00:00:07 ◼ ► And one part of the backup vortex is a Synology—I couldn't even tell you the model number off the top of my head—but a listener and friend had—
00:00:17 ◼ ► I completely forgot that one thing. It scared the poop out of me. But anyways, a listener and friend had sent me one that he had decommissioned.
00:00:26 ◼ ► And, you know, really it was just collecting dust, and I was like, "Sure, I'll use it." And I put it in Mom and Dad's house, which is a little less than an hour away from here.
00:00:32 ◼ ► And it was literally—the only real purpose it had was to slurp up backups from my Synology here at the house.
00:00:38 ◼ ► Well, there was some real bad thunderstorms that went through the area, like, a week ago or so.
00:00:44 ◼ ► And I guess wherever my Dad and I put the Synology, perhaps it was not on the surge suppressor. I don't know what happened, but apparently it is dead.
00:00:52 ◼ ► I haven't gotten physical control of it since this happened, so I genuinely don't know what the issue is.
00:00:57 ◼ ► It could be just a power supply, it could be something much more, you know, damaging, whatever the case may be.
00:01:07 ◼ ► But tale of woe number two is I decided to take my footstool—I'm sorry, my old Synology—and bring it back to life so it can serve as the backup vortex.
00:01:19 ◼ ► I had an 1813+—that Synology was kind enough to give one to all three of us, one apiece, literally 10 years ago, or 11 now or something like that.
00:01:29 ◼ ► And so it had been my Synology up until a few months ago when I got a new one, and I just kind of turned it off and basically used it as a footstool.
00:01:50 ◼ ► So I started my backup—I don't recall exactly what day I started it, but today was something like two or three days after I started the backup.
00:02:06 ◼ ► And I was looking at the hyper backup app within the Synology web interface, which is what's doing this backup.
00:02:17 ◼ ► And I was very excited because I think I'm going to be seeing my parents in the next couple of days.
00:02:21 ◼ ► And I can—and depending on where we are, I'll either hand them the Synology and say, "Please plug this in," or perhaps I will bring them the Synology if we're going to their house, and I'll plug it in and I can assess the damage on the other one.
00:02:31 ◼ ► And I really wanted this backup to be done locally rather than having to do it across the internet.
00:02:44 ◼ ► Because there was no great power outlet anywhere near where the old Synology needed to be.
00:03:08 ◼ ► It has on the back of it a tray where you can put like a power supply and cables and whatnot.
00:03:14 ◼ ► Past Casey was smart insofar as I draped like a little six inch extension cord off of it.
00:03:23 ◼ ► And so that's where I plug the Synology in on like a five or six foot, you know, standard,
00:04:10 ◼ ► I tried to get it in a good known good state and it very well could have been something
00:04:31 ◼ ► What I did was I drew, there's enough slack on the cable that I draped it over the edge
00:04:36 ◼ ► So instead of being like, you know, directly where my feet would be, it's way over to the
00:04:44 ◼ ► Now, why don't you get it plugged in somewhere that, you know, it will be safe for multiple
00:04:51 ◼ ► And I didn't want to, I didn't want to have to get a different extension cord rest your
00:05:21 ◼ ► No, the U2 ones I thought were worth putting in because I think they are, um, there are
00:05:46 ◼ ► And I just, I mean, they would have just ended up going into F because it's like taking a
00:05:50 ◼ ► good iPod and ruining it was kind of the way, you know, like when Steve jobs was introducing
00:06:04 ◼ ► Well, it wasn't the whole point of that basically a distribution deal because HP had so much
00:06:16 ◼ ► I mean, maybe it was definitely one of those deals where somebody convinced jobs that they
00:06:37 ◼ ► With regard to the tier list, we we've asked this question several times before, I feel
00:06:42 ◼ ► like, but it wasn't until this time that David Schaub wrote in to tell us S tier is borrowed
00:07:00 ◼ ► super or the Japanese word for exemplary, which is shoe, I guess I'm sure I'm pronouncing
00:07:06 ◼ ► And originates from the widespread use in Japanese culture of an S grade for advertising
00:07:19 ◼ ► Many universities use the following set of categories shoe or asks for exemplary or excellent,
00:07:25 ◼ ► which apparently is from 90 to 100% in terms of score, and it is rarely, rarely given you,
00:07:32 ◼ ► That's why you not the letter you, that is the letter A for 80 to 89% Rio, which is good
00:07:42 ◼ ► Which is 70 to 79% car, which is an average or pass or C 60 to 69% nin approved or acceptable,
00:07:58 ◼ ► It's interesting that they basically have a shifted version of the American grading system
00:08:07 ◼ ► And as for the tier lists, like when most people do tier lists and including us, I guess
00:08:20 ◼ ► is a very, very special tier, but the actual Japanese academic grading system is not like
00:09:13 ◼ ► Uh, Terry Gilbert writes with another, uh, proposition for a Brexit style name for Apple
00:09:59 ◼ ► thinks it's short-sighted to block all AI crawlers from being able to see your content.
00:10:22 ◼ ► came out on not allowing search engines to find your page for whatever reason you might
00:10:28 ◼ ► think like, obviously think, think back to like the 1990s when the internet was extremely
00:10:34 ◼ ► And you know, imagine if there was some, you know, some kind of fear out there that like,
00:10:47 ◼ ► You know, not necessarily even just, you know, fear about new tech, but even if even something
00:11:00 ◼ ► who think that like, you shouldn't be allowed to quote deep link into their site, that you
00:11:05 ◼ ► should force everyone to like go to the homepage first and then go into the web, the rest of
00:11:09 ◼ ► Publishers have actually tried to insist upon that or legally require that a long time ago.
00:11:19 ◼ ► And then search engines come along and say, we're just going to index anything you have
00:11:23 ◼ ► publicly and let people jump directly to your other like leaf pages without having to go
00:11:29 ◼ ► And that's actually probably better for most sites to have that ability and to have that
00:11:36 ◼ ► But at some point in the past, some publishers have thought that goes against my business
00:12:02 ◼ ► Now I recognize that is not really how most of them work today with the training methods
00:12:08 ◼ ► But we are seeing what a lot of people want out of chatbot style models is basically references.
00:12:24 ◼ ► And what if they start actually having links to follow to verify where they got that information
00:12:30 ◼ ► Well then, if that comes to pass and if that becomes a lot of search traffic, if you've
00:12:39 ◼ ► Now, yes, in the meantime, they could steal your traffic or they could steal your value
00:12:49 ◼ ► But if five years from now, half of web searching or more is now going through an LLM style
00:12:56 ◼ ► model and it does link out to where it found the information from, like Wikipedia style,
00:13:05 ◼ ► So I want to caution you, be careful blanket blocking everything unless you really know
00:13:22 ◼ ► Don't make any rash decisions that might block your entire site and all of your content from
00:13:33 ◼ ► Why not do the reverse of that and block everything now and if it turns out beneficial,
00:13:44 ◼ ► Again, if this is actively hurting the value of your content right now, do what you got
00:14:02 ◼ ► >> I mean, it may be a while to see that harm because there could be models that were trained
00:14:09 ◼ ► And who knows how long those models will be in service, especially if they're open source
00:14:19 ◼ ► now, but because you allow them to crawl you, you know, when iOS 18.4 comes out and has
00:14:24 ◼ ► Apple intelligence and there's stuff trained on your model that's part of it, then it starts
00:14:32 ◼ ► >> Yeah, and honestly, that might happen, but I think odds are if most people are going
00:14:46 ◼ ► still in the old Google index or whatever, you're going to lose all your search traffic
00:14:57 ◼ ► have a lot of credibility here because I personally don't have a lot to lose right at this second
00:15:01 ◼ ► with the way things are today, but if this is where the world is going and everyone starts
00:15:26 ◼ ► but that doesn't matter so much these days. No matter how great the Yellow Pages was for
00:15:34 ◼ ► so you kind of have to play ball with Google Maps and Apple Maps and Yelp and stuff like
00:15:41 ◼ ► If search takes a similar kind of turn, where the way web searches are done and where people
00:15:46 ◼ ► find content from the web is through LLM-based models that train on public sites and then
00:15:57 ◼ ► people are going. Now, it's a separate problem how we figure out how to compensate publishers
00:16:03 ◼ ► for that. In the olden days, with the search index, as we mentioned in the last episode,
00:16:07 ◼ ► it was this kind of trade of like, "Alright, I will let you index my site because the value
00:16:20 ◼ ► value exchange there. Obviously, that's not the case now with LLM-based search answers.
00:16:25 ◼ ► That's obviously a problem now, but if that's where all the searches go, you kind of have
00:16:44 ◼ ► All right, Cloudflare is offering a one-click AI bot blocker. So from Cloudflare's blog,
00:16:53 ◼ ► we hear today clearly that customers don't want AI bots visiting their websites and especially
00:17:01 ◼ ► those that do so dishonestly. To help, we've added a brand new one-click to block all AI
00:17:05 ◼ ► bots. It's available for all customers, including those on the free tier. We've observed bot
00:17:17 ◼ ► machine learning model has always recognized this activity as a bot, even when operators
00:17:22 ◼ ► lie about their user agent. This feature will automatically be updated over time as we see
00:17:27 ◼ ► new fingerprints of offending bots. We identify as widely scraping the web for model training.
00:17:37 ◼ ► do this. Fight fire with fire, machine learning versus machine learning. Because as we said,
00:17:55 ◼ ► learning type stuff, it's going to have false positives, right? It's not a system between
00:18:05 ◼ ► One party is trying to get through. The other party is trying to detect them when they're
00:18:08 ◼ ► trying to hide. So inevitably this will block some legitimate traffic in ways that are not
00:18:16 ◼ ► easy to understand or fix. But that might be worth it to some people. And so Cloudflare
00:18:21 ◼ ► is just trying to offer a service that people are asking for. I just do wonder exactly how
00:18:29 ◼ ► Again, unless you know specifically that you have a problem that AI crawlers are causing
00:18:35 ◼ ► you directly, please don't do this. Because again, first of all, it always catches other
00:18:46 ◼ ► feeds because some IT admin for a podcast website makes some blanket decision and says,
00:18:59 ◼ ► says protect against DDoS or whatever." And it ends up blocking like a third of crawlers,
00:19:03 ◼ ► including my own. And then their podcast feeds can't be read by half the podcast apps out
00:19:09 ◼ ► there. This happens all the time. The amount of pain in the buttery that Cloudflare has
00:19:23 ◼ ► they've caused us over the years with these kind of DDoS protections that maybe put people
00:19:37 ◼ ► even is the wrong kind of bot? It's been such a problem. The only way I even got around
00:19:55 ◼ ► stuff. And that process, I think it took me like six months and repeated emails and reaching
00:20:02 ◼ ► out to any content I might have possibly had like, "Hey, do I know anybody at Cloudflare?
00:20:10 ◼ ► this for your site, you will be causing lots of problems for things that you probably consider
00:20:23 ◼ ► A lot of the stuff is free through Cloudflare, but conceptually it's a nice business where
00:20:28 ◼ ► you sell the blocking and then you also sell the ability to not be blocked by the thing
00:20:36 ◼ ► It does make sense though, because for types of services that you do actually want DDoS
00:20:45 ◼ ► is a good bot? What is a bad bot? Like your example is perfect. In the case of podcasts,
00:20:58 ◼ ► are many of them, right? And some of them have their own crawlers. Some of their listeners
00:21:03 ◼ ► are using Overcast or Apple Podcasts or whatever thing they're using. The bots that feed those
00:21:18 ◼ ► And so maybe if they go beyond that complaint, which is just like the hoster, like, I don't
00:21:25 ◼ ► what your problem is, right? Maybe the next level they go and complain to the developer
00:21:28 ◼ ► of the app, Hey, I'm using your app and I try to do this thing. Your feed doesn't load.
00:21:33 ◼ ► And if they're really technical, they go to the app developer and eventually the app developer
00:21:35 ◼ ► says, when we try to crawl that feed as per your request through the application, because
00:21:53 ◼ ► it must be that thing that we pay for that blocks DDoS. And then you start the six month
00:22:01 ◼ ► as a good bot? That's what happens when you try to use best guess estimates, machine learning,
00:22:07 ◼ ► heuristic stuff like that, to try to implement a feature, uh, you know, between parties that
00:22:12 ◼ ► are adversarial because actual DDoS attacks are adversarial. They're trying to like take
00:22:20 ◼ ► world. Like that's what you're paying to get protected against. And that's a real thing.
00:22:23 ◼ ► And you do have to protect against it. And it's not easy and paying somebody is usually
00:22:26 ◼ ► how people do it, but people, you know, legitimate requests get caught up in that. And it's just,
00:22:32 ◼ ► it's a pain. The internet is not as straightforward and as simple as you would imagine it is.
00:22:38 ◼ ► It's really more like, you know, just, uh, I don't know, undersea ecosystem where you've
00:22:50 ◼ ► it's, it's, or maybe it's more like a jungle. I don't know, but it's, it's complicated.
00:22:53 ◼ ► It is a complicated ecosystem with all sorts of things doing all sorts of stuff at all times.
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00:25:08 ◼ ► July. So at about 9 o'clock in the morning, on the 5th of July, or 9 o'clock I think ATP
00:25:12 ◼ ► time anyway, Epic accused Apple of delaying its iOS game store launch. So Epic had said
00:25:30 ◼ ► it." So reading from 9to5Mac, Epic Games has accused Apple of deliberately delaying its
00:25:33 ◼ ► attempt to launch its own iOS game store in Europe and has filed a further antitrust complaint
00:25:38 ◼ ► with the EU. Now reading from Epic's newsroom on Twitter, "Apple has rejected our Epic Games
00:25:43 ◼ ► store notarization submission twice now, claiming the design and position of Epic's install
00:25:52 ◼ ► that's capital I lower A lower P is too similar to the app stores capital I capital A capital
00:25:58 ◼ ► P in-app purchases label. We are using the same install and in-app purchases naming conventions
00:26:03 ◼ ► that are used across popular app stores on multiple platforms and we are following standard
00:26:06 ◼ ► conventions for buttons and iOS apps. We're just trying to build a store that mobile users
00:26:10 ◼ ► can easily understand and the disclosure of in-app purchases is a regulatory best practice
00:26:14 ◼ ► followed by all stores nowadays. Apple's rejection is arbitrary, obstructive and in violation
00:26:20 ◼ ► of the DMA and we've shared our concerns with the European Commission." So that's part of
00:26:23 ◼ ► the problem of Apple being in this role of like, "Okay, so you can have third party stores
00:26:29 ◼ ► and you have to pay us for them. And also, by the way, you have to go through us to get
00:26:32 ◼ ► anything into the third party store." And that's the last one that makes Apple do things
00:26:44 ◼ ► think of it this way, personal computers, you know, Apple sells them, other people sell
00:26:52 ◼ ► the iMac came out, and I forget what company is, but some company introduced a computer
00:26:57 ◼ ► that was made with translucent teal plastic right after the iMac came out. Apple had no
00:27:07 ◼ ► rejection on every single personal computer that was sold, because those are independent
00:27:11 ◼ ► companies. Apple was not like the funnel for everything. Presumably, Apple would have stopped
00:27:17 ◼ ► many computers from being shipped. But instead, what happens is the company shipped them.
00:27:21 ◼ ► But Apple does have mechanisms to stop that. They sued one of these companies for violating
00:27:26 ◼ ► Apple's trade dress. It's some part of the law that's like if a customer could reasonably
00:27:31 ◼ ► be confused to think that your thing is actually an iMac because they'd heard of an iMac or
00:27:40 ◼ ► actual independent parties in the market when there actually is independent competition.
00:28:02 ◼ ► are ways they can sue to stop that. But having them say, "Actually, we just looked at this
00:28:07 ◼ ► and we're not even going to allow the store to ship." That's not the way a healthy market
00:28:14 ◼ ► works. They wear one party, who's by the way, Epic's competitor for selling games on iPhones,
00:28:20 ◼ ► gets to decide ahead of time, "Yeah, no, I don't like that." They're Judge Dredd, right?
00:28:26 ◼ ► They are the law, like they're Judge, Jury, and Executioner. That's not due process. No
00:28:32 ◼ ► one wants their competitor being able to decide whether their thing is allowed to be available
00:29:01 ◼ ► Today said it has approved the third-party Epic Games Store in the European Union, allowing
00:29:05 ◼ ► the Fortnite developer to launch its alternative app marketplace in those countries," reports
00:29:08 ◼ ► Reuters. "It appears Apple has relented and approved Epic's previously rejected submission."
00:29:18 ◼ ► temporary, and they are demanding we change the buttons in the next version, which would
00:29:31 ◼ ► allow it to go through." But then supposedly saying, "We let it go through," but they still
00:29:38 ◼ ► this is not a healthy relationship. Apple shouldn't be a decision maker in this process
00:29:48 ◼ ► of what the DMA is supposed to be doing. Again, you don't want your competitor being able
00:29:53 ◼ ► to stop your competing product from launching for whatever reason they feel like, or to
00:30:08 ◼ ► looks just like the App Store. It looks pixel for pixel. Let's put the exhibits in court,
00:30:25 ◼ ► Yeah, this is a bad idea. Apple should not be tarnishing what notarization means by basically
00:30:55 ◼ ► flies in the face of the EU rulings and clear intent of the DMA, and you know this is going
00:31:01 ◼ ► to just blow up in their face again and again and again. Why does Apple continue to provoke
00:31:17 ◼ ► particular nitpick that they're doing here, who cares? That's number one. Who cares? It
00:31:22 ◼ ► doesn't affect them really at all. But number two, what's going to happen here? I'll tell
00:31:35 ◼ ► cannot screen things at all, even for your alleged security and privacy reasons." That's
00:31:40 ◼ ► what's going to happen. And then, the iPhone as a platform gets worse. They're going to
00:31:44 ◼ ► lose their ability to even do security screening, because the regulators will never let this
00:32:00 ◼ ► I think they're just judging that they can get away with it and that dragging their feet
00:32:18 ◼ ► "We allowed this carve-out for security and whatever." That's all you're allowed to use
00:32:22 ◼ ► it for. So every time Apple does something that clearly has nothing to do with security,
00:32:26 ◼ ► like we think your buttons look too much like ours or whatever, the EU will forbid them
00:32:35 ◼ ► the carve-out, because the EU is not Apple. They're not going to punitively say—because
00:32:38 ◼ ► the EU also doesn't want the iPhone platform to be a free-for-all in Europe. That's why
00:32:43 ◼ ► they wrote the DMA this way. So I don't think there's any fear of that. But this definitely
00:32:50 ◼ ► doesn't make the relationship between the parties any better. I just think Apple's calculation
00:32:59 ◼ ► fines actually appear and have to be paid. And of course, Apple is countersuing and using
00:33:07 ◼ ► to drag on and on. But right now, the outcome is not clear. But yeah, as we said, it would
00:33:19 ◼ ► currently their strategy. A lot of times in lawsuits where the two parties are really—I
00:33:25 ◼ ► don't want to say the two parties really hate each other, but either way, the two parties,
00:33:33 ◼ ► give nothing, take everything, be as extreme as possible. Obviously, that's usually not
00:33:38 ◼ ► the way it goes down. Usually, one side is going to win, one side is going to lose, and
00:33:50 ◼ ► strategy play out, it's like, "Why can't these people be reasonable? They're just making
00:33:53 ◼ ► it worse for themselves." But especially when lawyers are involved, sometimes they're like,
00:33:57 ◼ ► "Look, you've got to fight tooth and nail to get, in the end, an agreement that is somewhat
00:34:03 ◼ ► equitable because if you're reasonable now, the other party will take advantage of that."
00:34:07 ◼ ► I don't know if that's really true here. Apple definitely seems like they're doing that.
00:34:10 ◼ ► The EU, debatable. But yeah, this continues to grind on. And you keep mentioning notarization.
00:34:16 ◼ ► This is another instance where Apple has used the same word to describe two fairly different
00:34:21 ◼ ► things. So notarization has existed on the Mac for a long time, and as far as I'm aware,
00:34:27 ◼ ► notarization on the Mac does not involve humans at all. You submit an application, you get
00:34:30 ◼ ► a developer account, you get certificates, blah, blah, blah. You can submit your application
00:34:33 ◼ ► to a server that Apple runs that they will do whatever private API scanning or whatever
00:34:39 ◼ ► they do. It doesn't involve a human. A computer will just take your input, grind it up, and
00:34:43 ◼ ► if it passes some basic checks, spit it back to you and say, "Here you go. Notarized application."
00:34:50 ◼ ► like the app stores." There's absolutely no human intervention. That is my understanding
00:35:01 ◼ ► involved. But this, this is also called notarization, and people are getting things delayed for
00:35:06 ◼ ► months or weeks or months, and then get them rejected for things that obviously a human
00:35:16 ◼ ► Well, not only is it app review, this is like... So you've always kind of been able to feel
00:35:32 ◼ ► is like if something in your app is maybe on the edge of a rule or maybe controversial,
00:35:38 ◼ ► your app will be stuck "in review" for a long time. Like normally, the in review status
00:35:43 ◼ ► lasts less than one day. And you can kind of always tell if you're "in review" for more
00:35:59 ◼ ► It seems like all of the alternative app store kind of things are getting that level of scrutiny.
00:36:06 ◼ ► Probably if I had to guess, I bet Phil Schiller is personally approving or denying each one
00:36:12 ◼ ► because there's going to be so few of them and they're going to be so important in terms
00:36:16 ◼ ► of PR and so there are going to be such big stories. I bet every single one of these is
00:36:27 ◼ ► going to get the harshness, the punitive rejections, you're going to get the personality, you're
00:36:43 ◼ ► a lot more like the other notarization because if they continue not to, they're only going
00:36:49 ◼ ► to keep inviting regulators to take control away from them in ways that matter a lot like
00:36:59 ◼ ► I think, Jon, you make a really good point about this being kind of two different kinds
00:37:03 ◼ ► of notarization and it's really too bad because Apple has done a really good job, to your
00:37:19 ◼ ► tell is bad about this. This seems to be good and worst case if it isn't, they can revoke
00:37:25 ◼ ► whatever thing they need to revoke to prevent machines from running that app anymore. And
00:37:31 ◼ ► Apple has been a really good steward of notarization on the Mac for years. Nobody's ever really
00:37:37 ◼ ► doubted it. Nobody's ever really, to my recollection, had this kind of drama with it. And here it
00:37:43 ◼ ► is, they said, okay, we're going to notarize third party apps for the EU app stores. And
00:37:52 ◼ ► us, I don't think, or maybe you guys did and I just didn't realize it, but none of us really
00:37:57 ◼ ► thought that they were going to treat this, like you said, as app review light. And now
00:38:01 ◼ ► they're treating it as app review light. And I think that that very clearly flies in the
00:38:06 ◼ ► face of the DMA. It's kind of gross anyhow. And now they've kind of tarnished the sanctity
00:38:13 ◼ ► of, or they've sullied the good name of notarization. And so now the next time Apple says, oh, we're
00:38:19 ◼ ► going to start notarizing, you know, X, Y, and Z, my eyebrows going to go up and be like,
00:38:23 ◼ ► oh, what does that really mean? Yeah. Which notarization is this? Is it the Mac automated
00:38:27 ◼ ► notarization or the third party app store, uh, Phil Schiller review? I don't understand
00:38:40 ◼ ► it many times, I haven't spoken, having spoken to many rank and file employees. Well, that
00:38:46 ◼ ► sounds like it's hundreds. I shouldn't say that, but I've spoken to enough rank and file
00:38:49 ◼ ► employees to know that a common understanding or, or perspective is that look, we did a
00:39:12 ◼ ► is by your, by our good graces, are you allowed to be there? Third party developers. And I
00:39:18 ◼ ► really think that that perspective is not only is it gross, but I, I, I think it's losing
00:39:31 ◼ ► biased participant in this conversation without these third party developers, there isn't
00:39:36 ◼ ► an iPhone or at least not the way it is today. And I don't think that Apple realizes that
00:39:41 ◼ ► while we are scratching their back or, and they're having to scratch ours too, like it's
00:39:47 ◼ ► both ways that, that analogy felt right down, but that's okay. You know what I'm driving
00:39:51 ◼ ► is, is, you know, it's, it's mutual, right? It's, it's symbiosis or whatever the biology
00:40:05 ◼ ► they don't frigging care. They are owed, they are owed all of this money. They are owed
00:40:21 ◼ ► be thankful that we allow you on our platforms and it's on the surface. Like, I guess if
00:40:27 ◼ ► that's the attitude you want to have fine, but you know, they around and now we're finding
00:40:32 ◼ ► out with vision pro, right? Cause nobody's touching it. I mean, I have an app on there,
00:40:37 ◼ ► but nobody's really touching it. And this is, I really think this is part of the reason
00:40:41 ◼ ► why. And if you want to hear more about it, listen to what was it last week's overtime.
00:40:49 ◼ ► that, okay, well they're going to notarize and well we know from the past that's, that's
00:41:01 ◼ ► saying. And it just bums me out. That's a too, cause like, I mean, look, we've had this
00:41:13 ◼ ► that, if you look at the history of capitalism, we make exceptions to that all the time once
00:41:19 ◼ ► it becomes fairly damaging to a market not to. Um, so that, that you can set aside. You
00:41:25 ◼ ► can also say, well what incentive does Apple have to, you know, make their platforms if
00:41:29 ◼ ► they can't make money on them? And you know, in case you covered that well, like there's
00:41:33 ◼ ► other value to apps being on their platform besides being able to extract money from the
00:41:43 ◼ ► You can try to say, well of course they should be able to make as much money as they can.
00:41:51 ◼ ► which you shouldn't because most of them have giant holes in them or are invalid for lots
00:42:02 ◼ ► and ecosystem because they depend on developers making software for their platforms for the
00:42:10 ◼ ► platforms to succeed. Obviously very true when you look at their less successful platforms
00:42:15 ◼ ► in terms of third party support. Uh, like VisionOS is obviously like the big headlining
00:42:26 ◼ ► iPad apps great, uh, or even are there at all. That's been a problem for the iPad since
00:42:30 ◼ ► day one. Uh, and, and even now when the iPad has lots of apps, a lot of times their companies
00:42:34 ◼ ► drive their feet on them. When we think about the way the iPhone and the app store came
00:42:39 ◼ ► up, it was a lot of Indies like us making apps for it. Today it's a very different world.
00:42:53 ◼ ► helped Indies like me succeed. That is largely and largely true. There's some asterisks on,
00:42:59 ◼ ► on that, but for the most part that is largely true. There was a lot of merit to that argument
00:43:03 ◼ ► and I've personally been one of those people. I've benefited from that because I have had
00:43:13 ◼ ► my career. It's wonderful. Okay. Uh, however, this is a different world today. Today. Most
00:43:33 ◼ ► Not only are there no indie developers there effectively for lots of reasons that we've
00:43:37 ◼ ► talked about. Basically nobody can afford them and there's no users so they can't afford
00:43:41 ◼ ► to buy them and then once they're there, they can't make any money there. That's okay. But
00:43:46 ◼ ► what people, what users of the vision pro mostly want is for larger companies and larger
00:43:52 ◼ ► content producers to adopt it and bring their stuff there because that's what, you know,
00:43:56 ◼ ► we want to do things like, you know, watch the youtube app. You know, I know of Christian
00:44:00 ◼ ► Felix app and that's wonderful, but like that's what most people are looking for is they're
00:44:03 ◼ ► looking for things like Netflix, HBO, youtube, like, you know, they're looking for the big
00:44:21 ◼ ► you should ask some big companies what they think of apple and their developer platforms.
00:44:25 ◼ ► Um, the relationship, you know, apple has poisoned the well so much that their platforms
00:44:31 ◼ ► are suffering. Like look at how much money they have poured into the vision pro. So much
00:44:38 ◼ ► time, so much engineering resource into this platform. It's going to probably fail that
00:44:44 ◼ ► in ways that there's multi, multivariate reasons why this problem, why the platform is not
00:44:48 ◼ ► doing great. But a big one is the lack of content and apps on it. Whatever they're doing
00:44:54 ◼ ► is not working enough to make this new platform succeed. Again, look at all their platforms
00:44:59 ◼ ► that don't have the iphone's customer base. They all have similar problems. So this isn't
00:45:05 ◼ ► just about apple, you know, being their right to take their 30% or enforce their very, very
00:45:11 ◼ ► strict rules. It isn't just about that. It's literally that their products are being held
00:45:15 ◼ ► back where they make way more money than the app store. Their products are being held back
00:45:20 ◼ ► by their app store policies. This is not just us saying we should have more money and apple
00:45:26 ◼ ► should have less. It is literally this is probably the wrong strategy for apple overall.
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00:47:37 ◼ ► Tech and labor. So this is something that we've kind of had bubbling around in our internal
00:47:39 ◼ ► show notes for a while and it seems like there's a bunch of different storylines that are all
00:47:45 ◼ ► kind of intermingled and interleaved together. So we'll start with in April in the United
00:47:53 ◼ ► States, the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, banned non-compete agreements for workers.
00:47:58 ◼ ► So reading from Washington Post, the Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday, April 23rd, banned
00:48:03 ◼ ► non-compete agreements for most US workers with a new rule that will bar employers from
00:48:08 ◼ ► enforcing clauses that restrict workers from switching employers within their industry,
00:48:17 ◼ ► to two Tuesday to issue the rule it proposed more than a year ago. The new rule makes it
00:48:22 ◼ ► illegal for employers to include the agreements in employment contracts and requires companies
00:48:27 ◼ ► with active non-compete agreements to inform workers that they are void. The agency received
00:48:32 ◼ ► more than 26,000 comments about the rule after it was proposed some 16 months ago. The rule
00:48:43 ◼ ► I wonder how pervasive non-competes are. When I started in the industry after graduating
00:49:09 ◼ ► I don't really know how things go." But yeah, for people in other countries who just don't
00:49:14 ◼ ► know what we're talking about here, if you worked, for example, for a video game developer,
00:49:19 ◼ ► your non-competes are common video games, but just as an example, your non-compete would
00:49:23 ◼ ► say, "Okay, well, you can quit this job whenever you want. You're not a prisoner here, but
00:49:29 ◼ ► if you quit, you can't get a job with another video game developer for two years." And if
00:49:35 ◼ ► that sounds totally bonkers to you, that's the reaction you should have. It's like, "Well,
00:49:40 ◼ ► wait a second. I'm a video game developer. If I quit this job, presumably, I would want
00:49:45 ◼ ► to go work for a different video game developer, and you're telling me, 'Oh, you can quit.'
00:49:49 ◼ ► You just have to get a job doing something other than video game development." And that
00:49:55 ◼ ► was across all industries. Sometimes it would be narrow, like you can't work for these specific
00:49:59 ◼ ► competitors, you can't do this specific thing or whatever, but as an employee, it was like,
00:50:06 ◼ ► me a lot of money, and I'm going to get this, that, and the other thing, and I like this
00:50:17 ◼ ► work somewhere else, and you're like, "Oh, now I can't go work for any of the three companies
00:50:21 ◼ ► that I wanted to go work for instead of this one. What am I going to do?" So this article
00:50:27 ◼ ► saying that it gums up the labor market, yeah, that's putting it mildly. Suppresses wages
00:50:34 ◼ ► and gums up the labor market. Suppresses wages because if a competitor, if you're working
00:50:41 ◼ ► pay you more money, you're like, "Oh, I'll go work over there. They're offering me more
00:50:52 ◼ ► "Hey, we'll give you more money." And so you go where you can make more money. That's a
00:50:56 ◼ ► competitive market for labor. The more in demand you are, the more in demand your skills
00:51:01 ◼ ► are, the better you are at your job, the more you can get paid. Oh, but if there's a non-compete,
00:51:06 ◼ ► if you quit your job today, you can't apply for a new job at us for two years according
00:51:14 ◼ ► big major topic here is tech and labor. And even though people who work in the tech industry
00:51:22 ◼ ► stuff, we are workers just like anybody else. We do not own or run the company. Sometimes
00:51:28 ◼ ► we get equity in them, depending. But if you're working for a salary, part of your power,
00:51:40 ◼ ► more for your skills and your labor, you should be able to go over there and do that. And
00:51:43 ◼ ► non-competes fly in the face of that. So they are super duper evil, and I came to hate them
00:51:48 ◼ ► more and more as I worked in the industry. And in my limited experience, they did become
00:51:52 ◼ ► less pervasive. I don't know why. Maybe it's because people stopped taking jobs. They said
00:52:00 ◼ ► find one that didn't have one. But anyway, they seemed less pervasive to me in my experience.
00:52:06 ◼ ► And the FTC banning them is long, long, long overdue. They're banned in many specific states.
00:52:11 ◼ ► I think California has had them banned for a while. But a federal ban makes a huge amount
00:52:16 ◼ ► of sense. This gives way too much power. Non-competes give way too much power to employers. The
00:52:26 ◼ ► have. No argument here. I completely agree. So put that aside for a second. We're going
00:52:30 ◼ ► to come back to it. Meanwhile, also in April, inside TSMC's expansion struggles in Arizona,
00:52:50 ◼ ► now much delayed chip fabrication campus outside Phoenix." So from restofworld, "The American
00:52:55 ◼ ► engineers complained of rigid counterproductive hierarchies at the company. Taiwanese TSMC
00:53:00 ◼ ► veterans describe their American counterparts as lacking the kind of dedication and obedience
00:53:04 ◼ ► that they believe to be the foundation of their company's world leading success. TSMC's
00:53:14 ◼ ► have hailed the Confucian culture, which promotes diligence and respect for authority, as well
00:53:19 ◼ ► as Taiwan's strict work ethic as key to the company's success. Chang, speaking last year
00:53:26 ◼ ► about Taiwan's competitiveness compared to the US, said that, quote, "If a machine breaks
00:53:32 ◼ ► down at one in the morning, in the US it will be fixed in the next morning, but in Taiwan
00:53:48 ◼ ► Yeah, this is, so I just mentioned how people in the rest of the world with stronger labor
00:53:53 ◼ ► laws would be shocked about the idea of non-competes. Here's another culture clash this time in
00:53:58 ◼ ► the other direction. There are many markets in the world where labor has even less rights
00:54:12 ◼ ► to your business is above even your own family, it's above your own health, certainly, it's
00:54:17 ◼ ► above your own everything. It's like the company is everything, strict hierarchies, whatever
00:54:34 ◼ ► having worked with people, engineers even, just doing the same job as me in other countries,
00:54:39 ◼ ► I can tell you that some countries pride themselves on the same as Taiwanese pride themselves
00:54:43 ◼ ► on the idea of our employees work late and they'll stay until the job gets done and they'll
00:54:49 ◼ ► do all this sort of self-sacrifice to do whatever it takes to make the company successful. And
00:55:01 ◼ ► country at work, I was like, "That's not something to be proud of." I know it sounds like it
00:55:07 ◼ ► is, it sounds like you're doing a great job or whatever and for limited amounts of time
00:55:11 ◼ ► that can be true, but at this point, it's not an open question that driving your employees
00:55:21 ◼ ► to the point of burnout is obviously bad for the people involved, but also counterproductive
00:55:31 ◼ ► doing in hour 14 costs you money. It's negative money because they're doing such a bad job
00:55:36 ◼ ► because they're burnt out because they've been working for 14 hours straight. The company
00:55:40 ◼ ► would do better if it let them go home after an eight-hour shift and sleep and come back
00:55:44 ◼ ► rested the next day, especially in programming and that type of work. But a lot of countries
00:55:53 ◼ ► counter anti-patterns of being blindly loyal to a strict hierarchy and doing whatever your
00:56:08 ◼ ► they're told to do, but to have minds of their own and to stand up when they're told to do
00:56:26 ◼ ► from the company. The company would do better if all their employees work 14-hour days.
00:56:29 ◼ ► The company wouldn't do better. That's the thing. The company believes that they should
00:56:32 ◼ ► drive employees to work. If there's anything wrong, you got to jump out of bed and do it
00:56:36 ◼ ► and we don't care how you destroy your life and a company comes to a family. That's not
00:56:41 ◼ ► better for the company in the long run. Whether or not American companies actually realize
00:56:47 ◼ ► that or whether existing American laws constrain them from doing things, because it's questionable.
00:56:53 ◼ ► Depending on the company you work for, you may feel like the only thing stopping my company
00:57:02 ◼ ► can. That's true. By the way, it's more true of lower paid jobs, believe it or not. Relatively
00:57:10 ◼ ► speaking, if you're a tech employee in America, you are treated the nicest of any employee
00:57:20 ◼ ► vacation days and there is some acknowledgment of burnout. Still, as someone in the game
00:57:25 ◼ ► development industry, and still, even those tech jobs, people are exploited. People are
00:57:41 ◼ ► worse. That's why, well, it's not why, but one of the reasons that you see more willingness
00:57:46 ◼ ► to unionize in industries that get paid less is because tech employees are like, "Oh, we
00:57:53 ◼ ► get paid so much money. We don't need a union. We're doing fine," or whatever. This culture
00:57:58 ◼ ► clash really highlights just the lack of agreement across the world and across cultures about
00:58:03 ◼ ► what a healthy working relationship looks like. The TSMC CEO saying, "This is why we're
00:58:10 ◼ ► ahead of you, America." There's lots of reasons why other countries are ahead of us in various
00:58:14 ◼ ► industries. I don't think one of them is that their employees are willing to work longer
00:58:20 ◼ ► hours. They have a better educated workforce. They have a better government system with
00:58:28 ◼ ► better support, better education, better healthcare. There's all sorts of government reasons why
00:58:35 ◼ ► they may be doing better in a certain area, cheaper labor, so on and so forth. The willingness
00:58:40 ◼ ► to work hard is really not one of them. I think America is closer to a reasonable balance
00:58:46 ◼ ► of productivity and hours worked than a culture like the one described here in Taiwan, which
00:58:57 ◼ ► whenever you look at the big studies, Americans work longer and harder than other countries
00:59:01 ◼ ► and get less vacation days. Then people say, "That's why we have higher productivity in
00:59:05 ◼ ► America because we work longer and harder." It's like, "That's probably why we have more
00:59:08 ◼ ► burnout. I'm not sure why it's how we get more productivity." Anyway, of all the things
00:59:14 ◼ ► that are delaying and messing with this TSMC thing in Arizona, I'm kind of not surprised
00:59:20 ◼ ► that one of them is the culture clash about engineering practices and work-life balance.
00:59:30 ◼ ► Ho. Back when the Japanese were going to take over America, there was a movie, I think it
00:59:34 ◼ ► was Michael Keaton, where a Japanese car company came to build a factory in America and they
00:59:39 ◼ ► had to deal with all the lazy, shiftless American workers who didn't know what they were doing.
00:59:42 ◼ ► In the end, the Americans showed that they're good workers too. It's a rah-rah, completely
00:59:51 ◼ ► Maybe not. But anyway, that was the big fear. Japan, they do everything efficiently. All
00:59:56 ◼ ► their workers are hardworking and diligent. They do exactly what they're told and so on
00:59:59 ◼ ► and so forth. It's just so much more complicated than that. Anyway, on this specific issue
01:00:05 ◼ ► of employees staying late and working long hours and sacrificing their family for their
01:00:21 ◼ ► despite government subsidies," also from April. This is 9 to 5 Mac. "Apple was pledged by
01:00:26 ◼ ► at least some of its chips from TSMC's upcoming plants in Arizona. There had initially been
01:00:31 ◼ ► doubts about whether this was much more of a PR move since the chip element seemed likely
01:00:35 ◼ ► to have to be sent back to Taiwan for what's known as packaging or a final assembly. One
01:00:46 ◼ ► would use another U.S. company, Amcor, to do the chip packaging. Producing chips in the
01:00:49 ◼ ► U.S. carries higher costs than doing it in Taiwan. Those subsidies were recently confirmed
01:00:54 ◼ ► as totaling $6.6 billion in grants across three plants and a further $5 billion in loans.
01:01:05 ◼ ► their chips outside of Taiwan as global capacity expansion, power costs, and increasingly complex
01:01:11 ◼ ► cutting-edge technologies weigh on its profitability. "If a customer requests to be in a certain
01:01:20 ◼ ► Wei, chief executive of the world's largest chip manufacturer, to investors on Thursday
01:01:23 ◼ ► during the company's first-quarter earnings call. Again, "In today's fragmented globalization
01:01:28 ◼ ► environment, costs will be higher for everyone, including TSMC, our customers, and our competitors,"
01:01:47 ◼ ► Building stuff in the U.S. tends to be more expensive. The cost of living is more expensive.
01:01:50 ◼ ► The cost of labor is more expensive because you have to pay those people so they can afford
01:01:53 ◼ ► to live here than it is in some other countries. And TSMC is passing that cost on to the customer.
01:01:59 ◼ ► So if some customer, meaning like Apple, not like an individual, if some customer or TSMC
01:02:03 ◼ ► says, "Hey, we want to buy chips from you, we'd like them to be manufactured in the U.S.,
01:02:07 ◼ ► please," they'll say, "Great, that'll be X amount extra because it costs us more to manufacture
01:02:11 ◼ ► them there." Strategically speaking, it is a good idea for Apple to have multiple geographic
01:02:19 ◼ ► sources for its chips. Now, having TSMC make them in Taiwan and TSMC make them in the U.S.
01:02:25 ◼ ► is not as good as having two different companies, but you take what you can get. And Taiwan,
01:02:29 ◼ ► there's potential geopolitical instability over there, so having a backup plan is good.
01:02:52 ◼ ► price or whatever, pay a little extra. Pass some of that cost on to the customer. Advertise
01:02:56 ◼ ► the fact that more and more of your components are made in the U.S. I'm not sure how much
01:03:03 ◼ ► of their devices are recycled, and they keep increasing that, and I applaud that effort.
01:03:13 ◼ ► not, Apple continues to travel that road to reduce their packaging, to use more recycled
01:03:23 ◼ ► should be doing, and not just out of a sense of nobility, but just because if they achieve
01:03:28 ◼ ► them, they'll be so far ahead of their competition in these areas, because everyone will have
01:03:40 ◼ ► job of it, they will be ahead of their competitors. And I think it's the same as true of paying
01:03:46 ◼ ► to build up U.S. manufacturing products. Apple put billions of dollars into manufacturing
01:03:57 ◼ ► are in them to build all their fancy computers and help train all the employees and so on
01:04:01 ◼ ► and so forth. Obviously there was a much bigger industry there already before Apple, but Apple
01:04:05 ◼ ► did put a lot of money into that. Apple should be dedicated to putting in even more money
01:04:11 ◼ ► in factories and all the surrounding infrastructure to do that stuff in America. That means paying
01:04:22 ◼ ► like have a company store or whatever, but through the means that we have in this country,
01:04:33 ◼ ► and stuff. What they're going to do is they're going to pay X dollars more per chip, and
01:04:42 ◼ ► saying no, we demand the lowest possible prices so we're not going to buy a single thing
01:04:54 ◼ ► still just TSMC instead of an actual American company like Intel, and Intel by the way did
01:04:58 ◼ ► also get its own billions of dollars in subsidies, but I feel like this is the road Apple should
01:05:02 ◼ ► be traveling down, and US labor is a big factor in this because the path to success here is
01:05:10 ◼ ► not, you know what, US employees should also sacrifice their health and family life for
01:05:33 ◼ ► ago on the 5th of July, a judge has said that the FTC lacks the authority to issue rules
01:05:55 ◼ ► authority. The preliminary ruling only blocks enforcement of the non-compete ban against
01:06:00 ◼ ► the plaintiff and other groups that intervened in the case. But it signals that the judge
01:06:04 ◼ ► believes the FTC cannot enforce the rule. The case is in US District Court for Northern
01:06:09 ◼ ► District of Texas, so appeals would be heard in the US Court of Appeals for the 5th District,
01:06:14 ◼ ► which is generally regarded as one of the most conservative appeals courts in the country.
01:06:19 ◼ ► It's an ongoing problem in this country where, you know, one of the major parties and all
01:06:27 ◼ ► of the people in power who support that major party believe that the government shouldn't
01:06:32 ◼ ► be allowed to do things that they don't like, and one of those is restraining companies
01:06:35 ◼ ► in any way. And so of course, of course, there's going to be a judge and a bunch of plaintiffs
01:06:39 ◼ ► who are going to say, "Non-compete? That's not fair. We should be able to stop employees
01:06:44 ◼ ► from getting another job in the industry for as long as we want. If they don't like it,
01:06:46 ◼ ► they can just choose not to take this job. There's nothing wrong with this system. Please
01:06:53 ◼ ► FTC lacks the authority to do that. In fact, all government agencies lack all authority
01:06:57 ◼ ► to do anything, and they shouldn't be allowed to do anything. Companies should be allowed
01:07:00 ◼ ► to do whatever they want, and there's no problem with this system." It's so exhausting.
01:07:05 ◼ ► It is so very exhausting. It stinks, but what are you going to do? I mean, you just do the
01:07:11 ◼ ► I mean, they would say, "Oh, let the states do it. California did it," or whatever. "We
01:07:17 ◼ ► Go move to California." No tech company has ever succeeded there. Obviously, these laws
01:07:30 ◼ ► their password functions into a standalone app, adopting passkeys is getting more interesting,
01:07:35 ◼ ► and I'm starting to consider moving away from my password manager of choice. I've always
01:07:39 ◼ ► been hesitant to do so in the past because I figured that an OS-native password manager
01:07:55 ◼ ► point for third-party managers, now that Apple's adding more and more features to their own
01:07:59 ◼ ► password manager. It's built in. It's well supported. The Apple ones have shared groups
01:08:08 ◼ ► by the day. One thing they do have going for them is that if your Apple ID gets compromised,
01:08:13 ◼ ► for example, and you don't have your third-party password manager, like Master Password, in
01:08:27 ◼ ► It is still one more layer of protection. Lots of stuff in security is how many different
01:08:38 ◼ ► the one big ball of stuff, if that ball gets cracked, that's just one layer. I know within
01:08:45 ◼ ► Apple stuff there are additional layers, but a third-party password manager does add an
01:08:49 ◼ ► additional layer. Third-party password managers don't have as nice integration as Apple's
01:08:57 ◼ ► Third-party password managers can get compromised. You hear the stories all the time. I can't
01:09:02 ◼ ► but a bunch of third-party password managers that I recognize in the past several years
01:09:06 ◼ ► I've seen stories that, "Oh, they got hacked, and all their stuff might be compromised,
01:09:10 ◼ ► and sorry about that, and that's really bad. Apple is a bigger company and has had better
01:09:21 ◼ ► This is the difficulty of making security decisions. When I recommend what people should
01:09:25 ◼ ► do, I usually try to pick the pass of least resistance, which is not to use a third-party
01:09:29 ◼ ► one, because they're much more likely to have problems dealing with a piece of third-party
01:09:35 ◼ ► software than they are to get hacked by somebody because everything was all in one place. But
01:09:42 ◼ ► for people listening to the show and tech nerds or people who have higher security needs,
01:09:46 ◼ ► using things from multiple vendors that are truly separated from each other does add an
01:09:51 ◼ ► extra level of security. And like I said, that's one of the strongest remaining reasons
01:09:55 ◼ ► to use a third-party password manager is if you feel like you need or want that additional
01:10:03 ◼ ► All right, Jamie writes, "With so many flops and mistakes, the reputation of AI is arguably
01:10:08 ◼ ► going the way of crypto. Do you envisage WWDC changing this course with Apple's input, or
01:10:12 ◼ ► do you think they're frantically scaling back the emphasis they put on the words AI in their
01:10:17 ◼ ► presentations and perhaps returning to machine learning to avoid being lumped together with
01:10:25 ◼ ► Yes, it was. Sorry. This is an old Ask ATP, but I thought it'd be fun to read now. They
01:10:35 ◼ ► answer the question after we know the answer. Yeah. This was a reasonable thing to think
01:10:47 ◼ ► are the negatives outweighing the positives?" But Apple's judgment, and I think the judgment
01:11:02 ◼ ► letters A and I and instead said machine learning or tried to separate themselves in a way that
01:11:07 ◼ ► was sort of like, "Oh, everyone else is doing AI, but we're not," that would have been bad
01:11:19 ◼ ► the pulse of the industry, and in the end, Apple did not do that. I think the comparison
01:11:42 ◼ ► shown that it does a bunch of useful things. It's just a question of what is the best way
01:11:50 ◼ ► Honestly, I think Apple's answer to WWC was pretty good. We talked about this on the WWDC
01:11:55 ◼ ► show. Apple did have a different angle on it. They are leveraging their strengths. They
01:12:00 ◼ ► are trying to maintain their values while implementing AI, but they are not shying away
01:12:04 ◼ ► from the term and they are trying to get as much value out of it for the customer as possible
01:12:15 ◼ ► are not directly calling it AI, they are calling it Apple Intelligence, which is interesting
01:12:21 ◼ ► for lots of reasons, but I think one area that will be interesting to see how this plays
01:12:25 ◼ ► out over time is by calling it Apple Intelligence, it better work. Because imagine how bad that
01:12:42 ◼ ► good. Imagine if Siri was called "Apple Intelligence" all these years. It would have a pretty bad
01:12:46 ◼ ► reputation. So I think naming it that is both pretty good marketing, but also that's a bold
01:13:06 ◼ ► answers to things or performs well. They have set the bar very high by putting their name
01:13:12 ◼ ► so prominently on it. So I hope it works for them, I hope it plays out. Time will tell.
01:13:22 ◼ ► to the Apple name, but eventually it got okay. So I don't know, it's the old joke, the example
01:13:29 ◼ ► of an oxymoron is military intelligence. Hopefully Apple Intelligence is not the punchline to
01:13:41 ◼ ► valuable trove of information that can be accessed by the user and so could be vulnerable
01:13:45 ◼ ► to exploitation. It would be disastrous if some bad actor gained access to it, but don't
01:13:50 ◼ ► you all have the same arguments or don't all the same arguments apply to other things like
01:14:01 ◼ ► Yeah, to be fair, recall was stored in plain text and then they fixed that. But yeah, having
01:14:19 ◼ ► place the most secure one place. Part of the reason iCloud Keychain exists is because Apple
01:14:24 ◼ ► also values making one big secure thing and making sure it's implemented right and securely.
01:14:36 ◼ ► some secret to be stored somewhere, put it in iCloud Keychain. It's accessible to applications,
01:14:41 ◼ ► you can use it in a browser, it's used everywhere. In cloud parlance, it's called a secret store.
01:14:48 ◼ ► There are whole companies that have businesses making secret stores for you. Put all your
01:14:59 ◼ ► that if iCloud Keychain gets hacked or there's some flaw or whatever and someone gets access
01:15:09 ◼ ► email account, which is probably not that secure because your email password maybe isn't
01:15:13 ◼ ► that great, they can just use the forgot password links on most of the websites and reset all
01:15:21 ◼ ► stuff like your bank. It's going to be like some shoe store that requires two-factor authentication
01:15:34 ◼ ► difficult. But the recall database was egregious because all the stuff that went into iCloud
01:15:42 ◼ ► secure enclave. So even if you have access to RAM, you can't read this information because
01:15:46 ◼ ► this is in the secure enclave, which is not accessible to regular programs from RAM. Apple
01:15:50 ◼ ► has worked really hard to make iCloud Keychain as secure as possible from the world and even
01:16:00 ◼ ► So yeah, that's part of the trade-offs of security. We always talk about the convenience
01:16:05 ◼ ► and security trade-off. The other trade-off is should I have one really secure place that
01:16:13 ◼ ► individual places? And I think the one really secure place, despite the concentration of
01:16:17 ◼ ► data, is the better strategy because it's so hard to make something secure. Even a company
01:16:22 ◼ ► the size of Apple does well to essentially make a secret store and have a dedicated team
01:16:31 ◼ ► to letting like, oh the mail team will come up with its secret store and the notes team
01:16:34 ◼ ► will come up with its secret store and the Safari team will come up with its secret store,
01:16:37 ◼ ► which maybe it's the best one in the company. But like, have a single place and put the
01:16:43 ◼ ► team on that because having a bunch of little ones is just going to mean you're going to
01:16:51 ◼ ► secure. That's my opinion now. If iClogCheatChains gets 100% broken and my life gets destroyed,
01:16:57 ◼ ► I mean it still would have been my opinion, but I think the odds are lower that that happened
01:17:10 ◼ ► privacy first company? We know that Android isn't due to Google being the world's biggest
01:17:15 ◼ ► advertising company. In recent years, Microsoft has been evolving Windows to display ads and
01:17:19 ◼ ► track users. A few years ago, Apple was consistently and constantly emphasizing privacy. However,
01:17:24 ◼ ► with Apple now earning more from ads, can we still expect them to uphold their commitment
01:17:28 ◼ ► to privacy or will they compromise it?" That's a good question. I mean, they've kind of,
01:17:50 ◼ ► not private? I don't know, but it's just kind of icky? I don't know. What do you fellas
01:17:55 ◼ ► think? We have already seen exactly how Apple compromises its standards for advertising.
01:18:03 ◼ ► Because look, the reality is like most people don't want ads, and so almost any ad-based
01:18:09 ◼ ► business is having to form some kind of compromise with the product quality or the user experience
01:18:20 ◼ ► an ad company. I think lots of other Google products have severe privacy problems, especially
01:18:26 ◼ ► the way they treat their dumb login prompts around the web these days. I mean, those are
01:18:32 ◼ ► just massive disrespect of the web experience. Again, like I've said this before, the way
01:18:44 ◼ ► That's how Google views the entire web. Google thinks the entire web is theirs to do whatever
01:19:09 ◼ ► them doing that kind of abuse on Android specifically. I think that's more of a Google on the web
01:19:13 ◼ ► problem, not Google on Android problem. Anyway, so going back to Apple and privacy here, I
01:19:18 ◼ ► think we have seen exactly how Apple compromises their standards in the name of increasing
01:19:25 ◼ ► revenue through things like ads. Whether that's ad money directly, but things like App Store
01:19:30 ◼ ► search ads, or whether it's using cross-promotion within their products to try to promote their
01:19:37 ◼ ► services which is kind of like ads, kind of different. So that'll be things like the promos
01:19:42 ◼ ► in the settings screen when you haven't finished setting up your phone. Like, "Oh, do you want
01:19:54 ◼ ► you endlessly. Or they'll send notifications from their apps that you never get permission
01:20:07 ◼ ► will shamelessly promote upsells everywhere, all over their platforms. So that is a massive
01:20:14 ◼ ► compromise. But it's a compromise in user experience and respect for the users and respect
01:20:20 ◼ ► for their own products and respect for themselves. But it is not a compromise in privacy. So
01:20:25 ◼ ► obviously you can tell by the way I'm phrasing this, I'm not a fan of this practice at all.
01:20:34 ◼ ► now taken it upon themselves, and Microsoft is again a good example of this, I think they
01:20:38 ◼ ► go even too far with it, but like it is now acceptable for general purpose computing platforms
01:20:50 ◼ ► platform. Apple is not the only person doing this, they're not the only company doing this,
01:20:59 ◼ ► that they're not, which is sad. They really should raise their standards in that department
01:21:15 ◼ ► the crap out of users, they will bother users, they will harass people, they will put ads
01:21:20 ◼ ► and promos and interstitials and notifications up to promote their own stuff or to drive
01:21:24 ◼ ► their own services revenue or to promote upsells or sell more Apple Care or sell more Apple
01:21:28 ◼ ► Music or whatever else. But they're not actually doing that in a way that invades privacy.
01:21:42 ◼ ► tracking transparency, which is really good for privacy for the user and actually helps
01:21:48 ◼ ► destroy other people's ad models, which is its own antitrust potential issue over there.
01:21:55 ◼ ► That's kind of a thorny issue, there's a lot of detail to that that I'm not going to get
01:22:09 ◼ ► other small, annoying ways. Yeah, that's why Apple, you know, Apple making more money from
01:22:14 ◼ ► ads. Apple, it's not just that their heart isn't into ads. To do advertising in the way
01:22:20 ◼ ► that makes the most money requires an invasion of privacy that Apple will not do, right?
01:22:30 ◼ ► Apple will track you across all of its own platforms. And to Marco's point, Google thinks
01:22:34 ◼ ► the entire web is its platform, so it will track you across the entire web and that makes
01:22:37 ◼ ► perfect sense to them. But like, you know, Apple does have platforms that it owns. Google
01:22:45 ◼ ► willing to do that. So when it does sell ads, it can't sell ads as well as Facebook and
01:22:50 ◼ ► Google because it doesn't have the kind of privacy invasive tracking and targeting that
01:23:07 ◼ ► information and they don't sell that information. They anonymize everything in their own services.
01:23:11 ◼ ► They don't want to know stuff about you. And so the parts of Apple that do have to sell
01:23:19 ◼ ► pay for. It's an anemic, less powerful interface because the whole rest of the company says,
01:23:25 ◼ ► yeah, you can't have that information. It's probably difficult to run an ad platform inside
01:23:33 ◼ ► information isn't available to you. Even if Apple itself tracks it, I would imagine they
01:23:37 ◼ ► wouldn't give it up to third parties because they know once you give it up to third parties,
01:23:40 ◼ ► third parties will do things with it that Apple doesn't agree with. So I do think Apple
01:23:44 ◼ ► is still for the most part holding strong on all their privacy stuff. But when it comes
01:23:49 ◼ ► to Apple looking at itself, oh, these aren't ads. We're just trying to tell you about the
01:24:00 ◼ ► TV Plus and the shows that are available on it. When Apple doesn't add for Apple TV Plus
01:24:07 ◼ ► got a service. They paid a lot of money to make those shows. They should advertise. They
01:24:11 ◼ ► advertise on television. They advertise in magazines. They advertise in their own materials.
01:24:14 ◼ ► I give them a pass on that. It's stuff like the Apple equivalent of whatever one complains
01:24:22 ◼ ► there. The Apple equivalent of that is Apple trying to upsell you in the settings screen.
01:24:27 ◼ ► Granted, it's all Apple stuff. You're not seeing an ad for like a mortgage lender inside
01:24:44 ◼ ► be struck there. Apple does have to let you know about the things that are available to
01:25:04 ◼ ► because you got to pay money or whatever." I think Apple has to do stuff like that. Not
01:25:12 ◼ ► one has to like, "Oh, someone's forcing them." I think it's just good business. Despite the
01:25:18 ◼ ► fact that some people are annoyed by it, letting people know about the products and services
01:25:21 ◼ ► you offer is a part of being a good business. It's just a question of when, how often, where,
01:25:27 ◼ ► what context. Sometimes the context is uncomfortable, like you just filled your phone. That is an
01:25:38 ◼ ► appropriate. Too annoying or whatever, but the people who run Apple Pay probably lobbied
01:25:43 ◼ ► hard to the other executives to say, "Look, we got to be in there because otherwise we're
01:25:46 ◼ ► not going to hit our numbers for blah, blah, blah, blah." That's, again, not privacy invasive,
01:25:50 ◼ ► but annoying. This is a multifaceted angle and sometimes people lump it all into privacy.
01:25:55 ◼ ► Technically, there are distinctions, but from a user experience perspective, people always
01:26:06 ◼ ► given the choice between like, like there's another EU case about Facebook saying, "You
01:26:10 ◼ ► can use Instagram for free and we'll track you or you can pass money and we won't track
01:26:17 ◼ ► to be tracked." And there are a few people who are really genuine about that and change
01:26:26 ◼ ► many consequences that most people choose not to do it, right? Privacy invasion, I think
01:26:32 ◼ ► people can feel more acutely, like if they knew that anyone in the world could find out
01:26:36 ◼ ► what they had for breakfast yesterday, that's an invasion of privacy. And even though it's
01:26:39 ◼ ► probably, you don't, you know, I didn't have anything super secret for breakfast, you don't
01:26:42 ◼ ► want the world knowing that. And if you knew they could know that by like going to an ad
01:26:51 ◼ ► individual people based on the magic of computers and data aggregation and various other signals.
01:26:57 ◼ ► That's one of the reasons everyone is convinced that their phones are listening to them because
01:27:01 ◼ ► it's sort of the low tech, non-technological explanation of how would somebody know this
01:27:06 ◼ ► about me, they must have been listening. So they just personify the phone and say, "How
01:27:16 ◼ ► don't need to use the microphones. They would if they could, but they don't need to, right?
01:27:21 ◼ ► So like, and it's, people don't understand how that mechanism works, so they just think
01:27:25 ◼ ► that, you know, it's been eavesdropping on them, but it's so much more complicated than
01:27:28 ◼ ► that. So, you know, that's why it all gets lumped together. It's like your actual privacy
01:27:34 ◼ ► of like other companies not knowing stuff about you that you don't want to know is actually
01:27:37 ◼ ► separate from how annoyed you are at ads that are thrown in your face, which is separate
01:27:44 ◼ ► circles about this. Sorry, Steven, but I would say my answer is that I think Apple still
01:27:59 ◼ ► to our members who support us directly. You can join at atp.fm/join. One of the big benefits
01:28:05 ◼ ► of membership is we do a bonus topic every week now called ATP Overtime. This week, the
01:28:17 ◼ ► contacts and things like that. It's an interesting issue that I think people don't generally
01:28:28 ◼ ► Apple could go from there, certain considerations they should have for dealing with death and
01:28:33 ◼ ► their features. So it's kind of a bummer, but I think it'll be an interesting conversation.
01:28:36 ◼ ► So that's ATP Overtime happening right after the show. For members, you can join it and
01:29:55 ◼ ► This tiny little closet closed in here with a dog for extra body heat and a 2019 Mac Pro
01:30:23 ◼ ► the mini split fan would probably be like right on the other side of this wall, I could
01:30:31 ◼ ► No, they're really like the condenser or compressor or whatever it is, those things for them,
01:30:35 ◼ ► the outside part is also really quiet. Like if it's just a one room size one especially,
01:30:47 ◼ ► What do you think is going to happen? Do you think your house is just going to fall down
01:30:59 ◼ ► buy that house in this globally warmed world when you don't have any sort of air conditioning
01:31:13 ◼ ► The number of houses in our neighborhood that have air conditioning has gone up over time
01:31:16 ◼ ► but it would shock you how low it is, obviously in Virginia every place has air conditioning
01:31:25 ◼ ► as old England, it's not as bad as old England in terms of air conditioning penetration but
01:31:31 ◼ ► the number is surprisingly low, when I left Long Island, pretty much every house had air
01:31:45 ◼ ► graduated high school in western Connecticut where there was no air conditioning in the
01:32:02 ◼ ► the brand new ones that were suite style did have air conditioning and everyone was very
01:32:06 ◼ ► jealous but generally speaking there was no air conditioning in the dorms and to be fair
01:32:09 ◼ ► it was in the mountains, well to a degree and so it did get relatively cool most nights
01:32:22 ◼ ► like the dorms like if you're a freshman and you're coming in which dorm should I pick?
01:32:25 ◼ ► I think one or two of them have air conditioning and the rest of them don't because the assumption
01:32:42 ◼ ► Yeah, like old England it takes a while for people to get over the idea of like look it
01:32:52 ◼ ► Sometimes and hey I was, none of my dorms, my freshman dorm for sure was not air conditioned
01:33:01 ◼ ► even in Boston it gets hot in the dorms and you know then the winter comes you don't have
01:33:17 ◼ ► I can link to that Technology Connections video if you want to learn a lot of heat pumps
01:33:20 ◼ ► Air conditioners have always been heat pumps so are refrigerators this is not new technology
01:33:23 ◼ ► it's existed for many many decades but they're getting more popular because they're really
01:33:27 ◼ ► efficient and again if you want to see in that video that we'll link the reason they're
01:33:32 ◼ ► efficient is because they don't you know produce heat for example when heating in the winter
01:34:00 ◼ ► produce heat or cool it moves it from one place to another so all it has to do is expand
01:34:05 ◼ ► the energy to move it so you can have an efficiency it's called like a COP coefficient of something
01:34:31 ◼ ► reverse the new trend is for essentially what something that looks like a window unit air
01:34:37 ◼ ► conditioner have you all seen the window unit air conditioner lets you like close the window
01:34:44 ◼ ► seen this yeah it's like a imagine a window unit air conditioner but put a slot in it and
01:34:49 ◼ ► obviously it's not all the slot doesn't go away to the bottom there's like a little thin
01:34:57 ◼ ► way anyway that's been around for ages I don't know how good those are I've never had one
01:35:20 ◼ ► hanging on the outside of your house and half of it is hanging on the inside of your house
01:35:23 ◼ ► right and then you can put your window down almost all the way same type of deal but they're
01:35:26 ◼ ► huge right they're like the size of the inside portion is the size of like a radiator and
01:35:33 ◼ ► the outside portion is often even bigger right this is a way to add heating and cooling more
01:35:39 ◼ ► efficiently to things like apartment buildings so in every single window in an apartment
01:35:42 ◼ ► building you hang one of these big U shaped things like it's not like just a window unit
01:35:46 ◼ ► that you put in and out it's a permanent part of the infrastructure but if you have a really
01:35:51 ◼ ► old building and you're using like steam heater radiators or whatever and you want to like
01:35:54 ◼ ► refurbish it this is in theory a less expensive way to do it to put one of these units in
01:35:58 ◼ ► every single room you often see them in like hotel rooms where there's that annoying thing
01:36:01 ◼ ► on the wall that does both heating and cooling I'm assuming those are also heat pumps kind
01:36:05 ◼ ► of a built in type of thing anyway they're really kind of scary looking and kind of cool
01:36:10 ◼ ► looking but I endorse this technology because you can use it for like a whole house heat
01:36:14 ◼ ► pump or you know something that's built into your basement and just has like the little
01:36:23 ◼ ► in apartment buildings without having to replumb the whole building or whatever or else those
01:36:31 ◼ ► radiators because the actual radiator is sitting in front of the window and you can't hang
01:36:34 ◼ ► a unit like that down into it but heat pumps are great houses in New England don't need
01:36:39 ◼ ► things like that apartment buildings you're right that's a it's a great use for apartment
01:36:43 ◼ ► buildings houses in New England can just install split units you don't need to put anything
01:36:48 ◼ ► in the windows you can let the windows be windows you can let them be closed and sealed
01:37:03 ◼ ► great system everything you said but heat pumps is correct every modern split unit that's
01:37:18 ◼ ► hardware and it's a very cheap difference it's basically like a reversing valve or something
01:37:26 ◼ ► if you are buying a new method of air conditioning for your house whether it's wall split units
01:37:32 ◼ ► or whether it's like a central thing central air conditioner spend the extra very small
01:37:36 ◼ ► amount of money if there even is a difference for you and get one that can also heat because
01:37:41 ◼ ► again it's so simple it's it's usually it's it's either no cost difference or it's like
01:37:54 ◼ ► option but as john was saying like whatever you whatever impression you might have about
01:37:58 ◼ ► electric heat being like super expensive or whatever that's because it was using the old
01:38:06 ◼ ► you know 100% heating and that's it but heat pumps you know as john was saying like you
01:38:13 ◼ ► get more out of them than you put into them in terms of heat because it steals heat from
01:38:16 ◼ ► the outside world yes even in the winter yes even when it's like zero degrees outside they
01:38:21 ◼ ► still work because they can still steal heat from the zero degree air and make your house
01:38:27 ◼ ► warm that still works and i can tell you this because now i am 100% heat pump all of my
01:38:33 ◼ ► heat and cooling comes from central heat pumps and it is great like because you know you
01:38:40 ◼ ► have obviously a forced air you have some downsides of forced air heat but the way people
01:38:45 ◼ ► always say like it's so dry that's not true everything you know about humidity is probably
01:38:50 ◼ ► wrong forced air central heat is actually the easiest kind to humidify because you just
01:39:08 ◼ ► compared to the old ways of doing it then you can you have more energy options available
01:39:15 ◼ ► sign up for one of those like various ways to get renewable energy to your house through
01:39:24 ◼ ► little bit extra through your utility company and they'll they'll give you wind power instead
01:39:29 ◼ ► or whatever it is like you you have a lot more options there so it's something to really
01:39:38 ◼ ► to have some kind of like oil or gas as backup heat like make the heat pump your primary
01:39:47 ◼ ► you need it trust me it's great and it's it's certainly you know a lot better in terms of
01:39:58 ◼ ► like energy options it's way more efficient and way more people should be using heat pumps
01:40:14 ◼ ► like you mentioned like how how low a temperature can they handle even within just like the
01:40:17 ◼ ► past five years the lowest temperature and the most efficient heat pump like that record
01:40:22 ◼ ► is being broken all the time they're getting more efficient they can go down to into the
01:40:31 ◼ ► the united states heat pump can do everything for you and in the places where you need supplemental
01:40:38 ◼ ► chat the thing i remember seeing on this whole house you know decades ago which is really
01:40:41 ◼ ► cool but also super expensive for just a geothermal heat pump where it steals heat from the ground
01:40:46 ◼ ► they build they dig a gigantic hole in your property which is where all the money is because
01:40:51 ◼ ► like the ground may freeze down to x number of feet but if you just keep digging eventually
01:40:56 ◼ ► you get down to ground that is above freezing like all the time and during the winter when
01:41:00 ◼ ► it's negative a bazillion degrees you have essentially an infinite source of above freezing
01:41:11 ◼ ► now i have to dig a gigantic hole and deal with all that cost or whatever but heat pumps
01:41:15 ◼ ► that work with just in the air like air conditioners and you know air conditioners running in reverse
01:41:24 ◼ ► ones yet but they cost so much less so that's why they're so popular and lots of the government
01:41:29 ◼ ► programs like those things in apartment uses like government programs subsidizing those
01:41:32 ◼ ► to say we want like all of new york city to be more efficient they're using you know fossil
01:41:55 ◼ ► just put one in every single unit or whatever we'll see how this works out because again