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ATP

211: Hardware Mind Virus

 

00:00:00   The on gold that's really the name of this thing. It's the on pro gold. Yeah extreme

00:00:05   Special edition. I mean if they're released in sky lake AP, I don't care what they call it, but that's really a stupid name 18 cores

00:00:12   Zeon gold are they gonna make a gold Mac Pro? That would be amazing

00:00:18   There could even be an addition. That's solid gold

00:00:23   John it if the next Mac Pro is only available in rose gold and like actual rose gold not like pink aluminum

00:00:30   But actual rose gold that would probably raise the price by $15,000. Would you buy that Mac Pro? No, can't swing it

00:00:37   What if it had a gaming video card in it?

00:00:39   Still no, that's cold Marco. No

00:00:44   $15,000 computers. Sorry

00:00:46   Well, I mean at the rate that you replace them that actually isn't that ridiculous

00:00:50   Like how many cars have you had during the time you've had this Mac Pro?

00:00:55   Well, I got a lot more value out of the cars

00:00:57   All right, so we should start with follow-up as we always do

00:01:02   Tyler lock loc loc has some APFS boot experiments that he has performed. Would you like to tell us about that?

00:01:10   Mr. File systems. He was the person who last week

00:01:16   tweeted about booting a Mac off of APFS and we talked about it in follow-up and

00:01:22   one of the points that I made during that segment was that he had posted a screenshot of the get info window in the finder

00:01:29   of the volume that he booted from and it said APFS case insensitive and

00:01:32   what I thought that meant was that

00:01:35   the APFS on his volume that he booted off was case insensitive and therefore all the weird problems that we discussed about

00:01:42   trying to run Mac OS and its applications on case-sensitive file systems wouldn't apply.

00:01:47   I should have looked a little bit farther down his tweet timeline because apparently he subsequently tweeted that

00:01:52   Finder and other utilities are confused about whether the volume is case insensitive or not. Rest assured, it is case sensitive.

00:01:59   So it's kind of weird that the get info window says case insensitive, but he's telling me, "No, no, this APS

00:02:06   volume is case sensitive." So again, he's doing weird stuff on an unreleased,

00:02:11   you know, beta, everything.

00:02:13   So it still doesn't tell us what the final incarnation of this is going to be, whether

00:02:17   it's in a point release of Sierra or whether it's in the next major version of MagOS, but

00:02:21   that's super weird that the Finder thinks it's case insensitive but knows that it's

00:02:25   APFS, but that the actual volume is case sensitive.

00:02:29   So oh well.

00:02:30   >> Whoo, riveting.

00:02:31   >> It is.

00:02:32   It's because this will be an important—even though this seems esoteric as the follow-up

00:02:39   We had a couple last week or whatever, but your programs won't work if it's case sensitive

00:02:42   Like or they won't work for some period of time till the developers update them. It will make you sad so

00:02:47   Better hope they sort this out

00:02:50   Fair enough, and then we have a little bit of talk about the various cesspools in Silicon Valley. Is that redundant anyway?

00:02:57   Tesla apparently is having some problems with harassment surprise surprise

00:03:02   There's an article in the Guardian, which I haven't had the chance to read but I intend to read tomorrow

00:03:07   A female engineer sues Tesla, describing a culture of "pervasive harassment."

00:03:13   You don't say.

00:03:14   A technology and car company.

00:03:15   That's surprising.

00:03:16   Yeah, I put that in there just because, not so much about the specific story, which this

00:03:21   is actually interesting in that it's a current employee suing the company, so that's another

00:03:26   twist in this.

00:03:27   But just to reinforce the idea that we touched on last week about Uber, that although Uber

00:03:32   is surely an extremely egregious example that this problem is not isolated to a single company,

00:03:38   to a single person, to a single bad apple. I think it's not even isolated to a single

00:03:42   industry, although, you know, in the circles we travel and we tend to see tech things.

00:03:46   It is everywhere, and when one of these stories comes up, what it does is it makes the other

00:03:51   stories come to the surface, you know, because it's, you know, a media trend or people feel

00:03:56   more emboldened to come forward or people want to report on it more, and they come in

00:04:01   But anyway, it's everywhere and if you want to see another example, there you go.

00:04:05   Yep, and then we have an entry in the show notes to Uber or not to Uber and I presume that this is because a

00:04:13   handful of listeners, very very astute listeners,

00:04:16   called out the fact that one of us, and very well may have been me, had talked about

00:04:20   with regard to WWDC

00:04:23   flying into like San Francisco rather than San Jose and

00:04:28   You know, maybe we could just catch an uber to get down to San Jose after flying into San Francisco

00:04:32   And you know a few people had said hey that seems kind of disingenuous after you spent you know a fair bit of time

00:04:39   Complaining and you know railing against uber to then immediately say oh, yeah

00:04:44   I'll totally take an uber after that so it's actually me. I'm pretty sure was me that said that yeah

00:04:49   It was Marco and he used it as a verb. He said like uber up to uber down to San Jose

00:04:53   Yeah

00:04:54   And the reason why is because when we recorded last week,

00:04:58   we didn't have time for the Uber topic during the main show,

00:05:01   so we did it in the after show.

00:05:03   During the edit, I decided it was too important

00:05:05   to have as an after show topic,

00:05:07   so I moved it forward in the show

00:05:09   and kind of promoted it in the edit

00:05:11   to a regular main core show topic,

00:05:14   so I thought it was important enough.

00:05:15   Then, I probably wouldn't have said that

00:05:17   after having that discussion,

00:05:18   and I just kind of said it without even thinking about it,

00:05:20   like at the time.

00:05:22   As soon as I said it, I regretted saying it,

00:05:25   because that is exactly the kind of thing

00:05:28   that I'm usually conscious of,

00:05:29   and it's the kind of thing where like,

00:05:31   yeah, I kinda don't wanna take Uber anymore

00:05:33   after all how horrible they are.

00:05:35   So anyway, I personally have since deleted Uber off my phone.

00:05:39   There were plenty of previous reasons to do it,

00:05:41   but this is the big one to do it, to do it like now.

00:05:44   And I figure, you know, I don't actually use it that often

00:05:47   because in my home city, I don't need it.

00:05:51   but when I'm traveling I would use it often,

00:05:53   but I think I'm gonna install Lyft now

00:05:55   and try that instead because yeah,

00:05:58   it's not worth supporting that if we don't have to.

00:06:01   - Yep.

00:06:01   - It's kind of like, as some people who tweeted at us

00:06:04   about this point, like the Kleenex situation

00:06:05   where because Uber was first and is so famous

00:06:09   and so prominent, that to Uber it is like,

00:06:13   even though you are saying the word Uber,

00:06:15   which is the name of a company,

00:06:16   it's just a generic term for a thing

00:06:19   that makes a car come and get you

00:06:20   because you tap stuff on your phone.

00:06:23   And so you could Uber from one place to the other with Lyft

00:06:25   or whatever.

00:06:26   But anyway, either way, the larger question

00:06:28   is, given all of this stuff, are we

00:06:32   going to continue to use Uber?

00:06:34   And I think all of us in the places where we actually live

00:06:38   never have a need for a service like Uber at all.

00:06:41   So it's not really relevant.

00:06:42   It's only really relevant when we're traveling.

00:06:44   And there have been a lot of people

00:06:46   deleting Uber off the phone or otherwise

00:06:49   vowing to never use it. One of the interesting things I read about the people who drive for

00:06:56   Uber is that very often the drivers are working for multiple ones of these companies at the same

00:07:01   time. So if you call for a Lyft or you call for an Uber, it could be the same person answering,

00:07:06   they just change what app is up on their phone, which is interesting. So it's not as if the car,

00:07:12   the person you get is actually dependent on the company and Lyft, like every other company,

00:07:20   I'm sure has its own fair share of problems and you know, or as people putting out in the chat room,

00:07:26   problems dealing with down to the application itself, you know, always putting location

00:07:30   on. Oh no, this is the opposite, they're complaining that Uber always has location on.

00:07:34   Anyway, I recall reading lots of scary things about Lyft as well and that very often they were

00:07:40   presented as the better alternative to Uber merely because Uber is so incredibly terrible

00:07:44   that the bar is low. In some respects it's a little bit like airlines that we've talked

00:07:51   about before where we all know angry travelers. Maybe we have been this angry traveler who has

00:07:58   a bad experience with an airline and vows to never fly in them again. And if you travel at all

00:08:05   Frequently you will eventually have that same experience with every airline and then you will literally be unable to fly

00:08:12   Because that because all airlines do something that is enough to anger people is that that's it

00:08:17   I'm never flying Delta again and they stick to it and they never fly Delta again

00:08:21   If you if you do that for five years of constant traveling you will be out of airlines

00:08:26   And I wonder if ride-sharing services especially ones subsidized by VC money that are basically trying to put taxi companies out of business

00:08:34   so they can dance on their grave and then raise their prices.

00:08:39   I wonder if there are any good ride sharing companies.

00:08:42   And it's not as if taxi services are all that great either.

00:08:45   Every one of these things seems to have some kind of problem.

00:08:47   So, you know, I've certainly-- what

00:08:50   I heard somebody say recently was that I'll still use Uber,

00:08:54   but I'll hate myself every time I do it.

00:08:56   I don't know if that's the solution.

00:08:57   Is the solution deleting Uber?

00:08:58   What if you use Lyft and you find all sorts of horrible

00:09:00   things about Lyft?

00:09:00   you can not use any rideshare services. It's hard to know what to do in these type of situations.

00:09:07   I think it is very similar to an airline type situation. But when there are alternatives,

00:09:12   obviously, if you have any kind of choice at all, and you really do think Uber is the worst of the

00:09:18   worst, don't pick them. Pick another company, right? And I guess you just keep doing that

00:09:24   until you're out of ride-sharing companies, or you know, ride-hiring companies. What are they called?

00:09:28   it's not ride sharing, what do you call a thing like Uber?

00:09:31   - I don't know, private taxis?

00:09:33   But it's not a car service, I don't know.

00:09:34   Whatever it is.

00:09:36   But like, you know, usually this argument of like,

00:09:39   well, they're all probably terrible,

00:09:41   when we might, we just might not know

00:09:42   how terrible the other ones are,

00:09:43   'cause they're like less in the public eye.

00:09:45   - Or we do know, but it was like two news cycles ago.

00:09:48   - Right, and so like, and like I've talked about this

00:09:50   previously with like, you know,

00:09:51   how I buy things from Amazon,

00:09:53   even though I know that in many ways,

00:09:54   Amazon as a retail company is kind of horrible.

00:09:57   but I've worked in other retail companies before

00:10:00   just enough to know that they're all pretty horrible

00:10:03   and retail is just a horrible business.

00:10:05   And so, you know, like the smaller ones,

00:10:08   like what am I gonna do?

00:10:09   Like, oh, I'm not gonna buy this thing at Amazon,

00:10:10   I'm gonna buy it at Walmart.

00:10:12   No.

00:10:13   (laughs)

00:10:14   And like, you know, where else am I gonna,

00:10:15   like maybe I'll go to Target.

00:10:17   Well, they're probably horrible in some other way too.

00:10:19   Because retail is a horrible business

00:10:21   and all the incentives kind of force everyone in it

00:10:22   to be pretty horrible or to go out of business.

00:10:25   And so I decided it's worth it to me to shop at Amazon

00:10:29   'cause it's just so much better than everything else

00:10:31   and their offenses aren't bad enough to offend me enough

00:10:36   to overcome the difference between them and anybody else

00:10:40   in morality versus the incredible convenience

00:10:43   that they offer.

00:10:44   With Uber though, I think it's a little bit

00:10:46   of a different situation because first of all,

00:10:49   Uber in the grand scheme of things is pretty young

00:10:52   And so it's hard for anybody to look at what Uber gives them

00:10:56   in their life and say, "I can't be without that."

00:10:59   Because like, well you were without that,

00:11:01   like what, five years ago?

00:11:02   Like it wasn't that long ago.

00:11:04   Chances are five years ago you weren't using

00:11:06   anything like that, and you still lived.

00:11:08   You still got around.

00:11:09   You still found a way to make that work.

00:11:10   How did you do that, right?

00:11:11   Like could you just go back to that?

00:11:13   How bad would it really be?

00:11:15   Even if there's no other ride-hailing companies

00:11:18   like Lyft or like, even if you can't get any

00:11:20   of the other ones in your area, if Uber's the only one

00:11:21   serves your area, how bad would it be not to use them?

00:11:24   And in some cases, it actually is really bad.

00:11:27   Like in some cases, if your alternative is like,

00:11:29   well, I can get an Uber in 10 minutes,

00:11:32   or because of where I am, like if you're like,

00:11:33   you know, in like nowhere Brooklyn,

00:11:36   and no cab will pick you up out there,

00:11:38   believe me, I've been there, this was before I used Uber,

00:11:40   and you have to wait like, literally,

00:11:42   you have to wait an hour and a half

00:11:44   from midnight to 1.30 a.m. on a pier in Brooklyn,

00:11:49   because there's no cabs around,

00:11:51   and you had to call a car service,

00:11:52   and that's the soonest they can come get you.

00:11:55   In that kind of case, okay, if Uber's really the only thing

00:11:59   that will serve you, I can't really fault you for using it.

00:12:02   However, most of the time, for most people,

00:12:05   if Uber serves you at all, other options probably do too,

00:12:09   whether it's your regular taxi service

00:12:12   or other car hailing services or mass transit

00:12:16   or other private car service and stuff like that.

00:12:19   Chances are, if you use Uber at all,

00:12:22   you probably have other options.

00:12:24   And they might be a little bit less convenient.

00:12:26   You might have to wait one or two extra minutes for a ride,

00:12:29   or you might have to pay a dollar more.

00:12:31   But you have to decide for yourself

00:12:33   if that's worth the moral savings or not.

00:12:37   And for me, I think it's worth it.

00:12:39   - Yeah, there was that other one I heard about

00:12:40   called Fasten, like fasten your seat belts.

00:12:43   I think that's another one that's,

00:12:45   at the very least in the Pacific Northwest,

00:12:47   I heard a bunch of people talking about.

00:12:48   So it's not just Uber and Lyft.

00:12:50   There are probably other options.

00:12:52   Maybe not all of them are nationwide, so I guess check the app store and ask around to

00:12:56   see what the other options are in your area.

00:12:58   You too can live an Uber-free lifestyle.

00:13:00   And hopefully, though.

00:13:02   And I mean, it's easy for the three of us to say because we're white dudes.

00:13:04   But you know, I've understood that in some ways it can be better if you're, you know,

00:13:08   like a minority or if you're a woman that maybe it's better for some reason to call

00:13:13   an Uber or perhaps a Lyft.

00:13:15   Well, maybe not an Uber.

00:13:16   There's been a lot of horror stories about women getting picked up by Uber.

00:13:18   Okay, maybe women was a poor example, but you know, maybe if you're a person of color

00:13:22   or something like that, you know, maybe a taxi cab would not take your fare where an

00:13:27   Uber or perhaps a Lyft would.

00:13:30   You know, I guess what I'm driving at is it's all nuanced, right?

00:13:35   It's just a balancing act and you do what works best for you.

00:13:39   But I plan to, before I go to San Jose, which I think I'm going to be doing, I plan to look

00:13:45   into Lyft and understand if there's any differences in procedure or like, you know, tipping paradigms

00:13:50   or anything like that. I plan to try to understand what that is before I go. So this way I can

00:13:56   use Lyft rather than Uber. And I should mention that a friend of the show, Jean McDonald,

00:14:01   who in the past has run or been deeply involved with, I guess she is still deeply involved

00:14:07   with AppCamp for Girls, which is an organization that's near and dear to all of our hearts.

00:14:11   Anyway, she, just for fun, decided to drive, I thought, and I'm pretty sure I have this

00:14:15   right, for both Uber and Lyft, and then ended up not doing it for Uber anymore because she

00:14:20   had some really bad experiences.

00:14:22   I don't have her tweets handy where she talked about this, unfortunately, but you can look

00:14:28   at her timeline or just ask her about it, and she'll tell you that she drives for Lyft

00:14:34   from time to time because she's just felt better about it.

00:14:37   I wish I could remember what was better,

00:14:39   but she seemed to think that Lyft

00:14:41   was a better experience for drivers

00:14:42   and probably for riders too.

00:14:44   - The pink mustaches, right?

00:14:45   (laughing)

00:14:46   - Well, I mean, here's the thing too.

00:14:48   It's kinda hard to be worse than Uber.

00:14:51   Literally everything they do is horrible

00:14:53   with the exception that they are kind of everywhere now.

00:14:56   But the company is horrible.

00:14:58   The people at the top leading the company are horrible.

00:15:01   The app is horrible.

00:15:03   The app itself is its own incredible case study of horrendous, abusive, fraudulent app

00:15:10   design.

00:15:11   Like, it does so many creepy, immoral things that honestly should be or might even are

00:15:19   prohibited on iOS.

00:15:21   It's just a terrible app in front of a terrible service run by some really horrible people.

00:15:28   Again, like in most cases, most of the time if you're deciding between big, crappy companies

00:15:33   like airlines or retail stores, I think the differences are usually smaller between them,

00:15:38   but in this case, my god is Uber horrible.

00:15:41   It would be really impressive for any other company in this business to be as horrible

00:15:45   as they are.

00:15:46   Well, that's what the competition is for.

00:15:48   So here's one article from Dlofnik saying Uber is quietly terrible for women and black

00:15:53   people, study says.

00:15:54   So there's an article on that, so much for Uber being better for minorities or women.

00:16:00   And then another article saying, "New business model, same racist cab drivers."

00:16:05   That just talks about both Uber and Lyft making it harder for people with black-sounding names

00:16:09   to get rides.

00:16:10   So like, as with so many of these things, I was trying to emphasize, it's not a problem

00:16:15   with a particular company or particular domain.

00:16:16   It's a cultural societal problem, because all these companies are made up of people

00:16:22   who come from this culture and this society.

00:16:25   Granted, very often they are the worst people, but you know, like the CEO of Uber who was

00:16:29   called in video arguing with one of his drivers which just just boggles my mind that maybe

00:16:34   he was drunk you don't have the self awareness to understand that i don't even i don't even

00:16:40   know if you can't if you can't be if you are the ceo of a company and you can't manage

00:16:43   to be respectful and magnanimous for five minutes to one of your employees who's angry i i do

00:16:49   boggle my mind that you could be this bad at everything having to do with it anyway

00:16:54   yeah so if you you know if you want peace fight for justice as they say. if you want to solve the

00:17:03   problem you really have to solve it at the root. you're not going to solve it by scolding spoiled

00:17:09   tech CEOs but if you can at all if you could at all avoid giving money to what really seems to be

00:17:18   the worst of the very worst of a business that is already in a slightly precarious situation in

00:17:24   in terms of all the articles going around about the fact

00:17:27   that Uber is not profitable and is basically

00:17:29   being funded by venture capital to put tax companies out

00:17:32   of business.

00:17:32   And if they ever succeeded in that,

00:17:33   they would just raise their prices.

00:17:35   And by the way, they exploit their workers.

00:17:36   And that's half of what the argument with the CEO

00:17:39   was about, saying I used to get paid x amount,

00:17:41   and now I get paid so much less.

00:17:43   And the Uber CEO is saying, he's just

00:17:45   waiting to replace all these drivers with self-driving cars

00:17:47   anyway.

00:17:48   And they're self-driving cars running through red lights,

00:17:49   and then Uber lying about it.

00:17:51   Oh, it's a mess.

00:17:52   So bottom line is stay in your house and never go anywhere.

00:17:55   (laughing)

00:17:56   - Wow, that is definitely the John Siracusa answer

00:17:59   to this problem.

00:17:59   - Yeah, you wish that was the answer.

00:18:01   - Solves a lot of problems, doesn't it?

00:18:03   - It solves your problems.

00:18:04   - Yeah, I don't think I've ever actually taken an Uber

00:18:07   on my account.

00:18:08   My wife has an account that we used it

00:18:10   when I was in San Francisco,

00:18:11   and I gotta tell you, it was convenient.

00:18:13   - I mean, my experience, my personal experience with Uber

00:18:16   has really been very good, truth be told.

00:18:19   I've never had a bad experience,

00:18:21   and it's always gone pretty well for me.

00:18:23   But like I said earlier,

00:18:24   I'm not comfortable with the way the company as a whole,

00:18:30   and certainly the CEO, seems to do business.

00:18:32   And that doesn't mean that there's nothing

00:18:34   but mean, terrible people at Uber,

00:18:36   but certainly the people that are running the show

00:18:38   seem to be pretty consistently mean and terrible.

00:18:41   So because of that, I intend to, like I said,

00:18:43   try out Lyft next time I'm out there.

00:18:45   - Yeah, and that's the weird,

00:18:46   like every time I've ever been in an Uber

00:18:50   or even a taxi for that matter.

00:18:52   The people who are actually driving,

00:18:53   like the leaf nodes of the org chart,

00:18:56   I've had good experiences.

00:18:57   Now obviously that's not universal,

00:18:58   and again, all the articles we just listed

00:19:00   about them refusing to pick up people with black-sounding names

00:19:02   and picking up women and driving them around longer

00:19:04   than they should be driving them and hitting on them

00:19:06   and doing all sorts of terrible things,

00:19:07   like obviously that happens.

00:19:08   But it's kind of like when you get met at Delta

00:19:12   and vow that you'll never fly with them again.

00:19:13   Does that mean every employee of Delta is an evil person?

00:19:15   Certainly not.

00:19:16   And so it's a complicated thing where you're like,

00:19:19   You're trying to punish the company by withholding your business, but what about the people who

00:19:26   work for the company?

00:19:27   Oh, they can just quit and work for a better airline.

00:19:28   Can they?

00:19:29   What if they work in Atlanta and it's Delta's hub?

00:19:31   I don't know.

00:19:33   The whole effectiveness and the sort of ethics of boycotts have always been complicated when

00:19:44   it's not like a black and white kind of pervasive issue like segregation or the bus boycott

00:19:54   and stuff like that.

00:19:55   This is slightly more nuanced, but I think if there's something you can do that's straightforward,

00:20:02   like Mark would have said, just call a cab, use a different company, it's so easy to

00:20:05   do, you should just do it.

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00:22:14   - So Marco, you had a big day today.

00:22:19   As we record on Wednesday as per usual,

00:22:22   Overcast ads are available for purchase

00:22:24   from anyone that has an Overcast account,

00:22:27   and that's exciting.

00:22:28   And what surprised me, but really shouldn't have surprised me, you have a really neat

00:22:34   little table here that's presumably all integrated with your ad backend that shows availability

00:22:39   and prices and some analytics, sort of, kind of, some estimated analytics.

00:22:44   And it's all much more mature than I would have expected.

00:22:47   The way you painted it when we've talked, both on the show and privately, I don't know,

00:22:52   I just got this impression that this was a little bit, I don't know, grab ass.

00:22:55   But as it turns out, this is legit.

00:22:58   This is the real deal.

00:22:59   And you've clearly put a whole lot of work in it.

00:23:01   - This is grab ass plus CSS.

00:23:03   (laughing)

00:23:05   - Touche, sir.

00:23:06   But anyway, this is super exciting.

00:23:08   And you've already had a few categories sell out.

00:23:10   So how's things going?

00:23:12   I mean, it certainly looks from the outside

00:23:13   like it's going really well.

00:23:15   - I mean, so far it's going great.

00:23:17   And you know, this is not an indication

00:23:19   of how it's going to be going long term.

00:23:21   Because no one, including me,

00:23:24   and the people buying the ads,

00:23:26   has any idea what is a podcast ad worth?

00:23:29   'Cause some of these ads are for websites or apps,

00:23:33   but most of them, by far, most of them are for podcasts.

00:23:37   By the way, I love that ratio.

00:23:42   I do want the ability to advertise for both types of things,

00:23:46   but I also would prefer if most of the ads

00:23:48   were podcast ads.

00:23:49   And I actually considered having it actually be

00:23:52   to separate inventory types.

00:23:55   So it would actually sell separate slots,

00:23:57   possibly at different prices.

00:23:58   Like maybe podcast ads would be cheaper than website ads.

00:24:01   And that was too much complexity,

00:24:03   so I just didn't build that out.

00:24:04   And I might do it later, but probably not.

00:24:07   Basically, it's kinda cool that in a podcast app,

00:24:11   I can now have ads for other podcasts,

00:24:14   because it makes it kinda not feel like an ad anymore.

00:24:17   And this is one of the reasons why I added the option

00:24:21   for paying subscribers who normally just automatically

00:24:24   wouldn't see any ads, I added a setting in settings

00:24:28   for them, a checkbox, for them to turn the ads on.

00:24:31   You know, for everyone else it just is on

00:24:33   and they can't turn it off, but for paying people,

00:24:35   one of the benefits normally that you're paying for

00:24:37   is not to see ads, but these ads are kinda nice.

00:24:40   Like it turned out really well and so far

00:24:43   there are like podcasts and a good number of them

00:24:46   and good quality ones buying the ads.

00:24:49   I mean, I'm literally only about four hours or so

00:24:53   into the ad sales, so it's very hard for me

00:24:57   to really know what this is gonna be like long term,

00:24:59   but in the short term, it's really easy.

00:25:02   It's really nice, it's really nice.

00:25:05   So I built the system, it's a pretty straightforward

00:25:08   like basic database thing with basic tracking in the app

00:25:13   of views, taps, and subscriptions.

00:25:15   The payment is all through Stripe,

00:25:17   'cause Stripe is amazing.

00:25:19   I love Stripe so much.

00:25:21   What did we do before Stripe?

00:25:23   Actually, I'll tell you what we did before Stripe.

00:25:25   PayPal, and it was a dark time.

00:25:27   Oh my, was it a dark time.

00:25:29   - I'm gonna tell you about dark times.

00:25:31   Before PayPal, we had banks of modems

00:25:33   that would dial the credit card companies

00:25:36   and transfer information using archaic protocols

00:25:38   from our Linux servers.

00:25:40   Phone lines, actual phone lines.

00:25:41   That's how we did credit card processing.

00:25:43   - Was that actually worse than PayPal?

00:25:45   I don't know.

00:25:46   - Yes, it was worse.

00:25:47   Have you ever tried to do subscriptions in PayPal?

00:25:49   - Phone lines and modems are among the least friendly things

00:25:53   you ever want to be wrangling at a data center

00:25:54   that is not in the same building as you.

00:25:56   - Have you ever used PayPal?

00:25:58   - I have.

00:25:59   I mean, PayPal will eventually freeze your account

00:26:01   and take all your money,

00:26:02   but the phone line situation made it so hard

00:26:04   to even get money in the first place.

00:26:06   - Yeah, well anyway, so this is all built using some,

00:26:09   you know, nice easy stuff with Stripe as the payment gateway.

00:26:12   I even accept Apple Pay, which is kind of cool

00:26:15   'cause they make it really easy.

00:26:17   So I literally, you put in a few HTML divs

00:26:19   and you enable this thing on your site

00:26:21   and then you have Apple Pay.

00:26:22   So you can go to my site and buy an ad

00:26:24   with your fingerprint in like three seconds.

00:26:27   It's kind of awesome.

00:26:28   (laughs)

00:26:29   It's incredibly satisfying.

00:26:31   And so yeah, that's what I've been working on

00:26:33   the last week or so is just building this system out.

00:26:37   And there's still a lot I have to do.

00:26:39   Like basically tomorrow I have to build a system

00:26:41   to notify people when categories become available

00:26:44   that are sold out.

00:26:45   That's something I kind of added last minute tonight

00:26:46   because a bunch of things sold out

00:26:48   and I immediately got a bunch of emails from people saying,

00:26:49   hey, I got here too late, my category sold out,

00:26:53   can you put me up for the next one?

00:26:55   And I don't really wanna get in the business

00:26:56   of having to maintain a thousand different relationships

00:26:59   with people and emailing them

00:27:00   and then what if it sells beforehand,

00:27:01   then they're out of luck and I email them.

00:27:03   So I'm just gonna be able to very simple notify me thing.

00:27:06   I already built the system to record your intention

00:27:09   to be notified, I just haven't actually

00:27:10   made the notifications yet

00:27:12   because now I have 30 days to do that

00:27:14   because all these ads have 30 day emails.

00:27:16   - That is the most Marco thing.

00:27:18   The most Marco comment I've ever heard.

00:27:20   Oh, I don't have to worry about that for a month.

00:27:22   - Yeah, and similarly, like, I want the ad to email

00:27:26   the person who bought it when it expires to tell them,

00:27:29   "Your ad has expired, click here if you want

00:27:31   "to buy another one."

00:27:32   And I haven't built that yet either,

00:27:34   because I have 30 days to build that too.

00:27:35   (laughs)

00:27:37   But yeah, so for the most part though,

00:27:38   the system is pretty much, like, it's, you know,

00:27:41   three quarters of the way done.

00:27:42   Like, all the core stuff is there,

00:27:43   accepting the payments, my admin interface to approve

00:27:48   or reject and refund them, all sorts of payment handling

00:27:53   things that were actually surprisingly easy

00:27:55   'cause Stripe is so good.

00:27:56   I mean, geez, Stripe kind of embarrasses

00:28:01   everything else I do.

00:28:03   Like, in like, every other part of this

00:28:06   was more complicated and took more work and more fiddling

00:28:09   than the entire payment processing.

00:28:11   (laughing)

00:28:12   which is kind of amazing.

00:28:13   - You would think that would have been the worst

00:28:15   because that's arguably the most important

00:28:17   since it involves money, but no, apparently not.

00:28:20   So I have some questions.

00:28:21   So you had made mention that you had,

00:28:23   this took you like a week?

00:28:24   So last I had heard, you had demo ads in the app.

00:28:28   You know, obviously I'm on the beta,

00:28:31   so I'm seeing these canned ads that,

00:28:33   well I guess they weren't entirely demoed.

00:28:34   They were kind of like first run ads.

00:28:36   - They were real ads.

00:28:37   I had just inputted them manually into the database.

00:28:40   - Right.

00:28:40   for people to buy them.

00:28:43   - And so that was running for a little bit,

00:28:44   and then how long did it take you to do this whole back end?

00:28:47   You said about a week?

00:28:48   - Yeah, about a week.

00:28:49   Well, 'cause I already had the system

00:28:51   between the app and the sync service,

00:28:54   I already had the system to serve the ads to the app,

00:28:57   have the app show them, record their stats,

00:29:00   and then transmit the stats back on the next sync.

00:29:04   And so I had basically the whole back end

00:29:07   like serving and tracking the ads.

00:29:10   So all I had to do was the creation, editing,

00:29:14   and buying of the ads.

00:29:16   And that's not a small amount of work,

00:29:18   but in the grand scheme of things,

00:29:19   it's only about half of it.

00:29:21   - So when one goes to buy an ad,

00:29:23   you select a price, and the first thing you're presented

00:29:27   with is choose an ad type, and you can either search

00:29:28   for a podcast or you can provide a URL.

00:29:31   What happens after that?

00:29:33   Would I be providing art or Blurb?

00:29:36   what is customizable here?

00:29:38   - Try it.

00:29:40   You don't have to pay until the very end.

00:29:41   - So I'm not gonna--

00:29:42   - I'm not gonna like send you an invoice.

00:29:43   - Fair enough.

00:29:45   - You will know when you're paying.

00:29:46   (laughing)

00:29:48   - Works for me, I got a little scared,

00:29:50   I don't wanna mess with it.

00:29:51   All right, so I have a title, description--

00:29:52   - You gotta support arrow keys in returning

00:29:54   your auto completes, come on.

00:29:56   - Oh, my big search, the podcast search box?

00:29:58   Yeah, that's a big custom thing.

00:29:59   - Yeah, if I hit down arrow to select and hit return,

00:30:02   it's like nope.

00:30:04   - Oh, I haven't looked at that code since 2014.

00:30:05   It might support it easily, I'm not sure.

00:30:07   I'm using this pure framework,

00:30:09   which probably doesn't even exist anymore, I don't know.

00:30:12   It was the smallest CSS type framework I could find in 2014,

00:30:17   so I put it in, but anyway, it doesn't really matter.

00:30:20   - It does not.

00:30:21   - Oh, this is very slick.

00:30:22   Okay, so I've put in,

00:30:24   this is the difference between Jon and I.

00:30:25   Jon is advertising for a podcast,

00:30:27   presumably one that has other people on it.

00:30:29   Me, I put in my own URL.

00:30:31   But anyway. - Oh yeah.

00:30:32   Marmot.org was this frequent test URL, don't worry.

00:30:35   (laughing)

00:30:36   So I have a title, description, a URL, an optional image,

00:30:40   and then what I really like is you have a little preview

00:30:43   right then and there that shows you approximately

00:30:45   what it'll look like, and then like you said,

00:30:47   when you're ready, either Apple Pay or Pay with Card.

00:30:49   Super cool, I really like this.

00:30:50   And so basically the idea is you are either advertising

00:30:55   for a podcast or anything that can relate to the web,

00:30:59   anything that has a URL.

00:31:00   - Yeah, so you know, apps, websites,

00:31:03   You know, any website.

00:31:06   - That's pretty cool.

00:31:07   And so the initial take rate seems pretty good

00:31:11   from what I can tell.

00:31:12   I mean, you're sold out in a few different things.

00:31:14   There's nothing that has no purchases.

00:31:19   - Nope, that slot's available.

00:31:21   - Oh, I'm sorry, I misread.

00:31:22   - So health has no purchases.

00:31:24   But there are other categories that have,

00:31:26   all the other categories have at least one.

00:31:28   - Ah, fair enough.

00:31:29   - Well, so you obviously massively underpriced this stuff.

00:31:31   I actually raised the prices about an hour ago

00:31:34   because they sold too fast.

00:31:36   - I noticed that.

00:31:37   - I know, but it's too late.

00:31:39   But anyway, live and learn.

00:31:40   There'll be another 30 days.

00:31:42   - I did kind of want this to be a quick sale

00:31:45   because one of the big challenges that I went into this with

00:31:48   is all those categories that say not enough data yet

00:31:52   because I just haven't had test ads in those categories.

00:31:56   And so I really need to know

00:31:59   what categories even get good traffic?

00:32:02   And then the pricing is kind of a guess.

00:32:04   Like, you know, business sold out really quickly,

00:32:07   and I had it in the low price category

00:32:09   'cause I didn't think it was as high traffic

00:32:11   as the other ones in Overcast.

00:32:13   But now I'll find out if that's true or not.

00:32:16   And if it is true, I'm gonna move it up

00:32:17   to the dark gray section between all and the others.

00:32:20   That's like the mid-price tier.

00:32:22   - That's why you should have done an auction system

00:32:24   because the market will decide what's valuable

00:32:26   'cause it's not just the traffic,

00:32:27   it's like how valuable are the people

00:32:28   who listen to business podcasts.

00:32:29   and maybe they all have lots of money

00:32:30   and buy expensive stuff all the time

00:32:31   so they're more valuable to advertise to.

00:32:33   - Maybe, I mean, you know, I can adjust the prices

00:32:35   obviously individually if I need to,

00:32:37   but ultimately I would rather have the inventory

00:32:41   sell out more often than to extract

00:32:44   every possible last dollar out of the highest bidder

00:32:47   because I want there to be a lot of ads in the system

00:32:49   because that way people see a nice variety in their apps

00:32:51   and it kinda gives more people a chance

00:32:54   to advertise in the app.

00:32:56   So that, I would prefer sold out inventory

00:32:59   to necessarily the absolute highest price.

00:33:02   Again, I have no idea how hard it's going to be

00:33:05   to sell these ads in six months, a year.

00:33:09   I have no idea.

00:33:10   It could be really easy.

00:33:11   This could require very little effort on my part,

00:33:13   or I might have to actually start keeping this email list

00:33:16   and quote, "Reaching out to people,"

00:33:19   and reaching all over them to get them to buy an ad.

00:33:21   I don't know.

00:33:22   - If I then you'll be onto the next business model anyway,

00:33:24   so it'll be fine.

00:33:26   - That's true.

00:33:27   - It's gonna be hard to beat this.

00:33:28   If this keeps going, anywhere near what it is now,

00:33:32   first of all, I've made today enough for something

00:33:37   like eight months of the Google Ads.

00:33:39   - Wow, that's awesome.

00:33:40   - And I don't know if I'm gonna make this every month,

00:33:42   but it certainly shows this was probably the right move.

00:33:47   And if I even get a quarter of this, I'm happy with that.

00:33:52   - Yeah, I feel like it's gonna go up.

00:33:54   I feel like next month it's gonna be higher,

00:33:56   because you have to raise the prices.

00:33:58   you just have to. And then even if it slowly tapers off over the course of a few years,

00:34:01   the only thing that will make you stop it, which is a thing that may happen, but the

00:34:05   only thing that will make you stop it is if you find it too annoying. That is the thing

00:34:09   that's going to gate this, I feel like.

00:34:11   - Yeah, I mean that's certainly the main limiting factor is how much of my time will

00:34:15   it take. But the good thing is, this is a really easy thing to have someone else help

00:34:19   with.

00:34:20   - Yeah, that's very true.

00:34:21   - But right now, I'm doing it myself right now because I don't want to immediately

00:34:25   outsource something like this because I wanna know,

00:34:26   first of all, how it's doing.

00:34:28   And the only way to do that is to really

00:34:29   kind of run it myself.

00:34:30   So I wanna know how it works for everybody

00:34:32   all right up front.

00:34:33   I wanna know what all the needs are,

00:34:35   what the pain points are so I can fix them.

00:34:38   And then I need to know, is this even the kind of thing

00:34:41   I need to outsource to someone else?

00:34:43   Or is it so little work that I can just do it myself?

00:34:46   If it's sending 50 emails on one day a month,

00:34:50   that's a decent amount of work,

00:34:51   but I could probably just do that myself.

00:34:53   So, you know, we'll see what it actually ends up being.

00:34:57   Again, it's way too early to tell,

00:34:59   but the very early indication suggests

00:35:02   that it's pretty good.

00:35:04   - This is super awesome.

00:35:04   Now, so you're doing all the approving by hand

00:35:08   using your little admin interface?

00:35:09   - Yep.

00:35:10   - Have you had to deny anyone as yet

00:35:13   that wasn't clearly just spamming you

00:35:15   for the sake of being a jerk?

00:35:16   - No, I mean, one of the things is

00:35:18   you have to pay to even submit it.

00:35:19   Like-- - Oh, right, yeah, sure.

00:35:21   - In like the CRUD web app terms,

00:35:23   it literally doesn't even save the database record

00:35:26   until it has a payment.

00:35:27   The payment's all in the temporary session post variables

00:35:32   until it's paid.

00:35:34   So that basically makes it un-spamable

00:35:36   from a pure spam perspective.

00:35:38   It puts up a pretty big barrier.

00:35:41   And I am human reviewing them all

00:35:44   to just make sure they're not obscene

00:35:46   or hate content or anything else.

00:35:48   And there was one, one person submitted one

00:35:51   that had a word that some people might consider a bad word.

00:35:55   It's not like one of the big ones,

00:35:56   but it's like a kind of ancillary one.

00:35:58   So I went back to that person.

00:36:00   I'm like, hey, do you mind if I edit this?

00:36:02   And we worked out a different copy,

00:36:03   and then that was it, and I approved it.

00:36:04   So that was the only one that even

00:36:06   required any review at all.

00:36:08   - Nice.

00:36:09   - And you know what's amazing about this?

00:36:11   When Google sells ads on my behalf,

00:36:14   I get something like, I think, 60% of it.

00:36:18   When Apple sells anything on my behalf,

00:36:22   I get 70% of it, or maybe a year later for subscriptions,

00:36:27   if I'm lucky, 85% of it.

00:36:29   When Google pays me money, it's money that I earned

00:36:33   like six weeks ago that I finally get paid for.

00:36:35   When Apple pays me my money, it's, again, similarly,

00:36:38   about money I earned about six weeks ago.

00:36:40   With these Stripe ads, I'm earning, I think,

00:36:43   about 97% of what they sell for,

00:36:46   and it gets deposited in my bank account in two days.

00:36:49   - That's amazing.

00:36:50   - It's really kind of amazing to be out of the

00:36:53   walled garden ecosystem for once.

00:36:56   - That's super cool.

00:36:57   So, initial reaction, things are going great.

00:37:01   - Yeah.

00:37:02   - How do you think you're going to play

00:37:03   with the pricing for now?

00:37:05   Like, are you going to, I guess,

00:37:08   suppose you sell out in the next 48 hours.

00:37:10   There's really no impetus to mess with pricing

00:37:12   until the end of the month, unless you wanna cut down

00:37:15   of the people that ask to be notified, right?

00:37:18   - Well, I guess, I mean,

00:37:21   that's probably not a good business plan

00:37:22   to cut down on the number of interested parties.

00:37:24   (laughs)

00:37:25   But--

00:37:26   - I guess what I'm saying is there's no reason

00:37:28   for you to raise your prices now once you sell out

00:37:31   unless you wanna prevent people from saying notify me.

00:37:34   Let's say the all goes from, as we record,

00:37:37   it's less than $1,000 and let's say

00:37:39   it becomes 3,000 tomorrow.

00:37:41   All you're really accomplishing since it's sold out

00:37:43   is you're preventing me from being interested

00:37:46   because maybe I would have spent less than 1,000

00:37:48   but I'm not gonna spend 3,000, you know what I mean?

00:37:50   So you don't really need to mess around with pricing

00:37:53   for like 30 days, right?

00:37:55   - Yeah, I mean for the most part,

00:37:57   unless things are not selling,

00:37:58   and then I might lower the price

00:37:59   on things that are not selling, like that health category.

00:38:02   But for the most part, I think I'm gonna treat this

00:38:05   the same way I've treated any other kind of thing

00:38:07   where I set the price for an ad.

00:38:09   So our podcast ads, my website ads,

00:38:13   when I sold RSS sponsorships, things like that.

00:38:16   And the way I've done this basically is

00:38:18   if they sell out way too fast when I go to sell them,

00:38:21   I raise the price a little bit.

00:38:22   Until things start selling still at a reasonable pace,

00:38:25   like I don't want it to be like pulling teeth

00:38:26   to get things sold, but slowly enough

00:38:29   that it's not like a stampede

00:38:31   and then I get 50 angry emails from people saying,

00:38:33   oh I missed my chance to buy.

00:38:35   Like you know, that's no good either.

00:38:36   That also is not great for business necessarily.

00:38:39   So I think I'm just gonna control the prices slowly

00:38:44   and maybe when next month rolls around,

00:38:46   I will see how it sells at the new higher price

00:38:50   from an hour ago instead of the initial prices,

00:38:52   which are about, I think about 30% lower.

00:38:54   I'll see how it sells at these new kinda higher prices.

00:38:59   And if it sells out just as fast,

00:39:01   then maybe for the month after that,

00:39:03   then maybe I'll raise it a little bit more.

00:39:04   But if it's selling out at a reasonably healthy rate,

00:39:09   then I'll just leave it the way it is, really.

00:39:12   - You really nailed it, this looks great.

00:39:13   - Thanks.

00:39:14   - So let's assume this is super successful for a year,

00:39:18   just for the sake of discussion.

00:39:20   Are you at all interested in expanding,

00:39:22   I think we talked about this a little bit,

00:39:23   but are you at all interested in expanding

00:39:25   into being like iAd for other people, so to speak?

00:39:29   And either white labeling your ad platform

00:39:33   or just extending your ad platform to anyone else's apps?

00:39:38   - Probably not.

00:39:40   Because once you become an ad network for other people,

00:39:43   that's a very different business.

00:39:45   And it's a much higher needs business

00:39:47   for just dealing with people,

00:39:49   dealing with everyone else's money,

00:39:50   dealing with staffing, and dealing with people's issues.

00:39:53   And it's a much bigger business.

00:39:55   It's a much higher touch business.

00:39:57   And this system I built kind of in response

00:40:01   to other types of advertising I've done

00:40:04   where it's like blog ads and podcast ads

00:40:06   where a lot of times you have to reach out to sponsors,

00:40:10   you have to coordinate with them

00:40:12   via four or five different emails,

00:40:14   you eventually put the ad in your,

00:40:15   you book the ad in your system, you do the ad,

00:40:17   and then you have to invoice them.

00:40:19   And then they might take six months to pay the invoice.

00:40:21   Like we've seen the whole spectrum.

00:40:24   Some people pay the next day,

00:40:26   some people pay a year later or not at all.

00:40:28   And it's a very just intensive process.

00:40:32   And there are tools like FreshBooks that make it easier,

00:40:35   but it's still a lot of just human work

00:40:39   and just dealing with administration

00:40:41   to just do the basics of selling and getting paid.

00:40:44   And so with this, I really created this

00:40:46   to be as simple as possible.

00:40:48   And this is actually one of the things

00:40:49   that's gonna keep the prices kinda low

00:40:51   because most big companies who would sponsor things

00:40:55   like this, who would buy these ads,

00:40:56   if it's below a certain price,

00:40:58   oftentimes that's $1,000, it requires less of a process

00:41:02   for them to approve the payment.

00:41:04   So a lot of the big companies, if it's more than that,

00:41:06   you'll have to go through an official requisition process

00:41:10   or some other garbage full of paperwork and overhead.

00:41:13   But if it's lower, if it's a sub $1,000 price for something,

00:41:19   a lot of times you can just put that on a credit card

00:41:23   and be done with it and not have to worry too much about it.

00:41:26   So I wanna keep these prices in that range

00:41:29   so that way I can have the system I have now,

00:41:31   which is, look, if you want one of these,

00:41:33   It's self-serve.

00:41:34   You go to my site, you set it up, you pay right there.

00:41:39   I don't even see it until you pay,

00:41:41   because I don't wanna have to be chasing you down

00:41:43   in a year 'cause you didn't pay your invoice.

00:41:44   I hate that so much.

00:41:47   And so this system is very much keeping it

00:41:49   as simple as I possibly can keep it.

00:41:51   And part of that, it requires that the prices be kinda low.

00:41:54   That definitely requires that everything remains self-serve,

00:41:57   and it requires that not a lot that I'm doing

00:41:59   involves human interaction from me,

00:42:01   because if that's what it ends up needing to be,

00:42:04   I'll have to hire someone else to help me

00:42:05   'cause I don't have the time to be dealing

00:42:07   with a lot of effort into the system.

00:42:10   But in order to keep it that size and that scale,

00:42:14   I basically have to keep it my app only.

00:42:16   I can't become an ad network for any other apps

00:42:19   because that will by nature make it a bigger,

00:42:23   more complicated thing, the prices would probably go up,

00:42:26   I'd have to start dealing with people's

00:42:27   stupid invoice systems, and I just don't wanna deal with that

00:42:30   It's not the business I want to be in.

00:42:32   - Oh, this makes a lot of sense.

00:42:33   The thing that impresses me about you is that,

00:42:37   maybe I'm just a big wimp,

00:42:39   but the audacity of doing something like this,

00:42:41   like, oh, screw it, I'll sell my own ads, why not?

00:42:44   There's no way in a million years,

00:42:46   maybe I would have had the thought if I were in your shoes,

00:42:49   but I'd look at this and be like,

00:42:50   yeah, I'm not gonna do that.

00:42:51   There's no way that'll work.

00:42:52   And good on you for not only having the,

00:42:57   I don't know, fortitude to do it,

00:42:59   but to make it happen so far seems successful.

00:43:02   Like Jon has said, I think the ticking time bomb

00:43:05   is about a year away until you do

00:43:07   another business model change,

00:43:08   so I'm expecting this will fail miserably.

00:43:09   - I mean, I was just mostly doing that as a joke,

00:43:12   'cause like Marlowe said, if it continues like this

00:43:14   or better, there's no reason to do it.

00:43:16   - Totally. - Like I said,

00:43:17   unless somehow it becomes too much of a burden

00:43:19   for Marco to deal with it, I don't see how it would,

00:43:21   because everything he just outlined

00:43:22   about how he doesn't have to do anything

00:43:24   and doesn't have to chase people for money

00:43:26   and doesn't have to get money on behalf of other people,

00:43:28   Like, you know, again, maybe he's leaving money

00:43:31   on the table by saying, oh, I'm gonna try to keep it

00:43:33   in the petty cash range, but if that's enough money,

00:43:36   then it's fine and it should be sustainable.

00:43:39   Same, could've probably been set up at all the past plans,

00:43:41   so again, we have to wait to see how it's gonna be,

00:43:43   but if it actually continues like this sustainably,

00:43:46   I don't really see any reason for him to change models.

00:43:49   - Yeah, I mean-- - I completely agree.

00:43:50   - And 'cause like, the sales would have to go down a lot

00:43:54   for it to make sense for me to look at another model again,

00:43:57   because right now I have pretty much everything I want.

00:44:00   I have a way to get sustainable income.

00:44:03   I have my paying subscriber still,

00:44:06   which is its own nice sustainable income

00:44:09   that can almost support the whole business by itself.

00:44:12   So this is kind of just bonus money

00:44:13   and this is monetizing all the free users finally

00:44:16   in a way that actually works

00:44:17   because the ads really didn't do that well enough,

00:44:19   the previous ads.

00:44:21   So this is kind of a great system.

00:44:23   As long as it continues to sell the inventory

00:44:26   at any reasonable rate.

00:44:28   And day one, again, it's impossible to say.

00:44:31   I mean, once you have the kind of audience that my app has,

00:44:36   I could sell out day one pretty easily.

00:44:40   But the question is, what happens on day 365

00:44:44   when people have had a year worth of buying these ads

00:44:47   to see what they're actually worth,

00:44:48   and what if they're worth a lot less

00:44:50   than what I'm charging?

00:44:51   Obviously I have to lower my prices,

00:44:52   but what are they worth?

00:44:53   We don't know.

00:44:55   I don't think there's ever been a system

00:44:57   where you could advertise for a podcast

00:44:59   in a podcast player.

00:45:01   So this is really a complete unknown

00:45:03   for both me and the advertisers.

00:45:06   We have no idea what a subscriber is worth,

00:45:09   or how much these subscribers stick around.

00:45:13   If you get a subscriber through an ad,

00:45:15   how many of them are still subscribed in a year?

00:45:16   We don't know.

00:45:18   And so it's the great unknown right now,

00:45:20   but day one suggests that there's basically

00:45:25   a very wide buffer here for things to need

00:45:31   to be scaled down if necessary,

00:45:32   if it ends up the economics don't work very well.

00:45:35   I can scale this way down and it's still worth doing.

00:45:38   So that to me shows that this is probably a good idea.

00:45:42   By the way, there's also other controls I have,

00:45:44   like I can increase the number of slots that sell.

00:45:48   You know, like in certain categories,

00:45:49   If they demand that the price be below a certain level

00:45:54   to sell them very often, I can just put more slots there.

00:45:57   This is a known thing to do.

00:46:00   People have been dealing with ad-based business

00:46:02   for quite a long time now.

00:46:03   We know how to do it.

00:46:04   And as long as the ads are valuable at all,

00:46:08   you can usually make it work.

00:46:10   And I think what we're seeing so far

00:46:12   is that I think these are valuable.

00:46:13   The only question is just how valuable.

00:46:15   But that's really just minor tweaks over time.

00:46:17   that's not like having to rethink the whole system.

00:46:20   - Yeah, that's super cool.

00:46:21   I'm really impressed, really proud of you.

00:46:23   That's good work.

00:46:23   - Thanks.

00:46:25   - Couple other very quick questions.

00:46:27   Would you consider open sourcing this ad backend

00:46:30   so that other people can copy all your hard work for free?

00:46:33   - Probably not, but it's not out of like a

00:46:36   guarding my hard work kind of attitude.

00:46:38   It's more just like a lot of it is pretty intertwined

00:46:41   with Overcast, so it wouldn't make a lot of sense

00:46:44   for this to be used for anybody else.

00:46:47   You know, like, this is really an ad network

00:46:49   for podcasts on Overcast that happens

00:46:51   to also work for websites.

00:46:53   So, like, you know, it's not,

00:46:54   it's pretty custom to Overcast.

00:46:58   And most of the hard stuff is payment processing,

00:47:02   which I don't even, you know,

00:47:04   anybody can integrate Stripe and do that.

00:47:06   So it's, yeah, there's not a lot of value to that.

00:47:09   - Fair enough.

00:47:10   And finally, where's my swipe to delete?

00:47:14   - I was doing this.

00:47:15   So I haven't done that yet.

00:47:16   I'm gonna tackle that probably next week.

00:47:18   - It's got 30 days to do swipe to delete,

00:47:20   is that how this works?

00:47:20   - Yeah.

00:47:22   Well, I have 29 days to do it,

00:47:23   and then one day to make all these notifications.

00:47:25   - Fair enough.

00:47:26   I take back all the nice things you said,

00:47:28   unless you give me my swipe to delete.

00:47:31   - One star.

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00:49:10   [Music]

00:49:14   So today, I think it was today, there was a rumor that broke that came out of the Wall Street Journal,

00:49:21   which is usually pretty well sourced. In fact, usually well sourced enough that we all kind of

00:49:26   believe that Apple goes to the Wall Street Journal and says, "Hey, would you talk about this, please?"

00:49:30   And the Wall Street Journal has said that the iPhone 8, or whatever it may be called,

00:49:36   will have USB-C. And at first I thought, oh, this means that it'll have lightning on the

00:49:43   phone and USB-C on the other end of the cable instead of USB, what is it, B? A? I always

00:49:49   get it confused.

00:49:50   >> A.

00:49:51   >> Whatever the, A, thank you, whatever today is.

00:49:53   >> B is the Pentagon on printers.

00:49:54   >> Ah, right, okay. So anyway, so I assumed, oh, that just means that the cable will go

00:49:59   from lightning to USB-C, that makes sense, most, pretty much all the laptops are USB-C,

00:50:04   fine. But upon further inspection it sounds like no no no the phone itself

00:50:09   will actually be USB-C. And I have really conflicting opinions about this because

00:50:16   my gut reaction is no no I do not want this. I have a crud load of lightning

00:50:23   cables, lightning is really small, and I don't want to mess with that. What good

00:50:29   does this do me?" And I think that that's in large part because off the top of my head,

00:50:35   I don't think I own a single device that supports USB-C. So I guess you could make the argument

00:50:42   I'm living in the past, and if you make the argument I'm living in the past, then I guess

00:50:45   really this is the future? And maybe I should be using USB-C and I should embrace my future

00:50:52   USB-C overlords. So John, Marco and I were talking a lot earlier. What do you think about

00:50:58   all this. This is a weird rumor because like you said it is in the Wall Street Journal which is

00:51:06   usually like the end stage of life for rumors if they graduate all the way up to potential leak and

00:51:12   end up in the Wall Street Journal. But as so many people have pointed out it is so poorly written

00:51:18   that we can't even tell. It's like it was written by someone who doesn't understand any of the

00:51:22   things involved. They don't understand how phones work. They don't understand what these different

00:51:26   standards for connectors are. They don't understand what a port is because they wrote it in such a way

00:51:30   they were all reading it going, "What are you even trying to say?" Just like Casey said, "Are you just

00:51:35   saying that the other end of the connector will be C? Are you saying the phone will have a USB-C port?

00:51:41   Are you saying iPads will have USB-C ports in addition to the lightning bolt? What are you even

00:51:44   saying? This is the worst leak ever. You have to leak in a coherent way so we can at least understand

00:51:50   the thing that you're telling us is supposed to be coming. But so I've kind of discounted,

00:51:54   or not discounted, but I've set aside how this rumor is being communicated. I've chosen to believe

00:52:01   that what these things are trying to tell us is exactly what Casey said, and that if you pick up

00:52:06   an iPhone in the future and look at the bottom of it, instead of a lightning port, you'll see a USB-C

00:52:11   port like every other, you know, Android phone and all the other things that are out there, right?

00:52:15   That's what I'm choosing to think this is trying to tell me, and then I'm thinking about that.

00:52:19   If it's trying to tell me something different, like, "Oh, the other end of the lightning

00:52:23   cable is going to be USB-C," that is a super boring rumor, and I guess we could kind of

00:52:28   get upset about that because, as has been pointed out in many places before, that's

00:52:31   cool for Apple's ecosystem, and it kind of makes sense, and it kind of gets back to the

00:52:35   whole iPhone 7 thing where, like, "Oh, you buy an iPhone 7 and a new MacBook Pro, and

00:52:38   you can't even plug them in because there's no place to put the USB-A connector."

00:52:42   That's true and all, but USB-A is everywhere as a charging port.

00:52:45   It's on my luggage, for crying out loud.

00:52:49   It is everywhere.

00:52:51   So there's an argument to be had there that Apple doing that would be maybe an Apple-y

00:52:55   thing to do.

00:52:56   It would be like, "Oh, you should just, you know, you should be in an Apple ecosystem.

00:52:59   Our Power Brooks have USB-C connectors.

00:53:01   That's the future of LBLOB."

00:53:03   Anyway, I'm ignoring that and I'm just pretending they're telling me that there's going to be

00:53:06   USB-C port on iPhones.

00:53:09   And I'm of two minds on this.

00:53:13   Like I feel like there are strong arguments on both sides, both strong arguments for why

00:53:18   this would be good and bad and also surprisingly strong arguments for why Apple wouldn't wouldn't

00:53:24   do this. Like usually it's the opposite. It's like, okay, well there's arguments for and against not

00:53:29   a tech wise, but then when you bring Apple into the picture and you say, would Apple do this? Like

00:53:33   there's only one strong argument for like that tech stuff aside, we know Apple would definitely

00:53:39   do a thing like this or would never do a thing like this. And with Apple in the state it is,

00:53:44   I think you can look to Apple and say very strongly they both would do something like this

00:53:51   and wouldn't do something like this and for the tech you can say this is an awesome tech idea

00:53:54   and this is a bad tech idea. So on the tech side I would say why is this a bad idea?

00:53:59   Because lightning is smaller and you know that every connector every millimeter on a connector

00:54:06   is some number of months or years off its life as Apple makes things ever thinner and thinner

00:54:11   you're going to hit the limit of USB-C before you hit the limit of lightning. Not much before,

00:54:16   it's like probably like fractions of a millimeter or something, but a little bit before. Lightning

00:54:20   is smaller than USB-C, so there's that. On the other side of the tech thing, and this is a little

00:54:25   bit of an unknown here, lightning, we don't know how unreliable lightning is. Like we have anecdotal

00:54:31   evidence of weird connector scorching and stuff. Apple knows for sure what their warranty repair

00:54:36   thing is, you know, and also there's the Apple cables themselves, which really has nothing to do

00:54:40   to do with connector and everything to do with Apple's uncomfortable relationship with

00:54:44   strain relief on cables, where they apparently make things that don't hold up that well under

00:54:52   rough usage.

00:54:54   But there is a tech argument to be made for the fact that lightning is smaller, but also

00:55:01   the fact that USB-C, and someone will correct me if I'm wrong, inverts the relationship

00:55:07   of springy pieces of metal and stationary pieces of metal,

00:55:11   where the connector is stationary and solid

00:55:13   and has these contacts on it, which is great

00:55:14   and makes that connector sturdy.

00:55:16   But the inside of the device has the little

00:55:18   springy metal fingers that touch the contact points.

00:55:20   So if those little springy metal fingers

00:55:22   get fatigued or bent up or fail to make good contact,

00:55:27   that's inside your phone and you've got a problem.

00:55:29   Whereas a USB-C connector is,

00:55:32   I believe the springy bits are in the cable

00:55:35   and inside the connector is the stiff stationary thing.

00:55:37   I'm using the tactical terms for all this, I'm sure.

00:55:40   And so if the little springy bits that make contact with the stationary thing fatigue,

00:55:46   throw out the cable and get a new cable.

00:55:48   So that is a tech argument on the side of USB-C. And then again, I guess on the connectors

00:55:55   themselves you've got the business side of like, well, Apple gets money for Lightning

00:55:59   connectors, people can't make peripherals without it, and that's a good and a bad thing

00:56:01   because good Apple makes money and can control it.

00:56:03   bad that apple has to approve every peripheral. um yeah so that's like you can is there arguments

00:56:11   about side for the tech thing and then let's move over to apple is this a thing apple would do or

00:56:16   is this an apple thing apple wouldn't do and i think probably as soon as like a couple years

00:56:22   in the past we all would have said regardless of all that tech stuff we just talked about

00:56:27   apple will never do this because apple loves things super thin and apple love things proprietary

00:56:32   and Apple is not so much in love with conforming to industry standards just for the hell of it,

00:56:36   right? That would be the only side of this argument. You'd all be like, "Yep, totally,

00:56:40   like that's the Apple." But today's Apple? Today's Apple is doing things the old Apple

00:56:46   didn't do, both good and bad, and has sowed enough doubt in my mind that I'm now envisioning

00:56:52   these boardroom conversations where somebody high up says, "Tell me again what the advantages are

00:57:01   of the our proprietary lightning connector versus USB-C and maybe this comes up because of

00:57:06   large numbers of warranty repairs or you know who knows what the inciting incident is but someone

00:57:13   says remind me again why we've been doing this lightning thing for five years like what advantage

00:57:17   do we continue to have over USB-C especially now that we spread USB-C to all of our max and our

00:57:27   power brick connectors and you know all that stuff and presumably if they ever release new

00:57:33   max they will expand it to even more of them. why are we still using lightning n? i'm not saying

00:57:38   there's not a reason but just you know just go over it again for me like tell me again what the

00:57:42   advantages are for someone like here's our revenue from our made for iphone program and here's what

00:57:47   we've been able to do with the connector but changing the pins through software and we're

00:57:51   We're not beholden to the USB consortium and here this blah blah blah and

00:57:54   Maybe

00:57:57   There's an argument within the company. It says that's those are compelling arguments now

00:58:01   Here's what we would get with USB C everywhere would be the same one connector for power data

00:58:06   peripherals

00:58:08   video out

00:58:10   adapters for networking like across

00:58:13   Max and all IOS devices including the future much bigger iPads that we're surely making with multiple USB connectors on them

00:58:19   Right, right Apple? Making those? Anyway.

00:58:22   Yeah, I'm sure there's a reason to make that.

00:58:23   Once you standardize on just literally one omnidirectional connector that's really small

00:58:30   across all your products, that's an advantage. And you get to take advantage of the ecosystem

00:58:37   of existing USB-C peripherals, which presumably will only grow as other things adopted. So,

00:58:42   in Apple five years ago, I can't imagine this discussion even taking place in serious ways.

00:58:48   Apple today, I can imagine this discussion being had prompted by whatever, and I can imagine the

00:58:53   USB-C contingent inside Apple winning the argument and saying, "We're going to go with the industry

00:58:58   standard, even though it is worse in a few ways tech-wise, because it's also better in a few ways

00:59:03   tech-wise." And there's an ecosystem advantage, not just for Apple and non-Apple companies,

00:59:09   but for Apple's own products internally to standardize them. Because there's never been

00:59:13   been a chance to do that before. At no time in the past has there been any viable choice

00:59:18   for a standard connector for like iPods and all Macs, except for I guess when it was Firewire,

00:59:23   but that was hardly viable and Firewire was definitely not the standard across all Macs.

00:59:27   They had Macs that didn't even have it on it. So here we are and I find myself incredibly

00:59:34   believing a rumor that a future iPhone would have a USB-C connector on it because, you

00:59:38   know, it's not a slam dunk and I'm not even saying it's higher than 50/50, but I would

00:59:42   say it is 50/50 in my mind, that tech-wise, coin flip.

00:59:48   Would Apple do it?

00:59:49   Coin flip.

00:59:50   That's where I come down on this.

00:59:52   Do you want them to?

00:59:53   I kind of do, because if they're going to standardize on USB-C everywhere, I'm sold

01:00:01   on the uniformity win.

01:00:03   And I'm also kind of sort of sold on the durability win, with the little bendy finger thingies.

01:00:10   I have no data on the reliability thing.

01:00:12   And of course all my connectors still work, and I don't have these problems that people

01:00:16   had.

01:00:17   Of course they do.

01:00:18   Of course, you know.

01:00:19   Although my wife said she had one of hers that had the little scorch mark.

01:00:21   I looked at it, it wasn't like Markoz was.

01:00:23   But just mechanically speaking, I love the Lightning connector to the fact that it was

01:00:28   solid and didn't have any little fragile pins in it and everything, but the fact that

01:00:32   those little fragile fingers are inside the phones, I can see that being a problem.

01:00:36   But anyway, I don't have data on this.

01:00:39   But I'm willing to believe.

01:00:41   And so if they did it, I won't be angry.

01:00:43   I'll be kind of proud of them for being surprisingly pragmatic and courageous.

01:00:48   And for—yeah, kind of.

01:00:50   Kind of.

01:00:51   Not so much courageous in terms of like, we're willing to take the heat.

01:00:55   Because I think they wouldn't actually—that's the other aspect of this.

01:00:58   Some people are getting angry like, "You just changed the connector.

01:01:02   You're changing it again."

01:01:03   Well, first of all, "just" is a relative term.

01:01:05   The 30-pin connector was around for almost 10 years.

01:01:08   And so, you know, I think that's a good run.

01:01:12   This is slightly more than half of that.

01:01:14   If they ended up swapping this out and slowly transitioning, it would be like five, six

01:01:17   years by the time they were done transitioning everything, right?

01:01:20   All the products they sold.

01:01:22   That's a little bit, that's, you know, it's shorter than a 30 pin, but unlike the 30 pin

01:01:28   to Lightning, they wouldn't be changing one proprietary connector for another.

01:01:32   They would actually be moving to where everybody else already is.

01:01:35   So I think actually people wouldn't be all that mad about it.

01:01:38   you'll be mad, I'll have these lightning cables. What the hell do I do with them?"

01:01:41   There is a PR and real win there to say, "But we moved to the standard. We moved to the industry

01:01:48   standard." So now, if you're in a mixed household with Android and iOS devices, you don't have to

01:01:52   have two separate charging cables. And the thing that you use to charge your Mac can also charge

01:01:57   your phone. And there's a story to be had there to sell this so that it is less impact. So that it's

01:02:04   It's basically, even though it hasn't been around

01:02:06   for 10 years, we're not moving to another proprietary one.

01:02:09   We're not screwing you over, moving to the

01:02:11   industry standard, so people will be less angry

01:02:13   for a shorter period of time, I think.

01:02:15   - Marco?

01:02:16   - Yeah, I pretty much agree with Jon.

01:02:18   If you would've asked me a year ago, I would've said,

01:02:21   "Oh, why would they kill Lightning?

01:02:23   "That's dumb, this might even come up a year ago."

01:02:25   I might've said exactly that, who knows?

01:02:26   But the way I feel about it now, now that I've had

01:02:30   my USB-C MacBook Pro for a few months,

01:02:33   and I have a few USB-C cables,

01:02:36   and now I have the stupid thing

01:02:37   where I have half of my cables are that kind

01:02:39   and half are another kind, and it's really annoying.

01:02:42   And on the phone, it's a little bit different

01:02:45   than a laptop 'cause it's the other end of the cable,

01:02:47   but it is kind of annoying when I'm packing for a trip

01:02:51   and I'm packing my charging cables

01:02:53   that most of what I use charges via Lightning,

01:02:57   but not all of what I use.

01:02:59   I still have to have some mini USB cables,

01:03:02   and now I have a USB-C cable for this new laptop

01:03:05   and probably anything I get in the future

01:03:07   will be USB-C cables.

01:03:08   There is a lot, you know, like the EU has mandated

01:03:11   certain charge cable standards for a while

01:03:13   and the reason why is because this actually generates

01:03:17   tons of waste, like all the different waste cables

01:03:20   that people have to buy separately

01:03:22   and then wear out separately, throw away separately

01:03:25   and have all these different connectors and everything.

01:03:28   It actually does hurt progress in a number of big ways

01:03:30   to have all these proprietary things.

01:03:33   I think all you have to do to decide

01:03:36   whether this is a good idea or not,

01:03:37   kind of in theory, is to think if they were designing

01:03:42   the iPhone 5, the first cable,

01:03:45   the first phone not to use the dock connector,

01:03:47   if they were designing that today,

01:03:49   would they still make lightning today

01:03:51   in a world where USB-C exists,

01:03:53   or would they just use USB-C?

01:03:55   And it's kind of, if you do the mental exercise,

01:03:57   what would be the right thing to do

01:04:00   if they had a clean start today,

01:04:02   if there was no legacy to worry about,

01:04:04   no established devices out there in the world,

01:04:07   what would be the right choice?

01:04:09   And I think it's very clear USB-C would be the right choice.

01:04:13   Assuming it is probably more resilient

01:04:15   because of having the pins on the cable instead of the plug,

01:04:18   things like that, but also just because it is clearly

01:04:22   a really good, very soon to be very widespread

01:04:26   industry standard, and there's a lot of benefits to that.

01:04:30   Like, Apple does love a good proprietary port

01:04:33   when they can make one.

01:04:34   They do love that.

01:04:35   They'll take advantage when they can.

01:04:37   But not always.

01:04:38   Sometimes they just use standard things,

01:04:40   like USB, like on the Macs.

01:04:42   For a long time, they used a standard headphone jack

01:04:46   because it wasn't worth making

01:04:48   their own custom headphone jack.

01:04:50   Like, the world had a standard for this thing

01:04:52   and they used it.

01:04:53   And most of the time, they do that.

01:04:56   Most of the time, that's the choice they make.

01:04:58   And right now I think it's very, very clear that,

01:05:01   you know, like when they made the dock connector,

01:05:02   that was a special purpose thing they made for iPods,

01:05:05   then they later adapted it.

01:05:06   When they made Lightning,

01:05:07   there was nothing better for them to move to.

01:05:09   Like the industry, you know, the USB consortium

01:05:12   and their people were designing God knows what

01:05:14   with all those crazy, like the USB 3B connector.

01:05:17   - Mini micro USB, the seven connectors they have

01:05:20   to my digital cameras in the house.

01:05:22   - Yeah. - They all look

01:05:23   almost the same.

01:05:24   - Yeah, and that like, pretty much everything

01:05:26   the USB people have ever designed from a cable perspective,

01:05:29   or from a connection perspective rather,

01:05:31   has been horrendous before USB-C.

01:05:32   It's no coincidence that Apple allegedly

01:05:35   had a very big role in USB-C,

01:05:36   possibly even designing the whole thing themselves

01:05:38   and just like handing it to the USB people and saying here.

01:05:40   - Yeah, that's another reason by the way

01:05:41   that this argument could be won inside Apple,

01:05:43   because whatever sort of not invented here,

01:05:46   Apple pride things may be preventing it,

01:05:48   like with Lightning we made,

01:05:49   they'd be like, we kinda made USB-C too,

01:05:51   so we're all good in the pride area.

01:05:54   Even if the world doesn't know it,

01:05:55   here at Apple know that we kind of made this too.

01:05:58   So that's why I can imagine this argument

01:06:01   being one inside Apple.

01:06:03   - Exactly.

01:06:03   And so today, no question, the right move,

01:06:08   if you were starting fresh, would be USB-C.

01:06:11   And so the only question is, is it worth it for Apple

01:06:14   to endure the transition costs to get to that point?

01:06:19   And I think, you know, Apple, I made a joke about

01:06:23   courage earlier referring to their wonderful justification

01:06:26   for moving the headphone jack,

01:06:27   but I think ditching Lightning this year

01:06:30   and going to USB-C in this new fancy phone,

01:06:33   that would be real courage,

01:06:35   because they are gonna hear better from the users

01:06:37   if they do this.

01:06:38   They are definitely gonna hear from people.

01:06:40   I mean, people are still mad today about Lightning.

01:06:43   Like, they're still mad almost five years later

01:06:47   that they can't use their dock connector

01:06:49   that they bought 10 years ago to charge their iPhone.

01:06:51   I do hope though, like maybe Apple has numbers in this, because Android phones are so

01:06:55   perverse, I think I saw like what their market share is among smartphones, I think it's like

01:06:58   80% or something, it's some really really high number. I'm hoping that every house that

01:07:03   has a, or some high percentage of the houses that have angry people who are angry about

01:07:07   like dropping lightning, there'll be USB-C charging cables hanging around within a couple

01:07:12   years to charge the Android phones in the house.

01:07:15   Exactly, and so if you think about like, what does an all USB-C world look like? Well, we're

01:07:20   already gonna be halfway there because all Android phones

01:07:23   are gonna have it, if they don't already,

01:07:25   they're gonna have it probably within the next year, right?

01:07:27   And so you're gonna start seeing now in places

01:07:31   like hotel nightstands and charging cables

01:07:36   in airports and terminals and stuff like that,

01:07:39   you're gonna start seeing, where you used to see

01:07:42   maybe you'd have a lightning port or a lightning cable

01:07:45   and maybe you'd have one of those dual lightning

01:07:46   and micro USB things, you're gonna start seeing

01:07:49   USB-C all over all those things now

01:07:50   for all the Android phones.

01:07:52   And wouldn't it be great if they could just do USB-C

01:07:56   and have that cover all phones?

01:07:58   That would just be the new standard

01:08:00   for charging your phone.

01:08:01   Like that would be amazing.

01:08:03   I think Apple had big plans for Lightning

01:08:06   for it being this like amazing universal port

01:08:09   that could do all these different data things

01:08:10   and everything and I think part of the justification

01:08:13   for removing the headphone jack last year was,

01:08:16   you know, it turns out we live in a wireless world.

01:08:18   like most of what we do is wireless.

01:08:20   Still, I'll go look at audio stuff,

01:08:23   like try to buy a decent microphone

01:08:25   or sound interface for iOS devices.

01:08:27   And a lot of them didn't even make the jump

01:08:30   from 30 pin to Lightning.

01:08:31   I think Lightning largely hasn't panned out

01:08:34   in being the universal accessory port Apple wanted it to be.

01:08:38   And for a number of reasons,

01:08:39   one is wireless things are so good.

01:08:42   Another is that Android is more of a presence

01:08:44   than I think Apple thought it would be

01:08:46   wanted it to be in that market.

01:08:49   It's similar to like, one of the reasons everyone said why they wouldn't maybe do this is well

01:08:54   they just had to make lightning headphones this past year.

01:08:57   Well no, lightning headphones have actually been around for a couple years but there's

01:09:01   been like three pairs of them.

01:09:03   Like there's been almost none and almost nobody uses them.

01:09:06   The only ones that have any reasonable use are the ones that Apple includes in the box

01:09:10   for free with the iPhone 7 but if they changed to USB-C they would probably just include

01:09:15   USB-C version, and just like it was basically no big deal

01:09:19   for all the people who got the ones in the box for free

01:09:21   with the iPhone 7, it would be similarly no big deal

01:09:24   for all the people who would get the new USB-C ones

01:09:26   in the box with the iPhone 8 or whatever it's called.

01:09:28   So like that, you can rule that argument right out,

01:09:30   that doesn't matter, that doesn't matter enough, right?

01:09:33   If you also look at the iPad in particular,

01:09:36   the iPad really needs help, you know,

01:09:39   it needs to become more of a work device

01:09:44   to boost its sales, 'cause it seems like they nailed

01:09:47   the passive consumption market pretty well.

01:09:49   If you want a--

01:09:51   - The passive consumption by rich people market.

01:09:53   - Yeah, the high end of the passive consumption market,

01:09:57   they have that covered now.

01:09:59   Where I think they need to make a lot more headway

01:10:02   is in the productivity market,

01:10:04   and they are starting to see things like the surface

01:10:08   hurting them, not in a massive way yet,

01:10:11   but in a way that they should really be noticing,

01:10:14   and that they probably are.

01:10:16   And for the iPad to grow, they are making it more PC-like.

01:10:20   They added the smart keyboards,

01:10:21   they added the smart connector, they added the pencil.

01:10:24   They're gonna hopefully keep pushing in this direction.

01:10:27   Who knows what the software has coming next month

01:10:29   or this month, whatever it is, we'll see, I guess.

01:10:31   But I think there is large potential

01:10:35   if you would put a USB-C port on an iPad.

01:10:38   Because right now, I mentioned earlier

01:10:41   about sound devices and things,

01:10:42   Very few of them are available for lightning.

01:10:44   Everything is available for computers.

01:10:47   Every kind of peripheral you can think of

01:10:50   is available with a USB interface on the end of it.

01:10:53   And maybe not a USB-C port necessarily,

01:10:55   but it could plug into a USB-C port

01:10:57   through a very easy, cheap cable,

01:10:59   or a very easy adapter that you probably

01:11:01   would already have three of in the bag.

01:11:03   If Apple wants the iPad to become

01:11:06   more of a computer replacement,

01:11:09   adding a USB-C port or two or three is not ridiculous.

01:11:13   You know, it's the kind of thing like--

01:11:14   - Yeah, I remember when I suggested that.

01:11:16   Was that on this show?

01:11:17   I suggested maybe a couple years ago

01:11:19   adding a bunch of USB ports to the iPad,

01:11:21   and I'm pretty sure both of you laughed at me very heartily.

01:11:24   - Because every Apple commentator

01:11:26   would have laughed at the suggestion a year ago or more.

01:11:29   We all did.

01:11:30   Since the iPad won--

01:11:32   - Well, I didn't laugh at it.

01:11:33   Like I said, you have so much room on the side of the iPad,

01:11:35   and they want it to be more capable, it's the place to put.

01:11:38   I was thinking of USB-A ports. That's how long ago it was. Like I was envisioning USB-A

01:11:42   ports on the side of like the iPad One because there was actually room for them back then.

01:11:46   But you know, the Apple, I want more than one port on the 12-inch iPad Pro. I don't

01:11:52   want just one centered in the bottom replacing the Lightning port. You have the opportunity

01:11:57   to put more than one. There's plenty of room. And if you want it to be the Pro iPad, like

01:12:02   Surface hardware, it doesn't have just one port for power and all USB like the MacBook

01:12:07   one does, so you gotta compete.

01:12:10   - Yeah, so I think the iPad, there's lots of new uses

01:12:15   or uses that would be better if the iPad had USB-C ports,

01:12:19   at least one.

01:12:20   And if they're gonna do that,

01:12:22   why would they keep the Lightning port also?

01:12:24   It would make very little sense to keep the Lightning port--

01:12:27   - That's for your headphones, right?

01:12:28   (laughing)

01:12:30   Speaking of that, I just realized the other day

01:12:31   when reading these stories about

01:12:32   Lightning headphones and stuff,

01:12:34   I realized I actually don't know

01:12:35   where my lightning headphones that came with my iPhone 7

01:12:38   are right now in the house.

01:12:39   I don't think I lost them, but I don't

01:12:41   know where they are in the house,

01:12:42   because I've been using AirPods.

01:12:43   And if they get out ahead of this,

01:12:46   if they do the transition now with the anticipation--

01:12:49   anticipating two things.

01:12:50   One thing Margaret said that USB-C, it's not pervasive now,

01:12:54   but presumably in a few years it will be pervasive

01:12:56   thanks to Android phones and everything, right?

01:12:58   So they'll be out ahead of that.

01:13:00   So they will be saving their customers

01:13:02   from the experience of being like, oh, I'm on vacation.

01:13:05   And, oh, I can't use my iPhone with this thingy or this charge cable because it's not USB.

01:13:10   So it's saving them from that.

01:13:12   And then two, the thing that Apple kind of knows and controls is, what is the time horizon

01:13:15   for wireless charging, right?

01:13:17   Is that just around the corner?

01:13:18   Is it one or two years?

01:13:19   I feel like Apple, if they switch now, will be saying, "We believe that by the time we

01:13:23   get our devices so thin that we can't use USB-C anymore, we'll have the wireless charging

01:13:27   thing covered."

01:13:28   So again, they're in a position to know, and those all seem like reasonable things that

01:13:32   could happen.

01:13:33   is like, I mean, this doesn't sound a lot more likely

01:13:36   than Apple adding USB to an iPad,

01:13:38   but what if the phone is getting thicker

01:13:41   because they're getting rid of the bezels

01:13:42   and they need somewhere to put things like the camera?

01:13:45   The reason why those bezels are there

01:13:47   is partly out of looks and grip and everything,

01:13:50   but mostly because that's where you have to put

01:13:51   a bunch of components that are too deep

01:13:53   to fit behind the screen.

01:13:55   And if they're moving to these larger screen,

01:13:57   like more edge-to-edge phone designs

01:13:59   that can be smaller in the hand,

01:14:01   like have a smaller width and height in the hand,

01:14:05   they might have to get thicker in order to just have space

01:14:08   for things like a decent camera.

01:14:09   - Get ready for some bigger camera bumps.

01:14:12   - Well, probably.

01:14:13   - I mean, that seems like a more aptly,

01:14:15   as judged by the iPhone 7, they'll just make a bigger bulge

01:14:18   rather than make the whole thing wider, thicker,

01:14:20   but we'll see.

01:14:21   - Yeah, maybe.

01:14:22   Anyway, so my point is basically that in a perfect world,

01:14:25   if they started from scratch today, had no legacy,

01:14:27   they'd probably go USB-C,

01:14:28   that would probably be the best option.

01:14:30   If you look at the iPad, the iPad could really use USB-C,

01:14:33   and it wouldn't make a lot of sense,

01:14:35   it wouldn't be very Apple style

01:14:36   to still keep Lightning on there,

01:14:38   they could just replace that.

01:14:39   We are already not using Lightning

01:14:42   for much else besides charging.

01:14:45   Like it's not being used for a whole lot more

01:14:47   by most people than just charging your phone.

01:14:50   And they're already pushing things like Bluetooth

01:14:54   for a lot of peripherals, for audio output,

01:14:56   and things like that.

01:14:57   And of course, then also you look at the Mac,

01:14:59   and the Mac, if you have USB-C on both things,

01:15:04   everything shares the same peripherals,

01:15:06   everything shares the same cables.

01:15:08   You can charge them everywhere,

01:15:09   even with the Android device cables.

01:15:11   You can use all of the devices for Android right now

01:15:16   that are made by companies like Sony,

01:15:17   that if Sony has to pick between making something

01:15:19   for Lightning or making something for USB-C

01:15:23   for Android phones, they pick Android,

01:15:24   'cause they're more of an Android-focused company.

01:15:27   There's lots of companies like that where

01:15:28   You kinda have to like, when you pick teams,

01:15:31   like you see some of the headphones,

01:15:32   like there are some USB-C headphones now for Android phones,

01:15:36   and there are some Lightning headphones for iPhones,

01:15:38   and usually the same headphone isn't available in both.

01:15:40   Like you kinda have to pick, and it sucks

01:15:42   having this format war really going on

01:15:45   between these companies and these different ecosystems

01:15:47   where you can't use the same headphones

01:15:49   between two different devices.

01:15:50   Wouldn't it be great if you could just have one standard?

01:15:54   And USB-C is good enough,

01:15:56   and it's gonna be good enough for quite some time.

01:15:59   We're not gonna have to change cables again

01:16:00   in like three years from now, it's gonna be a while.

01:16:03   And it would be amazing to have that.

01:16:05   Now, there is one other part of this

01:16:07   that is worth pointing out,

01:16:08   and that is the other end of the cable,

01:16:10   the end that plugs into the power brick,

01:16:12   or the computer, if the case may be.

01:16:15   I think, personally, I think it's more likely

01:16:19   that this rumor has been misunderstood,

01:16:21   and that the more likely outcome here

01:16:24   is that Apple's not changing the phone to USB-C,

01:16:26   but they're just gonna ship it in the box

01:16:28   with a USB-C cable that plugs into a USB-C brick,

01:16:31   but it's still gonna have lightning on the phone end.

01:16:33   That is way more likely.

01:16:35   - That's totally what I thought,

01:16:38   and I think that's so much more boring of a rumor,

01:16:40   so that's why I was like, I don't wanna talk about that,

01:16:42   'cause it's like, all right, fine.

01:16:44   If I do that, all you can do for that one

01:16:46   is get angry about the fact that now you have no place

01:16:48   to plug in your charging cable,

01:16:49   but that would make such perfect sense

01:16:51   along with everything we have.

01:16:52   But why is that a story?

01:16:53   That's not a Wall Street Journal-caliber story,

01:16:56   'cause who cares, whatever.

01:16:59   I really hope that's not it.

01:17:00   - And the thing is, in many ways,

01:17:03   having USB-C on the charger end is actually worse

01:17:05   than having USB-A on the charger end,

01:17:07   because as I ransomed on Twitter earlier,

01:17:09   basically the entire world right now

01:17:11   has tons of infrastructure in place

01:17:13   that has USB-A ports everywhere

01:17:17   for people to plug their phones into to charge them with.

01:17:21   And this isn't just the phone owner

01:17:25   having to buy a new power brick,

01:17:26   or having to use a different one that comes in the box

01:17:28   and throw away all their old ones.

01:17:30   This is like, again, it's like airplanes, cars, hotels,

01:17:35   like all these different-- - Luggage.

01:17:36   - Yeah, luggage, all these different places

01:17:38   where you have USB-A ports.

01:17:39   - Those travel things that we all have

01:17:41   with like 12 USB-A ports on them,

01:17:43   you take the hotel so you can charge

01:17:44   the whole family's devices with you.

01:17:45   Now, there's nothing to say that all those devices

01:17:47   won't also convert to USB-C at some point,

01:17:49   it's just the question of,

01:17:50   if you're changing the non-phone end of the cable,

01:17:52   which is what we're talking about now,

01:17:54   even though it's boring,

01:17:54   if you're changing the non-phone end of the cable,

01:17:57   is now the right time to change away from A?

01:17:59   'Cause you're not gaining much, except for,

01:18:02   the only thing you're gaining is uniform sanity

01:18:04   within Apple's lines, where you no longer have

01:18:06   the embarrassing situation where you buy a MacBook Pro

01:18:08   and an iPhone and you can't charge them and each other.

01:18:09   But that's it, that's all you get out of it.

01:18:11   - Yeah, and so like, you know, it would be fine

01:18:15   to have USB C to C as the main thing,

01:18:18   or see the lightning as the main thing, that would be fine.

01:18:21   But I think see the lightning as the cable

01:18:23   that comes with the phone and as a thing

01:18:24   that most people have is actually less convenient now

01:18:28   and for the foreseeable future than adal lightning would be

01:18:31   because there are so many A ports everywhere in the world

01:18:36   that people already have installed or bought

01:18:38   or everything else and it goes way beyond

01:18:40   just buying a new power brick and it goes into things

01:18:42   like buying a new car or retrofitting airplanes

01:18:45   and those are things that just don't happen very often.

01:18:47   So we're gonna have USB-A ports as the new power outlet

01:18:51   for phones for a long time to come.

01:18:54   And you can't adapt a USB-A port

01:18:59   to have a USB-C cable plugged into it.

01:19:02   You can go the other direction

01:19:03   with all these little wonderful $9 adapters

01:19:04   that Apple sells, but you can't go the other way.

01:19:07   You can't plug a USB-C device into a USB-A port.

01:19:11   It violates the USB spec because there's lots

01:19:13   of weird things that can go wrong if you do it wrong

01:19:16   and lots of weird combinations they didn't want to allow

01:19:18   with what do you do with the massive amount of power

01:19:20   on these pins and things like that.

01:19:21   And so that direction can't be like legally adapted

01:19:24   by the USB spec, and for very good reasons

01:19:28   that are probably unlikely to change.

01:19:30   So if you're gonna have a cable

01:19:32   that you're gonna wanna plug into whatever you find

01:19:34   as you travel or go throughout the world

01:19:36   or in and out of your car or wherever else,

01:19:38   you're probably gonna want a, whatever the phone has,

01:19:42   Lightning or USB-C, to USB-A,

01:19:44   and then maybe have a dongle with your laptop

01:19:46   so you can plug it in there sometimes.

01:19:47   - You wanna save yourself some email?

01:19:49   - Yeah.

01:19:50   - You have to tell them that you know

01:19:51   that there's connectors that go from A to C.

01:19:52   You have to say that.

01:19:53   - Yes, I know there are,

01:19:55   I know you can go on lots of places

01:19:57   and buy one from some kind of no-name brand,

01:19:59   but there's a reason why there aren't that many of them,

01:20:01   and why you don't see people like Apple selling them,

01:20:03   because they're bad.

01:20:06   Bad things can happen, please don't use them.

01:20:08   - So, speaking of saving email,

01:20:10   I forgot to mention that I do have a modern Apple TV

01:20:13   in the house, and that is USB-C.

01:20:16   Would either of you care to wager a guess

01:20:17   how many times I've plugged a USB-C cable

01:20:20   into that Apple TV.

01:20:21   - Isn't that just a diagnostic port?

01:20:23   I don't think it's supposed to be a user.

01:20:25   - No, it's for diagnostics and it's for developers.

01:20:27   When I installed Providence, the emulator that I use,

01:20:29   it's similar to how you plug in a phone to run devices,

01:20:33   or to run apps that you write from Xcode

01:20:35   onto the phone through USB.

01:20:36   Same thing with the Apple TV.

01:20:37   You plug it into the USB port

01:20:39   and it becomes an output device for Xcode

01:20:40   that you can run stuff on.

01:20:41   - Speaking of USB-C, the Nintendo Switch has USB-C,

01:20:44   which is out soon.

01:20:45   And someone tweeted earlier today that if you plug a Nintendo Switch into a MacBook

01:20:49   Pro, the Switch charges the laptop, not the other way around.

01:20:53   That's pretty great.

01:20:54   In the world of ubiquitous connectors, it is kind of a weird situation because we have

01:20:57   the—it's kind of based on size.

01:20:59   That's like you expect if you're using your laptop and you're like, "Oh, my phone's

01:21:02   low.

01:21:03   I'm going to plug it into my laptop."

01:21:04   That's a thing we've all done, right?

01:21:05   You fully expect that when you plug your phone into your laptop, the laptop will charge your

01:21:09   phone.

01:21:10   The phone won't charge your laptop.

01:21:11   And why do you think that?

01:21:12   Well, because the batteries in the laptop is bigger, I guess.

01:21:16   But when you do it with the Switch, I guess they don't know how big they are.

01:21:18   It's like the little dog that thinks he's the big dog.

01:21:20   It's like, "I got you, MacBook.

01:21:22   Here's some juice.

01:21:23   Take this."

01:21:24   I don't even know.

01:21:25   Who knows?

01:21:26   It could be that just the Mac thinks it's being charged, and it actually isn't, because

01:21:27   I don't understand why the Switch would output charge for anything.

01:21:30   But in this world of ubiquitous USB-C, our future world where everything has USB-C ports,

01:21:36   it can be confusing as to what the actual relationship between devices with batteries

01:21:41   and then will be when you plug them into each other.

01:21:43   - And I'm sure part of the standard is for that,

01:21:46   but they probably just didn't quite do it right

01:21:48   or something.

01:21:49   - Yeah, or again, why the hell

01:21:50   is the Switch charging anything?

01:21:51   I don't think there are any peripherals

01:21:52   that plug into the Switch and derive power from it,

01:21:55   so who knows?

01:21:56   - Yeah, what do its various external control,

01:21:58   like the Pro Controller, what are those,

01:22:00   are those all just wireless with their own chargers or what?

01:22:03   - I would guess so.

01:22:04   I mean, all existing console controllers I have

01:22:07   use one of the terrible micro USB things.

01:22:09   Maybe the Switch Pro Controller has USB-C.

01:22:13   I wouldn't know, 'cause I don't have a pre-order for it.

01:22:16   But I'm working on that.

01:22:18   By the way, so everybody knows, I do have orders.

01:22:20   I do now have pre-orders for the Switch

01:22:23   and for the Zelda game that I want,

01:22:25   thanks to some very helpful fans of the show.

01:22:28   So far, still no Pro Controller.

01:22:31   - Yeah, you're gonna have to tell me at some point

01:22:32   how I'm supposed to get a Pro Controller

01:22:34   when I get my Switch.

01:22:35   Also, can I buy the games?

01:22:37   I heard that Pete, when I mentioned that I had these games

01:22:40   in my Amazon cart, ready to pre-order,

01:22:42   I got a number of helpful people saying,

01:22:43   "Why don't I just buy a giant SD card and download them?"

01:22:46   Is that a thing I can do?

01:22:47   - Yeah, but like the only reason I'm on the Zelda

01:22:49   is 'cause it's like the special edition

01:22:50   that comes with a bunch of little tchotchkes and stuff,

01:22:52   and it comes with a soundtrack CD.

01:22:54   - I would throw all that away, or I'd mail it to you.

01:22:56   - Exactly, so if you don't care about that,

01:22:59   I'm pretty sure every single game is downloadable,

01:23:02   and the storage on the Switch itself is not that big,

01:23:03   so everyone's telling you to buy an SD card,

01:23:05   but I think if you just get the Switch

01:23:06   and just want to play Zelda, you can just get it and then download Zelda and play it.

01:23:10   And did you see the other story, speaking of Switch, about the Zelda cards? Have you

01:23:14   seen pictures of how big the little, the Switch cartridges are?

01:23:18   No. Like, they're really small. Like, they're

01:23:20   not as small as the micro and micro SD cards, but they're smaller than you think they are.

01:23:25   And that poses a problem, because, like, what if kids find these little games and stick

01:23:29   them in their mouth and swallow them or do something else bad with them, right? So Nintendo's

01:23:33   solution to this was to coat the cartridges they sell with a very, very bad-tasting substance.

01:23:39   So people are now licking Nintendo Switch cartridges.

01:23:41   [Laughter]

01:23:42   That's the backstory?

01:23:43   I had seen people say, "Oh, yes, they really do taste like garbage."

01:23:46   I didn't know what the backstory was, though.

01:23:49   Yeah, that's what I've heard.

01:23:50   It's a plausible theory, because it is like kind of a swallowing choking hazard.

01:23:54   They're small enough, and they're going to be around kids, because it's not like

01:23:58   they're – you're not worried about a kid swallowing the SIM card from your phone,

01:24:01   kids aren't playing with the SIM card on your phone,

01:24:03   but kids will be around these loose cartridges

01:24:05   for the Switch, or they bring a bunch of them

01:24:07   in the back of the car with them

01:24:08   and play them on a car trip and stuff,

01:24:09   and their younger sibling gets ahold of them,

01:24:11   and so apparently they taste terrible.

01:24:14   - Wait, and so I have a question.

01:24:15   All right, so I used to bite my nails,

01:24:18   and one of the ways I stopped was I got one of those

01:24:20   horrible-tasting nail polish things.

01:24:22   - Same theory. - And yeah.

01:24:24   However, one of the shortcomings of that

01:24:26   is that it would rub off on food I was preparing,

01:24:30   or anything that I touched would taste horrible.

01:24:33   So if you handle a Switch cartridge

01:24:37   and you go make a sandwich,

01:24:39   is it gonna rub off at all?

01:24:40   Are you gonna taste that?

01:24:41   - So I have to say that this is the internet

01:24:44   and I've just read some tweets.

01:24:45   So for all I know, this is totally false

01:24:48   and people just got some weird foul-tasting stuff

01:24:51   on their Switch cartridges.

01:24:52   But I will say that now, assuming this story is true,

01:24:55   I would think that the coding they put in these cartridges

01:24:59   would have some of the same problems as the nail-biting stuff. One, that it would eventually

01:25:03   be able to wear off or be sucked off, as very determined nail-biters know well, that if

01:25:08   you really want to go to town, you can A) build up a tolerance to, and B) eventually

01:25:13   remove that substance.

01:25:15   Not this stuff. I quit with one application. That's how bad it was.

01:25:20   You're not as determined as some little children. Yeah. I can tell you from personal experience

01:25:28   with people in my family who I will not name, who are not me, that it is possible, if you

01:25:34   are stubborn enough, to get rid of that stuff. And two, like you said, that like, will it

01:25:39   come off on your hands? I think it has to necessarily come off your hands if your hands

01:25:44   are wet, because if it doesn't come off on your hands when they're wet, it also won't

01:25:47   come off on your tongue when you're wet. And so I think those are real things. But what

01:25:50   I'm hoping is that cartridges don't get handled much under normal circumstances, and that

01:25:55   hands are not wet enough to pull off the stuff. Again, assuming this entire story is true.

01:25:59   But all we know is that when any of us gets or encounters a Nintendo Switch cartridge,

01:26:03   it is incumbent upon us, as part of the homework for the show, to lick it.

01:26:07   You've just given me a really good reason to just download all my games and not ever

01:26:11   buy one.

01:26:12   Now you have to get one to lick. You have to. Tiff's going to want to lick it.

01:26:15   I just have to lick my SD card and see if that has the same coding on it.

01:26:19   That's right. You need to ABX test this.

01:26:20   Oh my god.

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01:27:17   (upbeat music)

01:27:19   Anyway, I think the thing that bothers me

01:27:24   about the iPhone USB-C thing is if the USB-C

01:27:28   is on the device itself, is on the iPhone,

01:27:31   what technical thing does that solve?

01:27:34   Like, yes, I understand that there's a consistency

01:27:36   with the rest of like the laptop line,

01:27:38   but what does that actually do for an iPhone

01:27:41   that makes the iPhone itself better?

01:27:44   - Don't we get the advantage

01:27:46   of dedicated analog audio pins so that we don't need the DAC

01:27:49   and the things anymore and we could have cheap headphones

01:27:51   to connect to USB-C or am I misremembering this?

01:27:54   - Both USB-C and Lightning have ways to do that.

01:27:57   However, we also did find that in the little Apple dongle

01:28:00   is a little tiny DAC 'cause DACs cost nothing.

01:28:03   And it's not a very good one, but it doesn't matter

01:28:05   for most people for what they're using.

01:28:08   It's fine.

01:28:08   - So anyway, that's a potential advantage that you could get

01:28:11   if Apple decides to take advantage of it and if there,

01:28:14   I have no idea if there are any existing headphones that

01:28:17   take analog audio signals and have,

01:28:19   instead of a regular headphone jack command,

01:28:21   they have a USB-C one.

01:28:22   But in theory, that's one.

01:28:24   There's also, tech-wise, the thing with the bendy pins

01:28:27   that we talked about.

01:28:28   Who knows how big a problem that is?

01:28:30   But it stands to reason that it is better

01:28:35   to have the parts that eventually fatigue or bend

01:28:38   or wear out on the cable that you can throw away and not

01:28:41   inside the device.

01:28:42   So that's another tech advantage.

01:28:44   I guess, I just, there's nothing that you guys have said,

01:28:48   or that I can think of, that makes me think,

01:28:51   oh, this is a technical problem

01:28:52   that's being solved with USB-C.

01:28:54   It is worth, that juice is worth the squeeze

01:28:57   of pissing off the entire world

01:28:59   for another cable change, or another port change.

01:29:04   - Don't you think, do you guys not agree?

01:29:05   You both said that you thought people would be angry,

01:29:06   but I totally think people will be less angry

01:29:09   than 30-pin to lighting.

01:29:10   Even though 30-pin was 10 years old,

01:29:12   I think they'll be less angry about this

01:29:13   because it's a switch to the standard.

01:29:15   Because, yes, you're gonna be grumbly.

01:29:18   - You're assuming though that people have USB-C devices.

01:29:20   I am cheap, and I don't buy expensive things terribly often,

01:29:25   but I always keep up to date on iPhones and iPads

01:29:30   and whatnot, and I don't have a, like I said,

01:29:33   the only USB-C device I have is an Apple TV

01:29:35   that I've never plugged USB-C into.

01:29:37   - They'd be a little bit ahead of the curve.

01:29:39   Like I agree, people don't have,

01:29:40   but I think every story about this

01:29:42   would be Apple concedes or like the most negative story

01:29:46   you can have, Apple finally concedes

01:29:47   and does what everyone else does.

01:29:49   Apple finally gets in line.

01:29:50   Ever finally does the industry standard thing.

01:29:52   I think that would be the negative Apple spin

01:29:54   on these stories.

01:29:55   And again, with the European regulations requiring

01:29:58   whatever it was, mini USB and probably going to require USB-C

01:30:01   like I think that's the spin on the story.

01:30:03   And yes, it's like, oh, I don't care

01:30:05   what the hell the standard is.

01:30:06   I got a house full of fricking lightning cables

01:30:07   that are now worthless to me, right?

01:30:08   Like people will be angry, but I think the story will be

01:30:12   Apple gets in line with everybody else.

01:30:13   And that will soften the blow.

01:30:15   - Again, I think if you're gonna do that though,

01:30:18   you wait another year or something like that,

01:30:21   because everyone is still sensitive to this.

01:30:24   'Cause I still within the last month

01:30:25   have heard people whining about lightning ports.

01:30:27   And so if you're gonna make this jump,

01:30:31   you make the jump where it's preposterous

01:30:34   that Apple isn't on USB-C.

01:30:37   Right now, I don't think anyone-

01:30:37   - You wanna be a latecomer though?

01:30:39   Do you want them to feel like?

01:30:40   - In this case, yeah.

01:30:41   - Yeah.

01:30:42   - 'Cause again, the thing that I can't get past is

01:30:44   it's not solving any technical problem that I'm aware of.

01:30:47   Maybe on like an iPad, maybe if you wanted to plug in,

01:30:50   say, an external display, which I guess you can do that

01:30:52   with a HDMI cable on a phone or a pad anyway, iPad anyway.

01:30:55   So I'm failing to see what technical problem

01:30:59   that makes the iPhone itself better.

01:31:02   What technical problem are they solving by doing this?

01:31:05   'Cause otherwise, why bother?

01:31:06   - Well, we also don't know how pervasive

01:31:08   the lightning connector problems are.

01:31:10   Like, I don't know, how many people do we know

01:31:12   who've had this problem?

01:31:13   I know two people, Marco and Merlin, right?

01:31:16   Who have both had problems with the contacts,

01:31:19   the bendy little bits coming out of the thing

01:31:21   and then scorching the little connectors.

01:31:22   And I believe, Marco, did you get your phone replaced

01:31:26   because of that?

01:31:27   - Yeah, I did.

01:31:28   - And then Merlin, I don't know if he got anything replaced,

01:31:30   but he had like, we were calling it the hardware virus

01:31:32   because once one of the little bendy pieces of metal

01:31:35   doesn't contact with the shiny gold bits

01:31:38   on the lightning connector and starts arcing,

01:31:40   it can cause a little burny spot there

01:31:42   and that makes the connection even worse

01:31:43   and more working and so on and so forth.

01:31:44   And now you have a lightning connector

01:31:47   that has a little burny spot on it.

01:31:48   And then if you put that lightning connector

01:31:50   into another device, now you have poor contact

01:31:52   between the burny spot and the little bendy metal thing.

01:31:54   And it causes that to arc.

01:31:56   And so it's like a hardware virus

01:31:57   is as you plug this plug into a bunch of other devices,

01:32:00   eventually they all get this little burny spot

01:32:02   on the same place and that's bad.

01:32:05   And is this just a problem that is really rare and esoteric and really much smaller

01:32:10   in the grand scheme of things than Apple's bad strain relief?

01:32:12   I don't know.

01:32:14   But I do know two people, and it did cause a warranty replacement for sure on at least

01:32:18   one of them.

01:32:20   That I think would fall into the category of potentially a tech problem that USB-C is

01:32:25   solving.

01:32:26   But without numbers, it's hard to know without numbers, you know.

01:32:30   I guess I just—but here again, that's like, that's solving a problem for Apple

01:32:35   that your average consumer, even I, don't really care about.

01:32:38   Well, but Marco didn't want to get his phone—well, maybe he did because of the microphone thing,

01:32:41   but like, people don't want to have to bring in their thing to get it swapped, right?

01:32:45   I mean, does USB-C solve the lint problem?

01:32:47   That's another sort of anecdotal thing we don't have numbers for, but like, how many

01:32:49   people have you heard about, like, "My thing wouldn't charge, and I had to get out the

01:32:53   dentist gear and start pulling out the little lint balls or cat hair from inside the thing,"

01:32:57   I brought it to an Apple store and they had to do it for me.

01:33:01   My parents have had this problem where they had to have lint pulled out of their thing,

01:33:05   pulled out of their lighting connector by like an Apple store person, right?

01:33:10   Does USB-C suffer from that as much as lighting?

01:33:12   I have no idea, but that is another potential tech problem.

01:33:15   Not just for Apple, for warranty repairs, but people don't want their crap to break

01:33:18   and have to bring it to the store either.

01:33:19   Especially it's so hard to get an appointment and it's annoying to be in there and everything.

01:33:23   I don't know.

01:33:24   I feel like if I were to wager a guess, I think it's what our initial interpretation

01:33:30   was, which is it's going to—the cable included in the box may be Lightning to USB-C. That

01:33:37   falls down, though, because of what Marco was describing about how the entirety of power

01:33:40   charging in the world is all done via USB-A.

01:33:46   I think Apple—this is one of the old-school things where I would say, "Would Apple do

01:33:48   this?"

01:33:49   100 percent.

01:33:50   I totally believe Apple would go Lightning to USB-C. Despite everything we just said,

01:33:54   we all agree on that USB-A is more common. Why would Apple do it? Because they'd be like,

01:33:58   "This is our connector for our stuff, and our power bricks, and our computers. And by the way,

01:34:03   we sell the other one for a reasonable price, so buy more peripherals from us, and buy more

01:34:08   adapters, and it's fine." I 100% believe Apple would do that. It's just hard to tell from this

01:34:13   rumor. And speaking of hardware virus, I hope this rumor is a different kind of hardware virus,

01:34:18   and that even if Apple is either doing the boring thing or not doing anything,

01:34:23   and they just come with plain old USB-A to Lightning Connectors like every other thing.

01:34:25   The fact that this story is out there and that every tech site and the Wall Street Journal and

01:34:31   podcasts and everybody are talking about it, and it seems to me, collectively slowly convincing

01:34:36   ourselves that this would be a good idea, it would be great if somewhere at Apple they're like, "No,

01:34:41   Wall Street Journal, that's not what you were supposed to be leaking at all. It's just that

01:34:44   we were going to change the other end of the cave." And then come the time when the new iPhone

01:34:48   is released, we're all disappointed that it doesn't have USB-C, Apple will be like, "How did this get

01:34:51   - It's getting away from us.

01:34:52   So it's like a hardware mind virus.

01:34:55   - Wow.

01:34:56   Yeah, I don't know what to make of it.

01:34:57   It wouldn't entirely surprise me if the phone itself

01:35:00   had a USB-C port on it, but I just keep coming back to it

01:35:03   and I can't get past what is it really doing for the device?

01:35:07   Like what problem is it solving for the device?

01:35:10   I'm not saying there isn't one.

01:35:11   - It's making a lot of things more convenient.

01:35:13   And in the very, very likely future that we're gonna have,

01:35:17   because Android is doing this,

01:35:19   so we're gonna have all these USB-C cables

01:35:21   out there in the world.

01:35:22   It's gonna be very, very convenient

01:35:24   if we not only can just have one cable,

01:35:26   but then you can plug in your iPhone

01:35:28   to any of these things anywhere.

01:35:29   That's gonna be incredibly convenient.

01:35:31   It's also gonna be convenient for just people who travel

01:35:33   with an iPhone and a laptop.

01:35:36   And then you can have one charger

01:35:38   that you kinda switch between them as needed,

01:35:40   or you can swap cables between them

01:35:41   if you forget one of the cables,

01:35:43   or one of them goes bad,

01:35:44   or you only have one long cable and one short cable

01:35:47   and you need to flip where they are

01:35:49   for a certain arrangement that you have

01:35:50   when you're traveling or something.

01:35:51   Like there's all sorts of like everyday

01:35:53   practical advantages that this could bring

01:35:57   in a world where everything else is USB-C.

01:35:59   And I think it's very clear we are heading

01:36:00   towards that world.

01:36:01   Like the world where everything else is USB-C,

01:36:04   that's happening.

01:36:05   Apple is leading the charge with the Macs.

01:36:08   So that's obviously happening.

01:36:10   It's here.

01:36:11   Like if you've bought a new MacBook Pro

01:36:13   in the last five months,

01:36:15   you already are in this world, at least partially.

01:36:17   and as they update the iMacs hopefully in a few weeks

01:36:20   and everything else, over the next couple years,

01:36:23   if you buy a new Mac, it is almost certainly

01:36:25   going to be all USB-C.

01:36:27   So again, this world is here.

01:36:30   This is happening.

01:36:31   This is already a thing.

01:36:33   There's all sorts of great accessories for USB-C now.

01:36:36   Think of all the standard, just how iOS has had support

01:36:41   for standard USB devices, like standard HID things,

01:36:44   standard sound devices, things like that,

01:36:46   without any drivers or anything for a long time now,

01:36:48   but in order to plug them in,

01:36:49   you had to get one of those light into USB camera

01:36:51   connection kit adapters,

01:36:52   and this would actually allow the phone to have

01:36:56   a standard port that is always there

01:36:59   that can support a whole bunch of new devices

01:37:01   that can make your phone more useful

01:37:02   in certain specialized scenarios.

01:37:05   So there's the everyday practicality

01:37:06   of all these different charge cables

01:37:07   that are gonna be everywhere.

01:37:08   There's carrying it with you in a bag full of a USB-C laptop

01:37:12   with all the USB-C cables you're gonna have for that,

01:37:13   not having to have two separate sets of cables

01:37:15   with different sets of connectors and everything.

01:37:17   It's just tons of everyday practicality,

01:37:19   plus all this edge case power that you could have

01:37:22   by having this device be a member of the USB-C ecosystem,

01:37:25   a first class member, have it be a USB-C host device

01:37:28   that can have other USB-C things put into it

01:37:31   and have that just work,

01:37:32   in addition to being charged and everything.

01:37:34   - And eventually have Thunderbolt 3,

01:37:35   or Thunderbolt 7 on your phones, right?

01:37:38   - Maybe, I mean they wouldn't probably even need that

01:37:40   'cause USB 3 is already really fast

01:37:42   for most things a phone would be transferring

01:37:44   over an external bus.

01:37:45   - You would do it for a video outlet

01:37:47   on the 27-inch iPad Pro,

01:37:49   so you could have two of them next to each other.

01:37:51   - That actually is pretty cool, but yeah.

01:37:52   Yeah, and again, and then also think of the iPad,

01:37:54   where like, if they wanna bring the iPad forward

01:37:57   in a big way, one of the ways to do that

01:37:59   would be to give it a USB port of some kind,

01:38:01   and of course, these days, that would be a USB-C port,

01:38:04   and if you have that, why would you keep lightning there?

01:38:06   And if you're getting rid of lightning there,

01:38:08   might as well also get rid of lightning on the phone,

01:38:10   and also be a lot more comfortable

01:38:12   with the European Union in the process.

01:38:14   So there's lots of reasons to do it.

01:38:17   And Casey, so as I think the one of us

01:38:20   who's most cool on this idea,

01:38:23   would you at least agree that if they were starting

01:38:25   clean today with no legacy baggage,

01:38:28   would USB-C be the right choice?

01:38:30   - Oh, oh, without question.

01:38:32   And sitting here thinking about it,

01:38:34   I feel like the only way this makes,

01:38:40   that this feels better to me is if inductive charging really is a thing, right? Because,

01:38:46   although I plug in phones constantly because I'm a developer, like Erin for example, the only time

01:38:54   she ever plugs her phone into anything, it's just the wall to charge it. And yeah, it would be kind

01:39:00   of a pain in the butt if she had to bring her like charging pad everywhere she goes in order to

01:39:05   charge your phone, but that makes it sting a little bit less, I feel like. I don't know why.

01:39:11   Now that I'm saying that out loud, it seems bananas to me, because it's really no different.

01:39:15   Because, you know, if it's USB-C, then we would have to bring that specific USB-C cable, because

01:39:20   it would be the only one in the house. But if it's an inductive charging pad, suddenly that's better,

01:39:25   because I don't know why. But it just feels better to me, even though I admit that that makes no

01:39:30   sense. So maybe that's the fix is inductive charging is the thing since it's wireless

01:39:36   and Apple hates wires and USB-C for Apple TV style if you need it. I don't know.

01:39:42   I think inductive charging is probably a separate thing. It's the kind of thing where if it

01:39:48   ever makes sense to do it in an iPhone, which so far it seems like the uses that have been

01:39:53   out there in the world so far have not been very compelling for lots of different reasons,

01:39:59   some of which seem insurmountable,

01:40:00   but we'll see if that ever changes,

01:40:02   but things like the horrible efficiency of it

01:40:06   and the incredible close proximity you need to have

01:40:09   to the charging device, but anyway,

01:40:11   or the pad or whatever it is.

01:40:13   But I see this as separate things.

01:40:15   You know, like, it's very,

01:40:17   and even like Apple has said this on multiple occasions,

01:40:19   I think Phil has made a few comments to this degree,

01:40:22   you know, you have a wire, you can plug things into charge,

01:40:24   it's no big deal, like wireless charging sounds great

01:40:28   If you think about like, oh, I could just walk around everywhere, my whole house, my

01:40:31   whole work, the whole world outside maybe, and my phone just always charged from the

01:40:36   air.

01:40:37   But that probably isn't what it would be.

01:40:38   It would probably be like you just have these wireless charging pads like on your desk and

01:40:43   stuff, but like that isn't that much better than a cable.

01:40:45   Oh, that's a lot.

01:40:47   It's pretty better than a cable, I think.

01:40:48   I think if you could just have – think of the area in everybody's house where they

01:40:51   dump all their devices to charge and the rat's nest of wires that they have there.

01:40:55   if it was just a nice pad and they could just pile things on top of it.

01:40:58   And that's assuming they just go with like inductive charging with this type of thing.

01:41:01   If they go with the, what was that company called, the, wasn't it Steve Pearlman, the

01:41:06   OnLive guy, I forget.

01:41:07   Anyway, the beamforming Wi-Fi kind of tech that could be used to deliver power.

01:41:12   Peace something.

01:41:13   That's the thing that you're talking about.

01:41:14   Peace out.

01:41:15   Like I'm wandering around my house and my thing is charging and that is way, way, way

01:41:18   slower but even if it's just like within the same room, like imagine putting your phone

01:41:23   on your nightstand to charge at night,

01:41:25   but not plugging it in and not having to put it on a pad,

01:41:28   and not having your brain slowly microwaved

01:41:29   by the thing that's in your room.

01:41:31   - Yeah, that's a little concerning, to be honest.

01:41:34   And then my phone just scratched up by my nightstand.

01:41:36   Like, I have a little dock, it's great.

01:41:38   See, I think the real reason why Apple--

01:41:41   - The dock industry.

01:41:42   - Yeah, no, I think the real reason why Apple

01:41:44   is going to switch to USB-C on the phone

01:41:46   is that I just got these awesome studio neat docks

01:41:49   for everything, and they're really nice.

01:41:51   So whenever I buy new docks,

01:41:53   last time when they changed to Lightning

01:41:55   was right after I bought the Elevation dock.

01:41:57   And so now that I bought new docks finally,

01:42:00   I finally replaced my Elevation docks after five years

01:42:02   or however long it's been.

01:42:04   Now Apple is going to change away from Lightning

01:42:07   and make me buy all new docks.

01:42:08   - Well, the good news for the Kickstarter

01:42:12   for iOS device docks made of like, you know,

01:42:16   fancy burled walnut and all sorts of other things like that,

01:42:18   the good news is that once wireless charging is here,

01:42:21   can still sell those same docks, it's even easier because they don't have to even charge

01:42:24   it. It's just basically like a little stand for your phone, like a little home for it.

01:42:29   It props it up and makes it look cute. Because in the end, I mean, I know you think that

01:42:34   "Oh, it's a charging dock, it's very important that it charges." In the end, it's a little

01:42:37   stand for your phone. It's a nice stand for my phone. I know, I'm just saying that industry

01:42:43   will not be decimated by wireless charging. In fact, that industry will be freed from

01:42:46   having to worry about the silly electronics and they can concentrate where they really

01:42:50   care about which is fine materials and craftsmanship and so on and so forth.

01:42:55   And you can use all the money you're saving by not buying two sets of cables for everything

01:42:58   and just dump it all into docks.

01:43:00   That's right.

01:43:01   You can have one made from, what is your little heavy cylinder made out of?

01:43:04   Tungsten?

01:43:05   Tungsten.

01:43:06   Yeah.

01:43:07   Thanks to our three sponsors this week, Casper, Betterment, and Squarespace.

01:43:10   And we will see you next week.

01:43:15   Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin

01:43:19   'Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental

01:43:25   John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him

01:43:30   'Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental

01:43:35   And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm

01:43:41   And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them @C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:43:49   So that's Kasey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:43:54   Auntie Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-Uza

01:44:01   It's accidental (it's accidental)

01:44:05   They didn't mean to (it's accidental)

01:44:10   ♪ Tech podcast so long ♪

01:44:13   - What is going on?

01:44:15   My mouse, every great once in a while this happens.

01:44:17   My beloved magic mouse is like lagging to hell

01:44:21   and it just--

01:44:22   - Wants to be harpooned.

01:44:23   - Yep, it happens to me too.

01:44:25   You see me tweeting about that a few days ago?

01:44:26   - Oh yeah, you're right.

01:44:27   I think I told you it never happens to me in fact,

01:44:30   but I lied.

01:44:31   I'm a darn dirty liar.

01:44:33   That just happened to me

01:44:34   and it's not the first time it's happened.

01:44:36   - It appears to happen to everybody

01:44:38   who has any Apple Bluetooth pointing device.

01:44:41   It happens to the track pads and the mice.

01:44:43   It happens to the old mice that used AA batteries

01:44:46   and the new one that have the rechargeable harpoon thing.

01:44:48   It happens whether you're at a high battery level

01:44:50   or a low battery level.

01:44:52   There seems to be very little correlation

01:44:55   to any of these factors.

01:44:56   It just seems to happen to all of Apple's Bluetooth devices.

01:44:59   So it's probably an issue with either all Bluetooth devices

01:45:02   or at least Apple's Bluetooth devices.

01:45:05   - Doesn't happen to my wired keyboard

01:45:07   of my wired Logitech mouse from 1992.

01:45:09   - Oh, you're so old.

01:45:11   - Never, doesn't stutter, doesn't need to be recharged.

01:45:15   - Now, the Mac Pro that you have,

01:45:17   I'm pretty sure Bluetooth was optional.

01:45:19   Do you have Bluetooth on that?

01:45:21   - I don't know, let's go find out.

01:45:23   (laughing)

01:45:24   - I think it was like a $60 option.

01:45:27   - Turn Bluetooth on, there is a button that says that,

01:45:29   I think I can click it, it is currently off.

01:45:31   So I'm gonna assume I have it.

01:45:32   (laughing)

01:45:33   - Oh yeah, you probably do have it.

01:45:34   - I did not get the Wi-Fi option on this, by the way.

01:45:36   - Maybe that's what I'm thinking of.

01:45:38   - So my Mac does not have Wi-Fi.

01:45:40   - Maybe on the, I wonder if the 2006 Mac Pro,

01:45:43   maybe Bluetooth was optional on that one?

01:45:45   And maybe it was only Wi-Fi on yours?

01:45:46   - It might have been optional on mine.

01:45:47   I might have checked the Bluetooth boxes

01:45:49   and I'm like, maybe I'll get Bluetooth peripherals here

01:45:51   or 'hem eight years later, still no Bluetooth peripherals.

01:45:54   - What else did I talk about?

01:45:58   - You can talk more about the Mac Pro if you want.

01:46:00   - Hard pass and I gotta go.

01:46:02   - I mean, Tim Cook said nothing again.

01:46:04   - Yeah, that's why, that's why it's not,

01:46:06   You notice it's not even on the topic list.

01:46:09   Because there's nothing to discuss, because there was nothing said.

01:46:12   Well, I'll give my two cents that I already gave and slack to put this one to bed.

01:46:18   He was asked in the shareholders meeting about pro hardware and all the stuff we always whine

01:46:21   about, and he gave the same kind of non-committal, like, "Oh, you know, we have things coming

01:46:26   for pros, and we do care about them despite all our actions to the contrary."

01:46:30   But he didn't say, "I'm being sarcastic now."

01:46:32   But anyway, he gave the same kind of non-answer he did last time that we talked about that

01:46:35   led us to believe that an iMac Pro is coming or something. And there was some discussion about

01:46:39   like, all right, what's so bad about this? Like in the hierarchy of things that Tim Cook could have

01:46:44   said or done in relation to that, where does this fall? And I feel like saying nothing would have

01:46:50   still been worse. I feel like at this point, when there's a problem that a bunch of people see,

01:46:55   like some people are cranky about Pro Mac hardware, right? Saying nothing is the worst

01:46:59   choice because that's just like, it just makes people angry. It's like you're ignoring them or

01:47:02   or you're burying the head in the sand,

01:47:04   people want some kind of answer.

01:47:05   Saying something boring and noncommittal and vague

01:47:08   that's basically like Apple saying,

01:47:10   "We think we have something for you,"

01:47:12   is better than nothing because at the very least it says,

01:47:15   "All right, well, whether it's true or not,

01:47:19   Apple thinks they have something

01:47:20   that we're gonna like in the future."

01:47:22   And that's kind of vague, but it strings us along.

01:47:27   And then I feel like the best thing they could have done

01:47:30   is give a strong, definitive answer

01:47:32   that acknowledges the issue and then comes to a conclusion.

01:47:37   And so that could be, we hear your concerns,

01:47:40   or we've decided we don't wanna be

01:47:41   in the pro hardware business anymore.

01:47:43   Perfectly valid, it puts an end to all of our whining,

01:47:45   right, because like, well, what's done is done.

01:47:47   You know, we can yell at them about it,

01:47:48   but at least we have a definitive answer.

01:47:50   Or they could say, we've heard your concerns,

01:47:52   we realize we dropped the ball,

01:47:54   but we are going to rededicate ourselves to pro hardware.

01:47:57   They didn't say that either.

01:47:58   So we get the middle one,

01:47:59   the vague answer that tells us nothing,

01:48:01   that is still better than nothing, but is still much worse than Apple definitively coming

01:48:06   down in one direction or another. They don't have to announce new products. They don't

01:48:09   have to promise anything they could have just said. They have to acknowledge the situation

01:48:13   and say, "We realize we've dropped the ball, but we've decided to get out of this market

01:48:18   or we are going to rededicate ourselves." And they didn't do either one of those things,

01:48:22   so it's business as usual.

01:48:23   I think you and I just have different definitions of what "nothing" means. You think he didn't

01:48:29   say nothing, I think he did say nothing.

01:48:31   Well, no, because by not saying, like, "We're sorry you feel—" like, remember the Final

01:48:38   Cut Pro X thing?

01:48:40   What they basically said with that was like, "We're sorry you feel this way, but Final

01:48:43   Cut Pro X is the future, get used to it."

01:48:44   Right?

01:48:45   So instead of saying, "We're sorry you're sad about the Pro hardware, but we're not

01:48:48   doing that anymore, get used to it."

01:48:50   Like, what he was trying to say, what he tries to say every time in this vague thing is like,

01:48:55   "I know you're sad now, and I will not acknowledge that your sadness has found it in anything.

01:49:00   I know you're sad now, but we have some really great stuff coming in the future."

01:49:04   And he always says that.

01:49:07   It's a Tim Cook-ism to say, "Boy, we have a great roadmap.

01:49:10   We have great things coming."

01:49:13   He says it frequently in earnings calls.

01:49:14   For years and years, he's been saying it in earnings calls.

01:49:17   If you look back on those earnings calls and you try to say, "Three years ago when he

01:49:20   said that in the earnings call, what was he talking about?

01:49:23   What product was he so jazzed?"

01:49:25   like we have some great things coming we have amazing product line I think you're

01:49:29   gonna be super duper impressed and we get all excited and then if you go

01:49:31   forward three years like when he said that what was he even talking about like

01:49:35   was he talking about the watch or was that was that like the new retina iPad

01:49:39   mini it you can't even tell what he was talking about even after the fact but he

01:49:43   always says like hang in there guys just because you don't know that we're gonna

01:49:48   do a thing trust me in the future we're gonna do a thing and you're gonna like

01:49:51   it and I think that is materially different than literally saying nothing

01:49:55   like you know not answering the question and it is also different than then

01:49:59   actually definitively saying they are aren't going to going to rededicate

01:50:03   themselves to the pro market but see it's because you can't associate what he

01:50:08   says with anything even after the fact it basically means nothing because it

01:50:13   can you can apply his words to whatever you want them to be and he knows that

01:50:19   like it that it's it's a non-committal statement so if he says we have great

01:50:22   things down the pipe and it isn't at all what you want,

01:50:26   then by the time, but then like, you know,

01:50:27   when later comes and the great things they release

01:50:30   aren't what you want, it doesn't invalidate what he said.

01:50:33   It just, then there's just a new excuse of,

01:50:35   well, they made something new, it just wasn't for you.

01:50:39   You know, that's the--

01:50:39   - Yeah, right, but what if they never made another thing

01:50:42   that they even pretended was for pro people?

01:50:44   They never made an iMac Pro like,

01:50:46   because then we could call him on it.

01:50:47   By him saying this, it's clear that Apple thinks

01:50:50   they have something that pro people will like.

01:50:52   They may be wrong.

01:50:53   No, it's not.

01:50:54   They've been wrong in the past, but at the very least, I think what this says is, it's

01:50:57   them saying, "We're going to release a new Mac that we think will appeal to pros."

01:51:02   And all of us can say cynically, "Well, you're probably wrong.

01:51:04   It probably won't appeal to pros because your track record here is crap."

01:51:08   But at least you think you have something that will appeal to pros, which is more substantive

01:51:12   than just saying, "Vague, we have something coming."

01:51:14   I mean, it eventually built up to the point like it did right before the trash can, where

01:51:18   At that point they were like, stay tuned for exciting new pro hardware, which we all thought

01:51:26   was going to be a new Mac Pro and totally was a new Mac Pro.

01:51:29   And so we'll see if it builds to that.

01:51:31   But I feel like what Tim Cook is saying on this hardware front here is like, we're going

01:51:35   to introduce a product that we think people who like the old Mac Pro will like, and we

01:51:39   probably won't because it'll be an iMac Pro, but whatever.

01:51:42   That's what I think is coming.

01:51:43   That is even what he said.

01:51:44   What he said was things for pro markets

01:51:47   and especially creative pros.

01:51:49   You know what Apple pitches for creative pros?

01:51:51   The iPad Pro.

01:51:52   - And the MacBook Pro.

01:51:54   - Everything Tim Cook said could be just in reference

01:51:57   to the updated iMacs and iPad Pros

01:52:00   they're gonna launch in two weeks or whatever it is.

01:52:03   That's the thing, it doesn't mean anything.

01:52:05   - I don't buy that.

01:52:07   All right, so that's what I said.

01:52:08   If in a year there's been no motion

01:52:11   on anything that Apple is even pitching

01:52:13   as a Mac made for pros, I think people will be angry

01:52:18   and they'll come back at Tim Cook and say,

01:52:19   "You didn't deliver on those things."

01:52:21   As opposed to as other, we have this great roadmaps.

01:52:23   The problem is that we could say,

01:52:24   "Well, they did release a lot of cool stuff

01:52:26   "and any of that stuff could have applied.

01:52:27   "We just can't tell what the hell he was talking about."

01:52:29   But it's not as if they didn't deliver

01:52:30   because every year Apple releases great new stuff somewhere.

01:52:33   It's just never desktop Macs, right?

01:52:36   So I think that if it really is just like the new iPads,

01:52:40   people will be like, "Well, that's not what we thought

01:52:42   "you were talking about at all."

01:52:43   and they'll be pissed about it and they'll come back

01:52:44   even angrier with the same question.

01:52:46   Whereas if Apple releases an iMac Pro,

01:52:48   people are like, oh, all right, well I guess

01:52:50   this is what he was talking about,

01:52:51   but surprise, we're not happy

01:52:53   'cause we wanted a better Mac Pro.

01:52:54   - My concern with Cook's remarks in this area

01:52:58   and the resulting products that come out of Apple

01:53:01   is that, especially 'cause he specifically called out,

01:53:05   he said, some of the lines of like, you know,

01:53:07   prusers, especially creative pros,

01:53:09   and they keep referring to, oh, creative pros,

01:53:11   creative pros, it seems like Apple's image

01:53:15   of what a creative pro is, is somebody drawing

01:53:19   with a pencil and an iPad.

01:53:21   And that's one type of creative pro,

01:53:24   but that's a very, very small percentage of them.

01:53:27   And that's also, and like creative pros aren't all pros.

01:53:32   And Apple used to really own the market

01:53:36   for so many kinds of pros.

01:53:39   They really owned those markets so well

01:53:41   for such a long time.

01:53:43   And it seems like all the market share

01:53:46   that they've shaved off in recent years

01:53:48   by just neglect or cutting off support

01:53:51   or cutting off product lines or features or whatever else

01:53:53   are almost all the pro users that had more complex

01:53:58   or higher end needs than somebody drawing on an iPad.

01:54:03   And it doesn't seem like,

01:54:04   it seems like Tim Cook's Apple just either doesn't care

01:54:09   about the other kinds of pro work and needs

01:54:12   that are out there,

01:54:13   or they fundamentally don't understand it,

01:54:16   both of which are scary possibilities to me.

01:54:19   But I think it's very clear

01:54:20   that at least one of those is true.

01:54:22   - Did you see that MKBHD video

01:54:23   where he was complaining about his Mac Pro?

01:54:26   - No. - Yeah, I did.

01:54:27   - He was basically saying that he's got

01:54:29   the old 12-core trashcan Mac Pro,

01:54:31   the old slash current. - Current, yes,

01:54:33   the one that you can still buy for like $8,000.

01:54:36   - And he uses Final Cut Pro to edit his videos,

01:54:39   And what he was basically saying is like, people were like,

01:54:40   why are you even using that crappy old Mac?

01:54:42   Why don't you get like a fancy PC?

01:54:44   And he was like, well, I like Final Cut for video editing.

01:54:46   I'm sure it's what he's used to.

01:54:47   And he's like, I have plugins for Final Cut

01:54:48   that aren't available elsewhere and so on and so forth.

01:54:51   I think that's a good canary, the whole Final Cut Pro thing.

01:54:54   So like Aperture is gone, right?

01:54:56   Final Cut Pro is kind of the last bastion of pro-ness,

01:55:01   like the video market, right?

01:55:05   And it is currently being woefully underserved,

01:55:09   by their current trash can and anything else. I feel like, maybe I'm wrong, maybe people

01:55:14   are editing entire movies on their MacBook ones and I'm just silly for thinking this,

01:55:17   but whatever. MKBHD, who does video for a living, wants his Mac Pro. Maybe it's just

01:55:22   because he's like a computer gearhead like we are. No, no, he actually needs it. Yeah.

01:55:28   And he says that even despite that 12 core being old and creaky, that he does still get

01:55:32   better performance than he would with Adobe Premiere, which is not an apples to apples

01:55:35   comparison obviously, than he does on Adobe Premiere on a fancy PC. But you know, bottom

01:55:40   line is he just likes Final Cut, right? If they drop Final Cut, if they stop making it

01:55:45   in the same way they stop making Aperture, that will be an extremely strong signal. Because

01:55:50   you're right, Marco, like what's left? Is it just people making artisanal sketches on

01:55:55   virtual napkins? Is that it? Is that the only creative pro? Because even like real creative

01:55:58   pros need to use freaking Adobe Illustrator. Like let's get real here. Photoshop and Illustrator

01:56:02   what they need to use to do their jobs, and maybe a page layout type of thing.

01:56:06   Creative professionals? When they say that, I would think of things like

01:56:12   Aperture, oops, that's not there anymore, or Lightroom, because that's a Mac application too,

01:56:15   or things like Final Cut and Premiere. And so many markets, again, we complain about it so we

01:56:21   get a lot of emails, so this is self-selecting people saying, "I work in this industry,

01:56:25   and I've watched my entire industry dump Macs as soon as they can and switch all to PCs,"

01:56:28   because they realize Apple doesn't care about them.

01:56:30   Apple makes Final Cut.

01:56:32   It's their own program.

01:56:33   Presumably there is a team working on it, right?

01:56:35   And they put a lot of effort into the Final Cut Pro 10,

01:56:38   being a big leap over the other one

01:56:39   and endured all of the problems with that program.

01:56:41   And you know, like, they as a company seem dedicated

01:56:45   to resourcing and believing in that product

01:56:47   in the same way they used to for Aperture, I suppose.

01:56:50   If they drop that, then it will really be like,

01:56:52   all right, Tim, stop talking about professionals

01:56:56   of any kind, creative or otherwise, 'cause what the hell?

01:57:00   - By the way, on this MKBHD video,

01:57:02   you know what he says right before New Mac Pro?

01:57:06   - Oh, he's talking about USB-C, yeah?

01:57:07   - Yep.

01:57:08   - Well, it's in the news.

01:57:09   It's in the news, he's reading the same stories we are.

01:57:11   - Yep, he wants USB-C everywhere.

01:57:13   - He's so much cooler than us.

01:57:15   - That's a pretty low bar.

01:57:17   - I don't know, he's pretty nerdy.

01:57:19   You think he's cooler 'cause he's young and handsome,

01:57:21   but he's pretty nerdy.

01:57:23   - No, I'm pretty sure he's cooler than us.

01:57:25   - Yeah, I'm pretty sure he's considerably cooler.

01:57:27   - All right, all right, so it's a low bar.

01:57:28   Is he cooler than Casey?

01:57:30   Let's see, well, I don't know.

01:57:31   - That's also a low bar.

01:57:32   That's very flattering and complimentary of you.

01:57:34   - So I'm trying to put the coolest among us

01:57:37   to try to see if we can reach up to that lever.

01:57:40   - I mean, the coolest among us is definitely Casey,

01:57:42   and sorry Casey, I think he's cooler than you.

01:57:44   So I think therefore that solves the question right there.

01:57:48   - Yeah, I guess, I guess you're right.

01:57:50   Maybe if we combine all three of our coolnesses,

01:57:53   then maybe we can--

01:57:54   Maybe. Maybe all of us combined, like Voltron. It would still be, I think it would still

01:57:59   be a fight. Anyway, coolness counts for nothing in this industry. Witness Bill Gates, Steve

01:58:06   Wozniak, Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, not cool people. They're cool in their own way.

01:58:13   Bill Gates is cool in no ways, but. He is the antimatter of cool. Curing malaria. Not

01:58:22   keeps not carrying it but you know what I mean.