00:00:03 ◼ ► Oh, God. Oh, I don't know if I like this at all. Even though I'm in full support of you broadening your horizons, which to your credit you actually have done. But I'm not, so here's the thing. I'm not an athlete. I've never been an athlete. Anyone who has met me in person will not find this surprising at all.
00:00:23 ◼ ► But as it so happens, I've been rewatching The Last Dance recently, which is a just phenomenal documentary series chronicling the Chicago Bulls double three peeps.
00:00:41 ◼ ► We're required to mention the poop bus every time we mention any kind of band on the show.
00:00:44 ◼ ► Yes, I know. I know. In any case, something that athletes seem to do is wear like the same garments, you know, like, you know, or the same or tie their shoes in the same way or, you know, left shoe, then right shoe. You know, there's all these superstitions.
00:00:58 ◼ ► And now I feel like if we have a truly terrible recording or I don't know, maybe if I spill something on my computer, not that that would ever happen.
00:01:05 ◼ ► Perhaps it's because you chose to break the mold and not play fish before the show for the live listeners.
00:01:12 ◼ ► And so I am absolving myself. I am preemptively absolving myself of any guilt if anything bad happens this episode. It's all because you broke tradition.
00:01:22 ◼ ► This is a real insight into the way Casey's mind works. So what he wanted to say was like, you broke tradition and it's like a superstition, kind of like the sports superstition.
00:01:30 ◼ ► But he started with, I'm not an athlete. Then he mentioned a movie he liked about sports. Then he got to people in sports do superstitious things and then finally came around.
00:01:43 ◼ ► No, it like, it connected. Everything connected. It's just that it was a long path and that's an insight into how your mind works. Because that was your path to that thought.
00:01:51 ◼ ► My only thought was I was trying to come up with a like a fish fish goose joke and I didn't know if you would get that reference.
00:01:58 ◼ ► Oh, you get that one, but you don't get duck season rabbit season. That one goes over both of your heads.
00:02:08 ◼ ► Oh, maybe you didn't hear when? Oh, you heard us. We couldn't hear you. Marco was talking about the ducks out his window and he said he's not sure if it's duck season.
00:02:15 ◼ ► He said maybe it's rabbit season. And then Marco took it straight up and said, no, the rabbits don't come out yet or something.
00:02:19 ◼ ► No, it's full of rabbits. I have tons of rabbits, but I also did, yes, indeed miss the joke.
00:02:23 ◼ ► Okay. All right. Right. It's not a joke. Just a reference. But Casey got it. Casey got it. So I'm declaring partial victory.
00:02:29 ◼ ► All right. Let's get the show on the road. We have a lot of follow up because we're still in the WWDC follow up season and friend of the show, Ricky Mondello wrote with regard to iCloud Keychain browser integration in Sequoia.
00:02:43 ◼ ► So we had talked last episode, I think was last episode was 592, whatever one we're on now.
00:02:46 ◼ ► And we had talked about how there were some kind of unusual JSON files stored on the file system and we weren't really sure what it was about and didn't seem bad, but it didn't seem entirely right either.
00:02:59 ◼ ► And Ricky has worked on a lot of the passwords related stuff for Apple for a long time. I was lucky enough to see Ricky at WWDC.
00:03:08 ◼ ► I don't know. I don't think either of you were with me at the time, but they are doing great. And I was very happy to see them.
00:03:13 ◼ ► Anyways, coming back to the point here, I'm going off on a tangent again. Gosh, I'm so Alex.
00:03:17 ◼ ► Anyway, Ricky writes, ATP episode 592 speculated that macOS Sequoia pre-installs the iCloud passwords browser extension for Chrome users.
00:03:27 ◼ ► It absolutely does not. The discussed JSON files support the user installable extension communicating with the OS to securely access password data.
00:03:36 ◼ ► See, a link we'll put in the show notes. The new passwords app does encourage Chrome and Edge users to install the extension on first launch, however.
00:03:52 ◼ ► So Simeon writes, I'm a DevRel engineer for Firefox add-ons and previously Chrome extensions.
00:04:02 ◼ ► As the name suggests, this allows extensions and native applications to exchange messages.
00:04:07 ◼ ► More specifically, this files how a desktop application tells Chrome that if its partner extension is installed, Chrome can route the messages between them.
00:04:13 ◼ ► In order for this to work, both sides have to know about each other and opt into communication over a native messaging port.
00:04:18 ◼ ► Also, while browsers used to allow other applications to directly sideload extensions, they've scaled back that functionality for security, privacy, and annoyance reasons.
00:04:26 ◼ ► Today, browsers let native apps notify the user that an extension is available for installation, but don't actually install it until the user opts in.
00:04:38 ◼ ► So that explains it. The last episode we were talking about how the path in the JSON file was to one of the system cryptexes or whatever,
00:04:48 ◼ ► I'm assuming it's the thing that mediates between them, the native messaging system thing.
00:04:51 ◼ ► So these are just sort of declaring, hey, if an app, if these Chrome extensions or Firefox extensions with these signatures appear,
00:04:58 ◼ ► allow them to communicate through this mediated extension to get and set password data.
00:05:07 ◼ ► All right, Nilian, who's doing incredible work over at MacStories, reminds us that network location support is already in Mac OS 14 Sonoma.
00:05:23 ◼ ► Yeah, whenever it came back, it was probably in a follow-up item, and I just totally forgot about it.
00:05:29 ◼ ► It might have come back in the OS before that, which of course we all know the name of.
00:05:50 ◼ ► So with regard to iPhone mirroring, we had thought that, hey, maybe what you can do is in Sonoma...
00:06:10 ◼ ► Anyways, in Sequoia, in Beta 2, Hunt 2013 writes that you cannot enter home screen edit mode while using iPhone mirroring, so the plague of jiggle mode lives on.
00:06:22 ◼ ► Last night, I had Merlin test this, and he also could not figure out how to get into wiggle mode, because apparently the phone is locked when you're doing the mirroring thing or whatever.
00:06:31 ◼ ► So he couldn't. I was like, oh, just hold down on the icon on the phone. He was telling me he couldn't make the icons wiggle that way, and apparently holding down with the mouse cursor on the mirrored thing on your Mac also doesn't put it into wiggle mode.
00:06:42 ◼ ► So maybe this is not definitive. Maybe it's just a limitation of the Beta, but man, why would they do that? Why would they make it so you couldn't enter wiggle mode on your home screen?
00:07:00 ◼ ► Yeah, like frame rate, but it's right next to the... They do sidecar with the iPad with a much bigger screen, so it doesn't make any sense.
00:07:09 ◼ ► It could just be a bug. We'll find out. The reason I haven't tried this is because I was all ready to try it. Oh, it's in Beta 2 of Sequoia. I have Beta 2 of Sequoia installed on a real drive and also in a VM, although apparently VMs can't do it because of some Bluetooth limitation.
00:07:22 ◼ ► But anyway, then I realized, oh, you also need the Beta on your phone. I was like, well, I'm not ready to do that yet, so I haven't been able to try this.
00:07:30 ◼ ► But whichever one of us first installs the Beta of Sequoia and the Beta on their phone, we'll see if we can figure it out.
00:07:38 ◼ ► Not it on that one. With regard to HomePod RAM, I think this was in the context of, does it have enough RAM to do Apple intelligence stuff? I think?
00:07:48 ◼ ► So anyways, Jan Gobel writes, "According to every Mac, the HomePod 2 has an S7 chip with 1GB of RAM and the HomePod Mini an S5 with 1GB of RAM." Seeming a little slim. I don't think that's going to work.
00:08:00 ◼ ► Probably not going to be running any on-device Apple intelligence with that amount of RAM.
00:08:04 ◼ ► We had somebody writing in anonymously with regard to tvOS's Insight feature. This is the clone of Amazon X-Ray. "I run metadata APIs for one of the largest media companies on the planet. I don't know exactly how Amazon or Apple tags metadata, but I can offer some insight into how we do it.
00:08:23 ◼ ► We process hundreds of hours of content every week, and it's all tagged scene by scene with actors' locations, music, attitudes, moods, DEI info, and more. This is done with a mix of ML and a team of about 50 human taggers, and it is all done before content distribution.
00:08:38 ◼ ► ML does the first pass, and then the humans are tasked with checking the machine, as well as adding contextual mood-based tags that the machine doesn't or can't understand.
00:08:45 ◼ ► The first pass is relatively fast, and our accuracy is over 98%. This is achieved by having relatively limited data sets with specialized dynamically generated ML models for each show or movie.
00:08:55 ◼ ► For example, if the ML is tagging one of our sitcoms, the first thing it does is call for a list of actors and locations that have been previously tagged.
00:09:02 ◼ ► It then dynamically "trains" a small specialized model using only that data. This operation only takes a few seconds.
00:09:08 ◼ ► Then the robot matches existing tags to faces and places them from within the custom model. If any faces are new to the model at the end of the tagging algorithms, then generalized ML facial and location matches are made and flagged as needing a human tagger approval.
00:09:23 ◼ ► This tagging is much faster, more accurate than either human taggers or any generalized facial recognition ML, and can be automated on large batches of back library content without massive computing overhead.
00:09:35 ◼ ► That's a great example of just machine learning really taking a huge chunk out of that workload.
00:09:40 ◼ ► Because if it was done completely manually by humans, what a slog. Not a particularly fun job, slow, and the point that the ML can potentially beat humans on a first pass just because it's so tedious, the work is so tedious, that the computer is as good as it is, but it never gets tired.
00:10:00 ◼ ► So whatever it's doing in the first hour, it's also going to do in the 900th hour, whereas the humans are going to fade. This is an interesting human-computer combination to do all this.
00:10:09 ◼ ► I love that they're tagging it based on not just who's in the scene, but the mood of the scene and stuff. It's interesting that they're throwing so much metadata at whatever company this person works for, which they didn't say in their message.
00:10:25 ◼ ► Mihai Parparita writes with regard to chess on macOS that based on InfiniteMac.org, the chess app first showed up in NextStep 1.0 as a developer sample app. So that means, kids, it's almost 35 years old. Holy Jamalis.
00:10:40 ◼ ► Wow. That's a fun thing of InfiniteMac, which, if people don't know, it's a way to run in your web browser really old versions of macOS and now also old versions of Next. And so to answer this question that I was musing about last time, I wonder how old chess is. I thought it was dated back to the next days, but I didn't know how far.
00:10:55 ◼ ► Well, you could try to look that up on the Wikipedia page, try to find someone, a blog post about chess in the Next app. But it's so much more direct. Just go to InfiniteMac.org and pick an OS and launch it.
00:11:07 ◼ ► Like pick Next Step in some version and launch it and see if the chess app is there. And then just go back in time and go older and older until you don't see it anymore. I love InfiniteMac. Whoever did that site is amazing.
00:11:17 ◼ ► With regard to CarPlay, where did we leave our intrepid heroes last episode? I feel, I can't recall specifically because it was a while ago and I've been busy, which we'll talk about in the after show.
00:11:28 ◼ ► I believe we left them as Next Generation CarPlay has been announced and yet nothing has it, which is where we've left it for the last, what, two years? Three years?
00:11:36 ◼ ► No, no. Let me help you here. So we had an item about it. There was some feedback from someone who'd watched the Next Generation CarPlay sessions at WWDC and was characterizing them as a bunch of Apple developers saying, "Here, look at all these variations you can have. You can pick any variation of this one font, for example."
00:11:55 ◼ ► And that kind of attitude was not going to mesh well with the carmaker's desire to have much more control over the appearance of their cars. But many questions remained about Next Gen CarPlay because at that point none of us had seen the sessions.
00:12:09 ◼ ► Well now I have seen all the sessions that are relevant to this and so now we actually have some information to share.
00:12:14 ◼ ► Yeah, so I 2x'd them earlier today so you probably digested them far better than I did but I was trying to mainline them basically before we recorded. There were a couple of interesting parts and you actually called out in the show notes for the three of us something that I was going to call out when I was watching it.
00:12:31 ◼ ► A quote from the first session which is entitled Next Generation CarPlay Design System. And a quote from the host, they had said, "It enables you to express your own visual design philosophy within CarPlay to create an iconic individual look tailored to you, your vehicles, and their unique functions.
00:12:49 ◼ ► The result won't just look like Apple and it also won't just look like a copy of the built-in system. It's designed to be a unique celebration of both brands, a special co-branded experience only when your vehicle and iPhone come together and it reflects a great deal of hard work we've done with automakers all over the world to innovate the in-car experience.
00:13:08 ◼ ► Our design system for automakers, this is a little bit later, empowers you in partnership with our team here at Apple to help, excuse me, to develop a beautiful co-branded experience that celebrates both brands.
00:13:20 ◼ ► So this answers a lot of questions. So first of all, the question we were always asking, Next Gen CarPlay takes over all the screens. A few shows ago we had some quotes from interviews with the Mercedes and Polestar CEO on the Decoder podcast with the host asking, "Would you let Apple take over all your screens?"
00:13:38 ◼ ► And one of them was like, "No way! We're not letting Apple take over all our screens." The other one was like, "Oh, they can take over the screens because we still run the car and it's not a big deal." But we still had this question like, "What does this mean? How does the car work when the phone's not there? Is the phone required? Does this stuff run on the car? Does it run on the phone? Is it a combination?"
00:13:52 ◼ ► And then also the feedback we had last time about, "Oh, you can pick one font. It's got to look like Apple." This clearly gives a bunch of answers. Number one, there is a built-in system. If you don't have an iPhone and you get in the car, all the screens are filled with something. Something made by the car maker. Right? So that is clear.
00:14:11 ◼ ► Number two, the way Apple sees this is that this next-gen carplay experience is supposed to be a blending of Apple's branding and your car's branding. It's like, "Okay, your car is your car and whatever your car looks like on all the screens and everything. But when you get in with your iPhone, what we want is to say, 'Now, iPhoneify this car. What does this car look like when I come in with my iPhone? Woo, my iPhone takes over everything and it's iPhone-branded, but it's also your brand, but it's Apple-branded, but it's your brand.'"
00:14:40 ◼ ► They are so clear that they're saying, "We're not giving you a system where you, car maker, can make it look like how you want to promote your brand." That is not even what Apple is offering. Forget about whether they deliver. They're not saying, "Hey, we gave you a system and you can make this look like Audi. Whatever you want Audi to look like, we give you a Flexi--" No. They're not even offering that. They're saying, "We will give you the ability to make a look that is a combination that celebrates both brands. It's a combination of Apple's aesthetic and yours. And you're going to be able to make a look that is a combination of your brand and your car's brand."
00:15:09 ◼ ► And yours. And you can debate how much of a balance, like where is that line, how much is it. Is it 50% Apple, 50% Audi? Or is it 60/40? Or is it 90/10? Or whatever. But that is the pitch that this is what your car looks like when it's painted with a giant iPhone paintbrush. And it only happens when someone enters with a phone. And when they don't do that, or don't connect their phone to your car, it just looks like your car.
00:15:32 ◼ ► So I found this very surprising. Because I assume next-gen carplay took over all the screens. It would be some kind of thing of like, "Look, it'll be a carplay-like experience, but Apple's offering you the technology to do all your screens. And you can customize it and so on and so forth, and integrate with carplay."
00:15:48 ◼ ► But I thought that would be the whole thing. And then there would be a carve-out for when your phone's there, but when your phone's not there, it would still look like that. But that's not it at all.
00:15:55 ◼ ► And it makes me think even more like, "Who would want this? Who would want to have to design every screen in their car?"
00:16:04 ◼ ► You know, they have to design every screen in their car. They spend all this time to make everything look nice. They integrate all the features.
00:16:10 ◼ ► And then Apple's saying, "We would like it when someone gets into your car with an iPhone for that phone to cover up everything you've done."
00:16:19 ◼ ► And by the way, you have to do work to integrate this, and we'll get to that in a little bit on how the integration works. Every pixel that you've done before, we want to potentially cover up.
00:16:28 ◼ ► All these places where your stuff can peek through, and we'll talk about that. But because that would be a co-branded experience that blends the best of Apple in your car.
00:16:36 ◼ ► And the car may be like, "Why would I want to blend the best of Apple into my car? Why would I want to do that?"
00:16:41 ◼ ► Because people who own iPhones love iPhones so much, they want every screen they look at to look like an iPhone and be branded like an Apple thing.
00:16:47 ◼ ► Boggles my mind, but at least, question answered. That's what next-gen carplay is. And now it is no longer, it's even less surprising that there have not been carmakers jumping on this.
00:16:59 ◼ ► I will say, there's one aspect of it that I saw just breeze by in some slide somewhere. One of the changes in next-gen carplay is "buffered audio."
00:17:10 ◼ ► This sounds a lot like AirPlay 2 and the way that approaches audio buffering. AirPlay 1 had, in order to address the realities of dropouts and interference and stuff, so that your music wouldn't have little skips and static, it introduces a buffer.
00:17:35 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly. It made it very sluggish to respond to play/pause commands and stuff like that.
00:17:40 ◼ ► And then AirPlay 2 basically introduced a system where the app could send a whole bunch of data all at once of a minute or a minute and a half of audio to the client device and have the client device play it in a little bit more smart way, where operations like play/pause and seek would generally be able to use the buffer and respond immediately.
00:18:03 ◼ ► That's one of the reasons why AirPlay 2 is so much better than AirPlay 1. That just required more technical sophistication of being able to transmit a whole bunch of data at once and have the client actually store a large buffer of it and be able to navigate it a little bit more smartly.
00:18:17 ◼ ► Well, it sounds like that might be what they're doing with this CarPlay audio too, where in the current version of CarPlay, the audio just goes over what I believe is Bluetooth, I think all of the time, because it creates a little peer-to-peer Wi-Fi network for wireless CarPlay for the video streaming.
00:18:36 ◼ ► I don't think the audio goes over that channel. I think the audio always is Bluetooth, but I could be wrong about that.
00:18:43 ◼ ► Anyway, introducing "buffered audio" in this next-gen CarPlay sounds like the audio won't go over Bluetooth anymore, which will give them so much more control over latency and various handling details of that connection.
00:18:59 ◼ ► Honestly, I kind of wish they wouldn't tie these two things together. I wish they could find a way to introduce this new audio situation to a version of CarPlay that automakers are more likely to actually adopt.
00:19:16 ◼ ► It's not clear whether they demand to get next-gen CarPlay you have to let us take over all the screens, or whether a carmaker could choose to implement next-gen CarPlay only on the center screen.
00:19:33 ◼ ► Those type of business things were not mentioned in the WWDC session. It's kind of a weird WWDC session, too, because I guess the audience is people who work for carmakers. It's not like we, as just regular developers, can do anything with, "Well, I guess your apps would run in next-gen CarPlay."
00:19:51 ◼ ► I don't think that experience has changed too much. If they're really talking to the people who work at carmakers, the business people will have a lot more questions like, "Can we get the better audio without letting you take over the instrument cluster?"
00:20:06 ◼ ► At the beginning of the first session about the design system, I wasn't quick enough to call up the transcript, but the host says something along the lines of, "This is for automakers, or people who are just interested in design or cars or whatever." And that's where we come in.
00:20:20 ◼ ► One of the things that I did think was interesting was, before I watched these videos, a lot of people were getting really perturbed that the San Francisco font family is the only font family allowed.
00:20:32 ◼ ► At first I was like, "Yeah! That stinks!" But after watching the video, I see that while that is a little bit crummy, I actually am not that bothered by it because there are so many different variations between weight and kerning and everything.
00:20:47 ◼ ► But they all look like San Francisco, though. Carmakers have their own fonts that evoke the carmaker's brand. Some of them are, I think, kind of gaudy and ugly, but they look nothing like San Francisco.
00:20:59 ◼ ► Again, because this is a co-branded experience. It celebrates both brands, but it only celebrates Apple in terms of the fonts. It does not celebrate BMW or Lamborghini or Ferrari in terms of the fonts.
00:21:12 ◼ ► San Francisco is an amazing font. It looks great, but it always looks Apple. So again, what is the balance between how much it celebrates both brands versus how much it celebrates Apple versus how much it celebrates your brand.
00:21:23 ◼ ► I feel like it is heavily weighted towards Apple because some things are not changeable. So the font family is one limitation. There is a limited number of gauge types.
00:21:31 ◼ ► Especially with all-screen instrument clusters, there is a lot of variation in gauge design. Most cars have three or four different variations, like little bar charts, a racing one, a regular looking one.
00:21:44 ◼ ► It has a wide variety, but not as wide as the actual world of existing cars. Another thing, a quote from the presentation, "In our system, the speedometer is always paired with a fuel gauge or a state of charge gauge."
00:21:59 ◼ ► That's fine, like you're going to have those things, but they're not always paired. Sometimes in existing cars on their instrument cluster, the speedometer is in a different place than the fuel gauge or the state of charge gauge.
00:22:12 ◼ ► But in Apple's thing, they're always paired. Limitations like that are probably going to annoy car makers because they won't be able to do exactly what they want.
00:22:19 ◼ ► But the architecture is actually really interesting. It is as complicated as you would imagine, which is also why it is difficult to adopt.
00:22:28 ◼ ► There are basically four layers that are stuck together by two different compositors to, for example, form the instrument cluster. The top one is the overlay UI, which has things like the tire pressure warning light and a bunch of other tell-tales or indicators, as my daughter calls them, emojis.
00:22:49 ◼ ► "How's the gas in the car?" I text her after she arrives at a destination because I never text her when she's on the road. She said, "It's fine. It's not even close to the gas emoji thing." She calls them all emojis, but anyway, kids these days.
00:23:08 ◼ ► Then the next layer is the punch through UI, which is the built-in system of the car can basically render whatever it wants on a region that it punches through. So lots of times the driver assistance thing where they show a 3D model of your car going down the road with the other cars that it's sensing around it, that is all built into the car.
00:23:29 ◼ ► You're not going to redo that in CarPlay. You just punch that through. You pick a region of the instrument cluster and it says, "Okay, car, you get to display what's here." Then there's the local UI, which is the gauges and everything.
00:23:41 ◼ ► And then there's the remote UI, which is all the old CarPlay, it was all remote UI rendered by the phone and displayed. And so the remote UI, local UI and punch through are composited together.
00:23:54 ◼ ► And then the overlay UI is handled by the vehicle and composited together with those things. So the remote UI is rendered by the phone exactly like it is in the previous generation of CarPlay.
00:24:03 ◼ ► The overlay UI is rendered by the vehicle, and that includes the tell-tales and all the turn signals, the headlight indicator, stuff like that.
00:24:10 ◼ ► The local UI, this is what I have to say about that. The local UI is not affected by Wi-Fi interference or disconnect since data stays local to the vehicle.
00:24:17 ◼ ► The next generation of CarPlay starts instantaneously if you were using it on your previous drive. As soon as the displays are lit, or maybe when the door opens, or maybe when the driver is approaching the car, content is ready to show.
00:24:27 ◼ ► This may even be before the iPhone has been detected or reconnected. So obviously this is not running on the phone.
00:24:34 ◼ ► It is rendered locally by the vehicle. They use an OpenGL-based render. Hey, Apple's discovered OpenGL again. Why? Because car makers use it and they got to deal with it.
00:24:41 ◼ ► It includes image assets, behavior scripts, and it's specific to each vehicle and it's transferred during the pairing process and it can be refreshed over time.
00:24:49 ◼ ► So basically, Apple has to provide a wad of stuff, code, assets, and everything, that go into the car, that the car takes in stores and runs, because these screens need to come on instantly.
00:25:01 ◼ ► So all that local UI, which includes the speedometer, all those gauge things, all that stuff, it's rendered by the vehicle. Your phone hasn't even been detected, right?
00:25:09 ◼ ► So there is an aspect of this next-gen carplay that is in the car, but it is shoved there by the phone and updated by the phone as needed and so on and so forth.
00:25:18 ◼ ► And then the punch-through UI is entirely rendered by the vehicle. Another example is the backup camera. That's just entirely rendered by the vehicle. It's just punched through wherever they're going to display it.
00:25:28 ◼ ► And they also mentioned visually rich features or settings. So you know in Mercedes or BMW, they show this beautifully rendered picture of your seat with the little wavy lines with the heat and the massage and all that.
00:25:38 ◼ ► You don't have to re-implement that. They're like, "Oh, just punch that through." But the punch-through UI is such a weird compromise, because if you know what any of those screens look like on a fancy modern car,
00:25:49 ◼ ► especially the ones that are about, you know, "adjust where the vents are pointing with the touchscreen" or "turn on the massaging function" or "let's see the outside of the car and show all the doors opening when they open," all that stuff, right?
00:26:01 ◼ ► It does not and will not match Apple's aesthetic. So they're like, "Okay, just carve out a box on any of the screens that Apple is rendering and show a totally incongruous, totally unmatching, 'fonts aren't the same, colors aren't the same, design isn't the same,' just so you don't have to re-implement that."
00:26:18 ◼ ► This is Apple saying, "We are not going to make you re-implement literally every screen to be, you know, carplay-y and look like that, but you can just punch through your existing UI," which makes this even less attractive, because that's not a combination of the two brands.
00:26:32 ◼ ► That's just the built-in system, an Apple system, in a patchwork, in an ugly quilt, because, like, I look at these Apple screens and I'm like, "I've seen the screens in many, many different modern cars. None of them match this."
00:26:47 ◼ ► Right? Like, "You don't want to have to redo that big settings screen? Just punch it through. It will look totally incongruous with everything else we render, but at least you don't have to re-implement it."
00:26:57 ◼ ► This is quite an uphill struggle for next-gen carplay, and honestly, I don't even know, like, what's, like, why do this? What's the goal?
00:27:07 ◼ ► Like, does Apple really want to be able to co-brand the instrument cluster? Why not just be satisfied having, to Marco's point, better and better integration with the screen that people want to see their car stuff on?
00:27:17 ◼ ► Better audio, better lower latency video, more rich features, instead of saying, "We want to take over every pixel of every screen except for the part where you punch through your existing UI that's going to look nothing like ours."
00:27:29 ◼ ► You know, this makes me think of, let's go on another journey, fellas, this makes me think of, like, Microsoft Teams and Slack, right?
00:27:38 ◼ ► Like, Android Automotive, I think that's the right one, whatever it is, it's like the base layer, not Android Automotive.
00:27:45 ◼ ► Okay, yeah, yeah. Android Automotive is like, you know, Microsoft 365, right? We'll take care of it all for you. We've got this. You just sit back, you worry about the car stuff. We've got the infotainment stuff.
00:27:55 ◼ ► And it's all taken care of, easy peasy. And then Apple says, "No, we need to basically duplicate all of your existing efforts and we need to do it together holding hands."
00:28:05 ◼ ► Like, as a consumer, I think I would really enjoy this. I think it would be really nice and I think I would like it.
00:28:18 ◼ ► I don't think I would like it as a consumer. If I buy a car, like, I buy a Polestar and they have Polestar branded infotainment that matches the car, matches the Polestar brand, fits in with the car, all the pictures on the screens reflect what's in the car, like it is a complete cohesive branded experience they pay a lot of people to do.
00:28:35 ◼ ► When I get in that car with my phone, I don't want to cover over all that Polestar stuff and make the car iPhone-y. I like the iPhone. It's iPhone branded.
00:28:48 ◼ ► But I don't want the rooms and vehicles that I enter to suddenly become iPhone branded. Like, I bought the car because I like the car's brand.
00:28:55 ◼ ► I don't know why you would allow someone, it's like, if I enter a home with my iPhone, your television's UI is going to be covered up with my iPhone UI because I've entered it now and I have my iPhone.
00:29:08 ◼ ► I don't want that. It doesn't match the car. You can't change the design of the dashboard or the upholstery on the seats or the way the car looks. Why would I want to change everything that's on all the screens?
00:29:18 ◼ ► The reason people like phone integration is because phones are platforms and there are great apps for them and we have our life on them and all our songs are on them.
00:29:27 ◼ ► Yeah, we want that integration so stuff from our phone, we have a way to interact with it on the car, even so far as being able to use our voice assistance on our phone through the car, that's great.
00:29:37 ◼ ► Like, leverage the strengths of the phone. But the phone has nothing to do with the instrument cluster as far as I'm concerned other than maybe showing navigation in there or something like that.
00:29:48 ◼ ► I don't want my car to be phone branded when I enter with my phone and I would be annoyed if that was the only choice because I would want to use CarPlay for the things that we all like CarPlay for.
00:29:58 ◼ ► I would be saying, "Could I get that without you covering over my instrument cluster, the customer cluster that I liked with an iPhone UI that I don't particularly like and also have no control over?"
00:30:10 ◼ ► Because yeah, the automakers can customize this and pick stuff but it's not like the user gets to design their own instrument cluster with this.
00:30:17 ◼ ► They have the same limited options that, probably even more limited options than the built-in systems offer because again, built-in systems usually offer two or three different instrument clusters on these fancy cars and you can pick which one you like.
00:30:27 ◼ ► Yeah, I think I like CarPlay. I mean, I obviously don't usually have it in the Rivian but I like CarPlay the way it is now, mostly, in a window.
00:30:37 ◼ ► Like, in some cases, CarPlay is the entire display of certain displays but most car makers will let CarPlay take up most of the display when you're using it but then will have some kind of little area off to the side or below it or something that has their toolbar buttons that will switch you back over to their interface.
00:30:59 ◼ ► And then you switch back to CarPlay when you want to look at your music player or your navigation.
00:31:03 ◼ ► CarPlay already also has support for the secondary display so if you want to have something like, for instance, if you're doing navigation and you want to have a CarPlay display in the dashboard cluster during navigation, you can already do that with the existing version of CarPlay.
00:31:22 ◼ ► So CarPlay the way it is now, display-wise and integration-wise, already offers what I think I actually want as a customer.
00:31:31 ◼ ► Like, I want CarPlay to be contained. I don't want it to take over everything because, like John was saying, I actually like car controls when they are well designed.
00:31:40 ◼ ► I like car UIs when they are well designed. That is not the common case but it does happen.
00:31:45 ◼ ► And I just want more automakers to adopt CarPlay the way it is. And I hope, because a lot of these technological details and implementation details, you know, like stuff like more stuff running on the car, the audio being buffered differently, not using Bluetooth, stuff like that.
00:32:02 ◼ ► A lot of those things would actually be great improvements to the system we already have.
00:32:07 ◼ ► And again, I hope that by Apple trying to reach much further design-wise, I hope this doesn't preclude the automakers from adopting the technological advancements that they are trying to get done as well.
00:32:21 ◼ ► I hope we can actually have like good CarPlay with modern innovation and modern architecture behind it in a way that the carmakers can swallow design-wise.
00:32:35 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah. It's kind of, I don't know, I get where Apple is going here but I'm really struggling to figure out who they think this is for.
00:32:45 ◼ ► Because again, if I'm an auto manufacturer, no thank you. And it's just, I can't think of a better way to verbalize this and I think I'm being a little bit, probably more than a little bit dramatic, but it's kind of like Apple hubris.
00:32:56 ◼ ► Like of course the carmakers want to come to us and help us, have us help them design their stuff. Why wouldn't they do that?
00:33:02 ◼ ► And not just help them design it, but you're like, and of course they would want our branding to be part of their car because our branding is great. Wouldn't they want to have some representation of Apple inside their cars?
00:33:12 ◼ ► Why? I mean, I think the most optimistic scenario is kind of the same reason people use Apple TVs. Like, oh, I got a smart TV but the interface in the smart TV sucks and Apple TV is so much better.
00:33:22 ◼ ► So I'm going to ignore my smart TV's built-in interface and I'm just going to use the Apple TV.
00:33:26 ◼ ► And first I would say that's a choice people who buy an Apple TV make. But second, I think the degree to which smart television's built-in experiences are co-branded with the TV is much lower than the degree to which the infotainment on especially fancy modern cars is blended with the car.
00:33:48 ◼ ► Like, if you look at the instrument cluster on a BMW or an Audi or a Volvo or a Polestar or one of these expensive cars, you can just look at the instrument cluster without seeing anything else and you know what kind of car it's in.
00:34:01 ◼ ► They really heavily brand that. And the good ones that do their controls on the other touch screens, whether the climate controls are there or adjusting the seats or the 360 camera or whatever, those things are so heavily branded.
00:34:14 ◼ ► I mean, look at Rivian doing the cell-shaded 3D model of your car in the woods and everything. That is so different than what it looks like in an IONIQ 5 versus what it looks like in a Volkswagen.
00:34:25 ◼ ► It's so heavily branded. Now, if you hate your car's interface, as a consumer I can say, "Oh, thank God, my car's interface, I hate it." But when I get in with my phone it erases all that and replaces it with the phone UI.
00:34:36 ◼ ► I can see some people wanting to do that. But I think people buy cars based on the whole car. If someone hated, you know, "I can't stand..." I'm an example.
00:34:49 ◼ ► If you really don't want climate controls on a touch screen, you're not going to buy a car with climate controls on a touch screen. Right? You're choosing based on what's in the car.
00:34:57 ◼ ► In an Apple world, they're like, "What if you didn't have to do that? What if you were just happy with the way we paint over all those screens with our stuff and you never had to see your credit-built-in system? As long as you like our system, you can buy any car."
00:35:09 ◼ ► I think that's their pitch for the appeal, but again, I think people holistically buy cars and that branding is part of it.
00:35:15 ◼ ► If you buy some fancy electric Hellcat or the E-Ray Corvette or whatever, you want the cool Corvette logo and startup animation and the gauges and whatever.
00:35:29 ◼ ► Especially if they do the homages to the old Corvette instrument clusters on the new one with screen. When you're buying a Corvette, people who buy Corvettes want that.
00:35:37 ◼ ► They don't want, "I'm going to buy a Corvette and then I want it to look like my iPhone." No, they don't. They want it to look like a Corvette. I'm a car person. Maybe I'm not representative of the audience, but I think we'll have to wait until this is actually implemented to see what the non-tech nerd, non-car nerd public thinks of it.
00:35:56 ◼ ► But right now, it hasn't been rolled out on any cars, which I think is reflective of what the auto industry thinks of it.
00:36:01 ◼ ► Yeah, I was going to say, that's a long wait for a train or car. That ain't coming. All right, there is some big news that dropped sometime in the last week or two. I forget exactly when it was.
00:36:12 ◼ ► Apparently, it was leaked to the Financial Times, if I'm not mistaken, and then formally stated a few days later, the European Commission has found Apple in breach of the, what is it, Digital Markets Act, the DMA? There you go.
00:36:26 ◼ ► And so reading from a press release from the European Commission, "The European Commission has informed Apple of its preliminary view that its App Store rules are in breach of the Digital Markets Act, or DMA, as they prevent app developers from freely steering customers to alternative channels for offers and content.
00:36:42 ◼ ► In addition, the Commission opened a new non-compliance procedure against Apple over concerns that its new contractual requirements for third-party app developers and app stores, including Apple's new core technology fee, fall short of ensuring effective compliance with Apple's obligations under the DMA.
00:36:59 ◼ ► In parallel, the Commission will continue undertaking preliminary investigative steps outside of the scope of the present investigation, in particular with respect to the checks and reviews put in place by Apple to validate apps and alternative app stores to be sideloaded."
00:37:12 ◼ ► Gotta love the efficiency of government. So all these things we've talked about on the show. There are anti-steering rules, whether Apple's complying, core technology fee makes it unattractive for people to be in alternative app stores, and most recently, oh, they rejected UTM from notarization because they felt like it for third-party app stores.
00:37:31 ◼ ► Not for the App Store. They said, "Actually, we don't want that to be in any apps. We don't want that in our App Store, and also we don't want that to be in any third-party app stores." Why? Because we said so. So they have separate investigations into all these, and this announcement was just for the anti-steering thing of like, how easy is it for people to tell somebody in an app, "Hey, you can get a better deal if you go to our website. It's $10 here, but on our website, it's $5."
00:37:54 ◼ ► And Apple's like, "No, you can't tell them the price. If you link it, you gotta do it the special way," or whatever. So that's what they found them in breach up. And they say, "And just so you know, we're still looking to those other things like the core technology fee, and most recently..."
00:38:05 ◼ ► Now, I give them a pass on the UTM thing because that happened recently, but the core technology fee was there from day one. Why is it that they can't figure out all the different ways that Apple is non-compliant and tell them at once?
00:38:16 ◼ ► But no, these are all separate investigations and everything takes a long time. But anyway, if you're wondering if the European Commission thinks that Apple is following the rules of the DMA, and at least the anti-steering thing, the answer is no. They think Apple is not correctly following the rules.
00:38:37 ◼ ► Well, so here's the thing. None of us are lawyers. We're certainly not European lawyers. I think I've read most of the DMA. I've said it before. I think the DMA has written in such a way that it opened the door for Apple to do something like this and to plausibly argue that they are compliant.
00:38:57 ◼ ► Whatever the European Commission wants, it could have been more explicit about it. Instead of just kind of hinting in the direction of "we want competition" or whatever.
00:39:08 ◼ ► In some ways, it's like, well, they're not going to tell you exactly how to do it. You don't want them to pin it down entirely. That's not how laws work.
00:39:14 ◼ ► In other ways, say Apple was acting in good faith, which I don't entirely think they are, but if they were, and they were trying to be compliant, they would still have a lot of questions. I don't know how much backchannel communication happens, but if they were acting in good faith, I would hope Apple could say to the European Commission, "We're thinking of doing X, Y, and Z. Does that seem good to you?"
00:39:35 ◼ ► I don't know if the European Commission is saying, "We can't tell you anything. Just show us what you have, and then we'll tell you about it nine months later." Which is frustrating, because it's not...
00:39:45 ◼ ► Grubber complains about this, because he's super against the European Commission stuff. He's like, "Are they saying that Apple can't make any money?"
00:39:52 ◼ ► There's nothing in the DMA that says Apple is not allowed to make a profit on phones or the App Store or anything like that.
00:39:58 ◼ ► But Apple might have a question of, "If the core technology fee is going to be found to be non-compliant, what can we do?"
00:40:06 ◼ ► My answer would be, "You can't make it so that there's no way for anyone to make a more attractive option."
00:40:12 ◼ ► One thing that is clear in the DMA is they want more competition. And competition doesn't mean, "Apple, you set the rules so nobody can ever be better than you."
00:40:20 ◼ ► That's clear. That's why I think their compliance is obviously in bad faith. But, okay, I accept that.
00:40:31 ◼ ► How much competition? Should people be allowed to undercut us by 100%, 1000%? How unattractive can we make it?
00:40:40 ◼ ► Can we charge people anything, or can we charge people nothing? Because if the answer is we can charge people nothing, put that in the damn DMA and say,
00:40:46 ◼ ► "Oh, and by the way, people need to be able to sell things in third-party App Stores without Apple having any say on what's there, with very narrowly defined exceptions, and also without giving Apple any money."
00:40:57 ◼ ► But they didn't write that. They just didn't write that into the law as far as anything that I could see.
00:41:00 ◼ ► Now, maybe I'm not a lawyer and I missed it into staring me in the face because it's using language that I don't understand.
00:41:04 ◼ ► But I feel like this DMA could have been written to be more specific, but I am glad that Apple was found non-compliant because I think what they did is,
00:41:15 ◼ ► clearly not achieving the thing that is stated in the DMA, which is like, "We want more competition. We want a more open market."
00:41:25 ◼ ► And so, you know, you think you're complying with this by making sure you have made a market that is not open, and we're going to ding you for that.
00:41:34 ◼ ► Yeah, I think there's no way to look at Apple's compliance plan and say, "This is what Europe intended." As Jon said, we are not experts in European law and the dynamics of how they write the laws and how they enforce them and everything.
00:41:50 ◼ ► We do know a bit about Apple and a bit about the App Store and a bit about that kind of stuff. And it is very clear that the intention of the DMA and of allowing different app distribution channels that Apple does not financially control with arbitrary terms, that was the intention.
00:42:09 ◼ ► Apple should allow people who are not them to distribute software on their platform without burdensome economic terms that are dictated by Apple. That's clearly the intention of the law.
00:42:21 ◼ ► Without terms that make it unattractive. That's the main thing. There can be terms and there can be caveats and they have to prove it for security or whatever, but you can't make the terms such that nobody would ever want to do this.
00:42:34 ◼ ► It's like price fixing. You can compete with me, but you can't sell any products for any cheaper than I sell them. That's not actually what they're doing, but effectively it's saying, "Oh, you're just going to have to pay us anyway, so we're going to try to make it so that you running the store doesn't come out ahead.
00:42:50 ◼ ► The people selling it in the store don't come out ahead because they have to pay us for all those installs for 50 cents or whatever the core technology fee. People running the stores don't come out ahead. If you join into the system, you're going to look over at us and say, "Why are we even doing this? This is basically the same as the Apple system."
00:43:06 ◼ ► That's not competition. Apple found a way to do that and they think, "Oh, we're complying with the law." They're going to argue because Apple has a chance to argue about this and say, "Look, we're totally in compliance. You should have written a better law, but I'm not sure that's going to work out for them."
00:43:22 ◼ ► No. Obviously, Europe is saying, "We need people to be able to compete in this giant marketplace that is a huge part of commerce." I think that's very defensible. You look back at history, you see things like the railroads and the telephone companies.
00:43:38 ◼ ► There's a reason why we tend to promote freer, less burdensome competition even on a private company's assets once it becomes a huge part of commerce that starts to be able to affect lots of other businesses, especially in anti-competitive ways.
00:43:55 ◼ ► There is no question that Apple has reached that size with the iOS platform, with the App Store. It is that important in the entire economy. It matters a lot. So, whether they should be regulated, I think that question is answered. I think the answer is yes, of course they should be regulated.
00:44:12 ◼ ► Again, I'm not going to go too far into this, this time, because I say it all the time, but this was 100% on Apple for effectively provoking governments to regulate them with obviously blatantly anti-competitive behavior.
00:44:26 ◼ ► Again, you know I'm kind of down on Tim Cook's strategy. I wonder what the heck he was thinking all these years of blatant anti-competitive behavior, literally provoking governments to regulate him. What did he expect to happen here?
00:44:42 ◼ ► And this is a theme that we'll come back to in a little bit, but Apple definitely should have seen this coming. They rolled the dice. They said, "You know what? We're going to keep doing 100% of what we're doing. We're even going to tighten the screws over the last few years."
00:44:56 ◼ ► What could possibly go wrong? This. This is what could go wrong. So, I am cheering on the EU for this part of the DMA. I don't love the entire law. It's a big law and there's some weird stuff in it. But the part about ensuring freer competition for a giant app marketplace that is a keystone of modern commerce and business in so many ways and so many parts of life, I think that is 100% on point.
00:45:22 ◼ ► Some of the details we can quibble over, but the idea of that is on point. And you don't have to just look at Europe. Look, Japan is now doing the same thing. It's only a matter of time before more countries around the world start doing this.
00:45:32 ◼ ► And what we're going to end up with is this incredibly fragmented app store policy where Apple is going to not give an inch anywhere they're not required to. And instead, they're just going to have like nine different rules of where you are in the world and what kind of regional variations are necessary.
00:45:51 ◼ ► And they're going to keep just being absolute turds about it all when if they would have just eased up a little bit in a few areas that actually wouldn't have cost them that much, they could have avoided all of this and continued to have one app store for the whole world basically and have relatively few variations between them.
00:46:09 ◼ ► And they invited this. So you know what? If the EU is going to drag them through courts and everything forever, good. They need it. They're not doing it themselves, so someone has to do it.
00:46:22 ◼ ► They're burning so much time and energy on this too because if you can see the writing on the wall, like you mentioned, Japan and other countries doing similar things, then maybe Apple thinks the US will never do it or whatever. But for the European stuff, quibbling about like, "Oh, they didn't write the law specifically enough and what do they even want and it's so weird," in the end, Apple has very limited ability to control what European governments do.
00:46:45 ◼ ► They have a system of government and they apply laws to things that are sold in the EU. And I guess Apple can lobby the EU like any other big company can lobby them, but I feel like Apple's ability to lobby the US government as a US company is stronger than their ability to lobby the EU.
00:47:03 ◼ ► And they also don't seem to be particularly good at lobbying for what they want. But Apple is essentially powerless. They're not part of the European government. I mean, they're not powerless because they have tons of money, but you know what I mean? In the end, let's say Apple wins in their appeal and some judge in Europe says or whatever, "Well, technically Apple did comply with how the law is written." The EU will just write a new law. Apple can't win this.
00:47:30 ◼ ► It's the same thing with the battles with China. It's like you can either do what the Chinese government wants you to do and push back as much as you can or you can just not be in China. Like so many companies aren't.
00:47:40 ◼ ► And it's obviously complicated for Apple because of the manufacturing or whatever, but those are your choices. One of your choices is not, "Let's change what the Chinese government wants." Apple's ability to do that, despite all their money and everything, is extremely limited.
00:47:54 ◼ ► Apple is just burning time and energy implementing these things to try to get away with as much as they can get away with. And in the end, the EU can just say, "Okay, well, we made a mistake in the law. We'll write it and we'll make it stronger." And they'll just go around and around.
00:48:09 ◼ ► As opposed to Apple acknowledging what—surely Apple also understands what they're trying to get at, increased competition, and just say, "Let's do this once. Let's do it well. Let's do it globally," as we've discussed in the past episodes. Imagine if they just said, "Look, we see the writing on the wall. Everybody's going to want something more open. Let's just do something that we think is open enough that will satisfy all government requirements present and future. Let's do it once. Let's apply it to the whole world. Let's avoid fragmentation. Let's move on with our actual business."
00:48:36 ◼ ► But no, they're not doing that. They're going to fight tooth and nail. Every single one of these things, comply as little as possible, fight it in courts. And it's just wasting time and energy. It's making their platform more complicated, as we'll see when we get to the next thing. Although we do have some quotes here from the various parties to see how they're positioning themselves on the eve of this, or just after this preliminary finding on one of multiple things they're being investigated on.
00:48:58 ◼ ► Apple spokesperson Peter Ajemian, who is talking to The Verge, "Throughout the past several months, Apple's made a number of changes to comply with the DMA in response to feedback from developers and the European Commission. As we have done routinely, we will continue to listen and engage with the European Commission."
00:49:13 ◼ ► So that's their way of saying, "We're talking to them." And they will continue to listen to them. Here's the thing. There is some meaning of the minds on this because the DMA has written with some acknowledgement that it can't just be the Wild West, which is why there are carve-outs for Apple should have the ability to reject things for security reasons from even being in third-party stores.
00:49:42 ◼ ► The EU is not like, "You just let anybody do anything." It's like the PC of the 80s. They're not doing that. And Apple, to its credit, is trying to provide lots of security stopgaps while also allowing things. Like the browser kit thing. We want to allow third-party browser engines, but we want to do that as safe as possible.
00:50:04 ◼ ► Ideally, all the browser engines go through the same restrictions. Safari, that's not currently the case, but browser kit is basically built around what they already did for Safari.
00:50:13 ◼ ► So the two parties aren't so far apart that one wants completely everything open, free-for-all, and the other wants everything locked down. They agree with each other that certain things need to be done carefully.
00:50:25 ◼ ► But like everything else, Apple's like, "How little can we get away with? How unattractive can we make third-party app stores? How little disruption to our existing business can we make?"
00:50:34 ◼ ► We'll try to comply in a way that no one will ever take us up on any of these offers, or only a few people would, but in the end it'll just be a footnote and it won't actually change anything.
00:50:44 ◼ ► Or maybe, as we'll get through in a second, maybe it'll even make things worse and people will be like, "Boy, we thought we would like some third-party competition, but now that we've seen it, we're going running back to the app store because it's so much better there because of the way Apple set everything up."
00:50:57 ◼ ► Then Marguerite Vestager, I hope I have that right, I forgot to brush up on it, I apologize. But anyways, she said, "The ball's now in the gatekeeper's court. They have to convince us that the measures they take will achieve full compliance with the DMA, and where this is not the case, we will intervene."
00:51:13 ◼ ► "We are concerned that Apple designated its new business model to discourage app developers and end users from taking advantage of the opportunities afforded to them by the DMA. The letter of the DMA is clear. Gatekeepers have to allow for alternative app stores to establish themselves on their platforms and for consumers to be fully informed about the offers available to them, so that they can freely choose where they want to source their apps and at what conditions."
00:51:37 ◼ ► I would argue that the DMA is not clear, and even when she summarizes it here, like, "Gatekeepers have to allow for alternative app stores," Apple would say, "Yeah, we did that. To establish themselves on their platforms, yeah, we allow alternative app stores to be established on our platforms. For consumers to be fully informed, okay, they're going to say not fully informed. They're informed through a narrow aperture that Apple defines, and which is why they're not compliant, and so they can freely choose."
00:51:58 ◼ ► And Apple would be like, "Yeah, they can freely choose." It's the details, like, "Oh, we allow third-party app stores. We just don't want to make them impossible to be many more attractive than ours by applying financial burdens."
00:52:09 ◼ ► And even her summary, she doesn't even say, "Not like that. I know you did alternative app stores, but no one wants to do them because they cost so much money and suck so much, so change that."
00:52:19 ◼ ► But she doesn't. And by the way, that "Us" that Casey read and emphasized they have to convince us, that italic "Us" was in her thing. I didn't add that emphasis.
00:52:28 ◼ ► When she italicized it, they have to convince us that the measures they take will achieve full compliance over the next, you know, 12 months or whatever.
00:52:37 ◼ ► Like, every one of these things, there's like a 9-12 month horizon. I'm like, "Okay, then Apple gets to challenge it, and they have a hearing, and they do a thing, and then..."
00:52:44 ◼ ► Like, people think it's going to be like, "Oh, we passed the law, and Apple did a thing, but they're not compliant. Now they get fined." No, that's not how any of this works.
00:52:52 ◼ ► It's so long between the passing of this law to the point where Apple could potentially get those huge fines that, yeah, presumably something will be worked out, but this is just going to drag on for so long.
00:53:05 ◼ ► Yeah, and because the root of the problem is, the DMA, I guess the EU way of doing this is not going to specify too firmly what they really intend, which is, there can't be any fees.
00:53:21 ◼ ► I mean, I don't know if they say there can't be any, but you have to be able to undercut the App Store. I don't know how they would phrase that, but like, it's not competition if your competitors can never be better than you.
00:53:35 ◼ ► And the other end is free-for-all. There's no rules. The competitors can be, you know, if they have enough funding, they can do loss leaders and say, "Everything is free. We'll pay you to use our App Store," or whatever.
00:53:47 ◼ ► You know, competition is complicated because we all want competition, but there's such a thing as unfair competition. Again, there are laws in our country about, you know, I think there are laws about undercutting your competition by giving away stuff for free until all your competitors are out of business.
00:54:04 ◼ ► I know that's a common thing that VC funding does these days, but I think there are actually laws in the books in certain industries where you're essentially not allowed to do that. You're not allowed to take a giant war chest of money and put all your competitors out of business by giving away milk for free until they're all out of business and you buy them all up and then you start charging twice as much for milk or something.
00:54:20 ◼ ► I mean, that's what pharmaceutical companies do. But anyway, like, there are anti-patterns to too much competition, but we're at the other end of that spectrum right now. We're at the, like, no competition and then, like, competition in name only where it's not real competition.
00:54:35 ◼ ► And so trying to find that balance is tricky. You can't just say, "Apple, you can't charge anybody any money."
00:54:40 ◼ ► But I think that actually might be their intention. Like, they won't say it because it is, I think, I think that's legally a little bit tougher to argue, but I think that what they're clearly intending is for it to be like distribution on the Mac and Windows of just, like, "Yeah, you should just be able to install things for free if you want to." Like, that, I think that's clearly the intent, but they won't come out and say it.
00:55:01 ◼ ► Yeah, they didn't say it, and also they do have the carve-out explicitly in the thing where Apple gets to approve for security purposes and private APIs and stuff.
00:55:11 ◼ ► Exactly, but like, but the fact that that carve-out's there, it's like they don't actually want it to be like the Mac. You don't need to do that on the Mac. Like, you can just distribute unsigned stuff and right-click it and open it, you know what I mean?
00:55:22 ◼ ► It's, and so the question, like, again, I'm not going to say, "Well, what is Apple supposed to do? They can't tell what they want." Like, Apple clearly knows that they don't want this.
00:55:31 ◼ ► Like, it is a question of, like, how open should we be, and maybe you could argue, say, this was Apple's best play. Put out the most restrictive thing possible, get slapped for it, back it off, how do you like it now, as opposed to, you know, if your goal is to do as little as possible, start from a position of doing almost nothing.
00:55:48 ◼ ► Like, almost allowing no competition, and then back it off slowly. I just think it's going to be a waste of their time and energy, and they should have come up with something that everyone, onlookers would have considered reasonable, and put that out and then see what the EU has to say.
00:55:59 ◼ ► And if they put out something that was reasonable, like nominal fees to be a third-party app store, minimal oversight, the possibility of financially being way cheaper than Apple, right?
00:56:10 ◼ ► And they said to the EU, "That's competition, right?" And the EU came back and said, "Actually, no, we had zero dollars of money." Like you were saying, Marco. Like, actually, that is the thing that they wanted to say but couldn't.
00:56:20 ◼ ► That would be kind of crappy of the EU. Because if you want to say, like, and they're making the law, like, this is not a negotiation. Like, the EU 100% makes the rules and Apple can either choose to follow them or not be in the EU, and they didn't say, "Yeah, you can't charge anybody anything to have a third-party app store."
00:56:36 ◼ ► Yeah, but it does, like, I think the, whatever the political will and backing to get regulations like this through legislatures, wherever that comes from, I think when people are trying to argue for these laws or these regulations, I think what they have in mind is free distribution like PCs and Macs.
00:56:58 ◼ ► Like, that's what people are imagining. Now, obviously, again, like, legally, it's hard to require that. Legally, there's a whole bunch of snags to that, of course, because you're trying to legislate how a public, how a private company operates and makes money, and that's, that's obviously very tricky.
00:57:12 ◼ ► I mean, are there snags there? Because the EU does that all the time. I mean, and we just put 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs, right? So, like, that's, they can, I don't, again, I don't know the political situation there. You could be right that to get this passed, they couldn't be that explicit because people would be against it. But as it was written, it overwhelmingly passed.
00:57:32 ◼ ► My point is, like, when these laws, you know, the Japan thing, the weird dating app thing in the Netherlands, and then, you know, obviously the big one, the DMA, when these are passed, I think what people have in mind is free distribution just like Macs and PCs. And what Apple has done very well at is twisting and distorting the public discussion.
00:57:57 ◼ ► Remember the very first time that Tim Cook was on the stand, I think in the epic trial, I think this is where this came out, and the very first time that he presented this, it was, look, I don't have a lot of faith in Tim Cook's long term strategy, but this was a good move from his point of view. I hated it, but from his point of view, this is a good move.
00:58:15 ◼ ► When he mentioned something on the lines of, like, well, the in-app purchase fee is just the most straightforward way for us to collect our commission. How else would we collect our commission? When he said that, we all were like, what?
00:58:29 ◼ ► Because what that told us was Apple believes it is entitled to collect, you know, their commission, a commission, regardless of how the money is flowing, regardless of what it's being purchased through, and Apple has successfully controlled the public narrative that all of us are talking about.
00:58:48 ◼ ► Since then, that was what, two years ago? All of us have been talking since then as if it's inevitable that, yes, of course, Apple is going to collect a fee for everything sold, and we have totally bought into their fairly brazen framing of this.
00:59:03 ◼ ► We also have everybody talking about how Apple has to monetize their IP somehow. Why would anybody make software for a platform if Apple can't monetize their IP? Why would Apple continue to invest in the iPhone if they can't monetize their IP?
00:59:18 ◼ ► Some people have bought into this. I certainly haven't bought into it. I don't think you have, but some people have.
00:59:34 ◼ ► So, what we're talking about is, you know, the fact that, you know, we're talking about a platform that is not going to be able to create, you know, the regulations, but it's not going to be able to get the regulations, and it's not going to be able to get the security controls.
00:59:59 ◼ ► Apple is the one who is refusing to give it up, and that's why this is going to take forever, as John was saying. Because the EU is basically saying, "We would like no barriers, please," and Apple is basically saying, "We'd like all the barriers, please," and it's just going to take a long time to work this out, because neither of them is really...
01:00:14 ◼ ► Actually, the European Commission is not really being very clear about what they want. Apple's being very clear about what they want. Apple's very clear about, "We deserve everything, and we're going to give up nothing, and we're going to see how that goes."
01:00:27 ◼ ► And so, this is going to keep going on forever, but, you know, don't buy into Apple's framing too much when talking about this, because that came out of nowhere two years ago. That was not what anybody was ever thinking, and, I mean, just to rehash everything, like, they have plenty of reason to invest in the iPhone to maintain iOS and their developer tools without collecting a fee on every single app that transacts through it.
01:00:51 ◼ ► Yeah. I mean, the reason that the premise plays so well in America is that so Americans, like, you're going to tell a company how they can make money, you're going to tell them they can't make money in a particular way? That's not fair. They should be able to do what they want and let the market decide.
01:01:02 ◼ ► And, like, the whole, like... So, the premise Tim Cook was offering was, like, you know, "An unchangeable premise, we have to make money. All we're arguing about is how we can do that, and in-app purchases is the best way, and we can try other ways," or whatever.
01:01:14 ◼ ► But, like, it's like, I reject your premise, right? But in the same way, like, the premise of, like, U.S. business is, like, well, companies should be able to make money however they want, and if they pick a lousy way that people don't like, people won't buy from them.
01:01:27 ◼ ► The premise of the DMA, as you stated before, is that Apple has power in a market that's super important, and they have too much power, and so the government needs to step in to tell companies what to do.
01:01:40 ◼ ► What you could do when you were a small company, now suddenly we're saying, because you sell phones, and because you're this big, and because you're successful, and because phones are so important, we are saying new rules apply to you.
01:01:51 ◼ ► That's exactly what the DMA is. We don't really have anything like that in the U.S. quite yet, but exactly, well, and there's various DOJ cases, but anyway, but, you know, we talked about it in past episodes, but the DMA, that's the premise of the DMA.
01:02:02 ◼ ► The premise is, you specifically gatekeepers, new rules apply to you, but the American mind rebels at the idea of a government telling companies how they can make money, and so people, you know, groomers are so incredulous.
01:02:15 ◼ ► You're telling them that they can't make money the way they want to from their phone? And it's like, yes, because specifically, like, he even says, like, the Japan thing, like, oh, imagine if the Japanese game console makers, we should tell them, oh, well, guess what?
01:02:26 ◼ ► You know, you have to allow third-party apps on your PlayStation or whatever. Game consoles are not as important as phones. Like, that's what it comes down to. The premise of these cases is, it's not like every company that's like this.
01:02:38 ◼ ► It's technological gatekeepers for platforms that are so important to all of life and commerce that these rules apply to them, and gaming is big, but so far, right now, I'm going to say game consoles are not as important to the life and economy of a country as cell phones.
01:02:53 ◼ ► That's the determination made by many of these laws and lawsuits, and I agree with that determination. Game consoles aren't as important. They're more important than they used to be, and they are important, and maybe something could be looked at there, but if I had to say which is more important, it's the cell phone.
01:03:08 ◼ ► It's no contest. It's just so much more important. And so, yeah, these people are passing laws specifically targeting gatekeepers for platforms that are super important in our life, and it can seem unfair.
01:03:20 ◼ ► Again, why do the game consoles get away with it? Because they're less important. Maybe someday they'll come for the game consoles. Where do you draw the line? How do you decide when somebody is too powerful? We talked about this before.
01:03:29 ◼ ► When do you have a monopoly? What percentage is required? When is there too little competition? These are all complicated questions, but the premise of all these things is, Apple, new rules apply to you and Microsoft and Google and all these things because of exactly what you make and how important you are and how much power you have.
01:03:48 ◼ ► Some people just don't accept that premise. In the same way, we don't accept Tim Cook's premise that he just has to make money. Some people don't accept the premise of the DMA, and so they're never going to be happy with what the DMA does.
01:03:58 ◼ ► No details about the negotiation of the DMA. No compliance, malicious or otherwise, is going to be satisfying because they disagree with the premise that Apple deserves to be regulated, and so do other companies like it.
01:04:11 ◼ ► Right, so all this is going on and around the same time, give or take a few days, actually I think it was a few days before the EU's announcement, but nevertheless, one way or another it's around the same time.
01:04:25 ◼ ► Apple has declared that it may delay some of its AI features and others in the EU because of the DMA.
01:04:38 ◼ ► Reading from the Verge, Apple says, "Upcoming features like its Apple Intelligence generative AI tools, iPhone mirroring, and SharePlay screen sharing may not be available in the EU this year."
01:04:48 ◼ ► So now, quoting Apple, "Two weeks ago, Apple unveiled hundreds of new features that we are excited to bring to our users around the world. We are highly motivated to make these technologies available to all users.
01:05:00 ◼ ► However, due to the regulatory uncertainties brought about by the Digital Markets Act, or DMA, we do not believe that we will be able to roll out three of these features, iPhone mirroring, SharePlay screen sharing enhancements, and Apple Intelligence, to our EU users this year.
01:05:17 ◼ ► Specifically, we are concerned that the interoperability requirements of the DMA force us to compromise the integrity of our products in ways that risk user privacy and data security.
01:05:27 ◼ ► We are committed to collaborating with the European Commission in an attempt to find a solution that would enable us to deliver these features to our EU customers without compromising their safety."
01:05:36 ◼ ► So this is one of the aspects of the DMA that is either the DMA overreaching or us not understanding what the DMA wants. The idea is…
01:05:47 ◼ ► Yeah, or all those integrations that Apple has where there's some feature that, I mean this isn't a DOJ case, Apple Watch only works with Apple iPhone and this iPhone mirroring thing between Macs and iPhones only works with iPhones, not Android phones.
01:06:01 ◼ ► Like any feature that you can imagine Apple rolling out, there's some interpretation of the DMA, and again maybe it's straightforward interpretation, I'm not a lawyer, that says, "Hey, if you add a feature, you can't confine that feature to only first-party stuff.
01:06:22 ◼ ► And as anyone who's familiar with Apple's platform knows, that's not the way they do things. Sometimes they roll out first-party only for years and years and never allow third parties access.
01:06:37 ◼ ► Sometimes they do a third-party one five years later, ten years later, right? Think of all the features we have. How long do we have third-party keyboards? How long until apps are allowed to run in the background that weren't Apple's apps?
01:06:47 ◼ ► Like on the Mac, on iPhone and iPad, all these platforms, they don't always make it extensible by third parties ever and doing it on day one is rare.
01:06:57 ◼ ► So if the DMA really does require every gatekeeper to implement every feature such that it is extensible and open to third parties on day one, I think that is a technologically ill-considered requirement.
01:07:12 ◼ ► And Apple would be justified in saying, "We just can't roll out these new features because it seems like they are not going to be compliant with the law."
01:07:22 ◼ ► Now, interestingly, they weren't so hesitant to roll out all the other things that we said that we also agreed were probably not compliant, like the core technology fee and all the rules for alternative app stores.
01:07:32 ◼ ► Somehow their worry about whether those would be compliant did not stop them from deploying those.
01:07:38 ◼ ► But these ones, Apple says, "You know what? We're afraid we might not be compliant, so it's best that we don't roll these out."
01:07:43 ◼ ► I don't know if they're compliant. If they're not compliant, the DMA in this respect is bad and needs to be changed.
01:07:49 ◼ ► Because you can't require technology companies to only launch something when it's ready for the world to extend it.
01:07:55 ◼ ► That is too high a bar, it's not the right way to make technology. You can put a timeline on it, say it has to be extensible within five years.
01:08:05 ◼ ► But I would also say that, look, Apple is an important platform, cell phones, Gatekeeper cell phones, Android, Google, whatever.
01:08:11 ◼ ► Those are super important platforms that are important to the economy, all that stuff, right?
01:08:21 ◼ ► What's the most important way they need to be open? You need to be able to get apps from somewhere else.
01:08:28 ◼ ► Every feature, every thing that you can do on it, every single minute thing, share, play, iPhone, does every single thing need to be open to third parties at all times?
01:08:37 ◼ ► How about you wait to see if iPhone mirroring is a lever that Apple uses to dominate the industry before you decide that that needs to be opened up.
01:08:48 ◼ ► But you can't make an open-ended thing that says every little feature you add has to be open from day one.
01:08:54 ◼ ► It's pointless, it's counterproductive, and in the end, does it matter if iPhone mirroring only works with iPhones?
01:09:04 ◼ ► So I really hope that the DMA actually doesn't try to say everything in the OS open from day one.
01:09:11 ◼ ► And again, even if it did say that, Apple should probably just launch these features anyway.
01:09:21 ◼ ► and we're going to demonstrate that by holding back goodies that we're probably going to hold back anyway,
01:09:26 ◼ ► because Apple Intelligence is only supposed to be launching in English in the fall anyway.
01:09:29 ◼ ► And I guess they could launch it in English in Europe, because lots of people speak English there.
01:09:33 ◼ ► But this is part them making a statement about their interpretation of the DMA, and part sort of active defiance to show the consequences.
01:09:52 ◼ ► I don't have a good one off the top of my head, but I'm sure by next week we'll have lots of suggestions.
01:09:56 ◼ ► Exit, because it begins with an E. It has to be like an Apple thing, like Britain exit Brexit, you know.
01:10:09 ◼ ► That's lurking out the end of this disagreement, but this move by Apple of just, you know,
01:10:15 ◼ ► again, maybe they weren't going to roll this out anyway, but either way, this is a positioning move.
01:10:32 ◼ ► Well, the thing of it is that I feel like I can, I was going to say squint, but I'm not even sure it requires me squinting.
01:10:41 ◼ ► I can look at the DMA and look at particularly the mirroring and SharePlay screen sharing stuff,
01:10:48 ◼ ► and I can see an interpretation, a legitimate, honest, you know, no BS interpretation that, wow,
01:11:06 ◼ ► But they didn't have that same concern about all the other stuff they rolled out that you could have
01:11:10 ◼ ► the same exact statement about, wow, this may not comply, maybe we should hold it back.
01:11:14 ◼ ► I think because these are additive things that involve interoperability between devices, right?
01:11:20 ◼ ► And leaving aside the nuance of these particular selections, the broader point I'm trying to make is that
01:11:39 ◼ ► At a micro level, they haven't really read the room that, look, the EU is not going to like this, man.
01:11:44 ◼ ► Like, they're not going to take this lying down and be like, oh, you know what, we messed up.
01:11:54 ◼ ► And on a macro level, it's fascinating to me what Marco said, because I had the exact same reaction.
01:12:05 ◼ ► And it took me thinking about it a little bit, and I'm actually not so grumpy about this anymore, but I certainly was at first.
01:12:11 ◼ ► And what's fascinating to me is everyone seems to, broadly speaking, everyone seems to assume ill intent from Apple, right?
01:12:21 ◼ ► Like, they're doing this just to hold up a middle finger to the European Commission and say,
01:12:33 ◼ ► But it's kind of funny and unfortunate that because Apple has been so belligerently stubborn about so much,
01:12:44 ◼ ► and I think Marco was saying this as well earlier, they've been so stubborn about so much and haven't given a friggin' inch.
01:12:50 ◼ ► And so because of that, everyone is just like, "Well, this is Apple being a dick again."
01:12:54 ◼ ► News at 11, like same as it ever was. And that's the thing that kind of bums me out as someone who I consider,
01:13:01 ◼ ► I mean, I consider myself a fan of the company to the degree that anyone can be a fan of a company.
01:13:11 ◼ ► all of a sudden I'm looking around, or maybe Apple should be looking around and asking, "Are we the baddies?"
01:13:16 ◼ ► Because this is baddie behavior. If this is them thumbing their nose at the European Commission, it's just gross.
01:13:24 ◼ ► And I can't get past, and I know I'm repeating what Marco said before, and what we've said many times on the show,
01:13:30 ◼ ► I can't get past, this is an own goal. Apple knew this was coming. They could tell it was coming.
01:13:38 ◼ ► Anyone with three brain cells that followed this could tell this was going to happen, and that the laws are going to change.
01:13:44 ◼ ► And they're going to change because Apple is greedy, and they're entitled, and they just wouldn't give an inch.
01:14:00 ◼ ► Apple's actually probably correct that these features, you could see why they actually might be against the interop requirements of the DMA,
01:14:10 ◼ ► which are terrible, largely. You can see why. Yes, Apple is probably correct to cite this as a problem with the DMA,
01:14:19 ◼ ► with these things in particular. That's probably technically correct, but also, saying this and doing this
01:14:27 ◼ ► and having to face this dilemma at all is a direct result of their blatant anti-competitive behavior over time.
01:14:39 ◼ ► Well, that's debatable. I mean, you could say that no matter what Apple would have done, something like DMA would have passed anyway.
01:14:47 ◼ ► I still think they should have done it because you don't know that you couldn't have prevented it.
01:14:53 ◼ ► And I think we all agree it was worth finding out. Try something, instead of doing nothing.
01:15:00 ◼ ► And again, I want to remind people, Apple did loosen the App Store rules from 30% to 15%, the small business program.
01:15:12 ◼ ► Obviously, it was very slight, very limited, not at all anything close to something that would have preempted action, clearly, right?
01:15:20 ◼ ► But I'm willing to entertain the idea that there is really nothing Apple could have done.
01:15:25 ◼ ► But I just would have liked to have seen them try. Show me there's nothing you could have done by giving a big, good-faith effort to self-regulate, to head off regulation.
01:15:37 ◼ ► So I think that's what we're arguing. I'm not 100% convinced that they could have prevented something like this, but they should have tried.
01:15:43 ◼ ► Because I think their odds were okay. It wasn't impossible. There's probably something they could have done.
01:15:50 ◼ ► And even if they didn't head it off, even if they did some good-faith thing that really opened it up and made new worldwide rules that they thought would be compliant,
01:15:56 ◼ ► but something like the DMA passed anyway, and it turns out they're not quite in compliance,
01:16:00 ◼ ► then you're tweaking an existing worldwide system to comply. You're probably closer to a meeting of the minds about this, right?
01:16:11 ◼ ► And even for this, I think if you really want to demonstrate, again, if Apple's and the popular interpretation of DMA is such that these interoperables really would forbid iPhone mirroring and share play and stuff, right?
01:16:24 ◼ ► And Apple Intelligence? Ship the features, have the EU strike them down, and then throw up your hands and go, "See everybody?"
01:16:36 ◼ ► iPhone mirroring is not a giant lever of power that we use to dominate the industry. It's a tiny feature that benefits people.
01:16:46 ◼ ► But they didn't allow that to happen. They should have shipped it and got the complaints about it and had the evidence.
01:16:54 ◼ ► And of course, the EC is not going to come out and say, "Uh, Apple's wrong. It would have been compliant."
01:17:02 ◼ ► It's like, "If you don't submit the app, we're not going to tell you whether it's compliant or not."
01:17:10 ◼ ► And on the flip side, the EC, I guess, doesn't have the opportunity to show that the DMA isn't dumb by saying, "Hey, ship iPhone mirroring. We weren't going to strike that down. We're reasonable people here."
01:17:24 ◼ ► Neither does Apple. I'm not sure if the EC knows. Maybe they need nine months to investigate.
01:17:29 ◼ ► I think Apple knows that that is probably something. They're looking for holes to poke in the DMA because they don't like the whole thing.
01:17:39 ◼ ► They're looking for reasons. They're looking for ways to make it look overbearing and ridiculous.
01:17:44 ◼ ► And the main difference here is that with this move for the first time, they're not just attacking policies.
01:17:56 ◼ ► And that is, I think again, I question the strategy here. Is anyone strategizing over there?
01:18:04 ◼ ► They may be thinking that Europe is filled with Americans who are going to be like, "Hey, the government's stopping us from getting our cool Apple features," where it seems like a lot of people in the EU are going to say, "Hey, Apple's being a jerk about this law that we all agreed on."
01:18:20 ◼ ► Exactly, right? If Europe was filled with Texans, it would be a different story, but it's not.
01:18:26 ◼ ► And so I don't know if they're misreading that room. Again, I don't have a finger on the pulse of what Europe is like, but just look. The DMA passed overwhelmingly. The EU likes regulation.
01:18:37 ◼ ► Just look at all the laws around cheeses in Italy and stuff. It's just like they like the way things work there. They vote for these people.
01:18:46 ◼ ► So I don't know how this is going to work out, but I do think if this is the deal with the DMA, Apple can no longer do business effectively in Europe because, again, I think it's not reasonable to require every single feature added to all of their gatekeeping platforms to be open to third parties from day one.
01:19:03 ◼ ► It's technologically not feasible. So if the DMA is asking for that, it needs to be changed or Apple just needs to leave because otherwise people in Europe are going to get features like three years after the rest of the world gets them.
01:19:13 ◼ ► And that's if Apple decides to stay in the market and put in an effort to actually comply because that's the best case of the roadmap. You roll out the feature, tweak the feature, and then maybe open it up to third parties.
01:19:26 ◼ ► And then the next year the third party integration actually works well. And that's not Apple being a jerk. That's just the way technology works. It's not reasonable to require this.
01:19:39 ◼ ► Right. But it was their behavior with the App Store that generated a whole bunch of political will to do a lot like this in the first place that happened to also include other things.
01:19:49 ◼ ► Yeah. And again, it's not clear to me that SharePlay, like they wanted to wrap up SharePlay in this. Like maybe they're like, "Oh, no. We totally understand SharePlay is not what we're after," or whatever. But I don't know.
01:20:01 ◼ ► They're looking for reasons to discredit it. But again, I have to wonder, how many battles is Apple willing to fight at once?
01:20:10 ◼ ► They're doing battle with everyone. They're fighting on so many fronts and they seem to just provoke more of them to keep coming. And now they've involved a pretty decently sized chunk of their own customers as one of the fronts in these battles.
01:20:25 ◼ ► Why? Is this worth it? Because again, what we're talking about is not all services revenue. First of all, a huge chunk of it is Google. So, second that aside, what we're talking about is not even all App Store revenue.
01:20:40 ◼ ► We're talking about giving people the option to not use App Store purchasing and commissions for apps that are largely not using the App Store purchase system in the first place, things like Spotify, Netflix, HBO Max.
01:20:55 ◼ ► That's kind of what we're talking about here. We're talking about allowing these apps to link out and use their own stores or to use their own purchase systems that already mostly aren't using an app purchase. And that's not where Apple makes most of its money.
01:21:10 ◼ ► They make most of their money with games. So, we're not even talking about a huge chunk of App Store revenue that would just disappear overnight.
01:21:18 ◼ ► Apple is engaging in all these different battles all around the world, including in their own country now with the DOJ lawsuit, which touches on some of these things.
01:21:27 ◼ ► They're opening up all these fronts of war and battling and literally causing problems for their core product attributes like integration in the EU now and possibly the DOJ lawsuit.
01:21:40 ◼ ► Those both have integration components. They are causing substantial threats to really important parts of how their products are designed and how they work in pretty large markets around the world in order to save some tiny percentage of App Store revenue.
01:21:55 ◼ ► That to me, again, I have yet to see. I was trying to think, what are Tim Cook's long-term strategy successes? I can't think of many of those.
01:22:07 ◼ ► I honestly do not think Tim Cook as a leader has good long-term strategy in some pretty key critical areas to leading this company.
01:22:15 ◼ ► And honestly, it's time for new leadership. We've seen the limits of the Tim Cook Apple. We've seen he's really good at making money and he's a little spotty in some of the really important product details and a little bit short-sighted with some of these regulation and App Store details.
01:22:33 ◼ ► We've seen the limits of Tim Cook's Apple. I'm ready to see something else. This is bad leadership and bad strategy at the top.
01:22:50 ◼ ► Let's do at least a little bit of Ask ATP. It's been busy season for us, so we've unfortunately put it on the back burner. Let's bring it around. Some fellow by the name of Todd Vaziri writes, "An ATP 589 used Mark Gurman's rumor bullet points as a conversation starter.
01:23:05 ◼ ► Rumors are great at sparking conversation and debate, but I wonder if anyone has ever revisited Gurman's rumors post-event to validate the rumors themselves.
01:23:12 ◼ ► It seems like no one cares if the rumors are actually based on fact and bear fruit since the rumors help create 'content' and discourse, and that's good enough for some.
01:23:21 ◼ ► But when rumors that ultimately go nowhere are given full faith, I feel like we are all wasting outrage or interest.
01:23:27 ◼ ► Not to mention, if a rumor doesn't come true, the rumor monger can claim that Apple changed its plans and claim no responsibility.
01:23:34 ◼ ► I feel like my gut says that Gurman is over 50%, but I've never actually done any mathematics or anything to see if that's true.
01:23:44 ◼ ► Back in the early days before you guys were Apple fans in the Mac OS rumors. I know you're like, "Don't you mean Mac rumors?" No, I'm pretty sure I mean macosrumors.com.
01:23:57 ◼ ► There were a lot of websites that had Apple rumors. Some of those websites just flat made up stuff.
01:24:04 ◼ ► Some of those websites would publish things that were sent to them anonymously that the sender made up.
01:24:11 ◼ ► And it was a very exciting time to be an Apple fan because every possible thing that you could think would be like, "Whoa, look at this, look at that."
01:24:18 ◼ ► Back in that time, I thought to myself, "It would be great if there was a meta website that kept track of all the things that were on all the rumors websites and then rated them on accuracy."
01:24:28 ◼ ► And there are websites currently that do that. I wish I could remember the URLs. Probably we'll have them follow up next week if anyone cares.
01:24:33 ◼ ► But there are websites that do that. But it turns out that activity is not that exciting because very quickly, you kind of get a feel for what kind of things will people publish.
01:24:41 ◼ ► Will this site publish anything that's sent to them anonymously or will this site only publish things from sources that they have some reason to believe are actual real sources, not just an anonymous email that comes to you or whatever?
01:25:00 ◼ ► And the main thing against him is that the sourced information that he gets is usually buried in a giant pile of words, a lot of which are just his opinion on things. And it's like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. What did your sources tell you?"
01:25:13 ◼ ► And the reason we care what his sources tell us is because his hit rate for things that are sourced that he says definitively, very close to when they're actually going to happen, and even sometimes distantly, is very good.
01:25:25 ◼ ► He has real sources. He doesn't have people making things up. He's not guessing and being lucky. He has actual sources. Or maybe just one source. But whatever it is, when he publishes information without any qualifiers and says something definitively and it's like a week before the keynote, you can basically take that to the bank.
01:25:42 ◼ ► Rare misses like the Apple Watch and everything or whatever. But the reason we go back to that and talk about it as if it's a real thing is because it's like, "Well, it is a week before WWDC and Gurman says no hardware at WWDC." We just take that at face value at this point.
01:25:56 ◼ ► Because when he says that definitively a week before WWDC, guess what? No hardware at WWDC. And if he starts being wrong about that, he said no hardware and it was a huge hardware thing, then we're going to look askance.
01:26:06 ◼ ► As I think the Apple Watch rumor with the flat sides that never occurred, we look a little bit askance at that. Not 100%, but he has real sources. As opposed to Mac OS rumors back in the day, which I'm pretty sure had no real sources and just published anything that sounded cool and occasionally got things right just because of dumb luck and occasionally got real leaks but most of the time just made up stuff.
01:26:25 ◼ ► In the end, this is mostly entertainment or whatever, but I think on this show, if something is a rumor that's like we have no idea about the sourcing or whatever, we will say as much. But when we say it looks like no hardware at WWDC because Gurman said it, that's based on past performance.
01:26:42 ◼ ► That he's been pretty accurate about things like that. Farther out, like the new Apple Watch is going to have different straps. Remember when we talked about that ages ago? We were always framing that as like it's so far away, who knows if that's going to happen. He might have a source that just, even then it's like source? Oh, okay.
01:26:58 ◼ ► So they were working on an idea for a new strap on Apple Watch things and he got a source rumor to say that. That doesn't mean, and Gurman doesn't say definitively the next Apple Watch will have different straps. He's just saying this is the thing Apple's working on.
01:27:10 ◼ ► And it probably is, but you have to take that for what it is, which is Apple Works on a lot of stuff. Not everything ships. Sometimes they decide to do something different or whatever. That's different than when he comes out and says here are the features, here are the things, here's what's going to be in the keynote, here's what's not going to be in the keynote. Again, especially as the dig gets closer.
01:27:28 ◼ ► So I agree that just getting outraged on stuff that are just rumors is pointless, but I hope mostly on this show we either talk about rumors as a jumping off point to like imagine if they did this or whatever, or we take as close to fact things that come from sources that are usually right very close to the date when they're going to happen.
01:27:49 ◼ ► Yeah, and different rumor sources have different areas of strengths, I would say. Like for instance, when we hear from Ming-Chi Kuo about a new display size or a new display panel that could be used for an Apple product, that's usually pretty good because Ming-Chi Kuo is well sourced in the supply chain for displays, and we know that.
01:28:09 ◼ ► But we don't know what product that's going to be in. And very often he will definitively say this is going to be in a new laptop and it turns out it's in an iPad or something, because that's not something you would know if you just have sources at the display manufacturer.
01:28:21 ◼ ► Right, and sometimes you can derive it like if it's some giant 30-inch 8K panel, that's probably for a studio display, not like a MacBook, but there are some things that it's more vague. But yeah, we know when Ming-Chi Kuo reports pretty definitive display size stuff, especially when it's something like an iPhone, we know it's probably correct.
01:28:40 ◼ ► Or like the OLED iPad. We were talking about the OLED iPad as if we were sure it was a thing for months and months and months, because there are just so many sources in the display supply chain for so long saying iPad-size OLEDs, iPad-size OLEDs, dual-layer iPad-size OLEDs.
01:28:55 ◼ ► It's not just one source, it's tons of them come in and eventually we just start talking about it as if it's fact, and maybe that's just experience and knowing it looks like there's going to be OLED iPads with dual-layer screens, and there was.
01:29:10 ◼ ► And every time that happens it reinforces our instincts of when something, like where there's smoke there's fire, versus just a fanciful idea of I think they're looking at different ways to attach watch straps.
01:29:20 ◼ ► Right, exactly. And we know Mark Erman has limits too. Mark Erman often times will miss the marketing side of something, or the story, or the software details of certain things, but he's really good at hardware.
01:29:38 ◼ ► Like Mark Erman usually knows what hardware is coming, he knows usually some pretty good hardware details, and he's actually getting seemingly better sources over time. And so we pay attention to that, we notice that.
01:29:51 ◼ ► But we don't treat rumors as absolute facts, but usually we also see the patterns. We know that if there's pretty strong rumors about some new iPhone display size from Meng-Chi Kuo, and then a few months later Mark Erman reports a few more details about an iPhone of that size, and we know that's a plausible size and it's bigger than the existing ones.
01:30:14 ◼ ► And so we know that's probably true, just because we've seen the patterns before, we know roughly how this goes. We've been doing this for a long time.
01:30:21 ◼ ► And so we're not going to report on things on the show or talk about them as if they're facts if they seem really far-fetched, or at least we'll tell you why we think it's far-fetched if everyone else is talking about it and we feel like we need to.
01:30:34 ◼ ► But most of it is just kind of gut feeling, putting in context like, "This sounds plausible from this source that is usually good in this area, versus this thing from some rando account on Twitter that no one's ever heard of before is probably wrong."
01:30:52 ◼ ► And sometimes we don't even need rumors. For example, we talked about on past episodes, OLED screens are coming to MacBooks. I don't even think there's a rumor of that, but it's like, "Duh." Unless some better technology comes along, eventually the cool screens they just put on the iPads should be coming to MacBooks.
01:31:11 ◼ ► Now what we'll end up reporting on is, say there's a rumor that says, "Oh, it turns out they can't use the Tandem OLEDs in MacBooks because someone on the supply chain says they use too much power, they get too hot," or something like that. That's a rumor we'll report on.
01:31:22 ◼ ► But in the absence of any rumors, we're just like, "Well, we assume these displays will come for the MacBooks." Now we wait to see, "Does the rumor mill support that?" and say, "Oh, here's the schedule for the MacBook Air with a dual-layer OLED display."
01:31:35 ◼ ► "Here's when we think it's coming out, 2025, 2026," and they'll keep updating that date when they get it or whatever. Or are we looking for a rumor that says, "Apple changed their mind. They're not using a microLED on the watch," for example.
01:31:44 ◼ ► Like, they did all this investment in a microLED, they were going to use it on the watch, and they said, "Actually, we're not. We've bailed out of that. We sold the company," or whatever.
01:31:51 ◼ ► Those are things worth reporting on, but even in the absence of reporting, you can look ahead and you can kind of see very often where the tech is going.
01:31:58 ◼ ► What is going to be technologically possible, look at the products Apple's introduced, look at what technologies they would probably want to use in the rest of their line and see how that goes.
01:32:06 ◼ ► And then, obviously, this is the easy stuff. Like, "Hey, you know, Apple has an M4. There's probably going to be a more powerful than M4 chip," which historically speaking will probably be an M4 Pro and M4 Max, and maybe there'll be an Ultra, maybe there'll be an Extreme.
01:32:18 ◼ ► You don't need rumors to tell you that the M4 is coming to the Mac line. Like, you just don't need any.
01:32:22 ◼ ► And all we do is look at the rumors and say, "Okay, it looks like this is coming in this year and this is coming in this month," or whatever, to sort of lay out where they're coming.
01:32:28 ◼ ► But no one is debating. Like, "Someone said the M4 is coming to the MacBook Pro? I'm not sure about that." No, we're pretty sure.
01:32:35 ◼ ► All right, thank you to our members who were the exclusive sponsor of this episode. We are 100% members supported this week.
01:32:41 ◼ ► Please consider joining us at ATP.fm/join. And if you do join, you get a few different perks and benefits, including every week the ATP Overtime segment.
01:32:53 ◼ ► This is a bonus topic that we do every week just for members, and this week it's going to be about Apple allegedly planning thinner devices seemingly across the whole product line.
01:33:03 ◼ ► Speaking of German rumors, we were talking about this Apple thinner device rumor, which seems plausible and I think has some interesting implications.
01:33:12 ◼ ► We'll be talking about that in Overtime this week. So you can join to hear it. ATP.fm/join.
01:34:28 ◼ ► Yes, I have updates. So we got a call from the adjuster saying, "Hey, I'm at Volvo. Can you explain to me what the hell happened one more time?"
01:34:37 ◼ ► Like, as we had never spoken to the adjuster before. And I was like, "I can, but why don't I put my wife on the phone?"
01:34:42 ◼ ► She was the one who was there, you know, blah, blah, blah. So she does the whole song and dance about what had happened, et cetera, et cetera.
01:34:48 ◼ ► That same evening, the adjuster calls again. We are about to go to dinner. He says, "Okay, I have looked into the situation, and we're going to total the car."
01:35:00 ◼ ► Because the car is worth not that much more than it would cost to repair it. So we're going to total the car.
01:35:09 ◼ ► That means that now we have to buy a car under duress because Aaron can't drive my car, doesn't think she can. And she did get a loaner from our local Volvo dealer.
01:35:23 ◼ ► It is a piece of trash, but it's a piece of trash that will get her from A to B as long as A to B is pretty close to home.
01:35:29 ◼ ► And so we are very thankful for this piece of trash, but it is not a long-term sustainable solution. And service has been phenomenal.
01:35:39 ◼ ► Like if you live in the Richmond area or anywhere near it and you want to get your car serviced by somebody who seems to really care, go to Volvo of Richmond. They're very good.
01:35:48 ◼ ► But that being said, we still need to solve this problem. And what we're currently thinking is replacing the XC90 with another XC90. Which I could understand and argue that that's a dumb, terrible decision.
01:36:01 ◼ ► But I really believe in my heart a few things, and we'll talk about why. But first of all, I really think that this is the best car for Aaron. I really, really, really do.
01:36:08 ◼ ► And number two, I really think it was a one in a trillion bad unlucky break. I really, really do think that.
01:36:17 ◼ ► I think it was not one in a trillion, because somebody wrote in to say that this happened to two of their other Volvos. So I'm going to say it's a wild.
01:36:28 ◼ ► I mean, it definitely seems like it is not that rare. I believe we heard from multiple people who say something similar happened to them with a Volvo in particular. So it could be just a design flaw of some of their engines.
01:36:44 ◼ ► Not enough shielding on the bottom of the car or something. Still super rare, I would imagine.
01:36:54 ◼ ► Whatever that effect is. Like if he had had a Volkswagen and given the same story, we would have heard from the Volkswagen people who it happened to.
01:37:01 ◼ ► So maybe this happens to three out of every nine billion of every car manufacturer. It's difficult to draw conclusions from.
01:37:09 ◼ ► Because it's not a random selection. It's self-selecting because we talked about Volvos. We hear from the Volvo people this happened to. So I think the jury is still out on that.
01:37:27 ◼ ► Look, I know it's more money. It's also a lot nicer. It's also no gas. It also can't have that problem recur.
01:37:45 ◼ ► Just hold on. Put that in the parking lot. Ding. For a second. And make sure I come back to that. Because there is an answer for that. But let me put that aside for a moment.
01:37:54 ◼ ► So we look at the local Volvo dealer. What we're looking for is something around like a 2021 XC90. Aaron's car was not driven that much. So it only had like 42, 43 thousand miles on it.
01:38:03 ◼ ► So we want something with fewer than 40 thousand miles. And we want something that doesn't really give up any of the options we had before.
01:38:10 ◼ ► Which basically if you speak Volvo amounts to the climate package. Which gives you like rear heated seats. Which I think the kids are really going to want.
01:38:17 ◼ ► Even though we don't have winter here. And it gives you a few other things. I forget. Oh, a heated wheel. Which Aaron really, really liked.
01:38:23 ◼ ► And the advanced package is I think what they call it. Which among other things gives you a heads up display. Which Aaron has become completely addicted to.
01:38:30 ◼ ► And honestly I would too if I were her. So anyways. So to find that car has been challenging. Used is what we think we want to do.
01:38:39 ◼ ► We could potentially buy new. But we're talking, I mean these cars are now 70 thousand dollars new.
01:38:45 ◼ ► And I genuinely think they're great cars. And I could even make an argument they're worth 70 thousand dollars.
01:38:50 ◼ ► But I don't particularly want to spend 70 thousand dollars on a car right this minute. So we didn't think that we really wanted to go that route.
01:38:59 ◼ ► So okay that was Monday. Tuesday I say to her, alright. Let's go to the place I often mention on the show these days. Let's go to CarMax.
01:39:07 ◼ ► Because CarMax is a used car retailer. And they'll sell anything. Right? And you can bounce between several different cars all in the same dealership.
01:39:15 ◼ ► And see, and just sit in them. If not drive them. And see what you think. So I, or the four of us went to CarMax.
01:39:22 ◼ ► And we sat in and looked at an Atlas, a Volkswagen Atlas. A Audi Q7 which I actually really liked. But Erin was not that keen on.
01:39:31 ◼ ► A Kia Telluride which is extraordinarily well reviewed. And I know a couple people with them and they love them.
01:39:38 ◼ ► But Erin didn't care for it. The Mazda CX-9 which was mostly because we had such good luck with her Mazda years ago.
01:39:45 ◼ ► And that didn't impress either of us. And the Jeep Grand Cherokee which I know you two are going to snicker.
01:39:52 ◼ ► But honestly is a relatively upmarket three row car that feels to me like it's 13 miles long. Like suburban long.
01:40:07 ◼ ► I haven't looked it up but I feel like they are. Exactly. It may not be bigger but it looks bigger for sure.
01:40:15 ◼ ► It may not be. I genuinely don't know and I'm not going to look it up while I'm talking. But it looks way bigger.
01:40:20 ◼ ► And what was really great about the CarMax experience was we walked in and there's a little greeter person.
01:40:26 ◼ ► And they said, "Okay, what can I help you with?" And I said, "Oh, I want to look at these cars."
01:40:30 ◼ ► And of course because it's me I have model names and stock numbers written down and the lady looks at it and says...
01:40:41 ◼ ► But she says, "Okay, this one's over there, that one's over there, that one's over there, that one's over there.
01:40:49 ◼ ► Well, but it was said with a smile and so I'm like, "What? Are they open? Do I need someone to go with me?"
01:41:05 ◼ ► To be honest, I really enjoyed the CarMax experience because I didn't have to talk to anyone.
01:41:10 ◼ ► And so it was really great. We just walked around and granted we're going through heatwave here.
01:41:18 ◼ ► It's over 100 degrees. It's 8 million percent humidity and we're all drenched as we're looking at these cars.
01:41:25 ◼ ► And so we looked at them all and the only one that was really in the running was Grand Cherokee.
01:41:37 ◼ ► And if she was more enthusiastic about it, I definitely would have said, "All right, let's go try it."
01:41:48 ◼ ► So I had my eyes on, and this is coming obliquely back to what you were talking about, Marco.
01:42:02 ◼ ► There's the T5, which was a, I believe it was turbocharged only, instead of turbo and supercharged like Aaron's was.
01:42:15 ◼ ► And then there's the T8, which depending on the generation, or depending on the year, I should say,
01:42:19 ◼ ► it was either the T6 with a small electric motor for the, I believe it was the rear wheels,
01:42:26 ◼ ► or I think in later years, it was a turbocharged only motor with a slightly larger electric motor for the rear wheels.
01:42:36 ◼ ► And what's great about this, what I find super appealing about this, is that you can, like some of these quasi-hybrids,
01:42:51 ◼ ► And part of the way that Aaron had a seven-year-old car that only had 40,000 miles on it,
01:42:56 ◼ ► is that most of the time, we're driving, or she's driving, I should say, five miles, 10 miles, you know, maybe 20 in a day, maybe.
01:43:06 ◼ ► And so on paper, well, first of all, on paper, a full electric car is the correct answer.
01:43:24 ◼ ► Yeah, because the XC90, it's still available now with a plug-in hybrid option for like, you know, 30 miles of range.
01:43:36 ◼ ► And it's just like, ugh, whether or not we could afford that, which I don't know, but I don't think I want to pay that.
01:43:42 ◼ ► You know, like even if we could afford it, I don't think I want to pay that kind of money.
01:43:45 ◼ ► So, anyways, Volvo of Fredericksburg, they had a T8 that had, I think it's 30,000-ish miles and was optioned the way we want.
01:43:54 ◼ ► And I've been going back and forth with them over email and they wouldn't come down to exactly the price we wanted.
01:44:13 ◼ ► I don't expect it to be perfect, but this is where I'm becoming a total pain in the butt client or customer.
01:44:29 ◼ ► But the thing that was a real bummer, and if you work at a car dealership, take note of this for me, if for nothing else.
01:44:36 ◼ ► This thing has a battery, right? It's a small battery, but it's a battery nevertheless.
01:44:41 ◼ ► In order for this to really show us the differences between Aaron's T6 and the T8, that battery needs to be what?
01:44:49 ◼ ► Charged. I'll give you one guess if that battery was charged when we took it out for a spin.
01:44:57 ◼ ► I feel like the car dealerships are not equipped to keep all the plug-in hybrids plugged in.
01:45:02 ◼ ► I'm assuming electric car dealerships are because you kind of need that in the electric cars.
01:45:06 ◼ ► But the hybrids are sold by gas car companies and they're just on the same lot in the parking spots.
01:45:17 ◼ ► I mean, I had her old plates in my car. I had our insurance information for the old car.
01:45:28 ◼ ► But leaving that aside, I thought, "You know what? There's a better than 50% chance we will leave the house with one car, return with two cars."
01:45:35 ◼ ► And we took it around the block and Erin keeps saying to me, "This feels the same as my car."
01:45:41 ◼ ► And it's not that I didn't believe her, but I was like, "It should feel different because in that application, it's her engine plus another 70 horsepower or something like that from the pure electric motor."
01:45:53 ◼ ► And so driving around in pure electric mode, it felt like a doggy, slower version of her car, which I think makes sense because it's not a strong electric motor.
01:46:04 ◼ ► Real battery electric cars like the Rivian are stupid fast. This is different than that, right?
01:46:10 ◼ ► It's a little teeny electric motor and it's enough to get you around town and do the sorts of things that Erin needs to do.
01:46:16 ◼ ► But it's not going to blow your hair back until you have the gasoline motor involved as well.
01:46:23 ◼ ► And then this thing is like a 400 horsepower car or something like that. Granted, it weighs as much as a house.
01:46:35 ◼ ► It was surprisingly quick. And in theory, I would have assumed this one would actually be faster than my car.
01:46:50 ◼ ► Because I love fast SUVs. They're stupid, they're dumb, and they make zero sense and I love them anyway.
01:47:02 ◼ ► Right, exactly. So anyways, we weren't impressed by that. And they had a couple other options.
01:47:07 ◼ ► They were the least sleazy car salespeople I've ever worked with, so I really appreciated that.
01:47:16 ◼ ► And I don't think there was much they could have done to put us in anything short of letting us effectively steal a car.
01:47:21 ◼ ► But I have no answers. And so I asked both Richmond Volvo and Fredericksburg Volvo the same question.
01:47:36 ◼ ► I mean, there's differences here and there. But in spirit, it's a full battery electric version of Aaron's car.
01:47:41 ◼ ► I'm still unconvinced that I want our workhorse to be a full battery electric vehicle because we do long trips.
01:47:50 ◼ ► I'm sure. Well, so here's the thing. I'm optimizing for like one to two trips a year, which I intellectually know is dumb.
01:47:59 ◼ ► I haven't really gotten past that. And I recognize, full on, I recognize that I'm kind of being an idiot about this.
01:48:06 ◼ ► But nevertheless, the EX90, both dealers independently said they are just rolling off the lines now.
01:48:17 ◼ ► I believe the Fredericksburg dealer said, "We've seen one, but we have no idea when we're getting them."
01:48:26 ◼ ► And with regard to other battery electric vehicles, even leaving aside the fact that I'm not entirely convinced that's the right fit for us,
01:48:32 ◼ ► the only other decent option was a Kia EV9, which I'm not sure I love the look of at all.
01:48:45 ◼ ► I think both of us agree that my next car should be an electric car of some sort, but I don't think that it's time for Aaron quite yet.
01:49:07 ◼ ► Certainly they are way more expensive than I want, and it doesn't look like there's a robust enough, or really what I should say is cheap enough, used market to get to the price point that I'm looking to get to.
01:49:23 ◼ ► And so all of that to say, I really thought today we were going to take care of business.
01:49:31 ◼ ► And now I don't know what to do, because there are enough used XC90s, broadly speaking, in the area.
01:49:46 ◼ ► I don't particularly want to buy new, because it's way more money than we need to spend.
01:49:57 ◼ ► But I'm having trouble finding that unicorn of something that I think is priced reasonably, not to say it's a steal, but reasonably, and not beat to hell, not with a trillion miles on it, and optioned the way we want.
01:50:11 ◼ ► And so now I'm kind of like back at square one, and I genuinely don't know what we're going to do.
01:50:18 ◼ ► The plan is still to go with an XC90 of some sort. We might have to just wait it out for a while. I don't know what we're going to do.
01:50:29 ◼ ► - There's really no, when you have time pressure, and you're really picky with a whole bunch of stuff, something has to give.
01:50:39 ◼ ► And so you don't get to make the ideal choice. You have to compromise on something, or just get incredibly lucky with what you find. But that seems like that didn't happen.
01:50:48 ◼ ► So the question is which of these various things that you're going to not be very happy about, which compromise are you willing to take first?
01:50:57 ◼ ► Yeah, and that's the thing. And the only thing that is working on our side a little bit is that we're going away for a couple of weeks next month.
01:51:07 ◼ ► And so we really need to make it like three more weeks, and then we disappear for two. And then we can kind of reset and start over.
01:51:15 ◼ ► Yeah, but that means your wife's going to have no car for five weeks? That's a bit much.
01:51:20 ◼ ► She could presumably rock the loaner from Volvo for some or all of that. And if they need it back, which we've told them many times, like, "Look, the moment you guys want this back, tell us, and we will have it back immediately."
01:51:32 ◼ ► It's such a piece of trash, this car is so bad. But I don't think they're going to want it back anytime soon. But it's still, it's not fair or appropriate for us to hold on to this for two months or whatever.
01:51:43 ◼ ► So I genuinely don't know what we're going to do. I mean, maybe we rent a car for a couple of weeks to give us a little more time, but that's not cheap or free or anything like that. So I don't know. I'm genuinely at a loss of what to do.
01:51:56 ◼ ► Honestly, I think your best bet is, first of all, you have to also consider that Aaron's the customer, not you. And she got this ridiculously bad luck thing happen. I think your best bet is to get her back into an XC90 in whatever form that needs to take.
01:52:17 ◼ ► I would stop looking at other vehicles, if that's the one she really likes and she really wants, figure out how to get an XC90.
01:52:26 ◼ ► I think so. I mean, I will accept any kind of input, but we do use the capacity of the XC90 enough that I don't think she would do a sedan. And there are no sudans that exist in this country anyway.
01:52:54 ◼ ► All right. Well, you've got two small children. They would fit in this car. It's really nice. It's a plug-in hybrid.
01:52:59 ◼ ► One of the things we talked about, because we ended up having to rent a minivan to get to the beach and back, right? And I got to admit, this Chrysler Pacifica, which actually, by the way, was delivered to us from Enterprise Rental with 36 miles on it.
01:53:12 ◼ ► And we were the first people to rent it. And I don't want to own a minivan for a few reasons, but I will be the first to tell you, and she would agree, on paper, that is 100% the correct answer.
01:53:27 ◼ ► Honestly, everyone I've ever heard from who owns a minivan, they all say they're amazing.
01:53:34 ◼ ► You just have to get over the fact that you own a minivan, but once you get over that, people love them. They are really good in a lot of ways.
01:53:43 ◼ ► And if what you're looking for is a large amount of passenger and cargo volume and have it be roughly that kind of size and shape, a higher seating position, big volume, fits a bunch of kids and stuff, there's a reason minivans are so popular and have been for so long.
01:54:08 ◼ ► And actually, come to think of it, well, first of all, yes to everything you just said. Second of all, when we go on these beach trips, and it's getting better and better with each year as the kids get bigger and require less stuff and whatever, but we take Penny with us, and so that's a little bit of added cargo in and of itself.
01:54:23 ◼ ► But when we go on these beach trips, we typically will put a tule or whatever you call it, one of those cargo carriers on the roof of Aaron's car, and we still fill this thing just freaking full.
01:54:35 ◼ ► What are you bringing on your vacation? With your two small children, and you have a giant car and you need to have a roof thing?
01:54:42 ◼ ► Yeah, Jon, we do this every year. I don't have time for it right now. We can bicker about this another time.
01:54:54 ◼ ► We can come back to this if you want, but I'm supposed to say we have a tule or however you pronounce it, and the car is chock full, right?
01:55:02 ◼ ► Well, this minivan, I am freaking out, because it doesn't have any roof rails or anything like that. I am telling Aaron, I say to her, there's no freaking way we're going to fit everything. We're going to have to cut some stuff.
01:55:12 ◼ ► And she was like, first of all, we'll fit everything. Second of all, if we can't, we'll just leave some stuff behind. It'll be fine.
01:55:22 ◼ ► Well, okay, there is that. But nevertheless, we start packing the minivan, and it turns out that under the middle row, like under the floorboard in the middle row, there's these like freaking cavernous gullies.
01:55:34 ◼ ► I genuinely don't know if this minivan was all-wheel drive or not. I want to say it wasn't, but either way, there's these cavernous gullies under the kids' seats, or under their feet, I should say. We filled those with a bunch of stuff.
01:55:45 ◼ ► Then, the back, it was like two-thirds full. It was amazing. It was amazing how cavernous this thing was. It was incredible.
01:55:53 ◼ ► And it also had wireless carplay, which we only used briefly, but actually, and this is a Chrysler, mind you, which I don't personally consider a terribly fancy brand, even though I think they might think they are.
01:56:04 ◼ ► But anyways, the wireless carplay was very good. Very low latency, the screen was very high resolution compared to either of our cars that looked like retina. I mean, it wasn't literally, but it looked that way.
01:56:16 ◼ ► It was very impressive. But anyway, so we rented this minivan for the beach, and that worked out really nicely, and we talked about should we get a minivan.
01:56:26 ◼ ► Or, alternatively, should we get a sedan and then just understand we're going to rent minivans to go to the beach every year. And what we concluded was we do use that space in the XC90 often enough to justify something large.
01:56:44 ◼ ► But I think, ultimately, to come back to what Marco was saying, she had this thing that she loved ripped away from her by incredibly crummy luck. It's not like she got in an accident that was her fault or something like that.
01:56:57 ◼ ► She didn't get in an accident at all by any reasonable definition. It's just she had catastrophic engine failure.
01:57:02 ◼ ► And so I think I'm pretty convinced, and I think she is too, that an XC90 is the right answer. So we are no longer cross shopping. I forget which one of you was asking that question.
01:57:11 ◼ ► But we're no longer cross shopping. We did it just so we could check it off the list. We're not going to do that anymore.
01:57:15 ◼ ► But the question I keep asking myself is, I do not want to spend new car money on a new car for her. Or for anyone, really. It's not her specifically.
01:57:28 ◼ ► But the more I think about it, the more I'm wondering if maybe I just need to bite the bullet and find her the exact car that she wants. Because, A, she frickin' deserves it. She's an angel.
01:57:42 ◼ ► And B, if I can't put my fingers on, if I can't put my hands on a used one that she really, really likes, then why wouldn't we get a new one?
01:57:51 ◼ ► Now I think I'm more on board with this idea than she is. She is unquestionably the more frugal of the two of us, or the more financially responsible of the two of us.
01:58:03 ◼ ► So I think it might, even if I'm convinced, I don't know if I could convince her, but it's where I'm starting to lean at this point. Because I just can't find exactly what we want.
01:58:15 ◼ ► What about leasing, by the way? If you want to soften the burden a little bit up front, like leasing could be an option.
01:58:21 ◼ ► And I would also caution you that I would maybe not want to own a Volvo outside of warranty, and leasing fixes that problem as well.
01:58:29 ◼ ► Yeah, I'm kind of allergic to leasing, but what I haven't mentioned is both the dealers told us, and I don't remember the specific incentive, but I don't know if it's like a government thing or a Volvo thing, but apparently if you lease, they're offering like $7,500 off right now or something like that? Like an absurd amount of money off.
01:58:47 ◼ ► See, that's what I thought. But I don't know how that would apply to these cars unless it's only--
01:58:56 ◼ ► Automakers use lease incentives all the time to boost their quarterly numbers. So take advantage. Very frequently in the auto business, a lease special is often the best deal on a new car that's available anywhere.
01:59:08 ◼ ► Because they do kind of bet against their own future selves to boost the short-term gain. So as a customer, if what you want is available with a heavily discounted lease special, that's often worth considering.
01:59:21 ◼ ► Yeah, and so even though I find leases to be--how do you pronounce the word? Anathema? Is that right? Is that what I'm looking for?
01:59:28 ◼ ► I find it disgusting to lease. It's not my jam. But I shouldn't say disgusting. It's just not for me.
01:59:35 ◼ ► But that being said, if you're offering me $7,500 off, I'll carry a lease for at least a few months until I can pay it off or whatever the case may be.
01:59:46 ◼ ► Well, according to Volvo, they said you just got to lease it and last like three months or something like that. And then you can buy yourself out of it or whatever.
01:59:54 ◼ ► I've never leased before, so I'd have to talk to them more about it if we get serious. But either way, between that and I think most Volvo dealers or maybe Volvo corporate offers like a, "Oh, you've previously owned a Volvo. We'll give you $1,000 to buy another one."
02:00:11 ◼ ► Then we're Costco members and they do negotiations with these different car manufacturers and so I think we get $1,000 off from that.
02:00:18 ◼ ► So suddenly we're looking at like $9,500 off potentially on a brand new Volvo and suddenly the $70,000 Volvo is $60,000, which is quite a bit more than I wanted to spend still.
02:00:30 ◼ ► But nevertheless, it at least makes this sort of thing approachable or a possibility, I guess I should say.
02:00:37 ◼ ► Can I convince you to use the $10,000 savings to get the plug-in hybrid version at least?
02:00:42 ◼ ► I would really, really, really consider it because again, leaving aside the fact that it makes the car kind of fast, what I cannot stress enough is how appealing it is to me that we can have...
02:00:52 ◼ ► Even though I don't really love plug-in hybrids in general, I think in this application it actually is exactly the right answer because we have the infinite range * double dagger for when we go on whatever trip we need to go on.
02:01:05 ◼ ► But for all the around town piddly stuff, she can just go pure electric and it'd be fine.
02:01:26 ◼ ► They think for those two trips a year that you take that somehow it's never going to be possible to charge an electric car on the highway.
02:01:37 ◼ ► So this is a way for you to try out electric, realize that you like it better, and then for the next vehicle after this that your family purchases, you'll go actual electric.
02:01:46 ◼ ► But the correct step now is to take the plug-in hybrid now and begin that transition in a comfortable way that won't push anybody outside their comfort zone.
02:01:56 ◼ ► The problem with the hybrids is they have twice as much crap to go wrong. Historically speaking, the reliability of hybrids has not been as good as internal combustion or EVs.
02:02:05 ◼ ► They're better now. The newer designs have less stuff in them, but there's no getting around the fact that there's more stuff than an EV and there's more stuff than an internal combustion engine because it's got both.
02:02:15 ◼ ► Maybe not a concern. Obviously, if you're not going to own the car that long, you probably don't care and it'll probably be fine, but do keep that in mind.
02:02:23 ◼ ► Yeah, but also keep in mind that for all those electric-only local miles, that serpentine belt is not going to be turning.
02:02:32 ◼ ► Well, it depends on that. The hybrid drivetrains are very different from manufacturer to manufacturer and that's not necessarily the case.
02:02:40 ◼ ► I don't know where the belt is, where the engine is facing on these hybrids. There are so many potential options of how to do hybrid drives and many of them are very different than the internal combustion engines in the same model.
02:02:54 ◼ ► So you can look into that. But honestly, I just think that maybe the goal is just to keep the pebbles out. Whatever's going on with the belts, maybe don't want the pebbles in.
02:03:02 ◼ ► Yeah, we'll work on that for next time. But no, this is not a longitudinal, it's a sideways mount. What's the word I'm looking for? The engine's mounted like your car's are.
02:03:16 ◼ ► Yeah, it's a transverse-mounted engine, so the belt is on the passenger side on an American car.
02:03:23 ◼ ► But yeah, we'll see what happens. It's just tough because we try to be financially prudent, we try to have an "oh crap" fund like I think any reasonable adult should at least try to do.
02:03:37 ◼ ► But there are not a lot of people who have a $70,000 "oh crap" fund, you know what I mean?
02:03:43 ◼ ► And so it's just obviously we're not going to pay cash for this, but it's just still, it's like, "Oh, that's so much money that I was not planning on spending."
02:03:58 ◼ ► And so are all these various incentives and everything. And you know, owning a car is always a massive money hole. There's no way to own a car that you don't lose money.
02:04:09 ◼ ► It's just a question of when you lose the money, and sometimes it's not within your control, sometimes it is. So it's just when and how this money gets burned.
02:04:18 ◼ ► So this was obviously, you couldn't have planned for this, but you are car owners and you like giant nice cars.