even, you know, did the whole, like, you know,
00:34:15 ◼ ► developer revocation thing where it would stop launching. I think he would never touch his iPad
00:34:20 ◼ ► again. That would put him off the platform for a long time. Like, here's what would probably happen.
00:34:26 ◼ ► You know, Minecraft is such a big part of his life that like, we don't think is a bad thing. And we
00:34:30 ◼ ► support that, you know, with limits, but you know, we support that. So it's such a thing that like,
00:34:35 ◼ ► if his primary Minecraft device stopped being able to run Minecraft, guess what we would do?
00:34:39 ◼ ► We'd probably get him an Xbox or a gaming PC, and he would just switch to that. And he would
00:34:45 ◼ ► never touch the iPad again. So that's, that would be a user on Apple's platform that they would just
00:34:49 ◼ ► lose for a long time, possibly forever. And I think, while again, while I don't give two
00:34:56 ◼ ► craps about Epic, and I think they're being jerks in their own way throughout some of this,
00:35:01 ◼ ► I do think that's not to be overlooked. That like, it is going to be a significant cost
00:35:13 ◼ ► Now, like, you know, Apple's platforms have always kind of been second class citizens for major
00:35:19 ◼ ► gaming. But now this is like a major loss for them. And all those gamers who were playing Fortnite
00:35:26 ◼ ► on iOS devices, how many of those people are going to blame Epic for this? Probably not a lot.
00:35:33 ◼ ► Epic's done a really good job of showing all of them this is Apple's fault. Even though, again,
00:35:38 ◼ ► I think it is mostly Epic's fault, but that's beside the point. What all these people are
00:35:43 ◼ ► learning from this campaign that Epic is waging is that Apple's doing this to them. This isn't
00:35:49 ◼ ► just being fought in like the tech press, in the developer press. This is being fought in the
00:35:54 ◼ ► public. And Epic has brought all these users in. And all those customers, all those gamers,
00:35:59 ◼ ► they're all going to, you know, have a pretty big reason to stop using their iOS devices or
00:36:04 ◼ ► to beg their parents or to themselves buy a different system to play their games on now.
00:36:09 ◼ ► And those are, that is going to hurt Apple to some degree. It's not going to like put the company out
00:36:14 ◼ ► of business or anything, but that is going to be felt. Like, this is a significant difference here,
00:36:19 ◼ ► like in this fight compared to other fights that mostly happen kind of like behind the scenes and
00:36:23 ◼ ► closed business dealings and the companies didn't want to drag them to the public or couldn't drag
00:36:27 ◼ ► them to the public. This one is starting in the public and it's really, really big and it affects
00:36:33 ◼ ► a lot of people. And it's making Apple look like the big bad guy that frankly they pretty much are
00:36:40 ◼ ► in this area to millions of gamers and millions of customers who before weren't part of these fights,
00:36:47 ◼ ► weren't part of these discussions, didn't follow this kind of news. Now they're in it. And they're
00:36:55 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, something that's helping Apple a little bit here is that Apple's platforms are
00:37:01 ◼ ► basically third class platforms when it comes to Fortnite, right? Because like the serious
00:37:06 ◼ ► players are playing on PC because you can get the highest frame rate, the highest res, you know,
00:37:10 ◼ ► and you can use mouse and keyboard and all that other stuff. And then consoles are the second tier
00:37:14 ◼ ► and touch input iOS devices is third tier. Not that there aren't a lot of users because there
00:37:20 ◼ ► are a lot of users or whatever, but you know, it's only 12% of app of epic's revenue, but 12%
00:37:24 ◼ ► is still not nothing. But in general, I think Apple has helped that like that people don't buy
00:37:31 ◼ ► iPads to play Fortnite, right? It's a thing they can do on the iPads that they have. But if they
00:37:36 ◼ ► get super into Fortnite, they are going to eventually get a game console RPC as they get
00:37:41 ◼ ► older, they will graduate from it because it's not the ideal platform for that type of game.
00:37:50 ◼ ► losing Facebook on the iPhone, because Facebook like is natively like an iPhone. I know this is
00:37:57 ◼ ► a weird thing to say. But like, a lot of people read Facebook on their iPhone, there is no first
00:38:01 ◼ ► class platform for Facebook that is not your phone like that is the first class platform, right? So
00:38:06 ◼ ► again, epic is obviously not as big as Facebook. And it's not as used by as many people or whatever,
00:38:10 ◼ ► just to give an example, like Apple's isolated from this a little bit because it's bad. If
00:38:17 ◼ ► Fortnite never comes back on the platform, but every single one of those users can can and
00:38:23 ◼ ► probably was going to inevitably transition to playing Fortnite on a different platform.
00:38:28 ◼ ► I don't think anybody is willingly playing Fortnite on an iPad as they age out of, you know,
00:38:34 ◼ ► childhood into teen years into adulthood. Like, if you're an adult, I don't know how many adults
00:38:39 ◼ ► unless they're really, really forced to and they don't have any other choice, are willingly playing
00:38:47 ◼ ► We are sponsored this week by Backblaze unlimited computer backup for Macs and PCs for just six
00:38:56 ◼ ► bucks a month. I love online backup. It is one of the wonders of modern technology that you can just
00:39:03 ◼ ► back up all your files in your computer to the cloud. And Backblaze is by far my favorite way
00:39:10 ◼ ► to do this. I've been a Backblaze customer for a long time, long before they were a sponsor, because
00:39:14 ◼ ► they are the best cloud backup that I have found. I've tried a bunch of them. They are the best. And
00:39:19 ◼ ► I highly recommend you have cloud backup. It is a wonderful failsafe against the kind of hazards that
00:39:24 ◼ ► can make you lose data that's only in your house or only in your office. So, you know, things like
00:39:28 ◼ ► fires, floods, or just, you know, just data loss stuff, you know, accidental damage, viruses, all
00:39:32 ◼ ► that kind of crap. Online backup is a wonderful backstop to all that risk that just goes away.
00:39:38 ◼ ► It's also just a really good service. So they will back up unlimited space. And I've tested this. I
00:39:43 ◼ ► have backed up many terabytes to their $6 a month plan. And it really truly is unlimited. As long as
00:39:49 ◼ ► it is connected to your computer that includes external drives, they will back that up for you.
00:39:54 ◼ ► So it's all your data on a computer, $6 a month. You can restore it by mail or on their website.
00:40:00 ◼ ► If you do it by mail, they will ship you a hard drive. They will overnight it to you. And if you
00:40:04 ◼ ► return the hard drive, they'll refund the cost of it. So that's pretty awesome. Or, of course,
00:40:08 ◼ ► you can restore stuff right on their website. If you want to download it all, no problem. You can
00:40:11 ◼ ► restore individual files to your mobile device. So if you want to have access to a document that's
00:40:16 ◼ ► only on, say, your home computer, you can get to it from your phone. This is a wonderful backup
00:40:20 ◼ ► service. I highly recommend Backblaze. Go to backblaze.com/atp and you can get a 15-day free
00:40:27 ◼ ► trial, no credit card required. Fully functional, 15 days at backblaze.com/atp. Go there. Start
00:40:54 ◼ ► Almost. One thing I just want to clarify because I think I figured out Tim Sweeney's tweet.
00:40:58 ◼ ► No, that's a topic. But this is the finishing up the follow-up. Tim Sweeney's tweet that I
00:41:02 ◼ ► didn't understand. All right, so this is more about Epic Games versus Epic International and
00:41:06 ◼ ► Unreal versus Fortnite, right? So Tim Sweeney is saying that Apple said they'll invoke all of
00:41:10 ◼ ► Apple's SDK access for stuff on Friday, blah, blah, blah. The temporary restraining order
00:41:15 ◼ ► does not stop Apple from doing that to the account that owns Fortnite. But there's a different
00:41:20 ◼ ► developer account for Epic International that has the Unreal Engine stuff, and that's the one the
00:41:25 ◼ ► judge said that Apple can't ditch. So Apple can and apparently is still going to terminate the
00:41:31 ◼ ► developer account that is used to build and deploy Fortnite, right? Still doesn't explain why they
00:41:38 ◼ ► didn't release one last version for Mac users right now because it's not Friday yet, and you
00:41:42 ◼ ► could put out the build, right? And then the Mac users could have it. And I suppose, you know,
00:41:46 ◼ ► they can't do it for iOS because iOS is off the App Store, but there is no, you know, again,
00:41:49 ◼ ► Fortnite's not on the App Store for the Mac. But anyway, that's what Tim Sweeney is saying.
00:41:53 ◼ ► He's saying, "Oh, they're going to kill access on Friday," and that is true, and the judge is not
00:41:56 ◼ ► stopping them from it. Anyway, that's how that works. So I feel better that I understand the
00:42:02 ◼ ► complaints now. I still don't understand why the Mac version isn't out, but it's kind of a
00:42:06 ◼ ► foot stomping, like, "Well, if you're going to kill my account, I'm not going to rush for the
00:42:09 ◼ ► last two days to try to get the Mac version out because what if there's a bug or something?"
00:42:12 ◼ ► And then we'll no longer have a developer account for it to fix the bug, and it'll be bad.
00:42:19 ◼ ► Marco has certainly talked a lot about this, and I think, Casey, you weighed in on it a little bit,
00:42:23 ◼ ► but I've been avoiding the antitrust angle, as in, like, the legal government and just the general
00:42:29 ◼ ► idea of the referees coming in and saying, "What you're doing is bad, and we need to change the
00:42:36 ◼ ► rules of the game so that what you're doing is not damaging to the overall game and everyone who
00:42:41 ◼ ► plays it, right? Our economy." And my opinion on antitrust is mostly shaped by my sort of formative
00:42:51 ◼ ► experience of antitrust, which is the Microsoft antitrust trial, which was a very big deal in my
00:42:55 ◼ ► life. I was very big into the Mac and PC wars when I was a kid and was very anti-Microsoft. And
00:43:03 ◼ ► all the media and explainer articles and stories surrounding the antitrust, the Microsoft antitrust
00:43:10 ◼ ► trial, really sort of gave me a surface on which I could bounce all of my thoughts and opinions on
00:43:18 ◼ ► antitrust off of, right? Now, I'm not a lawyer. I don't know what the legal situation for antitrust
00:43:23 ◼ ► is. And I didn't know all the nitty-gritty legal deals of the Microsoft one. I'm sure I won't know
00:43:28 ◼ ► the nitty-gritty details of whatever may or may not happen related to tech and antitrust in the
00:43:32 ◼ ► coming years because there are rumblings in Congress about that and there were those hearings
00:43:36 ◼ ► and all that. So I don't know. But my personal sort of yardstick for antitrust and when it's
00:43:43 ◼ ► being damaging is based on something that was repeated a lot in the Microsoft trial and the
00:43:47 ◼ ► Microsoft case, which was lots of things that you do as a company in our semi-capitalist economy
00:43:55 ◼ ► to try to get one up on your competitors are fine until you become so big that you are a
00:44:08 ◼ ► a whole bunch of them become illegal because it's fine to do this thing like, okay, well,
00:44:14 ◼ ► if you buy a product X from us, you also have to buy a product Y, right? It's fine to do that
00:44:24 ◼ ► "I don't, you're making me buy X when I just want to buy Y, I'm going to go to someone else,"
00:44:32 ◼ ► if you become a monopoly, you tell them, "Oh, if you buy X from us, you also have to buy Y."
00:44:37 ◼ ► And they can't say, "I don't want that deal. I'll go buy from someone else." And you say,
00:44:46 ◼ ► in most cases, a monopoly is never literally the only game in town. But there was a particular moment
00:44:51 ◼ ► I remember from the Microsoft trust trial, which had me going, "Yes, finally," because as a Mac
00:44:56 ◼ ► fan at that time, it was so clear to me that Microsoft was a monopoly. That wasn't even a
00:45:02 ◼ ► question. I just wanted them to get to the part where they said, "Okay, given that you're a
00:45:04 ◼ ► monopoly, are you allowed to do X, Y, and Z?" But they had to argue all this stuff about the
00:45:08 ◼ ► monopoly. And at some point, one of the lawyers for the government side said to a giant courtroom,
00:45:15 ◼ ► courtroom and everyone there, they said, or maybe it was in Congress, I forget where it was, but it
00:45:18 ◼ ► was a big room full of people. And they said, "Raise your hand if you have a Windows PC." And
00:45:23 ◼ ► everybody in the freaking room raised their hand. Maybe there's one person in the back who didn't,
00:45:26 ◼ ► but today in this world where Mac and PC doesn't matter or anything, if you didn't live through it,
00:45:32 ◼ ► you don't realize how prevalent Windows PCs were. Nobody had Macs. People hadn't even seen Macs.
00:45:38 ◼ ► When you'd say you had a Mac, they'd look at you weird, like, "What the hell? Why do you have..."
00:45:41 ◼ ► Like, Windows massively dominated. Windows PCs were the entire market and just a bunch of weirdos
00:45:48 ◼ ► who wanted to overpay for a slower computer because it was pretty. Like, this is all pre-iMac,
00:45:59 ◼ ► even though it is just anecdotal or whatever, was hammering home the points like, "Look,
00:46:03 ◼ ► we all know that Microsoft is a monopoly. If you have some business and Microsoft forces you to
00:46:10 ◼ ► take some deal or bundles something with something else or uses their power as a monopoly to crush a
00:46:13 ◼ ► competitor, you're going to go, 'You know what? I don't like that. I'm going to switch to Mac.'"
00:46:24 ◼ ► And it was such an easy monopoly because Windows PCs were physical things that you could see.
00:46:29 ◼ ► You could just walk into any building in any city in the world and just go to every single
00:46:33 ◼ ► personal computer and say, "Is this a Windows computer? Yes or no?" And just count them up and,
00:46:37 ◼ ► sure enough, you'd find like 90-something percent of them would be Windows PCs. It was so easy to
00:46:41 ◼ ► do. There wasn't any sort of nuance to it at all. And so that always informs my opinion of antitrust.
00:46:48 ◼ ► It's fine to do all sorts of hard-nosed deals. And the way you can tell you're a monopoly is
00:46:55 ◼ ► you can make the deal awful and people still have to take it. That's when the referees need to come
00:46:59 ◼ ► in because it's anti-competitive. Competition means you can demand the thing of your customers
00:47:06 ◼ ► or raise your prices. That's the easy one because people always say, "Oh, it was the price raise."
00:47:09 ◼ ► But there are so many other things that you can do. You can crush competitors by saying,
00:47:12 ◼ ► "If you, my customer, do any business with that other company, I won't sell you Windows anymore.
00:47:18 ◼ ► And if I don't sell you Windows anymore, your business is dead because you have to have Windows
00:47:21 ◼ ► because what the hell else are you going to do?" That's how you can tell when you're a monopoly.
00:47:23 ◼ ► And after the antitrust trial, both before and after, on the internet and using it back in those
00:47:30 ◼ ► days or whatever, people would have all these opinions that didn't make any sense to me. Even
00:47:34 ◼ ► back then when the Mac was like 3% market share or something, people would say, "Well, Apple has a
00:47:40 ◼ ► monopoly on Macs." I don't think you understand what monopoly means. Does Honda have a monopoly
00:47:48 ◼ ► on Honda cars? I mean, yeah, they're the only company that sells Honda cars. They have 100%
00:47:53 ◼ ► market share of selling Honda cars, but that's not how it works. And so everybody has a monopoly on
00:48:01 ◼ ► the thing that only they do. So you need some other kind of yardstick. And back then, like I said,
00:48:05 ◼ ► it was so easy. It was market share as in just count up all the PCs and see which, all the
00:48:11 ◼ ► personal computers and see which ones are Macs and which ones are PCs. How many sold per year,
00:48:14 ◼ ► how many installed base. Pick a number. It was really easy to do. And a lot of the sort of app
00:48:20 ◼ ► store, Apple walled garden, Apple's being unfair, Apple is a monopoly too thing that never stopped
00:48:26 ◼ ► from the days when everyone just was complaining about Apple even when they were 3% market share.
00:48:38 ◼ ► applications on its own platforms, right? But Apple doesn't even sell the majority of mobile
00:48:44 ◼ ► phones, for example. Not only do they not have 97% market share, they don't even have 50%.
00:48:48 ◼ ► The biggest platform for mobile phones is Android. And Apple doesn't have anything to do with that.
00:48:56 ◼ ► So if your measure of whether Apple is a monopoly is not simply, "Oh, well, Apple has a monopoly in
00:49:01 ◼ ► Apple products, which is dumb." If you look at the model that we use for the Microsoft antitrust
00:49:07 ◼ ► trial, which is like market share, essentially, how many phones are out in the world and how many
00:49:11 ◼ ► of those phones are iPhones, you'll see that they don't have a monopoly. So if Apple does something
00:49:17 ◼ ► that users don't like, like for example, charging 700% commission on everything in the app store,
00:49:22 ◼ ► that would decimate their third party application support because everybody would leave,
00:49:26 ◼ ► right? Except for Facebook, who continued to... They said, "No more free apps and we get 700%.
00:49:30 ◼ ► So if you sell it for $1, we get $7." They made a terrible deal, right? Everyone would just leave.
00:49:39 ◼ ► Right. But I'm saying the test of monopoly power is how badly can you screw everybody involved and
00:49:45 ◼ ► they have no choice. And from a market share perspective, if Apple does things that developers
00:49:53 ◼ ► and/or customers don't like enough, people can switch. And Apple, by the way, will absolutely
00:49:57 ◼ ► argue this in the current antitrust trials or whatever comes, they will say, "People can and
00:50:01 ◼ ► do switch from iOS to Android. It happens all the time. It's a thing that you can do." So that showing
00:50:08 ◼ ► that there is competition. So if we, Apple, do something that's actually really bad, there is
00:50:12 ◼ ► someplace else for them to go. Unlike Microsoft, where it was just not viable for you to switch
00:50:26 ◼ ► applications you cared about weren't even on the Mac. If you're using this point of sale software or
00:50:30 ◼ ► custom software you have written for your thing or tons of other applications that were only
00:50:39 ◼ ► There's much more parity, right? So from a market share perspective, Apple certainly does not have
00:50:46 ◼ ► a monopoly using the sort of measuring yardstick that was used in the Microsoft antitrust trial.
00:50:54 ◼ ► as we were creeping up to this, this was generally the reason why I ignored any kind of
00:50:58 ◼ ► "Apple needs to be investigated for antitrust things." It's like, they're not in a Microsoft
00:51:03 ◼ ► position. They can't turn the screws on everybody and get away with it, because not only is there
00:51:09 ◼ ► a viable alternative, there's a more popular alternative, right? And that ratio, that market
00:51:14 ◼ ► share, Apple wasn't creeping up to eventually dominate to have 90% market share. They've been
00:51:19 ◼ ► holding steady or declining compared to Android. I don't think there's ever been a point where the
00:51:30 ◼ ► The thing that's changed for me in recent years is not Apple's behavior, because in many respects,
00:51:37 ◼ ► Apple doing things that make users and/or developers angry, and then us having reactions
00:51:43 ◼ ► to them. Obviously, it's coming to a head now, but it's always been sort of simmering in the
00:51:47 ◼ ► background. But that hasn't changed the general equation for me of like, "Okay, well, then if
00:51:52 ◼ ► users don't like it, and if Fortnite and Facebook and Netflix all leave the platform, everyone will
00:51:57 ◼ ► just switch to Android, right? So it shows Apple's not a monopoly." The thing that's been bothering
00:52:00 ◼ ► me a little bit lately is a different yardstick other than just installed base of phones and
00:52:06 ◼ ► ability to switch. And that yardstick is a different statistic, which is not installed base,
00:52:11 ◼ ► but share of money flowing through the mobile phone economy. And when you're selling a physical
00:52:18 ◼ ► good like a Windows PC that comes with a Windows license that you pay Microsoft for, it's really
00:52:23 ◼ ► easy to say you sell one PC, you have to sell one Windows license for it, and you figure out
00:52:27 ◼ ► how much that PC maker pays per license. It's a very straightforward thing. But just selling a
00:52:32 ◼ ► bunch of phones into the world does not directly translate to revenue that passes through those
00:52:38 ◼ ► phones. So even though there are way, way more Android phones in the world, my understanding is
00:52:43 ◼ ► that the majority, in fact, the vast majority of revenue that are profit revenue or profit,
00:52:50 ◼ ► I don't know if it's both. But anyway, the vast majority of the money that we care about that
00:52:54 ◼ ► flows through the mobile economy actually does go through Apple phones. Is it because people buy
00:52:59 ◼ ► Apple phones have more money? Because the phones are more expensive in general, and therefore,
00:53:02 ◼ ► they have more money to spend? Is it because iPhone users are more likely to spend money of
00:53:07 ◼ ► any amount than Android users? But either way, that is a very different statistic than how many
00:53:13 ◼ ► phones exist in the world. And that would mean that Apple may, I mean, we're kind of in the
00:53:18 ◼ ► process of finding out, may actually have monopoly level power when it comes to forcing companies to
00:53:23 ◼ ► do what it wants, because they are the gatekeeper to whatever the percentage is 80%, 90% of the
00:53:31 ◼ ► money flowing through the mobile economy. Right. And it would be interesting to see if anyone makes
00:53:36 ◼ ► that argument, maybe when the government case comes, probably not going to come from this epic
00:53:39 ◼ ► one. But all I'm saying is there's more, there's more to monopoly than just market share. And what
00:53:45 ◼ ► really matters in monopoly is what kind of power you have. Now, I don't think that Apple currently
00:53:50 ◼ ► actually has the power that Microsoft had to basically get its way because these companies
00:53:57 ◼ ► need Apple because they need that 80 or 90% of revenue, just because I think it's a little bit
00:54:02 ◼ ► more fragmented than that. And I also think the revenue would go with these companies if they
00:54:07 ◼ ► abandoned Apple. So Facebook, Netflix, you know, Amazon, Epic, all left Apple's platform and went
00:54:14 ◼ ► to Android, I think the money would follow them, because the people who currently have iPhones and
00:54:18 ◼ ► have been spending all that money would switch platforms. But right now, Apple's, I don't know
00:54:25 ◼ ► what you want to call it, money share is way out of proportion with their market share. And that's
00:54:29 ◼ ► the thing I'm keeping my eye on. Because you can imagine if Apple's money share got to be,
00:54:35 ◼ ► you know, 99% or 100%, and Android was just that phone that people get who never spend any money
00:54:40 ◼ ► through their phone, Apple would have a lot more power than it does now. I think part of the battle
00:54:44 ◼ ► that we're seeing here is a test case to see exactly how much power Apple has. And thus far,
00:54:50 ◼ ► Epic, I think, has shown that Apple has less power than Apple thinks it has. Because Epic is willing
00:54:55 ◼ ► to defy Apple, and Epic's not even that big in the grand scheme of things, right? How much does,
00:55:01 ◼ ► granted, Epic has less to lose, but they are a small fish compared to the biggest company in the
00:55:06 ◼ ► world. And they're willing to go head to head, they're willing to take the hit, they're willing
00:55:09 ◼ ► to battle Apple on this front. And it's a couple items that got pushed out of fault because it was
00:55:13 ◼ ► too long. Talking about other companies doing similar things, I think people smell blood in
00:55:18 ◼ ► the water when it comes to Apple. And I think that shows that Apple does not yet have monopoly level
00:55:23 ◼ ► power. And that's why most of my other discussion of this topic has been, Apple, you're doing
00:55:30 ◼ ► stupid things. Corporate relationship management is bad. What you're doing is not going to work,
00:55:35 ◼ ► right? I'm telling Apple as a customer that likes their products that you're making bad decisions.
00:55:39 ◼ ► But at no point that I said, Apple, what you're doing is illegal, or Apple, what you're doing is
00:55:44 ◼ ► immoral. It's just stupid business, right? You're making people like Marco super mad at you. That's
00:55:48 ◼ ► bad business. It's their right to do things that are bad for their business. But I, you know,
00:55:55 ◼ ► I'm going to say that I don't currently think that anything Apple is doing, specifically Apple,
00:56:01 ◼ ► requires antitrust intervention based on their current power in the market. But I will say that
00:56:09 ◼ ► writ large, there needs to be new regulation in the tech sector to control the actions of all
00:56:14 ◼ ► companies. Because when you go look at Google, it's like, oh, well, Google, you know, that's the
00:56:17 ◼ ► place where you can change, right? Google does all the same stuff, or mostly most of the same stuff.
00:56:22 ◼ ► And it's not because there's collusion or anything. It's just because there are too few players.
00:56:30 ◼ ► and give them tons of power. And even though they are themselves are deadly competitors, you know,
00:56:34 ◼ ► all the big tech companies are themselves deadly competitors with each other. There's just not that
00:56:42 ◼ ► why we need new regulation to protect customers to protect not to protect developers specifically,
00:56:46 ◼ ► but to protect customers and their data, and their rights, and everything having to do with that. So
00:56:51 ◼ ► I think absolutely, there needs to be new and better rate legislation, which will be really hard
00:56:55 ◼ ► for our broken system of government to produce at any time soon. But anyway, there needs to be that.
00:57:01 ◼ ► But I don't think Apple itself. I could be convinced otherwise, you know, that's I'll see
00:57:06 ◼ ► your evidence in court eventually, when this ever comes to court, right. But I don't think Apple
00:57:10 ◼ ► specifically anything that it's doing, demands legal intervention, I just think they're being
00:57:15 ◼ ► stupid. So what would you if you were allowed to make changes to the App Store rules? What would
00:57:22 ◼ ► you do? It's not a question of like App Store rules. I think they just need to be. It's so hard
00:57:29 ◼ ► to do because there's so many different ways you can go with this. But like, the example I'd always
00:57:34 ◼ ► use is like, everyone always wants to use consumer harm. And they they're so focused on prices, like,
00:57:38 ◼ ► well, the prices in the App Store are low, like that downward price pressure that we always
00:57:42 ◼ ► complained about from the software developers. That's good for consumers, right? downward price
00:57:46 ◼ ► pressure. That's good. Like the same kind of argument make for Walmart, hey, Walmart's able
00:57:49 ◼ ► to sell goods really cheaply. Isn't that great? But the power that Walmart wields over its suppliers
00:57:53 ◼ ► and the power that Apple wields over its suppliers and the power that Apple reads over its developers,
00:57:57 ◼ ► even though it results in low prices for consumers is not good for the sort of the ecosystem of
00:58:02 ◼ ► our general economy. So I would mostly be trying to target rules that require some kind of
00:58:11 ◼ ► require the big companies to certain certain rights of consumers need to be preserved. Like,
00:58:18 ◼ ► you can't do a thing that prevents like, here's an example. I don't necessarily agree with this one,
00:58:23 ◼ ► but it's an easy one to pull out. You can't do a thing that stops people from being able to
00:58:28 ◼ ► install whatever software they want on their phones, right? So side loading, for example,
00:58:33 ◼ ► again, we talked about this before, I don't necessarily agree with it. But it's an easy
00:58:35 ◼ ► thing to say customers, it's their phone, they bought it, you as a company shouldn't be able
00:58:39 ◼ ► to stop them from installing stuff on it by voiding their warranty or whatever, like, you
00:58:44 ◼ ► know, like, the MCA and everything makes that difficult because of the whole anti hacking crap
00:58:49 ◼ ► or whatever. But anyway, that's an example. And that would be a protection of consumers,
00:58:56 ◼ ► something they would never do on their own, because they don't want to enable side loading,
00:58:59 ◼ ► but there was law that it forced them to. That's a bad example, because I don't agree with it. But
00:59:02 ◼ ► that that is an example of sort of a thing that would apply to everybody. And that it would force
00:59:07 ◼ ► more competition. And it would force more innovation, right? Because lots of things that
00:59:11 ◼ ► aren't allowed on the App Store will never know what could have been created. And what somebody
00:59:15 ◼ ► bailed on because they thought it was an awesome idea. But they said, Oh, that'll never get past
00:59:17 ◼ ► Abreu. So they didn't do it right. And maybe they'll never get past Abreu. But you can do it
00:59:21 ◼ ► on Android then have everybody side load and then say, Yeah, but, you know, it's a thing that makes
00:59:26 ◼ ► money. And most people have money or on iOS, you'll never know the innovation you're losing by having
00:59:29 ◼ ► these closed platforms. So things like that are right to repair is another example, like,
00:59:34 ◼ ► you should be able to bring your iPhone to someone else and have them repair it, right? And
00:59:38 ◼ ► Apple would complain, it's a safety concern, and only Apple can do it or whatever, you know,
00:59:43 ◼ ► and some of that is true. But a lot of it is just a way for them to preserve the money for themselves.
00:59:51 ◼ ► if you make a hardware product, you can't actually stop people. This applies to like Tesla cars and
00:59:56 ◼ ► everything else. You can't actually stop people from taking it to someone else and paying them
00:59:59 ◼ ► money to fix it. Right? laws like that, that are not, oh, you should have this rule in the app
01:00:05 ◼ ► store, but that are instead, here's a class of things that we understand companies want to do,
01:00:11 ◼ ► that makes them tons of money. But in the end, if everybody does it, it makes the world worse for
01:00:16 ◼ ► all of us. Like, that's the role. That's the role of government, find the things that you know,
01:00:19 ◼ ► they're all the companies in some ways are, you know, competing for our dollar and doing all these
01:00:24 ◼ ► things. But eventually companies get enough power to start do things that benefit the company, but
01:00:29 ◼ ► don't benefit literally anybody else. And that's when you need, you know, laws to regulate the game
01:00:35 ◼ ► to make it so you know, I know you can do that move. And I know it makes everything for you
01:00:39 ◼ ► better. And no, no one can stop you. But the fact that no one can stop you means we're gonna make
01:00:44 ◼ ► a law that says you can't do that. Right? So I don't have any specific recommendations. But that's
01:00:49 ◼ ► the type of thing I'm thinking of. Yeah, I don't know, to answer my own question, I don't know,
01:00:53 ◼ ► I don't know what I would recommend. I feel like I feel like this distinction, this seemingly
01:01:03 ◼ ► arbitrary distinction that Apple has come up with, where you can sell something in the quote, unquote,
01:01:10 ◼ ► real world. And you can do that in a very user hostile way without Apple taking a cut. And that's
01:01:18 ◼ ► all right. Like you can sell stuff on Amazon, you can book an Airbnb rental, you can take an Uber or
01:01:24 ◼ ► Lyft. And Apple doesn't necessarily need a cut of that. You can schedule an in person and pay for an
01:01:30 ◼ ► in person gym class. But it's in person. So it's okay. But suddenly, if it's virtual or fake, if
01:01:40 ◼ ► you will, I don't literally believe that being open for the sake of discussion fake or electronic or
01:01:45 ◼ ► what have you, suddenly Apple deserves the money, according to Apple. And that distinction,
01:01:57 ◼ ► I finally had the time earlier tonight to read Ben Thompson's last couple of posts about this.
01:02:03 ◼ ► I think they might have been members only posts. If they weren't, I'll link them in show notes.
01:02:14 ◼ ► and I'm gonna butcher it because I'm not as smart as Ben. But basically, if the marginal cost for
01:02:19 ◼ ► selling the thing is effectively zero, you don't have to physically create another one, then, okay,
01:02:26 ◼ ► Apple gets 30%. But if there's a non-zero marginal cost, you actually have to have room in a building
01:02:32 ◼ ► to teach this exercise class. You are actually staying at somebody's Airbnb. You are actually
01:02:45 ◼ ► wherein Apple gets a cut, but maybe it's not 30%. And maybe those companies should be allowed to
01:02:52 ◼ ► offer their own payment systems and so on. And I feel like I understand the spirit of what Ben
01:03:04 ◼ ► in order for it to be fair for everyone, for users, for developers, for Apple, whatever the system is
01:03:10 ◼ ► should have a really, really simple elevator pitch. And to be fair, the elevator pitch or the
01:03:22 ◼ ► Pastorisk. Double dagger. Yeah, exactly. But I think you take the spirit of what I mean, though.
01:03:32 ◼ ► I mean, I don't think it's possible to draw that kind of distinction in a reliable, enforceable way.
01:03:39 ◼ ► Like, this is why I'm actually being a little bit more ambitious with what I hope to happen now.
01:03:46 ◼ ► Not that it will. There's, I think, almost no chance of this ever happening, even with regulation.
01:03:51 ◼ ► But I think one of the big challenges Apple has always had with App Store rules is that many of
01:03:59 ◼ ► the rules are fairly straightforward, objective rules of, like, you know, the app can't crash
01:04:05 ◼ ► during app review. That's bad. It has to do what it says it does, etc. It can't be malware. It has
01:04:12 ◼ ► to adhere to certain restrictions on how it uses certain hardware features. There's so many parts
01:04:19 ◼ ► of the rules that are sensible, defensible, and objective. And therefore should be fairly easy to
01:04:28 ◼ ► enforce consistently and fairly and in a way that everyone can predict before they go and develop an
01:04:35 ◼ ► app or submit it. Like, so it's fairly easy to avoid stepping on, you know, the straightforward,
01:04:39 ◼ ► obvious parts of the rules. And most of the App Store review rules, and I would even say
01:04:45 ◼ ► most of the value of them to customers, falls into that category. We're only really talking about
01:04:52 ◼ ► a relatively small handful of very vague, very controversial, unpredictable, and inconsistently
01:04:59 ◼ ► enforced rules. And I think it would be better for everybody, including Apple eventually long term,
01:05:08 ◼ ► but better for everybody, certainly better for developers, and I think even better for users and
01:05:14 ◼ ► for the whole ecosystem, if the only rules that were enforced were objective, easily defensible
01:05:22 ◼ ► rules. And so that's why I don't think you can really make a lot of like strong cases for any of
01:05:29 ◼ ► these rules that have to do with whether Apple can demand 30% of your money based on how and why
01:05:39 ◼ ► and for what your app is processing payments. So what I would actually hope to see long term,
01:06:02 ◼ ► in their apps, whatever the heck they want to do with payments and credit cards and money and
01:06:08 ◼ ► anything else. You know, this sounds crazy, I know, oh my god, what if there's all these scams and
01:06:14 ◼ ► people take their credit cards and everything? Well, you can do all that in Safari. And the world
01:06:20 ◼ ► has functioned. You know, yes, there are some scams. There are also lots of scams in Apples,
01:06:26 ◼ ► in App Purchase systems that use subscription billing and misleading things like, yeah,
01:06:30 ◼ ► there's a lot of scams in the App Store too. And again, the world has gone, has functioned and gone
01:06:41 ◼ ► on stupid stuff all the time through legitimate and illegitimate means with credit cards and with
01:06:50 ◼ ► And you can look at the web again, bringing this as another example, because it's a huge one,
01:06:56 ◼ ► you can look at the web and you can say, okay, well, the web, you can buy things with your
01:07:01 ◼ ► credit card on sites. However, there has recently, you know, relatively recently, been this
01:07:08 ◼ ► additional option that Apple offered called Apple Pay on the web. And Apple Pay on the web is
01:07:14 ◼ ► awesome for me as a consumer. Whenever I see a way to buy something with Apple Pay on the web,
01:07:20 ◼ ► I always choose that option. And I've even occasionally not bought something because it
01:07:26 ◼ ► was too hard to do, especially if I'm on my phone, I don't want to like type in on my billing info,
01:07:33 ◼ ► And so there's actually a big incentive for people with web checkout or purchase things
01:07:39 ◼ ► to add Apple Pay support. And Apple does get some kind of, I think, very small percentage of those
01:07:44 ◼ ► sales. I think it's on the order of like 0.1% or something like they get some kind of small
01:07:47 ◼ ► commission as part of the credit card merchant fee. But, you know, they don't get a lot of that.
01:07:51 ◼ ► But, you know, Apple's paid for that. And, you know, there is huge benefit to me as a customer
01:08:01 ◼ ► And it has this wonderful user experience. I don't see anything wrong with a long term vision in which
01:08:18 ◼ ► even in my crazy new world here, this thing's never going to happen. I'm not pushing for
01:08:22 ◼ ► sideloading or alternative app stores because, you know, that's a whole can of worms. I don't
01:08:27 ◼ ► think we need to go there necessarily. But so App Review can still function as a way to filter out
01:08:34 ◼ ► scams and bad actors and things that are breaking, you know, more objective, easily defensible rules.
01:08:40 ◼ ► But it's just too messy in the real world to try to like, you know, govern in a way what they
01:08:54 ◼ ► consistently and predictably and across all apps. They just can't do it. Like, for instance, like,
01:08:59 ◼ ► I recently learned from Tiff, actually, who bought an Instagram ad, that Instagram ads are
01:09:15 ◼ ► Like, Instagram is owned by Facebook. I'm not sure you know that. Yeah, right. Instagram is
01:09:19 ◼ ► bigger than Epic. Facebook ads, I have no idea if this is true or not, but I would bet you can
01:09:24 ◼ ► probably buy Facebook ads in their app too, because you can buy them in Instagram. And like, why
01:09:30 ◼ ► has an Apple demanded 30% of all of Instagram's ad revenue on iOS? Oh, because they can't. Because,
01:09:40 ◼ ► yes, John, they're too big. Like, Apple couldn't anger them that much. I have no idea why it's okay
01:09:49 ◼ ► for Instagram to sell ads in their app, and yet it's not okay for a lot of these other things that
01:09:55 ◼ ► Apple has rejected. And this kind of inconsistency is never going to go away. You know, you look at
01:10:02 ◼ ► the WordPress rejection from last week, and it's like, and even that's like, it's a weird, vague,
01:10:09 ◼ ► blurry line of like, whether this should have been allowed or not. And it's all these complexities
01:10:13 ◼ ► about how do you define the purchase? And what is WordPress versus the app and the service? Like,
01:10:18 ◼ ► there's all these blurry lines, because that's the real world. In the real world, we have a few,
01:10:23 ◼ ► you know, we have some simple cases where the rules are clear cut and make sense. Then we also
01:10:27 ◼ ► have a whole bunch of really complicated things where it's kind of vague as to whether it should
01:10:30 ◼ ► be allowed or not. They're never going to win that fight. They're never going to find a way
01:10:40 ◼ ► just angering everybody, get constantly getting in disputes, having unpredictable, inconsistent
01:10:45 ◼ ► enforcement of everything. And that has always gotten them in trouble with the App Store,
01:10:48 ◼ ► always since day one. And their recent incredible increase of aggression in this particular area,
01:10:56 ◼ ► which seems to me like a desperate way to drive up service revenue when everything else is constant,
01:11:00 ◼ ► but hey, that's just me. Their incredible aggression in this particular area to squeeze
01:11:06 ◼ ► out another few percent of profit margin for this quarter or whatever. I don't think it's worth it.
01:11:11 ◼ ► Like, I think they're doing so much more damage. Long term, I would be totally pleased and happy
01:11:19 ◼ ► if they would just have a consistent, easily enforceable rule of do what you want in your app,
01:11:26 ◼ ► and you can use our payment system if you want. And then Apple, again, as I mentioned a few
01:11:32 ◼ ► episodes ago, would be forced to compete because their payment system has a lot of big advantages.
01:11:36 ◼ ► For the same reason why I love using Apple Pay on the web, I also love buying subscriptions to
01:11:45 ◼ ► things with Apple's system instead of someone else's system because it is easier, it is faster,
01:11:50 ◼ ► and I know that when I want to cancel it, I'm not going to have to call anybody or do any weird
01:11:55 ◼ ► jumping through hoops. I can just cancel it and that's it. And so there is still that consumer
01:12:01 ◼ ► pressure that app developers will still have huge incentives to use Apple's system because
01:12:08 ◼ ► their customers will demand it and they'll get higher conversions as a result. That's why I
01:12:12 ◼ ► would still use it for Overcast. That's why I would still use it as a customer, as a user of
01:12:16 ◼ ► all these other apps, and I would subscribe more readily to something that offered Apple's system
01:12:20 ◼ ► than something that doesn't. That alone would be a reason why most apps probably would still choose
01:12:26 ◼ ► to use Apple's system. And that would be totally defensible on Apple's part. They could still
01:12:31 ◼ ► charge their same rates on that because they are providing legitimate value and they're convincing
01:12:36 ◼ ► you to use it not because of a giant stick that they wield but on its merit. Imagine how nice that
01:12:43 ◼ ► would be to choose to use Apple's net purchase system because of the merits it brings you rather
01:12:51 ◼ ► than to have to be forced to use it and have all this crap going on with all these rules that you
01:12:55 ◼ ► have to tiptoe around. Otherwise Apple will demand 30% of your entire business that has nothing to do
01:12:59 ◼ ► with them. And I frankly like Apple's counter arguments to this hold so little water. Their
01:13:07 ◼ ► counter arguments like the consumer harm side is mostly not there. If they would allow other
01:13:15 ◼ ► payments it's mostly not there. And I think the market would sort that out just like it has on the
01:13:19 ◼ ► web. And any argument that goes towards paying Apple to fund the App Store is 1000% BS because
01:13:32 ◼ ► whatever revenue the App Store brings in from Apple squeezing this 30% out of developers that
01:13:37 ◼ ► makes up like a few percent of their quarterly revenue pales in comparison to the value of the
01:13:45 ◼ ► app ecosystem to the iPhone which is way way more of the company's revenue. Because the iPhone
01:13:53 ◼ ► wouldn't sell at all if it weren't for all these third party apps. How many people do you know
01:13:59 ◼ ► who would buy an iPhone if it couldn't run any third party apps? I bet it's not a very big
01:14:04 ◼ ► number. I know yes the original one blah blah blah that was a long time ago. These days the value of
01:14:10 ◼ ► a phone is the apps it runs and in particular a handful of very big company apps that everybody
01:14:15 ◼ ► wants to run. And a phone that can't run those apps is not going to sell. And Apple without the
01:14:22 ◼ ► iPhone is a shareholder lawsuit that's for sure. A new CEO. Everyone gets fired if the iPhone is not
01:14:30 ◼ ► selling. So that's way more important. And the value of the apps is such a massive part of all
01:14:40 ◼ ► of Apple's hardware platforms that they make way more money from than this stupid services category
01:14:46 ◼ ► that keeps having them screw their customers over. They're framing it as like "Oh you have to pay
01:14:51 ◼ ► your way and that's how we justify this." But that's not the reality. That's not why the app store is
01:14:58 ◼ ► here. You know what's also really important to Apple? The bathrooms on their campus. How much
01:15:04 ◼ ► money do the bathrooms bring in? You can see it's a ridiculous argument to start separating things
01:15:10 ◼ ► out when there's a lot of value to that in other ways. They're pretty important. Sometimes you
01:15:15 ◼ ► have to fund something because it's important to the rest of your business that makes money.
01:15:19 ◼ ► The app store, they're double dipping. They have found a way to make significant money by squeezing
01:15:24 ◼ ► all of us from something that they would be running anyway because it has massive value to
01:15:30 ◼ ► their hardware platform that makes them way way way more money. Apple would be in great shape and
01:15:36 ◼ ► would have huge motivation to run the app store for free. They don't deserve any percentage of
01:15:43 ◼ ► our money for running the app store. We are in a symbiotic relationship here. We have software
01:15:50 ◼ ► that we sell or make money from and Apple has a platform full of users. By us having our software
01:15:56 ◼ ► on their platform, everyone benefits. The users, Apple's platform and therefore Apple and us by
01:16:02 ◼ ► making the apps. We all benefit from that. That's why they do it. Apple doesn't need any percentage.
01:16:09 ◼ ► All they need to do is cover their credit card fees and they can do that with 5% or less.
01:16:18 ◼ ► Again, it's a bad look for so many reasons. The really truly sad part about all this is
01:16:26 ◼ ► that this is like a drop in the bucket to them still. They're destroying their reputation.
01:16:33 ◼ ► By the way, being an Apple fan for so long, we've had to fight a long time to try to convince the
01:16:53 ◼ ► so long to shake off. I wish they wouldn't put themselves in this position. It really is. It's
01:17:01 ◼ ► like your best friend is in front of a crowd and starts to tell a racist joke and you're like,
01:17:08 ◼ ► "Oh no. Oh God. No, no, no, no. Stop. Stop. Please don't do this." Because you don't want to see them
01:17:13 ◼ ► look like a jerk. Then they just keep digging and digging and digging. You're like, "No, no, no, no,
01:17:18 ◼ ► no. Stop. Stop." This is how it is being an Apple fan right now. They just keep digging and digging
01:17:23 ◼ ► and digging and just looking horrible. They don't seem to know or care or even realize it
01:17:30 ◼ ► because they seem to be living in an alternate world where their behavior is defensible.
01:17:39 ◼ ► I think long term, all these weird subjective distinctions they try to make about when they
01:17:51 ◼ ► deserve their 30% and when they will permit you to not contribute to their app store are mostly
01:17:59 ◼ ► BS and unenforceable. It's full of vague edge cases. It always has been. It always will be.
01:18:05 ◼ ► And there is no way out of that that can be consistently enforced and reasonable to everybody
01:18:11 ◼ ► except giving up that revenue as a requirement and actually just earning it competitively.
01:18:16 ◼ ► **Matt Stauffer** So what you described is actually pretty hard to turn into legislation.
01:18:20 ◼ ► But giving your examples there, you came across two things that are not related to antitrust,
01:18:26 ◼ ► but are examples of the kind of legislation that we should have but don't. One example,
01:18:32 ◼ ► you complained about when I subscribe to something and then it's like a pain in the butt to get
01:18:35 ◼ ► unsubscribed because you have to send a letter or call someone on the phone or whatever. A very
01:18:42 ◼ ► simple, straightforward consumer protection law that companies would fight tooth and nail,
01:18:46 ◼ ► but that I think we could actually get passed even in this country is companies must allow,
01:18:52 ◼ ► if for any subscription service, customers must allow unsubscription through the same venue that
01:18:56 ◼ ► subscription happened. So if you subscribe by mail, companies must allow unsubscription by mail.
01:19:00 ◼ ► If you subscribe by phone, companies must allow unsubscription by phone. You can offer all the
01:19:04 ◼ ► alternatives, but the law is whatever venue the subscription takes place in, you must also be able
01:19:09 ◼ ► to do the unsubscription. So if you subscribe on a computer... **Matt Stauffer** I think that is a
01:19:13 ◼ ► law in California already. **Matt Stauffer** Right. But this is an example of a very straightforward
01:19:17 ◼ ► consumer protection law that industry hates because they don't ever want to be told what
01:19:24 ◼ ► Another example that you gave of, you know, what we're talking about Instagram selling the ads or
01:19:27 ◼ ► whatever, Facebook owns Instagram. For many, many years now, the part of our government that's
01:19:33 ◼ ► supposed to decide whether it's okay for one company to allow another has been just saying,
01:19:37 ◼ ► "Sure, whatever. Yeah, you can buy them." And we all know big, powerful companies like Facebook
01:19:43 ◼ ► get bigger and more powerful by finding a competitor and giving them an offer they can't
01:19:48 ◼ ► refuse, which is a pile of money and buying them. Right? And that's bad for us all collectively,
01:19:53 ◼ ► because we never, the competitors never get to grow and flourish because the big companies are so
01:19:58 ◼ ► big. Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, all of them are so big that, and this was true of Microsoft,
01:20:04 ◼ ► that if any company starts to get some kind of momentum, say in the social networking world,
01:20:08 ◼ ► maybe with a photo sharing app, Facebook will come along and say, "If we can't exactly copy what
01:20:14 ◼ ► you're doing and do that, we'll just buy you because we have so much money and it's worth
01:20:18 ◼ ► the money for us to just buy you and then absorb you into our hole and now we don't have to worry
01:20:22 ◼ ► about you as a competitor anymore." That's exactly the type of thing that our government is supposed
01:20:26 ◼ ► to examine and say, "That doesn't seem like a great idea to me." Buying television stations,
01:20:31 ◼ ► we used to have all of these, you know, precedent of like, "Well, we don't want you to own too many
01:20:34 ◼ ► television stations or television and radio combined." All these rules that used to exist
01:20:37 ◼ ► to try to not let anyone get too much control over the media. In recent history, it's been a free for
01:20:43 ◼ ► all to the detriment of everybody. So those are examples of non-antitrust laws that are relevant
01:20:47 ◼ ► to the tech sector that could be passed that could help all of us and help provide a more competitive
01:20:52 ◼ ► market. And I think those kind of targeted things, like targeted laws like that, that have nothing to
01:20:58 ◼ ► do with antitrust but just have to do with like regulating the marketplace, we need laws like that
01:21:08 ◼ ► I think we can come up with reasonable common sense laws in that realm. A few of those, they
01:21:14 ◼ ► would affect all stores, not just Apple, and those would go a long way towards helping settle this.
01:21:18 ◼ ► One of the things that Casey said before, and you touched on as well, about Apple deserving revenue
01:21:22 ◼ ► for like, you know, or you buy a physical thing and Apple doesn't get a cut of that, but if you
01:21:26 ◼ ► buy a digital thing, suddenly Apple deserves it. And I was thinking, I think about this a lot of
01:21:31 ◼ ► like, you know, I don't know, I don't remember if this was in any of the court transcripts,
01:21:39 ◼ ► sort of decision of like, well, physical stuff that you can just enter a credit card and whatever,
01:21:43 ◼ ► we won't touch that. But for digital stuff, you know, initially just the apps themselves,
01:21:52 ◼ ► will get the 30% cut, right? How do they come up with that rule to begin with? Does it make any
01:21:56 ◼ ► sense? It doesn't make any sense from a deserved perspective at all, because the deserved perspective
01:22:01 ◼ ► in Apple's maybe sarcasm itself is like, well, you know, it's customer acquisition, like, we're
01:22:06 ◼ ► giving you access to our billions of users. And that's how you're getting new purchases of your
01:22:10 ◼ ► thing or new subscribers to your thing, right. But that is exactly true of the physical stores as
01:22:15 ◼ ► well, right? We're giving the people self physical stuff access to all these users too. But somehow,
01:22:20 ◼ ► we don't deserve the acquisition of that customer. But we do deserve it when it's a digital thing.
01:22:24 ◼ ► It's the same. It's the same customers, right? It's not, it's not like, you know, so deserve is
01:22:32 ◼ ► because it's all just about relationships and power dynamics, but forget about deserve.
01:22:36 ◼ ► What I think what a, what I can imagine might be a reasonable rationale for this rule to begin with
01:22:43 ◼ ► was when Apple comes on the scene with their new App Store or whatever, like non, you know,
01:22:49 ◼ ► physical good businesses have established business models already. Whatever you're selling, if it's a
01:22:54 ◼ ► physical thing, if you're renting space, if you're teaching a class, if you're selling, you know,
01:22:58 ◼ ► a car, like whatever, like physical goods, those business models are established. So Apple, I think
01:23:04 ◼ ► would have correctly recognized, we can't parachute in and say we get all we get 30% of all car sales
01:23:09 ◼ ► now. Like, there's no room for you Apple, in the in the car sale business model value chain for you
01:23:16 ◼ ► to take pretty much any percentage, but certainly not 30%. Right? And repeat for any kind of
01:23:21 ◼ ► physical good. It just there's no way they could insert themselves into that would have been too
01:23:25 ◼ ► much of a barrier to the growth of their of their business. They say fine physical goods,
01:23:29 ◼ ► existing business plans, but for digital stuff, a lot of which Apple, quote unquote invented,
01:23:34 ◼ ► not really, but like, wrote, developed themselves that they developed a subscription system for
01:23:38 ◼ ► their App Store, they developed just the purchasing of apps they developed, you know, in app purchase,
01:23:42 ◼ ► like all these things they developed. That's not an existing business model and relationship because
01:23:49 ◼ ► again, the parties are the consumer, the developer and Apple, and they're making this thing together.
01:23:53 ◼ ► And so there is no existing business model with no room for Apple to take a cut. So that's they said,
01:24:00 ◼ ► okay, well, digital, we're going to take our cut. And you can even think of saying, okay, well,
01:24:03 ◼ ► physical goods are going to be physical goods, but the future of our business is digital goods.
01:24:07 ◼ ► And more and more games are more games, more and more things are becoming digital, like for example,
01:24:11 ◼ ► games, which when they were rolling this out, we're still mostly sold on plastic discs. And today are
01:24:15 ◼ ► mostly sold digital, or I imagine they're mostly sold digital. But anyway, the trend is clear.
01:24:19 ◼ ► Digital is the future. So if we're going to put our stake in the ground, we'll say physical goods,
01:24:23 ◼ ► you have your business models, we can't insert ourselves in digital, we'll, you know, we'll try
01:24:28 ◼ ► to take a cut of everything. Doesn't make any sense from a Apple deserves perspective. Doesn't
01:24:32 ◼ ► make any sense from a Yeah, but why? What is different about this? Even from a marginal cost
01:24:37 ◼ ► perspective, it may like the things that Ben was saying about, you could come up with percentages
01:24:42 ◼ ► based on whether the thing has marginal cost that makes sense from a customer corporate relationship
01:24:46 ◼ ► management perspective, because that's an example of a compromise that you could come to that has
01:24:50 ◼ ► rationale to say, we understand that you have to pay some incremental costs for every one of these
01:24:55 ◼ ► things, therefore, our percentage has to be less like that's the way Apple can work that deal out.
01:25:03 ◼ ► less of a philosophy for the entire structure. And a good example of the physical versus digital
01:25:20 ◼ ► ebooks decided that they're going to take the business model of physical books and just use that
01:25:25 ◼ ► one. Like there's an existing business model for physical books involving publishers, authors and
01:25:30 ◼ ► retailers and all that stuff. And when ebooks came around, the industry grew up saying, oh, yeah,
01:25:35 ◼ ► the paper book model, ebooks, we're going to use that same model, royalties, publishers, authors,
01:25:40 ◼ ► retailers, you know, the whole nine yards down to the point where, when the book went from hardcover
01:25:45 ◼ ► to softcover, the ebook price would decrease. Because the models were so joined at the hip.
01:25:51 ◼ ► Right? I'll find a link to my old ebook thing you can read about it. But it was it was grim.
01:25:56 ◼ ► It's better, slightly better today. But the book business was very dumb in many ways, right. But
01:26:01 ◼ ► that's an example of a digital business where Apple has had a lot of problems and where they haven't
01:26:07 ◼ ► been able to get such a big foothold because it was it was a digital business that was would model
01:26:12 ◼ ► itself on a physical one. And like I said, in the physical businesses, there's no room for Apple to
01:26:17 ◼ ► parachute in and say 30% for us. Because all the parties involved are like, who the hell are you?
01:26:23 ◼ ► You don't get 30% right. And obviously, because ebooks aren't physical, eventually, through wearing
01:26:29 ◼ ► them down, you can kind of, you know, because there actually is 30% there, because there's no
01:26:33 ◼ ► actual book like this. It works itself out. But it was just it was interesting to look at as an
01:26:37 ◼ ► example of Apple's possible rationale for the physical versus digital divide, which is, what
01:26:43 ◼ ► can we get away with? Right? Can we get away with asking for 30% for physical businesses? And you
01:26:48 ◼ ► just look around and say, no, can we get away with digital? And the answer was like, yeah, probably.
01:26:52 ◼ ► But it turns out, in a bunch of cases, not really, because the digital businesses that are like the
01:26:56 ◼ ► physical ones, say no room for you. And then eventually, in the digital businesses where
01:26:59 ◼ ► there are big powerful players, if Apple tries to hold the line as they are now, turns out,
01:27:07 ◼ ► vBooks, and no one wants to give you 30% of the Instagram ads and Facebook own Instagram. And it's
01:27:11 ◼ ► like, it's their their rationale was, like, it's not flimsy, but like, so sort of, it's non principled.
01:27:18 ◼ ► It's like, literally, what can we get away with? And it just so happened that what we can get away
01:27:23 ◼ ► with had this kind of guideline down the middle. It's like, it kind of looks like physical versus
01:27:26 ◼ ► digital. We can make that argument. But that I don't think is the reasoning at all. So it's not
01:27:31 ◼ ► about what they deserve. It's about what they thought they can get away with. And what they
01:27:35 ◼ ► thought they can get away with and what they can actually get away with, I think are diverging.
01:27:43 ◼ ► than that for like, like, why they don't take physical good commissions is they probably that
01:27:51 ◼ ► part puts them in a in a much messier and more risky place with disputes and chargebacks. Like,
01:27:57 ◼ ► I think it's I think it could be that simple where like, you know, when when you have an
01:28:00 ◼ ► Apple in app purchase transaction, Apple's the merchant, you know, you are paying Apple directly.
01:28:05 ◼ ► If you have an Apple Pay transaction on the web, you're paying the merchant directly and Apple Pay
01:28:11 ◼ ► is just like the it's like part of the credit card intermediary system. And so when there's a when
01:28:16 ◼ ► there's a dispute on a credit card payment, the merchant is the one who gets screwed out of that
01:28:26 ◼ ► refund the customer, and they will pull that out of the merchants account, and the merchant just
01:28:30 ◼ ► gets screwed. And so any dispute that would arise from, you know, an in app purchase, purchase,
01:28:38 ◼ ► Apple would be screwed out of that money. And I think it probably puts them in an easier position
01:28:43 ◼ ► with the credit card companies when negotiating, when negotiating like what to do about chargebacks,
01:28:47 ◼ ► that like, I bet if Apple just is only doing digital goods, then they can probably defend
01:28:54 ◼ ► a lot more chargeback things. Whereas for, you know, physical goods, if a merchant ships you a
01:29:01 ◼ ► physical thing that costs money, and then you do a chargeback, like the credit card company has to
01:29:06 ◼ ► be a little bit more careful. And there's probably different rules and different procedures and
01:29:10 ◼ ► different amounts of liability that everybody has in that process. So I think it probably is much
01:29:14 ◼ ► more likely as simple as Apple didn't want to get involved in like the physical goods disputes area.
01:29:21 ◼ ► Whereas with digital goods, disputes are much more straightforward and the cost of what somebody is
01:29:27 ◼ ► out who, you know, gave you an e-book for free is zero instead of, you know, some kind of massive
01:29:33 ◼ ► amount of money that they paid to build a car that is now somehow missing in the dispute process.
01:29:39 ◼ ► So part of what Apple can get away with is dictated by laws. And again, laws about the sale
01:29:44 ◼ ► and refunding and liability and physical goods, lots of those very well established physical
01:29:49 ◼ ► goods have been around for a long time. Laws surrounding the sale of digital goods and the
01:29:53 ◼ ► rights of customers and everything like that. Very practically non-existent compared to the laws
01:29:58 ◼ ► involving physical goods. So again, what can we get away with? Where can we insert ourselves?
01:30:02 ◼ ► And where will we be limited? If they were trying to do things in the physical world, like you said,
01:30:06 ◼ ► there are many, many laws and regulations and things that they would have to do right off the
01:30:10 ◼ ► bat, right? It's much harder to deal with that, right? Then the digital world where, and I think
01:30:16 ◼ ► the idea was because this is digital world that Apple and its envisioning of itself is inventing,
01:30:20 ◼ ► right? Like we're, we're, we're inventing this world. We're innovating, we're doing digital
01:30:24 ◼ ► descriptions or whatever. We can do whatever we want. We make all the rules because everything
01:30:28 ◼ ► is just bits and we're the bit company. And there are so few consumer protection laws and
01:30:33 ◼ ► laws relating to refunds and everything like that, that if we decide that developers can't give
01:30:37 ◼ ► refunds, then we'll just, we'll be the only ones who give refunds. And if we decide that if we
01:30:41 ◼ ► don't want to give you the refund, we won't, no one's going to stop us because there's no laws
01:30:44 ◼ ► surrounding refunds based on that. And again, there are state laws and there, you know, there are
01:30:48 ◼ ► digital laws related to digital commerce meant more than there were before, but compared to the
01:30:53 ◼ ► world of physical goods, where there's so many regulations down to this specific regulations for
01:30:57 ◼ ► specific kinds of physical goods. Like if you're, you know, I mean, to give an example, if you're
01:31:02 ◼ ► buying fertilizer, there's much more in different rules now than there were like a couple of decades
01:31:07 ◼ ► ago for lots of very sad reasons, right? Buying, you know, anything like live animals, buying
01:31:13 ◼ ► power tools, buying cars, like specific, very targeted laws. If you think about all the laws
01:31:19 ◼ ► involving buying and selling physical goods and how detailed they are and how specific they are,
01:31:24 ◼ ► then compare them to the laws surrounding the buying and selling of digital goods. You realize
01:31:29 ◼ ► the digital world is extremely unregulated, which is great for competition when everything is working
01:31:37 ◼ ► well, but when a few large players come to dominate, it means they get to set all the rules.
01:31:42 ◼ ► And it just so happens they all seem to pick rules that look very similar to each other. Again,
01:31:45 ◼ ► not because of collusion, but mostly because those rules benefit the big companies and give them more
01:31:50 ◼ ► and more power with which they can crush their competitors, leaving only one company being what,
01:31:54 ◼ ► by and large? MomCo? Pick your, what's the mom one in Futurama? Anyway, that's the future we're
01:32:01 ◼ ► trying to avoid. And whether they know it or not, that's the future these big companies are trying
01:32:06 ◼ ► to achieve. And I think everyone would be sad, including them, if they actually achieved it.
01:32:10 ◼ ► They just, you know, we've said of Apple thinks of itself as a scrappy upstart, but I think all
01:32:14 ◼ ► these companies have a difficult time envisioning themselves as bad or evil, except for Facebook.
01:32:22 ◼ ► They probably recognize that they're bad or evil. I know I bash on Facebook so much. A lot of it is
01:32:27 ◼ ► joking, but a lot of it is not. I'm sorry. I don't like them. But they deserve it. They deserve all
01:32:32 ◼ ► of it. Facebook makes Apple look like saints. Apple is like your good friend who's really
01:32:38 ◼ ► been a jerk recently. Facebook is like the devil themselves. It's like this very different level
01:32:53 ◼ ► they're losing sight of their effect on the world. But I think they probably mostly believe
01:33:02 ◼ ► that what they're doing is good for the whole world. Obviously, they're playing the game like
01:33:08 ◼ ► we want to win. We're Facebook. We want to defeat our competitors. And they have no problem doing
01:33:11 ◼ ► the Microsoft style tactics of buying your competitors or crushing your competitors through
01:33:16 ◼ ► anti-competitive mean and all that stuff or whatever. But the end that they're pursuing
01:33:22 ◼ ► is a connected world where we can all communicate with each other and yada, yada. And yes, they get
01:33:25 ◼ ► a big cut of that. But in the end, I think they actually buy into that division. They're just
01:33:29 ◼ ► very, very mistaken about what it is that they're actually doing. And that's why I get angry at them
01:33:36 ◼ ► because it's like, "I'm not going to be able to convince you that what you're doing is bad.
01:33:56 ◼ ► like Twitter exists, but Facebook, I feel like is... They're not at Microsoft level still. Again,
01:34:02 ◼ ► it's hard to convey exactly how dominant Microsoft was at its peak. Facebook is not as dominant as
01:34:07 ◼ ► Microsoft was, but it's much closer. Facebook, at least in the US anyway, obviously the rest of the
01:34:14 ◼ ► world has different social networks, but in the US and I thought the last stats I seen recently,
01:34:37 ◼ ► Whether you're working on a personal project or managing your enterprise's infrastructure,
01:34:41 ◼ ► Linode Cloud Hosting has the pricing, support and scale you need to take your project to the
01:34:46 ◼ ► next level. With 11 data centers worldwide, enterprise grade hardware and the next generation
01:34:51 ◼ ► network, Linode Cloud Hosting delivers server performance you expect at a price that honestly
01:34:57 ◼ ► you might not expect. And our listeners, when you sign up for a new account, can get a $20 credit
01:35:02 ◼ ► when you use promo code ATP2020. Linode Cloud Hosting is amazing for running servers. Whatever
01:35:09 ◼ ► your needs might be from big to small, from general purpose to specialized, they have you
01:35:15 ◼ ► covered. Their plans start at just $5 a month and they have all sorts of stuff above and beyond that
01:35:20 ◼ ► depending on what your needs might be, including specialty plans like dedicated CPU or high memory
01:35:25 ◼ ► plans or GPU compute plans. It's amazing what Linode can do for you for all your server hosting
01:35:31 ◼ ► needs. It's super easy to use. I've personally been a very happy Linode customer for about eight
01:35:37 ◼ ► or nine years now. I'm just very happy they're long before they were a sponsor. This is why I'm
01:35:41 ◼ ► so happy to have them as a sponsor because I'm able to honestly say I love them. I use them. I've
01:35:46 ◼ ► been using them. I chose them totally on my own, objectively, way before they ever sponsor anything
01:35:51 ◼ ► I did because it's just such a great host for running servers. I absolutely love Linode and I
01:35:56 ◼ ► think you will too. Also, their hiring, if that interests you, I think for our audience it's a
01:36:01 ◼ ► pretty good pick, go to linode.com/careers to find out more about that. For everybody else looking to
01:36:06 ◼ ► run some servers, check out Linode. They have amazing value, amazing servers, amazing support
01:36:11 ◼ ► if you need it. I'm a huge fan. Linode.com/ATP to find out more and get a $20 credit when you use
01:36:18 ◼ ► promo code ATP2020. Once again, that's linode.com/ATP and a $20 credit for new accounts with
01:36:26 ◼ ► promo code ATP2020. Thank you so much to Linode for hosting all my stuff and for sponsoring our
01:36:32 ◼ ► show. All right, let's do some Ask ATP and James Andrews writes, "John, when you did your MacOS
01:36:40 ◼ ► reviews, how much actually was that OS X still at that point or did you were you during the MacOS
01:36:46 ◼ ► era?" No, I was in the MacOS X era and the OS X era. Okay, see there you go. Wow, gosh, it's been
01:36:53 ◼ ► so long, John. It's been so long. Literally as Casey was reading that question, John went into
01:36:59 ◼ ► the show notes document and put a space between Mac and OS. Because I feel like you could still
01:37:05 ◼ ► say generically Mac OS, which is the Mac operating system. There was no product name that was based
01:37:11 ◼ ► on Next Step, Unix, blah, blah, blah. There was a classic Mac OS. Anyway, yeah, it looks gross when
01:37:15 ◼ ► it stuck. Who is it that always insists on capitalizing the M? Does Gruber do that? Gruber
01:37:21 ◼ ► does it, yeah. Yeah, no, I don't like that. Anyway, I hate the lowercase M, don't get me wrong, but I
01:37:25 ◼ ► feel like if that's what they named it, then that's... Anyway, go on. Here's the question.
01:37:29 ◼ ► Let me just try this all over again. "John, when you did your MacOS reviews, how much of the review
01:37:34 ◼ ► changed between the review content based on beta releases and final release? Or how much of the
01:37:39 ◼ ► OS could you bank on staying the same versus stuff that changed? Was it consistent?" I remember during
01:37:45 ◼ ► the run of the show, you complaining and moaning unjustifiably about screenshots and how you had
01:37:50 ◼ ► to take them 84 times because every single time you took them, something changed. But I would
01:37:55 ◼ ► assume that some of the content also changed as well. So what do you say to James? I can say that
01:37:59 ◼ ► it definitely wasn't consistent, that's for sure. The fear was always there, and the worst case
01:38:04 ◼ ► scenario... I mean, screenshots were bad and just gave you that sinking feeling when you'd see the
01:38:09 ◼ ► GM build and they change some subtle thing that appears in every single window and you're like,
01:38:16 ◼ ► Yeah, that's bad, but it's kind of a known quantity. The worst ones, though, were if there
01:38:23 ◼ ► was some... And this is... I had so little access to Apple back then, not that I have any access now,
01:38:27 ◼ ► but I had even less access to Apple back then, like zero access to Apple. It was just me out
01:38:33 ◼ ► there in the wild, and it wasn't even social networks like Twitter where I had a chance to
01:38:37 ◼ ► bump into and talk directly to Apple engineers secretly or in public. So there'd be things in
01:38:42 ◼ ► the OS, and I'd be like, "Is this supposed to be this way, or is this just a bug? Or is this
01:38:58 ◼ ► And so behaviors, anything that I could think about, it was never clear to me whether it was
01:39:05 ◼ ► on purpose or not. And the worst thing that would happen is there'd be some kind of new change in
01:39:09 ◼ ► behavior or UI or whatever, and it would be a thing that I had a lot to say about. And I would
01:39:15 ◼ ► spend a page and a half explaining why this is bad or a page and a half explaining why this is good
01:39:22 ◼ ► or whatever and just make it a big part of the writing. And then three betas in, they would
01:39:26 ◼ ► totally change that. It's like, "But I was just building my review around this thing, but it turns
01:39:32 ◼ ► out you changed your mind, or it was just a bug, or that feature isn't shipping in those OS, and
01:39:36 ◼ ► you pulled the code for it out, and then you have to rewrite." And it's harder to do this to make
01:39:41 ◼ ► screenshots over again. At least you say, "Here's the old screenshot. I just got to make it look
01:39:44 ◼ ► like that." It's a fairly mindless activity. Rewriting, especially I always tried to have
01:39:48 ◼ ► some kind of narrative structure to these reviews. Rewriting the review, especially at the last
01:39:53 ◼ ► minute-ish, like as in the second to last or maybe even the final beta or whatever, and they change
01:39:58 ◼ ► something, you're like, "Oh, even if it's a bad thing, I spent three pages yelling at you about
01:40:02 ◼ ► this, and you just pulled the feature. Now I got to remove all that and fix it all together."
01:40:12 ◼ ► Things would change up to the last second. You could never rely on, even if it's like, "Oh,
01:40:18 ◼ ► this is the GM build." No, the really real GM build, you always had to go for every build,
01:40:23 ◼ ► and more frantically as time went on, install it as fast as you can and go through every single
01:40:28 ◼ ► thing you wrote about over and over and over again and say, "Is this the same? Is this the same? Is
01:40:31 ◼ ► this still true? Is this still true?" It was really bad. It was a little bit better in the early days
01:40:41 ◼ ► because you'd have to go into a physical store and buy it and whatever. But eventually it became
01:40:47 ◼ ► the second the thing was downloadable by consumers. So the timing of making sure that you got the
01:40:54 ◼ ► final build and verified everything in it and rewrote and retook screenshots and had it ready
01:40:58 ◼ ► to go the second the thing was released. That's why I still have those school nightmares. I have
01:41:04 ◼ ► like the MAGOS 10 review deadline nightmares. Just not cut out for that kind of pressure cooker. And
01:41:18 ◼ ► - Michael Boyle writes, "What approach or tools do you use to filter spam email? Do you use G Suite
01:41:27 ◼ ► services, third-party dedicated spam filtering services, built-in email services on a basic
01:41:31 ◼ ► web post plus spam assassin or other, client-side filtering like Spamciv or just the built-in Apple
01:41:36 ◼ ► mail filtering?" For me, I have a Google backed email address and I rely on their stuff and the
01:41:46 ◼ ► - I've gone through a bunch of things over the years. I used to do Apple mail junk filtering
01:41:52 ◼ ► back forever ago. It was always okay. It was never great. I never used a lot of the alternatives out
01:42:00 ◼ ► there. I've never used Gmail, but I have used FastMail for a very long time. And for a while,
01:42:07 ◼ ► I used their built-in spam filtering, which is just running, I assume it was like a spam assassin,
01:42:17 ◼ ► filter thing. And then for a long time after that, I used MailRoute. They were a sponsor of ours a
01:42:23 ◼ ► few years back and they gave us free accounts. And so I've been using MailRoute, coincidentally,
01:42:30 ◼ ► literally for that entire time until this week. I literally just switched away from it this week.
01:42:35 ◼ ► And it's not that they did anything horribly wrong, but they've had a few additional false...
01:42:44 ◼ ► What's the thing where it reports good mail as spam? Is that a false positive or a false negative?
01:42:51 ◼ ► - It's confusing because spam isn't positive, but what it's supposed to be doing is identifying spam
01:42:58 ◼ ► - Got it. Anyway, so MailRoute has been great for all these years, but in the last month or so,
01:43:10 ◼ ► switching away from it. I haven't actually ended my account or anything. I'm just like,
01:43:14 ◼ ► temporarily, I pointed my MXs directly at FastMail and I'm trying FastMail's built-in stuff only.
01:43:20 ◼ ► One of the good things about FastMail's thing is it allows you to train it. You can tell it,
01:43:26 ◼ ► like, this folder, which I've set to my archive folder, use this as the training example of
01:43:31 ◼ ► not spam. So anything I archive is trained to be not spam. And then there's a separate folder.
01:43:36 ◼ ► There's one folder which is what they've filtered as junk. There's another folder that you can
01:43:41 ◼ ► designate, any folder in your IMAP account, you can designate as, like, learn that this folder
01:43:46 ◼ ► is spam. And so I'm putting stuff into that folder that I manually catch that they didn't catch,
01:43:54 ◼ ► So I've only been doing this for a few days, so take this with a grain of salt. But so far,
01:44:00 ◼ ► FastMail's modern spam filtering, which is, I think, significantly more advanced than the old
01:44:06 ◼ ► SpamAssassin-type server, I think it's pretty good so far. And it's also noticeably faster than
01:44:12 ◼ ► MailRoute for new stuff to come in and everything. I don't think they're doing gray-listing as
01:44:15 ◼ ► aggressively and everything, so it's actually quite nice. So anyway, that's my solution,
01:44:30 ◼ ► So I use Gmail and Gmail spam filtering, and it's mostly okay. I mean, I still have to wrangle it a
01:44:40 ◼ ► little bit, and there are certain things that just doesn't seem to want to learn, but in general,
01:44:43 ◼ ► it doesn't bother me. I bet I have many email addresses, so I have exposure to a lot of other
01:44:46 ◼ ► ones. Back in the day, when I was using POP and IMAP and everything, I used SpamSieve and loved it,
01:44:50 ◼ ► but it's kind of the, as I talk about before, my sort of switch from client-side to server-side.
01:44:56 ◼ ► I'm happy to have it all server-side. For server-side, I also use MailRoute on one of my
01:45:00 ◼ ► addresses. I think MailRoute was a former sponsor, and I'm happy with it, how it works on my one
01:45:05 ◼ ► account that I use it on. I get the emails that show me the messages that it's not sure about or
01:45:10 ◼ ► whatever, and it's right like 100% of the time, but that's a low-volume account, so it's pretty
01:45:14 ◼ ► easy to do. But I'm happy that I have that because it catches a ton of stuff. What I want from a low
01:45:19 ◼ ► volume email, I want it to actually be low volume, but if you get any publicly accessible email
01:45:23 ◼ ► address, if something becomes flooded with spam, instead what MailRoute does for me in that account
01:45:26 ◼ ► is, or I have several accounts actually going through it, it makes it so they are low volume,
01:45:31 ◼ ► only legit emails get through. The thing I want to talk about though is, I also have, you know,
01:45:36 ◼ ► multiple, but anyway, Apple iCloud accounts, and iCloud accounts come with their own email address,
01:45:42 ◼ ► right? And I use Apple Mail on my phone to receive them because I have no choice because it's
01:45:50 ◼ ► and so it's set up with one or more of my iCloud accounts. I use Apple Mail on my phone,
01:45:56 ◼ ► and I'm surprised when this question said, where is it, you know, built-in Apple Mail filtering,
01:46:06 ◼ ► my iCloud Apple email address does no spam filtering whatsoever because the spammiest messages
01:46:14 ◼ ► in the entire universe come in like a flood to that email address. Viagra, Russian mail order
01:46:21 ◼ ► brides, mesothelioma, like the worst kind of spam, things in languages that I don't understand,
01:46:28 ◼ ► you know, Chinese language things, Russian, Italian, just like, how can you not tell this
01:46:33 ◼ ► is spam? This is the easiest to detect spam in the world, and it's like 100% of it comes through.
01:46:39 ◼ ► And then what I do in reaction to that, what I still do, is I use this horrible Apple Mail
01:46:43 ◼ ► interface and hit the little reply button and scroll down to find the file as junk thing.
01:46:50 ◼ ► I do that hoping against all hope that hitting that button somehow tells something in the Apple
01:46:56 ◼ ► Mail world to learn that this is spam, but I think it does nothing except remove the message to a
01:47:01 ◼ ► folder. So Apple's quote-unquote spam filtering is apparently, from my perspective, non-existent
01:47:09 ◼ ► and non-functional, and yet every day I have to go in there and clean out that stupid spam because
01:47:14 ◼ ► I'm forced to have an Apple Mail account that's configured with a thing so I can send outgoing
01:47:18 ◼ ► mail from my phone. Thumbs down for Apple Mail. Wait, slow down. Why do you need it to send
01:47:24 ◼ ► outgoing mail from your phone? To send outgoing mail you have to configure an account in the
01:47:38 ◼ ► why not just add Gmail though? Because Apple Mail on iOS can't handle my Gmail account,
01:47:42 ◼ ► are you kidding? It can't handle that much mail. It would just, like, I think I did that in the
01:47:49 ◼ ► early days. There's no way, there's no way. Like, I don't want Apple Mail anywhere near my Gmail
01:47:54 ◼ ► account and there's just no way it would be, like, I don't even want it having to try to download
01:47:58 ◼ ► that amount of mail each day in the background or whatever it's doing. Like, just, like, in theory,
01:48:03 ◼ ► the accounts that I use with my Apple Mail thing, I just use my Apple ones because I'm like, well,
01:48:07 ◼ ► I know the Apple Mail client will work with the Apple Mail server, so I feel like they're a match
01:48:11 ◼ ► set. But I have to have one configured because you can't send outgoing mail through it until you
01:48:15 ◼ ► configure an account. Fair enough. Finally, Chris Anderson writes, "Like many listeners, I'm sure
01:48:22 ◼ ► I've amassed quite the collection of cables over the years, USB-A, micro USB, Lightning, Ethernet,
01:48:27 ◼ ► HDMI power, etc. The list goes on and on. Any suggestions on how to effectively store and
01:48:32 ◼ ► organize all those cables at home? I'm sure one solution would be to downsize the collection,
01:48:35 ◼ ► but you never know when you're going to need 20 USB cables all at once." I don't really have a
01:48:41 ◼ ► good answer for this. So Marco, do you have something good here? I would suggest not storing
01:48:48 ◼ ► or organizing too many of these cables. Whatever you are currently using, I would say—and you might
01:48:57 ◼ ► be using more than you think—like, actually add up what you're using and keep in reserve, like,
01:49:01 ◼ ► 20% more, you know, for the very common types. For the very uncommon types, I would say keep, like,
01:49:10 ◼ ► one to two of each one that you still have any potential use for in your house. Like, obviously,
01:49:18 ◼ ► if you don't have any devices that use, like, FireWire anymore, you don't need to keep any
01:49:23 ◼ ► FireWire cables. That's an easy one. Not everybody practices this, but that's an easy one. Just
01:49:28 ◼ ► throw away any cable that you no longer have a device for. But yeah, for stuff like, you know,
01:49:34 ◼ ► USB cables. Well, yeah, we do need a lot of USB cables, but almost everything that needs a USB
01:49:41 ◼ ► cable comes with a USB cable also. So you don't need to keep that many in reserve. You're basically
01:49:46 ◼ ► keeping in reserve, like, either cables for specialty needs, like super long or super short
01:49:51 ◼ ► ones, or cables to replace other cables that get worn or broken or lost. And that—unless that
01:49:59 ◼ ► happens a lot in your house, like, if you're burning through—you know, maybe keep the USB-8
01:50:04 ◼ ► or Lightning ones that your kid's iPad uses, because those will get burned through a lot.
01:50:11 ◼ ► At any given time—like, everyone's had one of these stories in life—I've been there, trust me—where
01:50:17 ◼ ► you are—you don't have the right cable. Right now, I actually have this going on right now.
01:50:22 ◼ ► I don't have an HDMI cable. I need one. I don't have one. I have to order one. It's gonna take,
01:50:26 ◼ ► you know, three days to get here. Had I just kept an extra HDMI cable at some point in my life,
01:50:32 ◼ ► maybe I wouldn't be in this situation. Anyway, we've all been in the situation where you need
01:50:34 ◼ ► a cable, and you have to, like, go to Best Buy or something, and you have to get the stupid
01:50:40 ◼ ► gold-plated one for $45, and you're just like, "Ugh! I know I'm being ripped off, but I need this
01:50:47 ◼ ► cable today. I can't get, you know, any drones or trucks to deliver it to me same day. So I just—I
01:50:54 ◼ ► have to just eat it and just buy it." And then that scars you for life. And then after that point,
01:50:59 ◼ ► you'll never throw away a cable, because what if you need this someday? Because you were burned
01:51:04 ◼ ► once. And it's important to be able to examine this feeling and this trauma and this past battle
01:51:11 ◼ ► that you fought and learned this lesson from and try to unlearn it, because chances are
01:51:17 ◼ ► that doesn't happen very often for almost any cable type. And you're probably doing yourself
01:51:23 ◼ ► a disservice by keeping, like, three bins worth of cables of which you will only ever use maybe
01:51:33 ◼ ► three or four of. You know, most of those cables are going to sit around for years and years and
01:51:38 ◼ ► years until you finally realize, "Oh, I—it's been a while since I've used a parallel cable.
01:51:43 ◼ ► I guess I can finally throw this away." So, like, you know, ideally, don't let it get to that point.
01:51:50 ◼ ► Ideally, go through that process of throwing things away as you get them. So right now,
01:51:55 ◼ ► for instance, almost every device that I buy that comes with a micro-USB cable, I just throw it
01:52:02 ◼ ► right away. Like, literally, like, I empty the box out over the trash can. I take the device out,
01:52:08 ◼ ► and I empty over the trash can the manual, the USB-A to micro cable, and, like, the little plastic
01:52:15 ◼ ► thing that holds it in the box. I just dump it all out. All that's garbage. Get rid of it.
01:52:20 ◼ ► There's no reason to even keep a micro-USB to A cable from me now because I have so many of them
01:52:25 ◼ ► all over the place that when a new one comes into the house, it just goes straight into the garbage.
01:52:28 ◼ ► I'm almost to that point with Apple's Lightning cables. Apple's Lightning to A cables, but we—again,
01:52:34 ◼ ► we're burning through those because we have an iPad problem, so we're burning through those
01:52:38 ◼ ► kind of quickly these days, so I'm keeping those. But, like, you know, even, like, you know,
01:52:43 ◼ ► certainly a USB-A to B cable, almost anything that has a USB-B port comes with a USB-A to B cable.
01:52:52 ◼ ► As you're transitioning to USB-C, we need even fewer of these old cables. If it's something that
01:52:58 ◼ ► I'm bringing with me for travel, it doesn't need to be USB-A at all because my travel setup is all
01:53:04 ◼ ► USB-C. Adopt a strategy of aggressively throwing things away as you go. How many Ethernet cables
01:53:12 ◼ ► do you really need? You know, it's more than zero, probably, but I bet it's less than 15.
01:53:16 ◼ ► You know, how many HDMI cables do you need? Well, how many HDMI inputs do you have in your house?
01:53:22 ◼ ► Three to eight, probably, total. Like, do you really need more than eight HDMI cables total,
01:53:30 ◼ ► including the ones that are already connected to the TV? Probably not. All right, so you can
01:53:34 ◼ ► kind of do this kind of exercise. Like, just anything that you think odds are pretty low I'll
01:53:39 ◼ ► ever actually need this many of this thing, just throw it away. And ideally, the cable collection
01:53:46 ◼ ► that you should be left with after doing that kind of, you know, thorough and ruthless purging of
01:53:52 ◼ ► your collection should be so small that you don't need to put much effort into organizing it.
01:53:58 ◼ ► It should organize itself because there should only be, like, a handful of cables left.
01:54:06 ◼ ► Poor Chris just wanted to know how to store and organize cables and we're all just telling
01:54:09 ◼ ► him to get rid of his cables, which he just specifically said he didn't want to be told to do.
01:54:13 ◼ ► My life is complicated by the fact that, like, the Marco rule of, like, when you no longer have
01:54:18 ◼ ► devices to use the cable, you can get rid of them does not help me because I don't get rid of my
01:54:22 ◼ ► devices. I have devices that need SCSI cables, so of course I'm going to keep the SCSI cable.
01:54:31 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah, yeah. But anyway, I have a lot of cables and having spare cables is handy too. But
01:54:38 ◼ ► my sort of management technique for this, and by the way, the two things you mentioned,
01:54:45 ◼ ► And, you know, it's constantly annoying me. Like, if I need to hook up, like, a single other device,
01:54:49 ◼ ► if I even know that I find out I have zero Ethernet cables in the house and then I buy one, right,
01:54:52 ◼ ► and every time that happens, I'm like, I have zero Ethernet cables. When I got the Mac Pro,
01:54:56 ◼ ► I actually did buy some new Ethernet cables, but I think I'm using all of them, so I think I'm back
01:54:59 ◼ ► to zero. Same thing with HDMI. I have, I found an HDMI cable that went bad, that was driving me
01:55:05 ◼ ► bad-y for a little while, back before I got my Mac Pro, and I put a big, like, piece of tape on it
01:55:10 ◼ ► that said "bad," because it wasn't totally bad. It would work sometimes. Oh my god, John.
01:55:15 ◼ ► It was the only, but here's the thing, it was the only one I had in the house. Like, every other one
01:55:19 ◼ ► was connected to a device. Oh my god. I think it might have been when I got my PlayStation monitor.
01:55:24 ◼ ► This was literally the only one that I had. I couldn't get rid of it because then I could not
01:55:28 ◼ ► use it at all, but it was bad because occasionally it would conk out and I'd have to unplug it and
01:55:32 ◼ ► plug it back in, but it was better than zero. But as soon as I got my, you know, got back on my cable
01:55:37 ◼ ► buying spree, the bad one goes in the garbage, right? So my advice for storing and organizing
01:55:48 ◼ ► have the sort of the registers, the L1 cache, be the cables you actually need to use with your
01:55:53 ◼ ► devices, the Marko rule, right? So when I got my whole big Mac Pro setup, I had a big pile of cables
01:55:57 ◼ ► that no longer plugged into anything in this room. Every single one of those cables went to L2 cache,
01:56:02 ◼ ► or maybe L3, whatever my attic is, right? HDMI cables, I have the connected ones. I have an
01:56:08 ◼ ► accessible small amount as my L2, and then my L3 is I have a Tupperware bin where I keep HDMI cables,
01:56:13 ◼ ► you know, now that I have more of them than I need, right? So have a caching hierarchy,
01:56:17 ◼ ► and what you can do with the caching hierarchy is, you know, just in the ones that you use all the
01:56:20 ◼ ► time, like constantly reassess those, because if you literally have no micro USB devices that you
01:56:24 ◼ ► use, that should not be, you should not ever see that cable. And as you graduate cables up the
01:56:29 ◼ ► hierarchy, you will eventually sometime come to like one of these Tupperware containers,
01:56:33 ◼ ► and you'll open it, and you, at that point, you'll realize either that the cables have become so old
01:56:39 ◼ ► and brittle and disgusting, you need to throw them out because they're gross, and they're probably
01:56:42 ◼ ► broken. Or B, you realize, actually, I don't have any devices that use this cable anymore,
01:56:46 ◼ ► and you'll just throw them out. But you need to get them, you need to get them out of your life
01:56:51 ◼ ► before you get them out of your house. That will help you with organizing them. And if you think
01:56:55 ◼ ► you need, you have so many cables that you need literally in your life that you need to organize
01:56:59 ◼ ► them into like, I people like the idea of having a big drawer that you can pull out and see all the
01:57:03 ◼ ► cables, but that's too much in your life. Unless you actually run a computer repair store or
01:57:07 ◼ ► something, you don't need that ready access to these cables. They can go into the more distant
01:57:12 ◼ ► caches. You'll know they're there when they need them, if you need to write down where they are,
01:57:15 ◼ ► or whatever. But then you care less about them being neatly coiled or divided or labeled. They're
01:57:19 ◼ ► just, they're out of, they're out of sight. And the out of sight stuff, when you go on your various
01:57:25 ◼ ► purges, that's where you purge from. Because you'll find that easier when you, when you literally
01:57:28 ◼ ► haven't seen it for a year, and you come upon it again in a Tupperware thing, it's much easier to
01:57:32 ◼ ► dump it than if it had been sitting coiled perfectly in a little drawer next to your desk
01:57:36 ◼ ► the whole time. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Linode, Backblaze, and Mint Mobile. And thank you
01:57:42 ◼ ► to our members who support us directly. If you want to become a member and get some cool benefits,
01:58:53 ◼ ► So right before we started recording, something appeared in the After Show section of the show
01:59:09 ◼ ► I saw this too. Right at that moment, I'm like, "Oh no, this is not good. Oh John, what's, what's up?"
01:59:19 ◼ ► It's one of those, no. It's one of those things where, it's like one of those, not a slow moving
01:59:25 ◼ ► disaster, but like it's kind of a gradual thing where I'm trying to pinpoint like, "When did this
01:59:29 ◼ ► all begin?" Because it begins innocuously and you don't pinpoint the time, right? Here's how it
01:59:34 ◼ ► began. I'm pretty sure this is, this is where it began. I was back from my vacation and I was
01:59:41 ◼ ► making another photo book as I do after my vacations. This is going to be the first non,
01:59:45 ◼ ► well, it's not the first non-Long Island photo book, but it's going to be the first year without
01:59:47 ◼ ► a Long Island photo book. I've made photo books of my trips to other places like Walt Disney World or
01:59:52 ◼ ► whatever, but anyway. I'm making my photo book and I made it all up and after you submit the photo
01:59:58 ◼ ► book, like it takes a while to upload all the images, much, not because of my connection,
02:00:04 ◼ ► Fapple Photos is preparing the photos and uploading it and blah, blah, blah." So I left. I left,
02:00:09 ◼ ► like, "Fine, you go upload these computers." And I was, and then I just like watch a TV show
02:00:14 ◼ ► with my family. And then I, and then later I'm like, "Oh yeah, the computer's probably done doing
02:00:17 ◼ ► that book." And I came back in and the screen was off and I'm like, "Oh, it must've gone to sleep.
02:00:24 ◼ ► It must've finished the upload and gone to sleep." But then I couldn't wake it up. I was like, "Huh."
02:00:29 ◼ ► You know, I tried, you know, space bar, mouse button, you know, like the fans were going,
02:00:36 ◼ ► but it wasn't, nothing was happening. So I went to another computer and checked, couldn't ping it,
02:00:40 ◼ ► couldn't SSH. Right. And I'm like, "Well, I don't know. Well, maybe, maybe that, maybe the thing
02:00:45 ◼ ► crashed something in the photo extension. Who knows what could have happened?" It was so long
02:00:49 ◼ ► though. I'm like, "Surely the book went through." Right. And so I, I hard reset my computer, held
02:00:55 ◼ ► down the power button. The thing booted back up. I could see in the email, there was a confirmation
02:00:58 ◼ ► email and I think the book is actually being shipped to me now. So I'm hoping when the book
02:01:02 ◼ ► arrives, it hasn't arrived yet, but I hope when it arrives that it will have all the pictures in it.
02:01:05 ◼ ► Like, you know, anyway, I think the book actually did go through, but that was the first instance
02:01:09 ◼ ► I can remember of, you know, I couldn't wake my computer up. Right. And then a couple of days
02:01:15 ◼ ► later, similar thing happened where I wasn't doing anything of note in particular, but then I went up
02:01:20 ◼ ► to my computer to wake it up and it didn't wake up. Like it was asleep, dead asleep. Right. And
02:01:26 ◼ ► then I hit the space bar and the fans would spin up. Like, like it's coming back to life. Right.
02:01:30 ◼ ► And I could hear my hard drive spin up, my, my few spinning hard drives in there, but it wouldn't,
02:01:35 ◼ ► wouldn't wake up. Same deal. Can't SSH in. Can't, you know, can't ping, can't do anything. Right.
02:01:40 ◼ ► And yes, I have SSH enabled in this computer and all that stuff. It's the thing I do all the time.
02:01:44 ◼ ► I don't think I had time to investigate it then, but then like the next day I was thinking about
02:01:50 ◼ ► it. I'm like, wait a second. Cause I'd been messing with my sleep settings cause I'd been doing some
02:01:54 ◼ ► long running stuff. And then sometimes various times I have a Mac configured to never go to sleep,
02:01:58 ◼ ► but I manually put it to sleep sometimes. And I also have it scheduled to wake up in the middle
02:02:02 ◼ ► of the night and do things. And for awhile, it was like, maybe it's waking up in the middle of the
02:02:05 ◼ ► night and flipping out about something or whatever. But eventually after a couple of days, it's like,
02:02:10 ◼ ► all right, maybe there's something wrong here. So, you know, I do an experiment, put my computer
02:02:15 ◼ ► to sleep manually, which I hadn't done a long time. Cause I've been doing those long running
02:02:18 ◼ ► tasks, try to wake it up. Doesn't wake up hard reset and do that experiment a couple of times.
02:02:24 ◼ ► And I start to come to this drawing realization that my computer no longer wakes from sleep.
02:02:32 ◼ ► Right. And I'm thinking what changed recently. And it's hard to pinpoint cause you're like,
02:02:38 ◼ ► when did this really happen? Was the photo book thing that really the first one or did the photo
02:02:41 ◼ ► book thing really crash? Like what's what happened recently? So I, I start going through basic
02:02:51 ◼ ► but the first thing I'm always thinking of was sleep wake is, you know, I go into PM set of
02:02:55 ◼ ► looking at the sleep wake log. I have like, I have all I'm when I tried to do, like, when I first got
02:02:59 ◼ ► it and tried to stop it from waking itself up right from stuff I had, I had set up a lot of
02:03:04 ◼ ► systems for looking at all the sleep and wake reasons and everything like that. But the problem
02:03:08 ◼ ► with this situation was it would go to sleep and the logs would all say, yep, totally. I'm going
02:03:13 ◼ ► to sleep just like you told me to. And the next log message would be booting up. Like there was
02:03:18 ◼ ► nothing happening. Like when I thought I was waking it up, it never got to the point where it woke up.
02:03:23 ◼ ► Like there were no other logs. It was the last log message would be, I'm going to sleep. And the next
02:03:26 ◼ ► log message would be hello, I'm booting. Right. And so my sleep wake logs and everything else
02:03:32 ◼ ► weren't helping. Then I went into just, okay, let me try all the different sleep settings,
02:03:35 ◼ ► power nap on and off, uh, spin hard drives up on it. Like all settings that I had configured and
02:03:40 ◼ ► messed with earlier, but I'm like, maybe there's something wonky about something or others. Let me
02:03:44 ◼ ► see if changing any of these software settings helps. Nothing helps. You know, no matter what
02:03:48 ◼ ► I had it set to you put it to sleep and that was it. It would not wake back up again. Right.
02:03:53 ◼ ► Then I'm starting to, well, I think I did a really reasonably sensible thing, which is like,
02:03:58 ◼ ► I have big Sur on an external desk. I'm like, well, one of the things that happened recently
02:04:03 ◼ ► is upgraded to 10, 15, six, right. That was like recently like less weakish or something,
02:04:08 ◼ ► or I don't know. Anyway, it's, it's a recent, it's a recent OS update. It's like maybe 10,
02:04:11 ◼ ► 15, six broke sleep, broke sleep on the Mac pro. And it's not the type of thing I'm likely to hear
02:04:15 ◼ ► about because nobody has these computers. Let me boot into big Sur. So I put into big Sur,
02:04:24 ◼ ► And you know, I repeat that, but the computer's leaving big Sur. It doesn't wake up. I'm like,
02:04:27 ◼ ► all right. All right. Now, now I'm suspecting hardware. Cause if this is a software thing,
02:04:32 ◼ ► it's not 10, 15, six, and it's not big Sur beta five. Cause they both do it and it's exactly the
02:04:38 ◼ ► same symptoms. So now I think I have a hardware thing. So I'm like, okay, hardware thing. The
02:04:42 ◼ ► first thing I look at, can you guess the first thing I look at on my desk? Your screen. Why would
02:04:49 ◼ ► it be your screen though? No USB hub. I always suspect the USB hub because they're like, well,
02:04:55 ◼ ► you know, this is, I've had this USB hub. This is the one piece of hardware I've still had from,
02:04:59 ◼ ► that I use with my old Mac pro. So I'm suspicious of that. So like yank that out of the computer,
02:05:04 ◼ ► right? Just disconnected entirely. And this, this is such a pain because due to my wiring thing,
02:05:08 ◼ ► I actually have like my keyboard and mouse wired and they go through the hub. So I don't have to
02:05:12 ◼ ► have the two cables snaking. Anyway, I switched to, you know, using my keyboard in Bluetooth mode,
02:05:18 ◼ ► which I normally don't know just because it's convenient and I switched my mouse to Bluetooth
02:05:22 ◼ ► mode. Just connect the USB hub. It doesn't help. And now I'm like, all right, scorched earth.
02:05:32 ◼ ► I ended up going to like the Apple support page and it's like, you should do an SMC reset. You
02:05:35 ◼ ► should do an NVRAM reset. You should do all these other things or whatever. Like, all right, I go
02:05:39 ◼ ► through the motions. I do an SMC reset. I do an NVRAM reset. You should spin in a circle. Yeah,
02:05:43 ◼ ► I do it. Like I do all those things, right? Because they recommend them, right? They also recommend
02:05:48 ◼ ► eventually getting the hardware things. You disconnect everything from your computer. That's
02:05:51 ◼ ► not an Apple keyboard, mouse, and monitor. Like I can do that. Right. I disconnect every single
02:05:56 ◼ ► thing. Just connect all the external hard drives. Just connect all the hubs. Literally the only
02:06:00 ◼ ► thing connected to this computer is an Apple monitor and Apple keyboard and Apple mouse. Put
02:06:04 ◼ ► the thing to sleep. Won't wake up. Right. I'm like, okay. All right. Still think it's hardware.
02:06:11 ◼ ► Because how could it not be hardware? Like Big Sur did it. And you know, what the hell? Catalina
02:06:18 ◼ ► also did it. It can't be the software update. Like two totally different OSes, you know,
02:06:27 ◼ ► what other weird ass hardware I've got? Well, I've got those spinning hard drives in there.
02:06:33 ◼ ► you get weird errors. Right. And one of the things that happens when you wake up from sleep is the
02:06:37 ◼ ► hard drives spin up. So maybe one of the hard drives is like, is pulling too much power and like
02:06:42 ◼ ► undervolting the whole, you know, motherboard or it's tripping some safety measure or there's a bad
02:06:49 ◼ ► bearing in it and it can't spin up or like God knows what's going on. Let me just for a very
02:06:53 ◼ ► brief time, register my continued disappointment that you have the 2019 Mac Pro and you also put
02:07:00 ◼ ► spinning hard drives in it. That's the greatest. One of the reasons I like it is because I can put
02:07:03 ◼ ► them in there because it's way cheaper to get, you know, 16 terabytes of storage inside my computer.
02:07:07 ◼ ► If I had to do that in SSDs, you know, I already spent a lot. Anyway, so I go in there and by the
02:07:12 ◼ ► way, this is the beginning of the opening the computer phase of this operation, which lasted
02:07:16 ◼ ► a long time, right? This computer, as I've said before, is way harder to get to the inside of
02:07:22 ◼ ► than the old cheese grater. Cause that door, you could get off in a second. I used to take that
02:07:26 ◼ ► door on and off with the cheese grater, the old Mac Pro under my desk. I would just go under there,
02:07:30 ◼ ► flip poop thing comes off in two seconds. This thing, it's an ordeal to get off. I have to take,
02:07:35 ◼ ► the procedure ended up with is like, if you try to take it off when you've seen it in a little
02:07:40 ◼ ► picture and you just see the picture of where it is in the relay thing where I showed a picture
02:07:44 ◼ ► of my desk, become a really member, everybody and go look at the, you can see a picture of my desk
02:07:49 ◼ ► at home. I think I tweeted it too eventually. Anyway, it's on a little table. And if I try
02:07:54 ◼ ► to pull vertically the Mac Pro case off, it's actually hard to continue to pull perfectly,
02:07:59 ◼ ► vertically straight, starting from a position that's like a desk height because it's a tall
02:08:04 ◼ ► case and you end up like, I mean, I'm a tall person, but you end up, it's hard to, you have
02:08:08 ◼ ► to really pull it off exactly straight. If you do it a little bit at an angle, it's bad, right?
02:08:11 ◼ ► So my procedure was disconnect all the cables, of course, because remember you can't get the
02:08:16 ◼ ► case off without the cable. So disconnect all the cables, find someplace to put the cable so they
02:08:21 ◼ ► won't slide down behind my desk. Cause my desk is, has, is against the wall and has a wall to
02:08:25 ◼ ► its left and a thing to its right. So my cables, like if they slipped down to the floor, I have to,
02:08:30 ◼ ► on my belly crawling under there to find them again. So I like had a big piece of masking tape
02:08:34 ◼ ► and I'm like taping them. So take the cables out, tape them to wherever they're going to be,
02:08:39 ◼ ► lift the Mac Pro off of the little mini table, put it on the floor, pick the thing, twist it up,
02:08:44 ◼ ► lift perfectly straight up very, very carefully. Put that thing away, pick the Mac Pro, which is
02:08:48 ◼ ► very heavy by the way, up again, put it back on your desk and now you can work on it. So I did
02:08:53 ◼ ► that. I disconnected both of my spinning hard drives. I plugged the and, and the power to them,
02:09:01 ◼ ► by the way. So it's three connectors, it's two little SATA connectors and like a power thing.
02:09:08 ◼ ► put it to sleep, wake it up at wakes like, all right, well, at least I found the problem. And
02:09:15 ◼ ► this is many hours into this because I said it really quickly here. I'm trying to say really
02:09:18 ◼ ► quickly, but remember every time I do this, it's a hard reboot of my computer and you know, and I'm
02:09:24 ◼ ► taking off these cables, I'm crawling around and like, it's just, it's, this is absorbing all of
02:09:28 ◼ ► like a Saturday, right? I'm like, finally found what it was. So I'm like, I was relieved to get
02:09:32 ◼ ► that, you know, the thing out of your head of like, at least I know what the problem is now. I don't
02:09:35 ◼ ► know why the problem is these spinning disks, but whatever I found the problem. I'm so hoping the
02:09:40 ◼ ► problem is your U-shaped piece of metal. I mean like the piece of metal does nothing, right? But,
02:09:45 ◼ ► but obviously the hard drives are hard drives are in that. I know, but like you focus so much on
02:09:50 ◼ ► like, you know, how ridiculous it was that this like, you know, basic piece of metal was whatever
02:09:55 ◼ ► hundreds of dollars that it was. And, and how could you, you know, how hard could it be to make a
02:09:59 ◼ ► piece of metal? They came with the eight terabyte hard drive, which was like, I suspected that one
02:10:02 ◼ ► immediately too. I'm like, I don't, I didn't pick this eight terabyte hard drive. I hate when I
02:10:05 ◼ ► don't pick the hard drive magazine. I picked the other one, which is a Western Digital Reb,
02:10:08 ◼ ► but I didn't pick whatever the hell this Toshiba thing is in here. So I made me suspect that. So
02:10:12 ◼ ► I was so relieved that I found the problem, but annoyed because I'm like, Oh, what am I going to
02:10:15 ◼ ► do now? Cause you know, again, it's like, you know, well, 12, 12 terabytes of storage. I can't
02:10:21 ◼ ► replace that with an SSD. I really need to have the spinning disc. So I'm like, okay, well, we'll
02:10:24 ◼ ► just set this aside. I went off and I did some other things. I did a driving lesson with my son
02:10:28 ◼ ► or whatever, and then like had dinner and then I resumed it. I'm like, okay, well now I'm going to
02:10:33 ◼ ► resume messing with this. What I really want to know now is which hard drive is the culprit,
02:10:44 ◼ ► You would think the only combination is plug in one hard drive, test it. And if it doesn't work,
02:10:47 ◼ ► you know, it's the other hard drive, right? But there are more combinations than that because
02:10:50 ◼ ► remember there are three connectors. Maybe it's just having the power connector connected that
02:10:54 ◼ ► does it right. And I made some mistakes where I disconnected one drive, but I didn't, I didn't
02:10:58 ◼ ► disconnect the cable at both ends. So technically that drive was still connected to power, even
02:11:02 ◼ ► though the data wasn't connected. So multiply by another like three or four or five or six opening
02:11:12 ◼ ► connect drive two. Oh, I forgot that first drive one test was invalid because drive two was still
02:11:16 ◼ ► connected to power. Disconnect both drives, but still have the power connected. I'm doing all
02:11:19 ◼ ► these different combinations and every single one of them, I put it to sleep. It doesn't wake up.
02:11:22 ◼ ► Right. And I'm like, well, I guess, you know, I like, maybe it's just if either of the drives
02:11:32 ◼ ► connected, it's bad. Maybe my motherboard is bad. Maybe the SATA thing is bad. And by the way,
02:11:35 ◼ ► yes, I ran Apple's hardware test, which seems much wimpier than it used to be. Like it didn't
02:11:39 ◼ ► take a long time to run. I'm like, please check all my Ram, do all my stuff. Like this hardware
02:11:43 ◼ ► test should take forever. It was disturbingly quick to run Apple's hardware test. Anyway,
02:11:47 ◼ ► I did all that testing. I'm like, no, in every single one of these scenarios, if I have that
02:11:51 ◼ ► thing connected in any way, the thing doesn't wake from sleep, but then I get the little itch and I'm
02:11:56 ◼ ► like, wait a second. And so I, I take the thing and I unplug all the cables from it and I try it,
02:12:03 ◼ ► put it to sleep, try to wake it up. It doesn't wake up. I was like, but that was the thing that
02:12:08 ◼ ► worked. Just kind of think everything is the thing that worked. And then I realized, because I had,
02:12:13 ◼ ► you know, I, I knew this was the case because I had a procedure for putting it to sleep, which was
02:12:17 ◼ ► put it to sleep and then wait a full minute after putting it to sleep before attempting to wake it.
02:12:22 ◼ ► Because sometimes when you put it to sleep, it takes a little while to actually go into sleep,
02:12:25 ◼ ► depending on what's going on. And it used to be able to gauge that by, you know, you can gauge it
02:12:28 ◼ ► by the fans turning off. This made me appreciate slash not appreciate how quiet these fans are,
02:12:34 ◼ ► because I'd have to shut, put my ear up to the thing to make sure I heard when the fans spun down.
02:12:43 ◼ ► I had not waited for it to fully go to sleep. And so what I was doing is not actually testing the
02:12:48 ◼ ► problem. Cause if you hit the space bar or the mouse button before it really goes to sleep,
02:12:51 ◼ ► the screen turns back on and it's fine. Cause it never got to the sleep phase. Right. And I guess
02:12:56 ◼ ► I just didn't give it the full minute or maybe the air conditioning was on and I thought the fans had
02:12:59 ◼ ► spun down, but they hadn't. But anyway, now, now I'm back to zero after an entire day of this,
02:13:05 ◼ ► I'm back to zero because I'm like, no, totally disconnecting the hard drives also doesn't let
02:13:11 ◼ ► it wake from sleep. So I, you know, at this point I took, I took the entire hard drive chassis thing
02:13:17 ◼ ► with the hard drives and the Ben Pines just out of the machine. I put it over there right now.
02:13:25 ◼ ► what's the problem here? You know, hardware test says it's nothing. I have two GPUs in this thing.
02:13:37 ◼ ► X that came with it. I'm like, I don't use that 5e X it's just in there. And on the off chance
02:13:41 ◼ ► that some program can use more than one GPU, like it's in there for computer purposes, but otherwise
02:13:46 ◼ ► nothing is connected to it. Let me get that out. So I take out the GPU that I'm not using. Right.
02:13:51 ◼ ► So I'm slowly stripping this machine down to basically closer and closer to stock configuration,
02:13:56 ◼ ► where it's just an Apple monitor and Apple mouse and Apple keyboard, Apple Ram that came with it,
02:14:01 ◼ ► the Apple internal Apple SSD, and an Apple video card, which is not the one that it came with,
02:14:05 ◼ ► but it is one of the built-over options now. And everything's all Apple, but the computer sleep,
02:14:11 ◼ ► try to wake it up. Doesn't wake from sleep. And again, every test comes back normal. I repeated
02:14:17 ◼ ► the SMC resets and did, you know, NVRM and just did everything that I could think of. And I'm like,
02:14:22 ◼ ► this has to be hardware. Right. So then I'm starting to get desperate now. And I'm like,
02:14:25 ◼ ► all right, I need some more data. Let me boot into windows and see if windows can sleep and wake up.
02:14:36 ◼ ► On my Mac? Yes. Windows would properly sleep and wake up. And I spent time on windows to play
02:14:41 ◼ ► destiny and windows. Like, you know, that's the whole reason I have it. Like I'm, you know, I've
02:14:45 ◼ ► explored the world of windows treatment of HDR, which is extremely confusing. Right. But you know,
02:14:49 ◼ ► for the most part it works, but I know sleep and wake works because like the default window
02:14:53 ◼ ► settings are to go to sleep. So, and you know, it works. Right. So I boot into windows. I reconnect
02:14:58 ◼ ► to my one external drive that has windows on it. I boot into windows. I put the thing to sleep.
02:15:03 ◼ ► I wait for this fan to spin down for it to go to fully to sleep, hit the space bar. It doesn't
02:15:08 ◼ ► wake up again each time. By the way, I say that I'm doing this like, oh, what if it's just your
02:15:12 ◼ ► screen? What if your screen's just not waking up every time I was also testing SSH and ping
02:15:16 ◼ ► and it totally was unresponsive, harder to do with windows because I don't know what the networking
02:15:20 ◼ ► situation is, but bottom line does not do not wake up in windows at all. So I'm like, all right,
02:15:25 ◼ ► doesn't wake up in windows. It doesn't wake up in Catalina, big Sur windows. I've removed every
02:15:31 ◼ ► single piece of hardware. All my hardware tests tell me everything is fine. What the hell is wrong
02:15:36 ◼ ► with this computer? And the reason I'm pursuing this like a madman is like waking from sleep is
02:15:41 ◼ ► an important part of my computing life. Like I never shut down my computer. The only time I
02:15:46 ◼ ► rebooted is for OS updates. What I do is when I'm done using it, I put it to sleep. And then in the
02:15:51 ◼ ► night while I'm sleeping, it wakes up and does a bunch of backup stuff. And then it goes back to
02:15:54 ◼ ► sleep. And so the next morning when I wake up, my computer is asleep. And when I want to go use it,
02:15:59 ◼ ► I sit down in front of it. I hit the space bar or click the mouse button and it wakes up. That's how
02:16:03 ◼ ► I use my computer. If my computer does not wake from sleep, it's not like it's useless to me,
02:16:07 ◼ ► but it's pretty close. I need the computer to wake from sleep. That's why I'm pursuing this because
02:16:12 ◼ ► there is no work around. There's no viable work around. This computer needs to wake from sleep.
02:16:16 ◼ ► Kyle: And like, and I would love to make fun of you for having, you know, using a desktop computer
02:16:21 ◼ ► this way. But the reality is like waking from sleep is an advertised and supported feature of
02:16:29 ◼ ► this platform. And so regardless of whether you should want to do this or not, which I won't argue
02:16:35 ◼ ► with you today. What do you think people do? Shut down when they're done using a computer? What is
02:16:40 ◼ ► this, the 80s? No, just walk away. Yeah. Maybe turn the monitor off and that's it. The Mac Pro is,
02:16:45 ◼ ► you don't understand how much heat this thing generates and it's not winter. Like I cannot
02:16:48 ◼ ► have this thing generate. I do not have central air conditioning. It's a very small room. This
02:16:53 ◼ ► thing needs to be asleep. And even in the winter, like in the winter, it could serve as a space heater
02:16:59 ◼ ► and then it could be on all the time. But I don't want to just wear the fans all day long,
02:17:05 ◼ ► when I'm not using it, it should be asleep. But yeah, anyway, it has to work. Right. And I'm
02:17:10 ◼ ► getting really close right now. Cause I'm, what I'm trying to avoid is like, I'm already thinking
02:17:14 ◼ ► about how would I bring this to an Apple store? Right. I, you know, I've brought many large things
02:17:20 ◼ ► to the Apple store. So I'm like, Oh, that Mac Pro box is so beautiful. And my look, my luggage
02:17:25 ◼ ► carrier, Dolly, that I usually use to like transport, like my member of my old, uh, 27 inch
02:17:29 ◼ ► Apple, whatever led display thing that went to the Apple store. Like I transported that, but it did
02:17:35 ◼ ► beat up the box. And I don't, I don't want to have to get the box down and put it back in. And I don't
02:17:39 ◼ ► want to let people in an Apple store touch my Mac pro. Then I'm not even going to know what it is.
02:17:44 ◼ ► We don't even have one in our local Apple stores and they're just going to scratch it up. And I'm
02:17:48 ◼ ► like, Oh, but you know, maybe like maybe they can figure out what it is because they have way better
02:17:53 ◼ ► hardware diagnostics. And if it's like the, some controller chip is not working right. Or, you know,
02:17:58 ◼ ► like, Oh, I just, I just, I'm already thinking about that and I'm dreading it. Cause I'm like,
02:18:07 ◼ ► my new video card versus the crappy one that it came with. Right. And that was going to be my
02:18:12 ◼ ► next move to my completely cord out computer was to do the final revert to stock, take out my
02:18:18 ◼ ► upgraded video card and put in the one that it shipped with, even though they're both Apple video
02:18:22 ◼ ► cards and see if that makes any difference. Cause like maybe the video card I got, it's gone bad or
02:18:27 ◼ ► something. I don't know. I'm just looking for something in hardware. But before I did that move,
02:18:31 ◼ ► I had somewhat of a revelation. Do you, if you, if two of you figured out based on all my weird
02:18:37 ◼ ► hints and everything, what this might be, I've got nothing. One thing I'm considering is bridge
02:18:43 ◼ ► OS being a potential culprit. This is like the thing that runs the T2 basically, cause this is
02:18:48 ◼ ► a subsystem that would be operational on some level, whether it's running windows or, or,
02:19:03 ◼ ► That's exactly what I was thinking. Cause I have a T2 in this computer, right. Which is hardware,
02:19:09 ◼ ► but also it runs software. And, and I don't actually know this for a fact, but I'll just tell
02:19:16 ◼ ► you the, tell you what I experimentally determined. Right. So it's my understanding that when you do
02:19:24 ◼ ► an operating system update to MacOS, one of the things that can happen during an OS update is that
02:19:30 ◼ ► bridge OS can be updated, that the software that runs on a T2 can be updated. And that makes sense
02:19:34 ◼ ► to me because, you know, bridge OS is software and it needs to be updated as well. And I can imagine
02:19:39 ◼ ► those updates coinciding with MacOS updates. Getting back to my earlier thing of thinking about
02:19:51 ◼ ► What immediately sprang to mind was 10.15.6, but like I said, like that's not it cause I've
02:19:55 ◼ ► rooted into big Sur and still have the problem. What else have I changed recently? Big Sur beta
02:20:01 ◼ ► five came out recently and I upgraded from big Sur beta four to big Sur beta five on the external
02:20:08 ◼ ► drive on this Mac. And the reason I wasn't thinking about it was like, well, I disconnected it though.
02:20:12 ◼ ► And I don't actually know if 10.15.6 or big Sur beta five are responsible or if either one of them
02:20:20 ◼ ► did a bridge OS update. Then I'm like, okay, before I try to take out that big video card,
02:20:29 ◼ ► let me try essentially reinstalling the OS on the T2. Right. So I had to look up how to do this
02:20:37 ◼ ► cause I haven't had a Mac with a T2 before and it's actually slightly different for all of them,
02:20:40 ◼ ► but Apple has really good instructions in doing this. You use the Apple configurator two thing,
02:20:44 ◼ ► you connect another Mac to it with, I used the thunderbolt cable cause I never know what the
02:20:49 ◼ ► hell cables to use it in these USB-C shaped holes. We're like, let me use the cable. It supports all
02:20:53 ◼ ► the things like the highest speed thunderbolt cables. It might've just been USB-C. I don't
02:20:57 ◼ ► even freaking know. You put it into one specific thunderbolt part. You put your Mac pro into DFU
02:21:02 ◼ ► mode, which is really weird, but that's when you put your Mac pro into DFU mode and you have two
02:21:06 ◼ ► choices. You can do what Apple calls a revive and a restore a restore. You do that and you're just
02:21:14 ◼ ► going to need to wipe everything on your computer. And yes, I have a thousand backups, but I really
02:21:18 ◼ ► don't want to restore from any of them. Partly because I have lots of good backups, but
02:21:24 ◼ ► it takes a long time to restore four terabytes. And I had podcasts to do. In fact, the day I was
02:21:36 ◼ ► doing this, I had a podcast. It was the special we did for Relay. That was the day this was going on.
02:21:41 ◼ ► Even if this succeeds, I don't have time to do a four terabyte restore for one of my backups.
02:21:48 ◼ ► So I didn't want to do that. So what I did was revive. And what revive does is in theory,
02:21:53 ◼ ► it does something to the T2 to get it back to a working state based on who knows what. But
02:22:00 ◼ ► the point is that it doesn't require you to delete everything on your computer. Because you
02:22:04 ◼ ► could imagine if you just erased everything in the T2, then you wouldn't be able to decrypt your
02:22:08 ◼ ► drives anymore or whatever. That's what I imagine the limitation is. But the restore is complete
02:22:12 ◼ ► wipe. So I did revive. I did revive and the thing rebooted and it came to the login screen.
02:22:20 ◼ ► And that's what I've been doing, by the way, to eliminate, is it some user account? Is it
02:22:27 ◼ ► your Mac, there's a sleep button. So you don't even need to log in to test sleep. You can just
02:22:30 ◼ ► boot right to the login screen, then hit that sleep button and it will go to sleep. And then
02:22:33 ◼ ► you can try to wake it up. You don't even have to log in to test the problem. So it rebooted after
02:22:38 ◼ ► the revive, got to the login screen, hit the sleep button, waited for the fan to spin down,
02:22:42 ◼ ► waited for my one minute timer, woke it up. It woke right back up. Like, yes, I figured it out.
02:22:47 ◼ ► It's the T2. God knows what happened to the T2. I don't know if it was the Big Sur Beta 5.
02:22:54 ◼ ► That's my main culprit just because it's a Beta OS. I don't know if it was 10.15.6. I don't know
02:22:58 ◼ ► if it was something unrelated to either one of those and just something went bad in my T2. Who
02:23:01 ◼ ► knows? But it woke from sleep and I was like, sleep, wait a minute, wake, sleep, wait a minute,
02:23:11 ◼ ► And then I went to log in to my account. I'm like, good. I'm just going to get back to normal.
02:23:17 ◼ ► Go to log into my account. If I click on my face and I type in my password and it does a little
02:23:22 ◼ ► head shake thing. It's like, no, no, that's not your password. I'm like, no, it's totally my
02:23:26 ◼ ► password. And then I go click on my wife's face and try to log in with her password. It goes, no,
02:23:33 ◼ ► no, it's not your password. I'm like, no, it's not true. And then I go back to the login screen.
02:23:37 ◼ ► I'm like, wait a second. What happened to my daughter? Like, I normally see all of our faces
02:23:40 ◼ ► there, but it was just me, my wife, and my son. What happened to my daughter? Where did she go?
02:23:45 ◼ ► I'm like, what the hell is going on with this computer? And it really wouldn't let me log in.
02:23:50 ◼ ► And when I tried to log in, I have, you know the way you can put a hint for your password?
02:23:55 ◼ ► Like, I always put a hint there. The hint I always put is go away. That's not going to do with my
02:24:00 ◼ ► password. It's trying to give a hint to the person trying to get into my account without
02:24:03 ◼ ► knowing my password. My hint to you is go away. And it showed me go away. I'm like, all right,
02:24:07 ◼ ► well, this is my account. That's my picture. Those are my names. These are people, but A,
02:24:11 ◼ ► where is my daughter's account? And B, why can't I log in? So I reboot into recovery mode,
02:24:17 ◼ ► which I'd done many times over. And by the way, I left out some steps where I booted into recovery
02:24:21 ◼ ► mode, ran disk first aid in every volume. Like I did a whole bunch of the, I left out some of the
02:24:25 ◼ ► normal stuff that I did. So anyway, I was very familiar with booting into recovery mode. So I
02:24:29 ◼ ► boot into recovery mode and what I'm looking at, like, you know, everything else is removed
02:24:34 ◼ ► from the computer. So I've just got like my, my computer and my hard drive neighbor link, right?
02:24:38 ◼ ► So I've got link and link space, hyphen space data, which is the whole, the two volumes
02:24:42 ◼ ► that Catalina breaks up your stuff into. And there are actually more volumes than that. There's the
02:24:46 ◼ ► volume that I'm booting into in recovery mode. There's a recovery volume. There's a software
02:24:50 ◼ ► update volume. We talked about this with the APFS volume rolls. There's actually a whole bunch of
02:24:54 ◼ ► volumes there. That's how I'm able to boot. Right. But what I saw was that on this boot
02:24:59 ◼ ► into recovery mode, it showed the system volume, which is just called link. The read only system
02:25:04 ◼ ► volume just called link was grayed out and unmounted. And then link hyphen data was there.
02:25:10 ◼ ► Right. And I tried to mount link and it wouldn't mount. And I tried to run this for the first day
02:25:16 ◼ ► and I wouldn't run this for a second. And it gave me an error message that I looked up in Google and
02:25:20 ◼ ► saw a bunch of reports of people getting this exact error number, very long number. I forget
02:25:25 ◼ ► what it was, 429 something or very long error number and did a lot of Googling. They're like,
02:25:29 ◼ ► look, if a drive ever gives you this, it basically means that some records somewhere for that volume
02:25:35 ◼ ► is missing and it can't be mounted without it because the computer doesn't know where anything
02:25:39 ◼ ► is in it. And I've never found a way to recover from this. You just have to delete that volume.
02:25:42 ◼ ► Right. I'm like, all right, well, but that's the read only system volume. Like my data is in the
02:25:47 ◼ ► other volume and it's confirmed to be good. And I can run disk first aid on it. And it's like, yep,
02:25:51 ◼ ► there's your data volume. It's, you know, however many terabytes, all your stuff is there.
02:25:55 ◼ ► I don't need the read only system volume. I can just delete that volume. I can't mount it. I can't
02:25:59 ◼ ► do anything with it. I spent a long time banging my head against it, but I'm like, well, but I finally
02:26:03 ◼ ► figured out this problem. My T2 is cured. I can sleep, wake from sleep. I just delete this volume.
02:26:09 ◼ ► Right. And I was, I think it was just anxious to get it over with. If I had thought a little bit
02:26:13 ◼ ► more, maybe I would have realized this was not a great idea, but anyway, I deleted the system
02:26:16 ◼ ► volume and really, honestly, I'm not sure what else I could have done because that system volume was
02:26:20 ◼ ► completely useless. It was unable to be mounted in any mode, single user mode, anything. It could not
02:26:25 ◼ ► be mounted. Couldn't run disk first aid, couldn't drive FSCK. It was just system volume was like,
02:26:31 ◼ ► forget it. Right. So I deleted the volume. So now I've just got one volume called link data.
02:26:36 ◼ ► I create a new APS, FFS volume called link. I run the installer. And when the installer asks,
02:26:43 ◼ ► where do you want me to install? I say, please install on link, which is this new empty volume
02:26:51 ◼ ► reinstall Catalina at one point or maybe two points. I had to reinstall Catalina with, with
02:26:59 ◼ ► didn't fix the sleep wake thing. Right. That was another thing that I tried. So I I've been very
02:27:02 ◼ ► used to the Catalina installer. So I'm very used to doing this. I picked the link volume. I
02:27:06 ◼ ► reinstalled Catalina. It rebooted. And again, it gave me a list of users, but with one user missing.
02:27:13 ◼ ► I was like, what the hell is, Oh, no, no, it didn't give me this user. This is different thing.
02:27:17 ◼ ► It gave, I can explain that one in a second. That was, I have to go back and explain that
02:27:20 ◼ ► because I think I figured out what that problem was too. But no, what it told me was to create
02:27:29 ◼ ► and link data. Why don't you just use those? And like, well, I don't know what that was going. So
02:27:32 ◼ ► I create an account and I intentionally gave it a different name so I wouldn't get confused. This
02:27:35 ◼ ► is a very important thing when you're debugging. Like I don't give volumes the same name. Don't
02:27:41 ◼ ► give user accounts the same name. You always have to know where you are and what you're dealing with.
02:27:44 ◼ ► So I created some temporary domain account. I logged into it and I realized what it had done
02:27:50 ◼ ► was taken link and made a second volume called link hyphen data with nothing in it and made
02:27:56 ◼ ► that new user account in it. So what I had was now the volumes I had was link with the OS link,
02:28:00 ◼ ► hyphen data with the user data that I had just created for this new account. And then another
02:28:05 ◼ ► volume called link hyphen data with my actual data in it. Oh my God. So the installer had
02:28:10 ◼ ► had installed onto link by breaking link into two volumes, both of which were initially empty and
02:28:15 ◼ ► then weaving them together. So then I'm like, okay, all right, well still the data's all there.
02:28:21 ◼ ► I just need to find a way to install the OS and tell it installer, don't make yourself a new data
02:28:27 ◼ ► volume. Use that data volume. It's sitting right there. You just need to make the OS volume and tie
02:28:33 ◼ ► it to that data volume. Just weave them together. And in my research and actually a personal email
02:28:38 ◼ ► to someone I thought might know the answer to this. The answer I got was, now obviously it's
02:28:43 ◼ ► possible to weave together two volumes in that way. Cause the installer does it, but I was not
02:28:48 ◼ ► able to determine a way that a user could do it. No command line tools, no secret technique, no
02:28:54 ◼ ► weird install invocation. It may exist, but I couldn't find it. Right. So now I've got this
02:29:00 ◼ ► computer with all my data intact that sleeps and wakes just fine, but I can't get like my volume
02:29:07 ◼ ► back. So you may be thinking at this point and then maybe if you're a casey, you're like, well,
02:29:10 ◼ ► fine, just I'll just delete all of it and restore from backup. Cause I just want to get this over
02:29:13 ◼ ► with. Right. But I'm not Casey. And so I didn't do that because that would be a mistake. Instead,
02:29:20 ◼ ► what I said is like, look, I need another copy of all this data right now. Yes. I know I have
02:29:26 ◼ ► a time machine backup, a super duper clone, another time machine backup on the Synology
02:29:36 ◼ ► which has its own backblaze backup time machine backup and Synology backup. So my photos are,
02:29:39 ◼ ► have three other backups. Right. But that's not enough. So I had to get another hard drive.
02:29:48 ◼ ► And I looked around my house. This is where I like looking for cables. I must have another
02:29:51 ◼ ► spinning hard drive around here that can hold my volume. Right. It's I don't fill the full
02:29:56 ◼ ► four terabytes. Turns out I feel like two and a half terabytes. And the biggest hard spinning
02:30:01 ◼ ► hard drive I have now is two that's not currently used. So I had to order a hard drive. So I'd order
02:30:08 ◼ ► a hard drive. And during that time I'd order the hard drive. I did that podcast that we did the
02:30:14 ◼ ► relay special. I did a rectifs episode and now I'm doing this episode. Right. And the hard drive
02:30:20 ◼ ► arrived and I eventually arrived at arrived today. And I did a backup, a copy of the internal drive.
02:30:28 ◼ ► And it took about nine hours to complete. Right. This is just a straight copy from my SSD onto this
02:30:36 ◼ ► incredibly slow external spinning disk. So now finally I have my final redundant copy of the
02:30:46 ◼ ► other hard drive. Right. And what I've been booted into here during this podcast and erectives is I'm
02:30:55 ◼ ► booted into the new system with a new weird user that has nothing in it. And I just installed Skype
02:31:01 ◼ ► Audio Hijack and you know all that other stuff into there. So that's what I've been podcasting
02:31:05 ◼ ► from. And the reason I haven't attempted to restore like I could have attempted to restore
02:31:08 ◼ ► today after the nine hour thing. Right. But it was like that's going to take a long time. And if it
02:31:13 ◼ ► screws up I don't want to screw up this computer. So what I'm waiting for is a gap in my podcasting
02:31:17 ◼ ► schedule to try my best guess at what I can do besides restore because I still don't want to do
02:31:24 ◼ ► restore. Like I know I have all the stuff I still want to restore. What I want to do is delete all
02:31:28 ◼ ► the volumes except linked data and then point the installer at linked data and say installer install
02:31:34 ◼ ► the OS on this volume. And I want it to crack linked data in half and make an OS volume. Because
02:31:39 ◼ ► if you point the Catalina installer at any volume any like just single volume that has a bunch of
02:31:44 ◼ ► users and applications and you know like it just like a pre Catalina OS that's when it does the
02:31:49 ◼ ► weaving. That's when it says okay I'll make a new empty volume install the read-only system and
02:31:54 ◼ ► weave it together with that one using these firm links right. That's when it does the connection.
02:31:58 ◼ ► Now I don't have a complete pre Catalina volume but I do have a Catalina volume that has user
02:32:04 ◼ ► accounts and all this other stuff application folder and it actually has a slash system
02:32:08 ◼ ► quote unquote folder that is the old firm link to the old thing like so I but the reason I didn't
02:32:13 ◼ ► want to do that until I held all their backup is because like what if that screws up what if I
02:32:17 ◼ ► point the Catalina installer at my data volume and it says oh I'll just empty this volume out
02:32:21 ◼ ► and erase it or if it just hoses it entirely or whatever it is a valid option in the installer.
02:32:26 ◼ ► The installer does give you the choice if you can select the linked data to install onto it
02:32:30 ◼ ► gave me that choice before right but I'm afraid that's going to destroy everything. Now finally
02:32:36 ◼ ► after this podcast concludes probably tomorrow or the next day I will try to resurrect my computer
02:32:42 ◼ ► resurrect the data on my computer before I have to do the next podcast which I think is like Sunday
02:32:48 ◼ ► or something right so that's my plan that is my tale of woe it could have gone much worse but it
02:32:55 ◼ ► certainly could have gone better I spent a lot of time on this and it's not particularly satisfying
02:33:00 ◼ ► to have this conclusion where it was the t2 basically but why why was it the t2 I like the
02:33:08 ◼ ► beta 5 the big sur beta 5 theory unfortunately it's so vague that I can't even file a feedback
02:33:14 ◼ ► on it and say hey I have a vague notion that perhaps upgrading to big sur beta 5 hosed the
02:33:20 ◼ ► t2 such that my mac pro never woke from sleep and by the way every time I hard rebooted it and
02:33:24 ◼ ► and woke from sleep but offered to send a report to apple but the report is just like a boilerplate
02:33:29 ◼ ► like uh failure to wake from sleep I'm like yes that is what happened but there's no stack tracer
02:33:34 ◼ ► like there is a stack trace but there's a message at the top that says please disregard the stack
02:33:37 ◼ ► trace it's meaningless right because if you don't wake from sleep there's just nothing like
02:33:41 ◼ ► maybe dump something from nv room I'm not sure but anyway I sent a thousand of those reports to apple
02:33:46 ◼ ► during during the thing but I don't have enough to send a feedback or anything like that and by
02:33:50 ◼ ► the way the the missing child and the user thing apparently at some point it was able to boot from
02:33:58 ◼ ► an installed os but not able to see the data volume and when you do that the installed os
02:34:07 ◼ ► has a memory of the user accounts that have been logged into recently apparently but when you try
02:34:12 ◼ ► to log into them if it can't actually find the data for it it says wrong password right it's like
02:34:17 ◼ ► it the os volume says yeah I I've you've logged into these three accounts and you know in the last
02:34:23 ◼ ► year or something so I'll show these little faces and you can click on them and enter a password
02:34:26 ◼ ► when I go to validate the password apparently at that point it needs to like see the user's
02:34:30 ◼ ► home directory or something and that volume just wasn't mounted at all why wasn't it mounted and is
02:34:36 ◼ ► it I think my daughter didn't appear just because her account hasn't been logged into on my computer
02:34:40 ◼ ► since forever which makes sense to me because she never uses this computer and occasionally I log
02:34:44 ◼ ► into my son's to do something right but that was what that was the mystery of the missing account
02:34:48 ◼ ► and that was also the mystery of the the not accepting my password was that the data volume
02:34:54 ◼ ► was somehow unmounted or unreachable at that point again I have no idea why because the data volume
02:34:59 ◼ ► is the volume that's fine and has all the data on it as far as I'm aware so more updates on this
02:35:05 ◼ ► next week I'll tell you whether reinstalling the os onto the data volume worked I'll tell you whether
02:35:11 ◼ ► I had to restore from backup and then I'll tell you exactly how many hours it took to restore from
02:35:14 ◼ ► backup because I can imagine it's gonna take longer than nine holy smokes my my current bet is you're
02:35:21 ◼ ► gonna end up with a link data data volume and it will still have some kind of weirdness I mean you
02:35:26 ◼ ► can this is the thing by the way these names like they don't mean anything like remember I had to
02:35:29 ◼ ► link data to link data on you can rename it it's the mac you can rename the lines whatever you want
02:35:33 ◼ ► it doesn't get confused the volumes have ID have identifiers that are unique that are under the
02:35:36 ◼ ► covers that you never see you can rename your volumes to whatever you want which is why I
02:35:39 ◼ ► always recommend like if you're doing some stuff like even if you end up like I ended up with the
02:35:43 ◼ ► two link data volumes I immediately renamed like the new one it created to be you know something
02:35:48 ◼ ► different like new data or whatever so I could always tell them apart because it's so dangerous
02:35:51 ◼ ► when you have volumes that are named the same that you're going to screw something up but yeah like
02:35:55 ◼ ► in this situation like is it hardware or software and I was I was attacking it on both fronts
02:36:01 ◼ ► hardware I'm just going to remove every piece of hardware from the thing and run hardware to
02:36:05 ◼ ► software let me try it in windows let me try it in big sur let me try in Catalina the thing that
02:36:08 ◼ ► got me was it's hardware and software it's the t2 with software that you never think about but
02:36:23 ◼ ► if you know beta 5 did a new firmware install on the t2 and that was somehow not entirely backwards
02:36:31 ◼ ► compatible with Catalina like I I but it didn't wake in big sur either but yeah it could have just
02:36:36 ◼ ► been a bug it could have just been a big sur bug but I you know and that's why it's my biggest
02:36:41 ◼ ► culprit because like yeah for maybe the maybe big sur beta 5 had a bug that caused mac pros not to
02:36:45 ◼ ► wake from sleep but I could not find any report from it anywhere um and it doesn't surprise me
02:36:50 ◼ ► because how many people have mac pros and how many people have mac pros and installing big sur beta
02:36:53 ◼ ► 5 it's got to be a small group and that's why I think maybe it's just something that was hosed in
02:36:56 ◼ ► my t2 or like maybe really was 10 15 6 I just don't know all I have is the experimental results
02:37:04 ◼ ► doing a revive and why the hell did doing a revive hose my my os volume like I don't think that was
02:37:10 ◼ ► an expected result of doing a revive the whole point of doing a revive is it's not supposed to
02:37:14 ◼ ► hose all your data and it didn't hose my data but it made my system volume completely unmountable
02:37:20 ◼ ► forget about unbootable unmountable so there are many mysteries here the only you know and that you
02:37:26 ◼ ► know and right now I have on my desk right out in front of me the guts of my computer I have my GPU
02:37:32 ◼ ► here I have a bunch of those little brackets that hold the thing in that I gave up and putting back
02:37:35 ◼ ► ages ago I've got my big hard drive sitting over there I've got a big piece of tape over there I've
02:37:41 ◼ ► got my new hard drive I've got a bunch of cables it's a it's a mess in this place I can't wait to
02:37:45 ◼ ► reassemble this all but first I will tackle the software part of it so that's the problem
02:37:50 ◼ ► having big large volumes of data restoring from backup even a local backup takes forever
02:37:56 ◼ ► and just I have to find a time in my life when I can set that off and have enough time for it to
02:38:02 ◼ ► finish I did do when we did our member podcast I did that from my uh from a laptop so I'm
02:38:08 ◼ ► successfully podcasting from a laptop and the world didn't end but I certainly didn't like it
02:38:16 ◼ ► hopefully they aren't the fault of you podcasting on a laptop but I didn't but it did better
02:38:20 ◼ ► recording a podcast and apparently Casey's computer can never do I was going to say that
02:38:23 ◼ ► I had inherited Casey's like Casey's hardware curse but I don't know I feel like this is just
02:38:28 ◼ ► assuming my my uh guess about what it was this is just a really bad situation of like hey beta
02:38:36 ◼ ► software has bugs and I think I've said this on past shows back before all this happened
02:38:41 ◼ ► Big Sur has been the hardest experience I've ever had running software update on beta OS's and I've
02:38:47 ◼ ► obviously run software update and beta OS's since 10.0 right I don't know what it is about Big Sur
02:38:53 ◼ ► is it because of the ARM transition is it because of like a code fork merge between the ARM branch
02:38:58 ◼ ► and the regular branch or whatever like every single version of Big Sur like I'd install it
02:39:03 ◼ ► on either my DTK or my Mac Pro and then someone say hey there's a new beta of Big Sur out and
02:39:09 ◼ ► I'd go to software update and it would be this incredible battle to get the freaking thing to
02:39:13 ◼ ► install you wouldn't just click software update and update it would be like oh update failed
02:39:16 ◼ ► download failed can install I don't see an update and it was like oh reinstall the beta profile or
02:39:20 ◼ ► try this or use the command line tool the command line is failing some of it was user error where
02:39:24 ◼ ► I had like the boot security different or whatever but even on the DTK where none of that applies
02:39:28 ◼ ► I'd always have to be looking for tweets and googling and say how do you get to every single
02:39:34 ◼ ► update has been like pulling teeth including beta 5 I had to take 20 different runs at it to
02:39:38 ◼ ► get the thing to download and turn content caching so the other thing can get it because it could
02:39:41 ◼ ► fail the downloader from the I don't know what the hell Big Sur's problem is Big Sur running it has
02:39:46 ◼ ► been fine like I don't see lots of huge bugs other than cosmetic stuff inside the OS but actually
02:39:51 ◼ ► getting software update to run has been killing me it's probably because they replace software
02:39:55 ◼ ► update in Big Sur with the mobile update that they use in iOS for obvious reasons but yeah that's
02:40:02 ◼ ► super buggy so needless to say I will no longer be applying be installing betas of Big Sur on my
02:40:08 ◼ ► Mac Pro after this I'll still do it on the DDK that can get host fine but as far as I'm concerned
02:40:13 ◼ ► my Mac Pro is done with Big Sur until official release and even then I'm gonna make like a
02:40:17 ◼ ► hodgillion backups before before I install Big Sur on it because now I am terrified of a similar
02:40:22 ◼ ► thing happening again oh that was an adventure yeah I never want to open up this computer again
02:40:29 ◼ ► it's just so so stressful because it's like you know those bank high scenes where they're like
02:40:34 ◼ ► trying to lift like the diamonds out of the thing without hitting the lasers or trying on things
02:40:38 ◼ ► like every time I lift that lid off like it's not it's there's you have to do it perfectly straight
02:40:46 ◼ ► and smoothly and you don't want to bang these pieces of metal against each other I've heard
02:40:49 ◼ ► some horror stories of people who picked a little handle up and twisted and like there's some there's
02:40:53 ◼ ► some like padding stuff in there they can get all bunched up and it's just I'm really I really don't
02:40:59 ◼ ► you know I'm glad I hopefully will only have to open it up and close it one more time after I get
02:41:04 ◼ ► this sorted out but I'm way over my I remember when I first got it I opened to close it two or