00:00:25 ◼ ► Oh congratulations! So exciting! More vaccines open up to me. I think I have to get that one twice.
00:00:32 ◼ ► Yeah, do you have a party for that? That's fun. If you haven't had chickenpox what you get instead is
00:00:37 ◼ ► the chickenpox vaccine that prevents you from ever getting chickenpox. But too late for old people.
00:00:53 ◼ ► follow-up. This is so funny to me in a good way. I almost didn't talk about this because I
00:01:02 ◼ ► and so on and so forth. And this actually got quite a bit of traction both in terms of feedback
00:01:07 ◼ ► and some other stuff which we'll talk about in a minute. But we have, thanks to the magic of
00:01:13 ◼ ► friend of the show, Guy Rambo. And you might know Guy because of AirBuddy which does a lot of really
00:01:20 ◼ ► fancy and fun Bluetooth stuff with your Mac and other devices. Also what was the name of the
00:01:25 ◼ ► keyboard silencer thing that we've been talking about on and off for the last few weeks?
00:01:28 ◼ ► Is it Keyboard Buddy? Is everything Buddy? I think that's right. I think it is Keyboard
00:01:31 ◼ ► Buddy or something like that. It's a very friendly category of software. It is very friendly and so
00:01:35 ◼ ► is Guy. Anyway thanks to Guy we have actually some sample audio that we can play for you. And thanks
00:01:42 ◼ ► to Marco it should play not only for John and I but more importantly for those of you listening,
00:01:46 ◼ ► even those of you listening live. So we're going to go through a bunch of feedback. And the funny
00:01:52 ◼ ► thing about this feedback is I am pretty darn confident that we have discovered the genesis of
00:01:59 ◼ ► one of the, or actually two of the noises, one of which I was talking about, one of which I wasn't.
00:02:03 ◼ ► But there's yet another noise that I'm still not sure what the genesis, what the purpose is for
00:02:08 ◼ ► this noise. Let me get to the feedback. Zach says, "I have the same model of AirPods Pro as Casey and
00:02:13 ◼ ► I feel like there was a firmware update in the last few months that introduced a new noise because I
00:02:17 ◼ ► never heard it before." Which tracks what I was experiencing as well. "It sounds a lot like what
00:02:22 ◼ ► Casey described. Turns out that noise is to let you know that the case has 40% or less battery left.
00:02:28 ◼ ► You can turn off case charging sounds but then you don't get the chime when it starts charging."
00:02:32 ◼ ► I think, I am not saying this with confidence, but I believe that this is what Marco will play
00:02:38 ◼ ► for you now, which is, so that like trailing off noise is I think the case saying, "Hey, I need to
00:02:49 ◼ ► be charged now, please." And there's actually a little bit of knowledge-based articles that we can
00:02:54 ◼ ► talk, or that we'll talk about in a moment that indicates that there is a noise that does this,
00:02:59 ◼ ► but doesn't indicate which noise does this. I'll tell you, I've heard this noise for, you know,
00:03:03 ◼ ► years now occasionally. I never assumed that's what it meant. It might be what it means, but I
00:03:08 ◼ ► have just, I just, oh, I put my AirPods in the case sometimes, I guess. Actually, before you go
00:03:14 ◼ ► on, let me just address something that Zach pointed out that a lot of other people point out as well,
00:03:17 ◼ ► that you can turn off case charging sounds, right? This annoys me so much, I think, about AirPods,
00:03:24 ◼ ► and I think I complained about it before, and I will do it again. Whenever I read anything like
00:03:28 ◼ ► this, like, "Oh, there's some setting in AirPods, I should go change that," because I was like,
00:03:32 ◼ ► "You know what? I don't really benefit from the case charging noises. I should probably just turn
00:03:36 ◼ ► them off." But guess what? You can't, unless the AirPods are connected to your phone, and that
00:03:43 ◼ ► drives me insane. It's like Apple, just give me the UI, and then the next time they connect,
00:03:48 ◼ ► set the settings in. So I have to go get the AirPods, put them in my ear, open up the phone,
00:03:54 ◼ ► "Oh, there's my AirPods," and now I can turn off case charging now. So anyway, if you don't feel
00:03:58 ◼ ► like you benefit from hearing noises from your case, which I don't think I do because I'm pretty
00:04:02 ◼ ► good about keeping things charged, you can turn it off, but you do have to connect your AirPods,
00:04:06 ◼ ► and then the AirPods show up at the top of all of your settings, and you can dig into them,
00:04:09 ◼ ► and you can find this. - That is very true, and there actually will be a link in the show notes
00:04:14 ◼ ► about where you can do this, if I'm not mistaken. But Marco, if you wouldn't mind playing that same
00:04:19 ◼ ► one one more time, please. So that's one of them, which we believe to be the case is mostly
00:04:26 ◼ ► discharge sound, but there's another one, and this one, I'm still not entirely clear what this is.
00:04:31 ◼ ► Marco, if you please. I think that might mean that there's some sort of "I'm not charging"
00:04:38 ◼ ► situation going on. - Yeah, like one of the AirPods has poor contact or something. - Yeah,
00:04:42 ◼ ► that sounds like an error. - We all agree, and I think that's what it is, but I've heard in red
00:04:48 ◼ ► no specific confirmation that that's the case. That's just a theory. But that being said,
00:04:53 ◼ ► Tom French writes, "Hey Casey, I think the sad sound your case makes is telling you that the
00:04:56 ◼ ► case charges below some level needs to be charged. I find this helpful to not end up with
00:05:00 ◼ ► uncharged AirPods because I forgot to charge the case. It may be the same sad sound the AirPods
00:05:05 ◼ ► make when their batteries are low, but I'm not sure." - It's not. - It's not. "The orange light,
00:05:09 ◼ ► when nothing is in the case, tells you it is not fully charged. Green indicates fully charged.
00:05:15 ◼ ► Orange with AirPods in the case tells you the AirPods are still charging. Green tells you the
00:05:20 ◼ ► AirPods are fully charged. I was aware of the orange and green for when the AirPods were in
00:05:26 ◼ ► the case. I didn't realize that if you do the same motion, if you open the case while the AirPods are
00:05:31 ◼ ► in your ears or just out of the case, I suppose, that the light now serves double duty as the case
00:05:38 ◼ ► status, which was a bit of news to me." - Continuing on, Ian Williamson writes, "You reminded me of a
00:05:42 ◼ ► noise that I've been meaning to investigate with my AirPods Pro 2, recorded here when I put one
00:05:46 ◼ ► AirPod back in the case with the other. You can hear the sad charging noise overlaid with the case
00:05:51 ◼ ► closing snap, but about 15 seconds later you can also hear what appears to be a diagnostic sound
00:05:55 ◼ ► coming from the AirPods inside the case. It was driving me mad for a while as I kept hearing the
00:05:59 ◼ ► sound, but I couldn't figure out where it was coming from. So I'm gonna have Marco play this in
00:06:03 ◼ ► just a moment. I will tell you that by no fault of Marco's, this is a little bit shrill, so if you
00:06:08 ◼ ► have the ability to turn your volume down just for a moment I might recommend it. So Marco, why don't
00:06:12 ◼ ► you play it like twice please if you don't mind? This is apparently a sound that's played only when
00:06:21 ◼ ► the case is closed, only when the AirPods are in the case, and this is quoting from a Knowledge
00:06:25 ◼ ► Based article that we'll put in the show notes, "To help ensure that your AirPods, microphones,
00:06:29 ◼ ► and speakers are operating at their best, for example to help provide high quality hearing test
00:06:32 ◼ ► results, your AirPods may periodically play a quiet chime when they're in their charging case."
00:06:38 ◼ ► I have heard this from time to time, had not a damned idea what the hell it was, and so I am very
00:06:44 ◼ ► thankful for Ian Williamson and others who have written in with this. This was not one of the
00:06:49 ◼ ► noises I was talking about last week, but I am genuinely happy to know what exactly this is. So
00:06:55 ◼ ► again, we'll put a link to Ian's little video recording on Mastodon in the show notes, as well
00:07:00 ◼ ► as the Knowledge Based article that mentions this. Then as John had mentioned earlier, you can turn
00:07:06 ◼ ► off the charging sounds, and there's also some information about the light. This is a different
00:07:11 ◼ ► Knowledge Based article, which we also put in the show notes quoting from that, "When your AirPods
00:07:14 ◼ ► aren't in your case, the light shows the status of your case. Green means fully charged," which I
00:07:18 ◼ ► well thought earlier, "and amber, or what I called orange, means less than one full charge remains,"
00:07:23 ◼ ► which I did not know until I read this. That was very useful. This ended up getting picked up by
00:07:29 ◼ ► MacRumors, and so we actually inspired an entire article on MacRumors, and it's so wild for me
00:07:34 ◼ ► personally, because again, this is a thing I was barely even going to bother talking about. And
00:07:38 ◼ ► then Julie Clover made an article out of it on MacRumors, and so among other things, Julie writes,
00:07:46 ◼ ► AirPod sounds were discussed on," what's now last week's ATP podcast. Then finally, somebody who
00:07:53 ◼ ► listens to the show who goes by Patch said, "After listening to your most recent episode, I put
00:07:57 ◼ ► together AirPodNoises.net, a super simple site that has the various AirPod noises you can go
00:08:02 ◼ ► through and play to work out what they are. The only one I believe I'm missing at the moment is
00:08:05 ◼ ► the new shake head and nod head sounds from AirPods Pro 2 and AirPods 4, but I will hopefully
00:08:10 ◼ ► add those soon." And actually, Patch at the time, or last I looked, it doesn't have a couple of
00:08:16 ◼ ► these noises that we talked about earlier today, but I don't know, maybe Patch will slice and dice
00:08:20 ◼ ► them out of the recorded version of this episode, I don't know. But for the day-to-day noises, this
00:08:25 ◼ ► is what I was hoping to see on Apple's website, and I didn't. So, Patch, thanks for rescuing Apple.
00:08:31 ◼ ► Yeah, Apple hasn't figured out how to play audio on the web yet, but they'll get to it.
00:08:38 ◼ ► Yes. Right. But anyway, thank you to everyone, thank you to Guy, thank you to Marco for being
00:08:44 ◼ ► DJ for me, and thank you to everyone for writing in. This had a lot more traction, like I said,
00:08:47 ◼ ► than I realized, which makes me feel good that I'm not the only dope in the world. So, go team.
00:08:57 ◼ ► This one snuck in after we recorded, I saw this news, so I think we just missed it at recording
00:09:02 ◼ ► time. I don't know why these guys don't get all their announcements done all at once, but they
00:09:06 ◼ ► don't. They tend to trickle out over the course of CES, so I think this is probably the last one.
00:09:10 ◼ ► This is from Hisense, a Chinese television manufacturer, usually known for making not-so-expensive
00:09:15 ◼ ► displays with very impressive specs. They're kind of an upstart. Anyway, they have a television,
00:09:22 ◼ ► which I believe is called the 116UX. That was the name that stuck on the plate underneath it on its
00:09:27 ◼ ► display, but a lot of the videos that we will link in the show just don't actually say the name of
00:09:31 ◼ ► the TV. But anyway, it's as the name might imply, a 116-inch television. It is very large. Its
00:09:37 ◼ ► innovation is what they are calling, what they are branding, "trichroma LED backlight," which is,
00:09:45 ◼ ► as the name sounds, a backlight that uses three different colors. Now, with a regular mini-LED TV
00:09:52 ◼ ► or mini-LED screen in your MacBook Pro or whatever, what they mean is that the backlight, instead of
00:09:56 ◼ ► being just one big giant light, is a bunch of smaller lights. And usually the more the better,
00:10:01 ◼ ► because you want those backlight regions to be small, because the way it works is it turns on
00:10:05 ◼ ► the backlight regions behind the areas of the screen that are lit up and turns them off or
00:10:09 ◼ ► turns them down below the areas that are darker. The screen has millions of tiny little pixels on
00:10:14 ◼ ► it. The backlight, maybe there's hundreds, thousands, ten thousands, but the screen has
00:10:19 ◼ ► millions. So the backlights are maybe one inch by one inch or one centimeter by one centimeter,
00:10:23 ◼ ► or on a large television a few inches by a few inches. And obviously the pixels are very,
00:10:27 ◼ ► very tiny. This is one of the disadvantages of mini-LED screens, because you can't just light
00:10:32 ◼ ► up an individual pixel. If you want one white pixel on a field of black, you've got to light
00:10:36 ◼ ► up the entire giant backlight behind that one pixel, and then it bleeds through and yada yada.
00:10:40 ◼ ► Right? Well, the innovation on this screen is instead of the backlights being white or blue
00:10:46 ◼ ► LEDs, which is the two things they predominantly use, they use white because it's convenient,
00:10:51 ◼ ► and they use blue because they can turn the blue into the other colors in a quantum dot front layer,
00:10:57 ◼ ► and they let the blue straight through for the blue sub-pixel, and then they turn it into red
00:11:00 ◼ ► and green with quantum dots. Anyway, instead of the backlight being all one color, every backlight
00:11:06 ◼ ► region, every like square in the dynamic backlight has an ROG and a B, you know, RGB LED lights that
00:11:14 ◼ ► combine. If you turn them on, they make a white backlight, but you can also obviously make it a
00:11:18 ◼ ► colored backlight. So one thing that television manufacturers have been doing in demos,
00:11:29 ◼ ► sometime during 2024, where they basically show you a television screen where one half of the
00:11:35 ◼ ► screen is the whole screen, has the liquid crystal display layer, and then the backlight behind that,
00:11:41 ◼ ► and you know, the whole stack, right? But the other part of the screen does not have the LCD,
00:11:45 ◼ ► so there is no liquid crystal display over it, it is just the backlight regions, right? And whatever
00:11:50 ◼ ► like filters and polarizers and stuff they have, to show off how good their backlight is, right?
00:11:57 ◼ ► What they want to show you is like, okay, well here is what the screen looks like, but you know,
00:12:01 ◼ ► even just looking at the backlight, you can kind of make out what the picture is, because our backlight
00:12:06 ◼ ► regions are so small and there are so many of them, and we do such a good job of blending them,
00:12:10 ◼ ► so they do not look like little squares or whatever. See, is not that impressive? Well,
00:12:14 ◼ ► Hisense did the same thing, I do not know if it was for real, like they peeled away the physical
00:12:18 ◼ ► layers of their screen, or if they faked it by just showing video, but either way, you can follow
00:12:24 ◼ ► the links that will be in the show notes and see it. You can see on the left, the actual color
00:12:28 ◼ ► image of the screen, and on the right, what is supposedly just the backlight, and what just the
00:12:33 ◼ ► backlight looks like, is a really blurry color version of the screen, because the backlight
00:12:38 ◼ ► itself has colors in it, and that obviously makes the backlight look closer to what is on the screen,
00:12:45 ◼ ► and also helps the color purity of the individual pixels. What they claim for this is that it covers
00:12:51 ◼ ► 97% of the BT220 color space, which is a very large color space that no television has come close to
00:12:57 ◼ ► covering all of. The closest any television has ever gotten was QDOLED, which is around 75-80%
00:13:02 ◼ ► of BT220, and this is 97%, so this has the best color volume of, I was going to say before I
00:13:08 ◼ ► finished filling in these show notes, the best color volume of any consumer television, and this
00:13:12 ◼ ► television goes up to 10,000 nits, so they do not say what the window size is for that, like how
00:13:17 ◼ ► much of the screen is lit up, so this is very impressive. OLEDs still have the advantage in
00:13:22 ◼ ► terms of they can light up every individual pixel, they don't need to deal with this backlight stuff,
00:13:26 ◼ ► but the color purity they're achieving here has surpassed OLED, which is very impressive.
00:13:29 ◼ ► Then I got to the video which came out, I think just earlier today, the first one to say a price
00:13:37 ◼ ► for the television, and it's $30,000. Oh, so cool. My excitement has been severely tempered,
00:13:46 ◼ ► because I thought, look, it's a mini LED television, it's 116 inches, there have been 115,
00:13:51 ◼ ► 100-inch, 98-inch, it's not unreasonable size, and the tech that it was using, it's like, oh,
00:13:56 ◼ ► it's mini LED, but they have RGB backlights, but yes, $30,000, so that's not great. But still,
00:14:03 ◼ ► impressive showing. Samsung and TCL also have similar tech in the works. I also remember back
00:14:11 ◼ ► before I bought my first flat-screen television, I had bought a used 34-inch Sony Vega CRT that
00:14:20 ◼ ► weighed a hoe-jillion pounds, and I was going to buy my first flat-panel TV, and I was looking at
00:14:24 ◼ ► what's on the market for flat-panel TVs, and at one point I was really enamored with Sony's LED
00:14:31 ◼ ► backlit LCD televisions of the day, and I believe they also used RGB backlights. Incredibly
00:14:38 ◼ ► primitive, I think they look like actual big Christmas tree-like R, G, and a B, right? I
00:14:45 ◼ ► ended up getting a Panasonic Plasma as my first flat-screen television, but I remember this tech
00:14:50 ◼ ► existing back then as well, and like I said, Samsung and TCL are also investigating it.
00:14:54 ◼ ► I don't know why it's so expensive, it seems like if it has a similar number of backlight regions as
00:14:59 ◼ ► a regular mini LED TV, making them RGB shouldn't increase the cost that much, but whatever. Anyway,
00:15:16 ◼ ► comes with a MediaTek Pentonic 800 chipset, which finally supports four full-bandwidth HDMI 2.1
00:15:23 ◼ ► ports, just in time for HDMI 2.2 to be announced. They've done it. MediaTek now sells a part that
00:15:29 ◼ ► can handle four full-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 ports. So in theory, companies other than LG and Samsung
00:15:41 ◼ ► I'm sorry, to fill in a little background here, I'm going to go with what my understanding is,
00:15:47 ◼ ► and just interrupt me whenever you're ready. So there is a parts manufacturer that does
00:15:51 ◼ ► kind of the I/O for many, many, many different TV manufacturers, and their most common version of
00:15:58 ◼ ► this I/O board only supports one or two HDMI ports at 2.1, is that right? And then every other HDMI
00:16:04 ◼ ► port is neutered by comparison. Is that fair? It's not just their most common, their best one.
00:16:10 ◼ ► You couldn't buy one from them that supported for years. You get two of the good ports, and then two
00:16:16 ◼ ► not-so-great ports. And then, like I said, LG does their own chips, and I think Samsung does as well,
00:16:21 ◼ ► and they've supported four HDMI 2.1 ports for years, and every other company that just buys
00:16:25 ◼ ► this MediaTek chip, there wasn't anything for them to buy to support it, but this year there is.
00:16:29 ◼ ► Now, will TV makers buy the new MediaTek chip, or will they keep using the old ones? We'll see.
00:16:37 ◼ ► been announced for 2025, I hope they use the new QD OLED screen, I hope they use the new MediaTek
00:16:42 ◼ ► chip, and that will be great. But anyway, good job for Hisense for pushing the envelope, bad job for
00:16:48 ◼ ► it being $30,000. I mean, if you're going to look at $30,000 TVs, like I said, there were micro-LED
00:16:54 ◼ ► televisions where every little sub-pixel is a tiny individual LED, like that amazing screen
00:16:59 ◼ ► technology that is the best technology you can get, but those have always cost more than a car,
00:17:03 ◼ ► right? Well, if I'm going to spend $30,000, I'm going to start looking at those. I'm not going to
00:17:07 ◼ ► be looking at a mini-LED backlit thing. And supposedly they had ones of those that were...
00:17:13 ◼ ► There was one company showing them being less expensive, because those tend to be modular,
00:17:17 ◼ ► like literally one of the demos they have is you can take a piece of the screen and pull it off
00:17:22 ◼ ► like a television will be made of like six or 12 of these panels, and you can literally like remove
00:17:26 ◼ ► one while the television is running and snap it back into place, which made me think, which should
00:17:31 ◼ ► make everybody think, "Won't you see the seams between the panels?" And the answer is, "Yeah,
00:17:36 ◼ ► you kind of do see the seams, but if you pay enough money, they can essentially precisely
00:17:43 ◼ ► manufacture the parts so that like the rectangles really touch each other, you know, so that you
00:17:48 ◼ ► can't see the seams because like they're so precision engineered and like the light overglow
00:17:54 ◼ ► like hides the seam." So even in that tech, you can kind of understand why they're expensive,
00:17:58 ◼ ► because A, it has to be precisely manufactured, and B, placing however many millions of tiny
00:18:15 ◼ ► - Noted for when I inevitably have $30,000 with no other purpose than a absurdly expensive TV.
00:18:22 ◼ ► All right, tell me about DLSS, if you please. This was the, what does this acronym stand for?
00:18:31 ◼ ► I believe, from memory. DLSS4 was announced at CES. We talked about it last episode. A few people
00:18:37 ◼ ► had some feedback about it. Hampus Jensen says, "Frame generation was added as part of DLSS3."
00:18:42 ◼ ► That's what I was trying to remember last time. I'm like, this is not the first version of DLSS
00:18:45 ◼ ► to do frame generation, but the big innovation with DLSS4 is it can add like three manufactured
00:18:50 ◼ ► frames instead of just one. So anyway, continuing. Yeah, DLSS3 actually included this originally with
00:18:57 ◼ ► just one frame. And while the comparison, this is going back to Hampus, "And while the comparison to
00:19:01 ◼ ► motion smoothing on TV is apt, it's not just a dumb average between two frames that uses motion
00:19:06 ◼ ► and depth information from the game engine." And then Flunked Flank's explanation of this is that
00:19:10 ◼ ► DLSS frame generation introduced in DLSS3 is not just extrapolating the next frame based on
00:19:15 ◼ ► previous frames, but rather interpolating between rendered frames. But wait, how is it possible to
00:19:20 ◼ ► add a frame before the one being shown? Did they invent a time machine? Well, no. About half a
00:19:26 ◼ ► frame of latency is added to the display pipeline. After a frame has completed rendering, the display
00:19:30 ◼ ► pipeline delays it a half a cycle until the next frame is about halfway through rendering.
00:19:36 ◼ ► Another half cycle later, the next frame is done. DLSS runs the relatively quick interpolation step
00:19:40 ◼ ► and then immediately displays the generated frame. Another half cycle later, the frame that was
00:19:44 ◼ ► previously finished can now be displayed, rinse and repeat. So what it's doing is basically like,
00:19:48 ◼ ► it wants to interpolate between two frames. So it's got one frame ready, and then it waits a
00:19:53 ◼ ► little bit until the other frame is almost ready. And then it does an interpolation between the frame
00:19:57 ◼ ► that's ready and the frame that's half-baked to make the in-between frame. And if you just repeat
00:20:02 ◼ ► that pipeline, you get ahead of the game and you end up increasing the frame rate. There's a digital
00:20:07 ◼ ► foundry explanation video that tries to show this in action in like the Spider-Man game if you want
00:20:11 ◼ ► to see what this looks like. And then something I meant to add last time is this whole DLSS,
00:20:17 ◼ ► XDSS, I can't remember all the things. There's a bunch of different alphabet soups from every
00:20:21 ◼ ► company. This family of technologies was originally focused on letting people run games at lower
00:20:27 ◼ ► resolution, because obviously if you render fewer pixels, you can have a higher frame rate. Render
00:20:33 ◼ ► the game at lower resolution and then upscale it to fill like a 4K screen. So you render it at
00:20:37 ◼ ► 1080p, upscale it to 4K. That's what most of these technologies were originally aimed at,
00:20:43 ◼ ► because upscaling is obviously fast and easy to do. The upscaling has gotten better and better.
00:20:49 ◼ ► I believe they added machine learning upscaling many years ago, and now it would be called AI
00:20:54 ◼ ► upscaling. Like, can we upscale with a little bit more smarts than just like Photoshop, you know,
00:20:59 ◼ ► you just expand while Photoshop probably does AI upscaling too. Instead of just like bicubic
00:21:03 ◼ ► interpolation or whatever. Anyway, all these technologies, DLSS included, started kind of
00:21:09 ◼ ► doing that and still do that, still can do that. But now DLSS, you know, starting with version 3,
00:21:19 ◼ ► get better frame rates in your games without relying on, what was it, traditionally rendered
00:21:26 ◼ ► frames or brute force rendered frames. They use those same terms in the video. So these really
00:21:31 ◼ ► are terms of art in the industry of rendered frames, having all these adjectives stuck on them
00:21:37 ◼ ► to make them seem old fashioned. All right. And then with regard to Mac monitors, Henry Chen
00:21:46 ◼ ► wrote in, have you all spent any time looking into the monitor options from lesser known Chinese
00:21:50 ◼ ► manufacturers? Remind me, reminds me of about 10 years ago when you could get Korean branded
00:21:54 ◼ ► 27 inch monitors for a fraction of the price of the American ones. That said, the Korean one I
00:21:58 ◼ ► had died a few years ago and I'm still using my 27 inch Dell UltraSharp purchased around the same
00:22:05 ◼ ► time. I found a thread on MacRumors covering a lot of these and we'll link to that. And then
00:22:10 ◼ ► Henry says, here's the one I would likely get the Kuicon, K-U-Y-C-O-N G27X. And this is aesthetically
00:22:19 ◼ ► a clone of the XDR, but it's 27 inches in 5K instead of 32 in 6K. But I mean, just looking at
00:22:29 ◼ ► it, it looks good. I mean, visually I'm not offended by it at all. So please load the webpage.
00:22:35 ◼ ► I didn't put the images in the notes, so please load this webpage now and take a look at this
00:22:38 ◼ ► monitor. I'm guessing that you're going to make me feel dumb because I'm not seeing what you see.
00:22:42 ◼ ► No, like you're right. Like they're trying to, the whole idea is presumably it's using the same
00:22:46 ◼ ► panels, a 27 inch 5K panel, 600 nits, you know, like it's probably the same panel that's like in
00:22:52 ◼ ► 5K IMAX, right? Like that much I believe. And they're trying to style it to look like the XDR.
00:22:58 ◼ ► But how do they do that and offer this panel in an XDR looking case for $1,000? Because that's
00:23:06 ◼ ► the price, $1,000, which is, you know, incredibly inexpensive compared to like the studio display.
00:23:10 ◼ ► Well, let's look close, a little bit closer at this case, which is hard because they're
00:23:14 ◼ ► WebP images and if you try to open the image in a new tab, it will download it because of
00:23:17 ◼ ► some misconfiguration of their website. But anyway, take a look at the back of the monitor
00:23:22 ◼ ► with like the XDR Mac Pro looking holes in it. Yeah, that pattern is wrong. It's like the,
00:23:27 ◼ ► it's like two layers sandwiched together that are offset. So it isn't exactly, instead of what,
00:23:32 ◼ ► what's actually on the front of the Mac Pro is like, if you machined out these partial spheres,
00:23:37 ◼ ► this is just two sheets of metal with holes in them that are offset from each other. Yeah.
00:23:42 ◼ ► So it's like a, like a 2D shadow puppet version of the much, much more expensive machining that is
00:23:48 ◼ ► completely unnecessarily done on the back of the monitor that I never see because it's facing a
00:23:52 ◼ ► wall. I got it. Okay, look, I got to say, so the way I mentioned in the past that my desk is
00:23:58 ◼ ► floating in the middle of my office, so I can, I'm sometimes behind my desk. Like I have a chair back
00:24:04 ◼ ► there to take phone calls that are boring on. So I can sit there during a boring phone call and look
00:24:08 ◼ ► at the back of my Pro display XDR. And even though it's ridiculous and even though this monitor
00:24:13 ◼ ► needed no additional reasons to be expensive, it's really cool. It does look really awesome.
00:24:19 ◼ ► On the front of my Mac Pro, I look at it all the time. It's a beautiful work of art entirely
00:24:24 ◼ ► unnecessary just for aesthetics, but it's also incredibly expensive because you have to have
00:24:27 ◼ ► this thick piece of aluminum that you machine out into those incredibly complicated shapes. Like
00:24:32 ◼ ► it's just so expensive. So this is trying to look like that, but it's literally two flat pieces of
00:24:37 ◼ ► metal with holes punched in it that are just slid past each other. So clever there. Second thing,
00:24:42 ◼ ► take a look at the side view at the bottom there, because this comes with a stand, right? Looks a
00:24:47 ◼ ► lot like the XDR stand, but look a little closer. I think it's just like, there's no articulation.
00:24:54 ◼ ► Like that thing coming out of it is just a flat piece of metal. There's no hinges anywhere on the
00:25:00 ◼ ► thing. It is not height adjustable. It's not tilt adjustable. It is like, this is the position.
00:25:04 ◼ ► Does not move. I'm given an option for a height. So it comes with no stand because they copied
00:25:10 ◼ ► Apple that closely. And then regular stand is 50 bucks. It's a little bit less expensive than
00:25:15 ◼ ► Apple's. And the height adjustable stand is a hundred bucks. Right. But like the one you're
00:25:21 ◼ ► looking at the regular stand, like it looks like the XDR stand, but it does not move. Yeah. That's
00:25:26 ◼ ► gotta be. So kudos to these people for, and it's a visa mount on the back of it. So it's a
00:25:33 ◼ ► standardized thing or whatever, but like I, my faith in the quality of the casing around this
00:25:38 ◼ ► is probably low. But this is always the gamble with those things. Like the panels are made by
00:25:44 ◼ ► a small number of companies. If you know, this is actually the panel that you want, and you think
00:25:49 ◼ ► the surrounding case is aesthetically to your liking, and you think it will be reliable. And
00:25:53 ◼ ► you think like, you know, things that are, people tend not to think about until they go wrong,
00:25:58 ◼ ► Casey, like the connection of the USB-C ports in the back of the monitor to the, uh, the printed
00:26:03 ◼ ► circuit board that's inside and how, when that starts getting flaky, the whole monitor becomes
00:26:08 ◼ ► no good. Um, it's hard to judge stuff like that. Right. But anyway, yeah, there's, there are many
00:26:13 ◼ ► sort of lesser known brands for monitors that use the same panels. Uh, it's just a question of
00:26:18 ◼ ► finding one of those that is going to work out for you in the end, because there's, there's so much
00:26:23 ◼ ► more to monitor than just the panel, all that other stuff around it, including the case and the stand,
00:26:27 ◼ ► but also the power supply and the way it's designed and how the connectors connect to the
00:26:32 ◼ ► circuit board that all adds up to the sum total. That is the monitor experience. So you gotta be
00:26:36 ◼ ► a little bit careful. Additionally, Tim, when a writes, uh, with regard to the ACEs, I'd never
00:26:43 ◼ ► get it right. I always say ACEs, but I have no idea if I'm right. All I know is that my version
00:26:47 ◼ ► of ACEs is definitely wrong. Definitely. That's definitely incorrect. Uh, the ACEs PA 32QCV,
00:26:54 ◼ ► uh, which is a 32 inch, uh, same resolution CXDR, uh, 6k monitor. And again, at a glance,
00:27:01 ◼ ► this looks pretty good 1200 bucks. It's not, it's not many led. So it's just got one big backlight,
00:27:07 ◼ ► no dynamic backlight. So the black levels aren't going to be great. It's 98% P3 HDR 600. I finally
00:27:12 ◼ ► found a webpage that explains what these like display HDR 600 specs, like what it means.
00:27:16 ◼ ► Like you just glance at it and say, look, it's not going to get brighter than 600 nits,
00:27:19 ◼ ► which is fine, whatever, but we'll, we'll link to the performance criteria thing on display HDR.org.
00:27:29 ◼ ► two Thunderbolt four ports, U S it's a USB-C hub. It has a headphone jack and ambient light sensor
00:27:33 ◼ ► built in KVM 96 Watts power delivery, $1,200. I I'm assuming this is you uses the same LCD panel
00:27:41 ◼ ► as the XDR because it's 32 inches. It's the exact same resolution. Yeah. It does. It does not use
00:27:46 ◼ ► the same backlight obviously. So it's not HDR. It's not 1600 nit. It's not going to have good
00:27:50 ◼ ► black levels or whatever, but like it's the XDR panel, uh, with tons of IO on it in a plasticy
00:27:58 ◼ ► looking case, but it's $1,200. It's it's less than the studio display with no stand. And it's
00:28:03 ◼ ► basically, it's a 6k monitor. And remember the studio display also doesn't have HDR also doesn't
00:28:08 ◼ ► have a mini, uh, uh, mini led backlight also doesn't do 120 Hertz. Right. So, and ASIS is
00:28:14 ◼ ► not a fly by night brand. So this looks like the best deal I have seen for someone who just wants
00:28:19 ◼ ► 6k pixels, doesn't care about HDR and wants it from a brand that they've heard of. Yeah. This
00:28:25 ◼ ► looks, cause like this is literally like you could buy five of these for the cost of an XDR with its
00:28:31 ◼ ► stand. Like this, this entire monitor, which comes with a stand is almost, it's only a little bit
00:28:38 ◼ ► more than the stand for the produce XDR. Like, yeah, it's not going to be as good in some of the
00:28:44 ◼ ► kind of edge, some edge case specs that a lot of buyers won't care about. And it doesn't do HDR at
00:28:49 ◼ ► all. So if you want HDR, just this is not the monitor for you. Right. And, and, you know, and
00:28:52 ◼ ► look these days, every third party monitor is going to have a little bit of friction with Mac
00:28:58 ◼ ► OS. Like there's not going to be as great integration in certain ways. You know, you're not
00:29:02 ◼ ► like there's, there's going to be downsides to using non-Apple monitors as there always are.
00:29:07 ◼ ► And I feel like these days there's downsides are a little bit higher, but $1,200 for the same size
00:29:13 ◼ ► panel as the $6,000 XDR, like the same size and same resolution that like, let me, let me tell you,
00:29:20 ◼ ► I haven't moved to one of these panels a few years back. It's amazing. And when I use a 27 inch now,
00:29:27 ◼ ► it feels like I'm looking through a porthole. Like when you have this much space, like screen
00:29:32 ◼ ► space matters a lot to power users. And especially, you know, in certain use cases, but almost
00:29:38 ◼ ► everybody who's a power user can benefit from more screen space within, within, you know, up to a
00:29:43 ◼ ► certain limit of like, how big is your field of view, like physically from your eyes. And I think
00:29:48 ◼ ► 32 inches maxes it out. Like this, I feel like I can use this monitor fully without turning my head.
00:29:55 ◼ ► And it, this is about as big of a monitor as I can use without turning my head. But to have this
00:30:01 ◼ ► option, if this is good, I mean, look, we don't know yet. We don't have it. We don't know what
00:30:05 ◼ ► the experience is like using it with a Mac. But if the experience of this monitor is good,
00:30:18 ◼ ► given how frugal I am, I mean, this is probably what I would get. It's, it's, it's incredible
00:30:26 ◼ ► value for money, assuming it isn't a pile of trash. But who knows? I mean, I hope not. But
00:30:50 ◼ ► "In HP Episode 500, you wondered what the industry at large would call the dynamic island. Here's
00:30:54 ◼ ► what the phone maker OnePlus calls it." And this is from NKBHD's review of the OnePlus 13.
00:30:59 ◼ ► Somebody, maybe Jon, maybe it was Dan, put together a YouTube clip, which I very much appreciate.
00:31:13 ◼ ► that's why we were talking about it. It's like, dynamic island, what an Apple kind of, you know,
00:31:18 ◼ ► poetic name for, you know, making lemonade out of the lemons that is the giant punch out needed for
00:31:24 ◼ ► the Face ID sensor. I'm going to say dynamic island is better than Live Alert Capsules.
00:31:33 ◼ ► so clearly just a complete copy of Apple's feature. You know, Apple did this thing with their
00:31:38 ◼ ► cutout. We're doing the same thing. But we call it Live Alert Capsules. So there you go. That's
00:31:43 ◼ ► Oh, yeah. All right. Let's talk topics. And I don't know. I don't know what to make of this.
00:31:50 ◼ ► And I'm not sure I really want to talk about it, but we need to. So Tim Cook apparently donated
00:31:55 ◼ ► a million dollars to the Trump inauguration. Reading from Axios, Apple CEO, "Tim Cook will
00:32:01 ◼ ► personally donate $1 million to the President-elect Trump's inaugural committee. Sources with knowledge
00:32:06 ◼ ► of the donation tell Axios." The Verge writes, "Cook's donation follows similar commitments
00:32:10 ◼ ► from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos through Amazon, and meta as big tech
00:32:15 ◼ ► companies and executives work to curry favor with the incoming administration. Unnamed sources tell
00:32:20 ◼ ► Axios that, "Cook, a proud Alabama native, believes that inauguration is a great American tradition
00:32:26 ◼ ► and is donating to the inauguration in the spirit of unity." Sorry. I'm good. I'm good.
00:32:37 ◼ ► David Schanzer Continuing, Apple is "not expected to donate to the inauguration." And then later on,
00:32:42 ◼ ► we'll link to The Verge also where Google and Microsoft apparently are also doing the same thing.
00:32:53 ◼ ► Kevin Anthony Yeah, that's just the price that's stamped on it. Like, you know, do not pass go,
00:33:01 ◼ ► do not collect $200, donate $1 million. Everyone's just interestingly, they all decided they're
00:33:05 ◼ ► going to donate exactly $1 million to the inauguration committee. And you may be wondering,
00:33:10 ◼ ► what is donating to the inauguration, which is like the event where the person becomes president?
00:33:18 ◼ ► Why would giving money to that event be helpful or useful in any possible way? And I think before
00:33:27 ◼ ► we talk about the people doing it, that's worth considering why that's the case. It's basically
00:33:31 ◼ ► because it's a way to get money while looking like you're helping to pay for a party. And really,
00:33:37 ◼ ► what's happening is it's a sort of not money laundering, but might as well be like, like many
00:33:42 ◼ ► government things. This some amount of money is going towards this thing. And this thing is
00:33:48 ◼ ► somehow going to find a way to spend all of that money by hiring all the companies that are friends
00:33:55 ◼ ► with the incoming administration. And they will get all this money and just look at what happened
00:34:00 ◼ ► to all the money that was given to the 2016 Trump inauguration committee. It's just a way to
00:34:14 ◼ ► money to the inauguration committee is seen as a thing that is desirable. This is like, well,
00:34:23 ◼ ► whatever obscene price that my brother-in-law's DJ company is going to charge us for whatever it is
00:34:30 ◼ ► that they're supposedly doing for the inauguration or whatever. Yeah, I'll just say it's a bribe.
00:34:35 ◼ ► That's a lot faster way to say what John just said. It's just a bribe. Yeah, it's just basic.
00:34:41 ◼ ► I mean, like a lot of government stuff is like this, where it's just basic government corruption,
00:34:49 ◼ ► corruption. But every administration has some form of patronage where you give money and I hire them.
00:34:55 ◼ ► And there's this whole sections of the government that are meant to try to stop this to say,
00:35:02 ◼ ► we'll have a whole process for figuring out who wins the bid for this contract and so on and so
00:35:06 ◼ ► forth. And then the companies all involved find out how to subvert that process and make sure
00:35:10 ◼ ► their brother-in-law's company still gets the money. And the cycle goes on. But the Trump
00:35:14 ◼ ► administration in 2016 and again in 2020 is like, we don't, we dispense with the notion to even
00:35:19 ◼ ► pretend we're doing anything legitimate. It's just straight up corruption. Give us the money and it
00:35:23 ◼ ► will go to all the people we want to give it to. And we're not even going to pretend we're actually
00:35:27 ◼ ► spending it on anything for real. So yeah, it's a payoff. It's here's some money in exchange for
00:35:32 ◼ ► something. Yeah. And let me just also put another explanation point on what John just said here,
00:35:37 ◼ ► because I'll say it even more directly. To say that like this is just the nature of the game
00:35:43 ◼ ► is to do a disservice to, you know, to most of the players in this game and to the people listening,
00:35:50 ◼ ► because that kind of equivocates it with like, oh, this is just all politicians are this corrupt. And
00:35:54 ◼ ► what we saw during the first Trump administration, and there's absolutely no end in sight with now
00:36:00 ◼ ► the second one, is that they take corruption to another level. This is, it is a difference in
00:36:05 ◼ ► degree so great that it is not comparable to what almost any other US president has ever done. Like
00:36:13 ◼ ► it is a very different level of corruption. It is, first of all, right out for everyone to see. Like
00:36:20 ◼ ► there is no... It's shameless. They have no, they have no shame. There's no, they don't try to hide
00:36:25 ◼ ► anything about it. They hire their idiot son-in-law to be like an important government position for
00:36:30 ◼ ► things that has no experiences in it. It's like, I'm not even going to pretend there's a reason for
00:36:34 ◼ ► this. It's straight up corruption. What are you going to do about it? I mean, look, he was elected
00:36:40 ◼ ► by this time, a pretty good margin, despite being a convicted felon, a rapist, a traitor to our
00:36:49 ◼ ► country. I mean, there's the list of crimes is pretty severe here. And yet, you know, people
00:36:56 ◼ ► like him. So obviously, he knows he can do whatever he wants. He did last time, nothing happened. And
00:37:02 ◼ ► so he's going through the same thing again. And so now we have, getting back to the topic at hand
00:37:07 ◼ ► here, now we have all of the, well, most of the big tech people, basically just right out in the open,
00:37:17 ◼ ► giving him protection money. Like just going right in and saying, you know what, we're just going to
00:37:23 ◼ ► give him a huge amount of money here, just so we can curry favor with him. And what we see, you
00:37:29 ◼ ► know, look, I've seen a lot of people, you know, say online, oh, well, this is just shrewd business
00:37:34 ◼ ► from from Tim Cook. So you know, because they're, he's gonna, because Trump's gonna put tariffs from
00:37:38 ◼ ► things on things from China. So Tim Cook has to protect the troops and, you know, make sure that
00:37:43 ◼ ► all these thousands of people whose jobs he's responsible for, surely they can't be hit by
00:37:49 ◼ ► tariffs and from things from China. And my reaction to this is, first of all, the fact that Tim Cook
00:37:58 ◼ ► put everything in China, despite the political environment of the last couple of decades,
00:38:03 ◼ ► that is his fault, largely. Like, yes, there are certain volumes and certain entries, but
00:38:09 ◼ ► Apple could have moved slowly out of China, they could have done that sooner and more than they
00:38:16 ◼ ► have been doing that. So they're stuck there. And that's, that's on them. That's the Tim Cook era
00:38:23 ◼ ► right there, like that's on them. So that's number one, huge strategic problem that they have. And
00:38:28 ◼ ► that's right on Tim Cook. Now, number two, does he have to play ball here and literally bribe the
00:38:35 ◼ ► incoming president? First of all, will that even matter? Trump turns around and fires his gun at
00:38:41 ◼ ► whoever he wants to all the time, including people close to him. It's a waste of a million bucks, in
00:38:46 ◼ ► my opinion, because it's not, that's, if Trump wants to get that money from Apple's products,
00:38:52 ◼ ► he will. Like, if he wants to put the tariffs on, this won't matter. Number three, suppose these
00:38:59 ◼ ► tariffs actually do go into effect, which that's, I mean, that's a big if, let's be honest, it's kind
00:39:03 ◼ ► of a severe thing, but you never know with Trump. So suppose these tariffs actually happen.
00:39:08 ◼ ► Shouldn't Apple's products be hit with them? Like, if you're gonna have a tariff from products made
00:39:15 ◼ ► in China, isn't that what most Apple products are? I don't see any moral high ground for Apple to not
00:39:25 ◼ ► be tariffed the same way everybody else would be. To me, that is also morally indefensible.
00:39:32 ◼ ► So no part of this move by Tim Cook strikes me as either good for business or at all justifiable.
00:39:42 ◼ ► Tim Cook is a bullsh*t artist. He's always been a bullsh*t artist. He's a big corporation CEO.
00:39:48 ◼ ► Most of them are. That's kind of how it goes. He puts on this great show about how much he cares
00:39:54 ◼ ► about certain things, and, you know, he's not a terrible person. He does care about certain
00:39:59 ◼ ► important things. You know, his environmental, the company's environmental efforts under his
00:40:03 ◼ ► reign have been very good, and that continues in certain ways, but when it comes down to the
00:40:08 ◼ ► bottom line, he's a business CEO like every other business CEO, so when something threatens to attack
00:40:14 ◼ ► his bottom line, he's gonna do what it takes, and he does not have the courage to stand up to this
00:40:20 ◼ ► in any other way. This is a complete lack of courage. This is a complete lack of good business.
00:40:25 ◼ ► This is the result of kissing a** and bribing a new president to cover up for strategic errors
00:40:30 ◼ ► he made in the past and to protect his bottom line, screw everyone else. So I have a slightly
00:40:34 ◼ ► different take than Marco, but first I want to explain why I think Marco is so angry about it,
00:40:44 ◼ ► why are people mad about Tim Cook donating a million dollars to the president's inauguration
00:40:51 ◼ ► committee? The reason is that people who dislike everything that Trump stands for don't want to see
00:41:02 ◼ ► him get support from anybody for anything. So if the CEO of a company you like does literally
00:41:10 ◼ ► anything to try to help or support or seem to endorse in any possible way anything having to
00:41:25 ◼ ► we don't want you to smile at him, we don't want you to shake his hand, we don't want you to
00:41:32 ◼ ► just say nothing, because everything he stands for is the opposite of everything Tim Cook says
00:41:36 ◼ ► he stands for. So you'd be like, "Oh, it's not a lot of money, who cares, whatever, blah blah blah."
00:41:41 ◼ ► The whole thing is the symbolism of the gesture. We don't think that this million dollars is going
00:41:46 ◼ ► to make a big difference in the grand scheme of things. It is Apple, a company that we all care
00:41:51 ◼ ► about, a company that claims to stand for and I think does stand for, essentially the opposite of
00:41:56 ◼ ► everything Donald Trump stands for in terms of issues that people care about is giving this
00:42:04 ◼ ► money. So that's why people are mad. Now, I'm mad about it too, because I also hate everything that
00:42:10 ◼ ► Trump stands for and think it is the opposite of everything that Apple and Tim Cook stands for.
00:42:27 ◼ ► this is Apple. I think there is something to that a little bit, but come on, it's Tim Cook,
00:42:33 ◼ ► it's Apple we know. There's no getting around the fact that this is Apple. You can just say Apple,
00:42:42 ◼ ► Tim Cook in particular, I think has a reason to believe that it will be good for Apple's business
00:42:52 ◼ ► because he did the same stuff last time Trump was president. It wasn't a million dollars,
00:42:56 ◼ ► but it was that whole like, "Oh, come and stand in front of me and I'll stand next to you and smile
00:43:00 ◼ ► and listen to you say the wrong things about the Mac Pro factory." And then like whatever,
00:43:05 ◼ ► that whole PR thing where he was with Trump about the company that made the Mac Pros and stuff,
00:43:10 ◼ ► that, you know, basically kissing up Trump and trying to make him look good by standing next to
00:43:16 ◼ ► him and allowing all that to happen was supporting an administration that lots of people didn't like
00:43:21 ◼ ► and made people angry and it got Apple, in theory, not provably, a carve out in a bunch of regulations
00:43:30 ◼ ► and rules, I forget what they were, that would have hurt Apple a lot financially, but for whatever
00:43:35 ◼ ► reason, Apple was excluded from those. Interesting. So will kissing up to Trump get you a business
00:43:44 ◼ ► advantage? History has shown that it is possible, perhaps even likely, right? That's the nature of
00:43:50 ◼ ► corruption. He is a corrupt politician. Bribing corrupt politicians gets you something. That's
00:43:55 ◼ ► why they're corrupt. That's the whole point. Bribing an honest politician doesn't get you
00:44:00 ◼ ► anything. Lots of companies give money to the inaugurations and funds of lots of, you know,
00:44:05 ◼ ► that's the thing that tech companies always do. It's like, we just give money to all politicians.
00:44:08 ◼ ► People are angry about that. You can't give it to all politicians when half the politicians are
00:44:11 ◼ ► doing terrible things. But anyway, we just do that because it's just a thing that we do. But like,
00:44:16 ◼ ► in theory, if a politician thinks they at least have to pretend to be honest, they're not just
00:44:21 ◼ ► going to be like, oh, take your money and then write into the law. Everybody gets this law except
00:44:25 ◼ ► for Apple. Don't ask me why. Nah. Right? That's corruption, right? So I think Tim Cook has some
00:44:33 ◼ ► reason to believe that giving this money will get Apple an advantage because it did last time.
00:44:38 ◼ ► It's, you know, it's terrible. It is an indictment of the Trump administration. But I think there is
00:44:45 ◼ ► reason to believe that this will be a smart business move for Apple. Now, a smart business
00:44:52 ◼ ► over Apple. Marco thinks that they should, you know, take their lumps along with everybody else.
00:44:59 ◼ ► because they're made in China, they should take that because guess what? They are made in China,
00:45:04 ◼ ► right? And that should, they should just take that the way it is. That's one possible position.
00:45:09 ◼ ► The other position, which Marco said in a funny voice before, but I think is a position that has
00:45:21 ◼ ► has some historical connotations that are not positive. This was a Wikipedia article about
00:45:29 ◼ ► Charles Irwin Wilson, who was up for the nomination for Secretary of Defense some, many decades ago.
00:45:36 ◼ ► And this was back when people really actually needed to pretend to be somewhat honest. And
00:45:45 ◼ ► he was previously the CEO of General Motors. Like, you're going to be Secretary of Defense,
00:45:50 ◼ ► but you are running General Motors? Isn't that unfair? Aren't you going to have a conflict of
00:45:54 ◼ ► interest? Like between like what you want, you know, you want things that are good for General
00:45:58 ◼ ► Motors, but now you're supposed to be making decisions for the whole country, but you're not
00:46:01 ◼ ► going to, surely not, you're not going to do anything that hurts General Motors? Can you imagine
00:46:06 ◼ ► being afraid of a conflict like that, given the insane conflicts that everybody has in government,
00:46:10 ◼ ► including everybody in the, anyway, it was a different time. And his answer in the confirmation
00:46:20 ◼ ► that what's good for General Motors is also good for the United States and vice versa. So he's like,
00:46:24 ◼ ► well, you know, like, I'm not going to do things just to benefit General Motors, but General Motors
00:46:29 ◼ ► is so big and so important, that what's good for General Motors is also good for the whole country.
00:46:33 ◼ ► So I'll just do what's good for the country, and it will also be good for General Motors or vice
00:46:37 ◼ ► versa. And that was widely condemned as saying like, oh, you think, you know, the country and
00:46:43 ◼ ► General Motors are equal and just as important in each other, and so you don't even draw a distinction.
00:46:47 ◼ ► You're like, I'm just going to do what's good for General Motors, because as we all know, whatever
00:46:50 ◼ ► is good for GM is good for everybody. And the rest of the country is like, no, not, that's not the
00:46:54 ◼ ► way it works, right? But that angle on Apple is perhaps a lot more apt than it was for GM. Apple
00:47:02 ◼ ► is huge, not just in terms of the people they employ and the money they make, but also in terms
00:47:10 ◼ ► of given the current financial situation, how much of every private person's retirement who has any
00:47:17 ◼ ► kind of retirement account is unknowingly wrapped up in Apple and three other tech companies,
00:47:22 ◼ ► right? Because we all like people who have 401ks have mutual phones, and they're invested in the
00:47:27 ◼ ► stock market. And what are the big players in the stock market, like what percentage of people's
00:47:31 ◼ ► portfolios are unknowingly made up of the big tech companies? Like they don't know that because it's
00:47:37 ◼ ► a mutual fund. It's not like they're buying individual Apple or Google or Microsoft stock,
00:47:50 ◼ ► kind of like GM was back in the day. What's good for Apple is good for the country. What's bad for
00:47:55 ◼ ► Apple is bad for the country because we're so freaking big and you may not even think you have
00:47:59 ◼ ► any interest in Apple whatsoever, but guess what you kind of do? Because if we get screwed over and
00:48:03 ◼ ► we get destroyed by these tariffs, your 401k is going to go down and you're not going to understand
00:48:07 ◼ ► why. And it's because tech dominates our industry, right? That angle does exist. Now it is extremely
00:48:15 ◼ ► charitable to ascribe to Tim Cook the motivation that he wants to essentially protect the fortunes
00:48:22 ◼ ► of all the people who are financially dependent on Apple. It may be true, it may not be true. I
00:48:27 ◼ ► don't know what's in Tim Cook's heart, but practically speaking, it is a fact that if Apple
00:48:32 ◼ ► gets massively hurt financially, obviously Apple employees get hurt by that because a lot of their
00:48:41 ◼ ► he's a billionaire. He's not worried about that and no one else is. So he's not in it for his own
00:48:46 ◼ ► personal wealth or whatever, but tons of people rely financially on Apple maintaining at least
00:48:52 ◼ ► its current level of health. So, and you know, trying to protect the people who depend on Apple,
00:49:00 ◼ ► employees, investors, everyone who's got stuff on their 401k, there's something to that. Now you
00:49:06 ◼ ► could say that's not worth the price you're paying, you're enabling the evil Trump administration or
00:49:10 ◼ ► whatever, but the most charitable and noble interpretation of what he's doing is personally
00:49:18 ◼ ► sacrificing his own reputation and perhaps historically his own view and history because
00:49:24 ◼ ► if Trump turns even worse during this term, everybody doing anything to support him is going
00:49:29 ◼ ► to, they're going to go down in history as like the person who helped out this even more terrible
00:49:36 ◼ ► person, right? Personally sacrificing himself because he knows people are going to hate him
00:49:41 ◼ ► for this and they do, right? And he donated it himself rather than donating it through Apple.
00:49:47 ◼ ► And that doesn't deflect the blame from Apple because again, it's obviously an Apple donation
00:49:51 ◼ ► done for the purposes of protecting Apple. Like it's clear what it's for, but by doing it himself,
00:49:56 ◼ ► he is putting his personal reputation in the trashcan, right? For doing this in exchange for
00:50:08 ◼ ► but I honestly believe he's not doing it to protect his riches. He doesn't care about the
00:50:12 ◼ ► money for himself. He knows he's got enough money. He's going to give all his money away anyway. He
00:50:16 ◼ ► seems like a nice person. He is not someone like some of the billionaires we know who can never
00:50:22 ◼ ► feel like they have enough power and money and always have to have more. I don't think that's
00:50:27 ◼ ► Tim Cook's MO. So I think he's doing it to protect Apple. It could be argued that his tunnel vision
00:50:35 ◼ ► about protecting Apple is causing him to miss the wider picture, which will say there's protecting
00:50:39 ◼ ► Apple, but now you're enabling this terrible administration. On the other side of that,
00:50:43 ◼ ► you can say, is this amount of money going to materially affect how much evil the Trump
00:50:47 ◼ ► administration does or is it just going to enrich the brother-in-law DJ? Because in the grand scheme
00:50:51 ◼ ► of things, it's just the inauguration fund, which is going to be skimmed off of by a whole fleet of
00:50:56 ◼ ► grifters that, yeah, those people probably go off and do bad things, but honestly, they'll probably
00:50:59 ◼ ► just blow it on jet skis or whatever. So I hate this. I think everybody who is against the Trump
00:51:08 ◼ ► administration hates seeing Apple support the administration in any way, but I also feel like
00:51:13 ◼ ► I've been here before. I hated seeing Tim Cook standing next to Tim Apple in the Mac Pro factory.
00:51:18 ◼ ► I hated the Mac Pro's good name being sullied by that whole thing. Oh my gosh. Yeah. But he did get
00:51:25 ◼ ► a carve out for Apple. Is it fair that Apple has a carve out? No, it's not. It's corruption.
00:51:29 ◼ ► Is it a more defensible moral stance to not give in to that corruption and not pay the bribe?
00:51:38 ◼ ► Maybe, but morality is not just a one-dimensional thing of like, do you participate in a corrupt
00:51:43 ◼ ► system by paying off the corrupt politician or do you not? That's an easy decision. That decision
00:51:48 ◼ ► doesn't happen in a vacuum because there's also the people who all wanted to retire from Apple
00:51:53 ◼ ► this year, but when Apple's stock price gets dropped in half because Trump puts giant tariffs
00:51:56 ◼ ► on it that hit Apple, all those people can't retire anymore. What is the moral factor in
00:52:01 ◼ ► one person sacrificing his own personal million dollars and personal historical reputation in
00:52:06 ◼ ► exchange for protecting the financial fortunes of all these Apple employees? To me, that is a
00:52:11 ◼ ► really dangerous argument because once you start saying that we have to let Apple keep making as
00:52:17 ◼ ► much money as possible because if you don't let them keep making as much money as possible
00:52:21 ◼ ► through basically whatever means they deem necessary, then we're going to harm all these
00:52:26 ◼ ► people's retirement funds. It doesn't mean you need to grow without bound. It just means if
00:52:31 ◼ ► something terrible is going to happen like these China tariffs that again might not ever happen.
00:52:35 ◼ ► But anyway, if these terrible things that were threatened didn't come to pass, it was not just
00:52:39 ◼ ► a matter of growing without bound or even just maintaining. It's a matter of like massively
00:52:43 ◼ ► hurting. There's so much wrong with this, but like, you know, I think number one is like if
00:52:55 ◼ ► under the argument that this is good for people's retirement funds and the employees and everything,
00:52:59 ◼ ► it totally would be. Well, okay. But like, first of all, does Apple need any more unfair advantages?
00:53:06 ◼ ► They're a monopolist in so many areas already. Like, so for instance, like, you know, should,
00:53:15 ◼ ► I know that's, that's the nature of corruption. Yeah. They're the people with money bribe.
00:53:22 ◼ ► remarkable tablet that's made in China? Like should the remarkable tablet cost $1,500 when
00:53:27 ◼ ► the iPad is 700 because of this, you know, because they, cause they weren't big enough to make up,
00:53:32 ◼ ► to give a million dollars to Trump. Like it's the entire, like to say that the solution to
00:53:36 ◼ ► corruption is more corruption. It's not a solution to corruption, but it is trying, but what is it?
00:53:42 ◼ ► It's harm reduction. What is the, what is the least, how can I make the least amount of harm
00:53:46 ◼ ► come out of this terrible situation we're all in? No, what should happen is if these tariffs end up
00:53:50 ◼ ► ever being real, every single American who voted in or who chose not to in this past election should
00:53:58 ◼ ► feel the pain of what they voted for. Honestly. Yeah. We know how well voters are able to connect
00:54:03 ◼ ► the consequences of their vote to things that they don't like. They just really like the Trump.
00:54:15 ◼ ► Yeah. Well, we'll see how it works. Anyway, I don't, I don't support this. If, if I were
00:54:19 ◼ ► Tim Cook, I wouldn't have done it, but I'm not Tim Cook. I don't understand the, the what's it.
00:54:25 ◼ ► First of all, I don't understand what's in his heart. And second of all, I don't understand the
00:54:27 ◼ ► responsibilities he feels. What's in his heart is completely irrelevant. Well, Matt, you judge him
00:54:32 ◼ ► by his actions. Look at what he's doing. Right. But, but his actions net, net, his actions may be
00:54:38 ◼ ► reducing the total amount of harm that is, that happens during the Trump administration.
00:54:42 ◼ ► When you count the number of people times amount of harm, you know what I mean? Like he's doing
00:54:45 ◼ ► the most harm to himself and in exchange, he's protecting a whole lot of other people from
00:54:50 ◼ ► consequences. He's a cheap ass coward is what he is. Hurting competitive, but like, no, that's the,
00:54:54 ◼ ► that's the difficulty of ethical and moral decisions to deciding, you know, this, we may
00:54:58 ◼ ► discuss this in a future episode, the good of the one versus the good of the many. And how do you
00:55:02 ◼ ► balance that? Right. It's not, it's not so cut and dry. Like I, I, you know, we all hate it. We all
00:55:08 ◼ ► don't like it. I don't, I, I'm not going to come out and say it is a noble move by Tim Cook. Cause
00:55:13 ◼ ► I don't know that it's a noble move by Tim Cook, but like the con I'm not ready to say that the
00:55:17 ◼ ► consequences of it are, uh, it won't actually be better overall when you multiply the amount of harm
00:55:25 ◼ ► times the number of people it affects. And no, it's not fair. It's corrupt and terrible. Like,
00:55:29 ◼ ► I'm not saying this like, Oh, you fixed the problem. It's not fair to Sonos. It's not fair
00:55:32 ◼ ► to any, it's not fair to the people who vote. It's not fair to anything. None of this is fair.
00:55:36 ◼ ► Nothing good is happening here. It's just trying to figure out how can we minimize the harm. And
00:55:41 ◼ ► on that front, I think one of the things that you can argue is like with the slippery slope thing,
00:55:44 ◼ ► which I think is true is like, okay, well the inauguration, a million dollars personal donation,
00:55:48 ◼ ► like in the end, is that going to enable any harm that wasn't going to happen already anyway?
00:55:53 ◼ ► Probably not. But there are things that you can do later by, okay, well now I need another few
00:55:58 ◼ ► million, another few billion. I need you to do to support this nominee for this or whatever. And
00:56:02 ◼ ► you can't just say like, well, whatever bribe I give, it's fine because I'm reducing harm. Maybe
00:56:13 ◼ ► government position in exchange for Apple avoiding the tariffs because the devil incarnate is going
00:56:17 ◼ ► to, you know, do devil things, right? Like it's just like, you can't just say, Oh, no matter what
00:56:23 ◼ ► you do, it's fine because there's some good that comes of it, right? I think this is very close to
00:56:28 ◼ ► the threshold because you are giving money, but it's not a lot of money. And it's just mostly
00:56:31 ◼ ► going to be sucked up by ancillary grifters, right? And it's not, nothing bad that is going
00:56:36 ◼ ► to happen wasn't already going to happen anyway with or without this million dollars and yada,
00:56:40 ◼ ► yada, right? But it's, it is actually a slippery slope. And that's one of the things that people
00:56:44 ◼ ► hate about this. It's like, okay, well, once you've decided you're ready to bribe corrupt
00:56:47 ◼ ► politicians, when does that stop? Do you just bribe them all the time now? Once you know the
00:56:51 ◼ ► bribes work, like this is how corrupt governments happen. It's like, Oh, well, everyone knows you
00:56:55 ◼ ► have to bribe to get anything done. We don't want that to be the system. Unfortunately, a corrupt
00:57:00 ◼ ► politician has been elected and a bunch of the largest tech companies in the world are all saying
00:57:05 ◼ ► we are going to now pay the bribe in hope of avoiding the things that he's been threatening
00:57:09 ◼ ► us with probably in exchange for getting bribes. That's not a good precedent. And then the result
00:57:14 ◼ ► of that will be every single smaller company who can't afford to bribe the politician is going to
00:57:20 ◼ ► have their products squeezed even further out of the market. Yeah, I mean, and that's, and by the
00:57:23 ◼ ► way, that's not just like, forget about corrupt politicians or whatever. That's true of everything
00:57:27 ◼ ► having to do with anything, no matter who's into the administration, the big companies always get
00:57:31 ◼ ► advantages. The whole like regulatory capture and like, you know, open AI being in favor of
00:57:37 ◼ ► constraints on AI, like regulations regarding AI, because they know they're big enough and rich
00:57:45 ◼ ► trying to get regulations on the books that only they can navigate. Microsoft has done the same
00:57:49 ◼ ► thing, like setting aside Trump. This is just something that big businesses always do. They
00:57:53 ◼ ► get advantages over small businesses by donating money to politicians. It is, you know, Citizens
00:58:00 ◼ ► United has made sure that that is a thing that can continue to happen in this country. One of the
00:58:04 ◼ ► many things that is broken about our system and every big company does it. And it is unfair to
00:58:08 ◼ ► small companies. This is worse than that because the person they're bribing wants to do a lot more
00:58:14 ◼ ► than tweak regulations to favor big tech companies. But it is not unprecedented and it has always been
00:58:22 ◼ ► happening and it has always been terrible. And it's one of the many, many things wrong with our
00:58:27 ◼ ► country. Yeah, it's just, I think the problem is something that I've been struggling with a fair
00:58:33 ◼ ► bit, both in a personal level and a professional level. We, well, I shouldn't say we, I fancy Apple
00:58:40 ◼ ► as a company that tries to do good in a company that's trying to do right by people. And Tim Cook
00:58:47 ◼ ► is a good man who cares about things that I care about. And everyone's good. They're all good. And
00:58:55 ◼ ► rank and file Apple by and large are good people. Tim, as you both have said, predominantly John,
00:59:02 ◼ ► is probably, I think he's mostly a good person, but as Apple gets bigger and as their monopolies
00:59:09 ◼ ► get stronger and as they operate as a bigger and bigger company with all the bad that comes of that,
00:59:16 ◼ ► it's real hard to be really enthusiastic about Apple. And I think this comes in fits and spurts.
00:59:22 ◼ ► I think if you were to plot the vibes of ATP over the last several, over the last 10 years,
00:59:28 ◼ ► there have been times it's been hard to be a fan of Apple and there's been times it's been easy.
00:59:31 ◼ ► And it's funny because right now in terms of products, by and large, I think it is a pretty
00:59:37 ◼ ► good and easy time to be a fan of Apple. And yeah, you can start saying, well, what about this? What
00:59:40 ◼ ► about that? But I mean, look at how great Macs are these days. iPhones are iPads. I mean, these are
00:59:45 ◼ ► all great products. And in that sense, it's easy to be a fan, but it's hard for me to come to terms
00:59:51 ◼ ► with. I don't really want to support a company that that is a clear to me anyway, a clear monopolist
01:00:01 ◼ ► and doesn't give a that that's the case. Like they just don't care. It's like, yeah, we are owed this
01:00:07 ◼ ► money. We are owed 30% of everything. You know, we're owed. We, we put in a lot of hard work.
01:00:12 ◼ ► We're owed it until the end of time. And that's hard to be enthusiastic about. And it's hard to
01:00:20 ◼ ► find a way to be enthusiastic about a man who even though on the whole, I think is a good person
01:00:25 ◼ ► who donates to this just frigging monster. Like, I'm sorry, if you're enthusiastic about Trump,
01:00:32 ◼ ► maybe you're cackling and excited about what we're saying, but I am not, I am not in. We are not
01:00:38 ◼ ► into shoulder up to slash kind of snuggle with him is just frigging gross. It's just gross. And
01:00:48 ◼ ► I can squint and I can think of a thousand different reasons why it's by some definitions,
01:00:53 ◼ ► the right thing to do. And this is what John was talking about, but it's also just gross. And so
01:00:57 ◼ ► it's hard to be enthusiastic about this company that I have enjoyed for a long time, not as long
01:01:04 ◼ ► as John, but I've enjoyed for a long time. And to some degree I've hung like I've hitched my
01:01:09 ◼ ► horse professionally or if you hitched my cart, rather it's professionally to this horse in many
01:01:14 ◼ ► different ways, not only this very program, but you know, the apps that I write, they're only on
01:01:20 ◼ ► Apple platforms and yes, I could switch and yes, I could do a bunch of things, but I don't want to do
01:01:25 ◼ ► those things. So it's making me kind of feel like, I mean, I'm being a bit dramatic now, but it's
01:01:31 ◼ ► making me kind of have that, oh wait, are we the baddies moment? And I think Apple are the baddies.
01:01:36 ◼ ► And I think Tim, at least in this action is a baddie. And again, I can justify it. I can make
01:01:42 ◼ ► a passionate argument why this was 100% the right thing for him to do, but it would be a hollow
01:01:47 ◼ ► argument because I don't think he should have done it. And I just, it just makes me feel disgusting.
01:01:59 ◼ ► we would never want to do it because it would feel so terrible. Like it would be so soul destroying
01:02:04 ◼ ► and denial, like, especially if we're, you know, us in our position where we know how we feel
01:02:08 ◼ ► internally, we were like, how could you ever bring yourself to do that? Cause it would feel
01:02:12 ◼ ► so bad. Even if you were convinced, which you may or may not be, that it actually is the, you know,
01:02:17 ◼ ► the, the thing that produces the least long-term harm, you still have to eat that beep sandwich.
01:02:24 ◼ ► See, I do it myself. I don't know. You still have to eat that beep sandwich yourself. Like,
01:02:30 ◼ ► well, I don't even have to do that. All right. So now I gave you like the noble Tim Cook self
01:02:34 ◼ ► sacrifice version of it. Here is the less noble, less charitable version, which you can decide if
01:02:38 ◼ ► it's more or less likely. One area where I think it is possible that Tim Cook actually does agree
01:02:49 ◼ ► to regulating big business. Tim Cook probably wants what's best for all the people in the world,
01:02:56 ◼ ► but he thinks he may possibly think it is very feasible and, you know, plausible to imagine him
01:03:04 ◼ ► thinking that, uh, the, uh, person or entity best positioned to decide what is good for all the
01:03:12 ◼ ► people of the world is Apple and not the U S government. Therefore, Tim Cook may agree that
01:03:19 ◼ ► less regulation on big tech companies is better than more. Tim Cook's recent experience with the
01:03:25 ◼ ► EU and the DMA is some evidence that Tim Cook thinks maybe governments don't know what's best
01:03:32 ◼ ► when it comes to making decisions that affect large numbers of consumers. And so even though
01:03:37 ◼ ► Tim Cook may be opposed to pretty much everything that the Trump administration stands for,
01:03:43 ◼ ► he may in his billionaire heart of hearts believe that this kind of regulation of tech companies
01:03:49 ◼ ► is harmful and those kinds of decisions are best left to benevolent wise, smart people like Tim
01:04:04 ◼ ► captain of industry and not start to believe that the people or entities that know best
01:04:11 ◼ ► are the captains of industry, the private companies that have all this money and power,
01:04:18 ◼ ► especially if you are, as I think Tim Cook is, a benevolent captain of industry who does want
01:04:24 ◼ ► what's best for people and isn't in it to enrich himself past all reason for, you know, like,
01:04:34 ◼ ► stop trying to amass money and power as if it's some kind of game and they'd have some kind of
01:04:41 ◼ ► governments should not be telling Apple what to do. And Trump also seems to believe mostly to
01:04:48 ◼ ► enrich, mostly because of a hangover from his own life as a quote unquote business person that like,
01:04:53 ◼ ► yeah, rich people should be able to do whatever they want and the government should not tell them
01:04:57 ◼ ► what to do. So I should be able to discriminate and, you know, do terrible things and cheat on
01:05:02 ◼ ► my taxes and there should be no regulations on me and I should be able to put lead in the Cheerios
01:05:06 ◼ ► that I feed to the kids and like that's the world Trump wants. And Tim Cook doesn't want any of
01:05:10 ◼ ► those bad things, but he absolutely does not want the government telling Apple what to do.
01:05:21 ◼ ► you know, as much as they have any kind of coherent anything, he is aligned with that. And so
01:05:26 ◼ ► I think as much as he hates Trump and what he stands for, if there is an opportunity to do
01:05:34 ◼ ► something that produces less government interference with Apple, he would do that no matter what,
01:05:39 ◼ ► no matter who was in the administration or not, he would be lobbying for, I don't think you should
01:05:44 ◼ ► make more rules that govern Apple. Don't do what the EU did. It's bad what they're doing. Don't do
01:05:50 ◼ ► that here in the US. Don't regulate us. We know what's best. We're Apple. We don't need any more
01:05:55 ◼ ► regulations on us at all. Regulate our competitors. Fine, but not us. So any rule that's going to
01:05:59 ◼ ► affect us, we don't want. And you can see that in every kind of shareholder meeting in Apple,
01:06:04 ◼ ► where there's sort of like, you know, shareholder proposals, we think Apple should do X, we think
01:06:08 ◼ ► Apple should do Y. And the default answer is always Apple recommends you as a shareholder
01:06:16 ◼ ► Well, let's reframe this a little bit though. The Department of Justice currently has an open lawsuit
01:06:22 ◼ ► against Apple. For now. Right. So why else might Apple and might Tim Cook support Trump?
01:06:29 ◼ ► Huh. Maybe the million dollars and all the support, maybe this is not just about tariffs. Maybe it's
01:06:37 ◼ ► also because Apple wants the regulatory pressure and the lawsuits from the Department of Justice
01:06:44 ◼ ► to go away. Now under pretty much any other non or less corrupt president, that would be unheard of.
01:06:52 ◼ ► Under this president, that will become commonplace. So we are saying, the two of you maybe are saying
01:06:59 ◼ ► things from the point of view of Tim Cook really doesn't support Trump, but he's gritting and
01:07:06 ◼ ► bearing it for the good of whatever. What if Tim Cook does support Trump? Like I think Tim Cook
01:07:12 ◼ ► actually literally does support Trump. He absolutely does not. He does not support Trump.
01:07:16 ◼ ► How do you know? He's a gay man. He's not going to support a president who hates gay people.
01:07:21 ◼ ► You think he's the only gay man who would have voted for Trump? Like, no, of course not.
01:07:26 ◼ ► But I'm saying he absolutely does not. He loves the environment. Trump thinks climate change
01:07:30 ◼ ► isn't real. He does not. Tim Cook, every fiber of Tim Cook's being is counter to everything
01:07:36 ◼ ► that Trump stands for, except for the part where the government doesn't interfere with what Apple
01:07:39 ◼ ► does. See, to me, people are bending over backwards trying to justify why Tim might be doing this
01:07:45 ◼ ► despite hating Trump. It sure looks like Tim Cook supports Trump, period. Like that's it. What else
01:07:50 ◼ ► do you call this? He doesn't. But he didn't lobby for him to get elected. He didn't give
01:07:54 ◼ ► millions of dollars to help get him elected like Musk did. It's clear that he does not support
01:07:58 ◼ ► Trump. When every other big business person gives Trump some kind of financial support, we all say
01:08:04 ◼ ► they're a Trump supporter. Why don't we say that about Tim Cook? No, he only is giving this after
01:08:08 ◼ ► he's been elected when he has the power to do something that affects Apple. Tim Cook is a Trump
01:08:12 ◼ ► supporter. What do you call it? If he had been giving stump speeches for Trump, then maybe I
01:08:16 ◼ ► would believe you. But even that would take a lot of speeches to think it wasn't some weird strategy
01:08:20 ◼ ► because personally, from everything we know of Tim Cook, he is not... I mean, he was out there trying
01:08:27 ◼ ► to get Hillary Clinton elected in the first time Trump was elected. Like, it's not a Tim Cook thing.
01:08:32 ◼ ► It's a long time ago. Things change. A lot of people support Trump now who didn't then.
01:08:37 ◼ ► As you noted, it doesn't really matter what's in Tim Cook's heart. It only matters what he does,
01:08:40 ◼ ► but I would bet such a huge amount of money that Tim Cook hates Trump and everything he stands for,
01:08:46 ◼ ► except for the part where he doesn't regulate Apple. I think Tim Cook likes making a lot of
01:08:49 ◼ ► money from Apple. And I think if you compare... You think he's motivated by his personal fortune?
01:08:54 ◼ ► No, not... Well, no, I think he's motivated by his company's fortune, which is related very heavily
01:08:59 ◼ ► to his personal fortune. But listen, if you compare the behavior of Tim Cook in all the various app
01:09:06 ◼ ► store regulation lawsuit kind of stuff, compare that, do you think Tim Cook really would like to
01:09:13 ◼ ► be a little friendlier and less horrible with the app store in-app purchase policies, but he's,
01:09:18 ◼ ► for the good of his company, he's making the difficult decision to be a greedy a**hole?
01:09:28 ◼ ► and Apple shouldn't have tariffs too. I don't see why these are different things. That's just Tim
01:09:33 ◼ ► Cook. That's him. And I think he should be more aware of how many LGBTQ people he has in his own
01:09:39 ◼ ► company who have a big problem with this and literally have their lives threatened by this
01:09:44 ◼ ► administration. Talk about supporting the troops. He doesn't support them at all. It's all about
01:09:49 ◼ ► Apple and money. That's what I was saying, how much additional harm is happening from donating
01:09:57 ◼ ► substantial. There is a line, right? And Tim Cook is walking right up to that line. You maybe think
01:10:01 ◼ ► he's already over that line, right? Tim Cook flew over that line in his private jet. But now listen,
01:10:05 ◼ ► now going back for a minute, I do want to, what Casey said a few minutes ago I think is worth
01:10:10 ◼ ► discussing. You know, it is hard at this time when you are as fired up as I am or as Casey is,
01:10:15 ◼ ► and maybe Jon's down there, I don't know where, Jon's on a different planet right now, a planet
01:10:20 ◼ ► of compassion and understanding. Casey and I are like, I'm in the sun. I'm mad about it too. I'm
01:10:26 ◼ ► just able to see more sides of it. I mean, as I think I said in other conversations about this,
01:10:37 ◼ ► he's like the way, and he has, and Tim Cook has actually articulated, like whether it's the truth
01:10:43 ◼ ► of his motivation or not, he has articulated, he said, this is why I'm doing this with China.
01:10:46 ◼ ► Because he thinks it is better to engage with them and do the best we can than to do what Facebook
01:10:52 ◼ ► did, which is like saying, no, we're not dealing with them at all. And you can argue about that.
01:10:55 ◼ ► Is it better to deal with them and engage with them and let China enter your data centers and
01:11:03 ◼ ► it's easier to argue against that because Apple's moves in China open up millions of Apple customer
01:11:09 ◼ ► to invasive stuff that Apple supposedly doesn't want and stands against. But Tim Cook says,
01:11:15 ◼ ► well, maybe it's better to engage with China because they manufacture all your stuff. And
01:11:18 ◼ ► if they didn't, you'd be screwed. Isn't that convenient? Yeah. So I think it's important
01:11:23 ◼ ► to kind of bring this down a little bit back down to the John's planet of compassion. But
01:11:37 ◼ ► process this as Apple customers and Apple fans? And I think that's a worthy discussion to have
01:11:44 ◼ ► because it's hard. It is not an easy thing to do. And I brought this up a couple of times in
01:11:50 ◼ ► the past. I think it's a great analogy. A while ago, our friend CGP Grey said somewhere on a
01:11:55 ◼ ► podcast, whenever he complained about Apple stuff, people would say, why don't you move to Android?
01:12:00 ◼ ► And he compared changing your major computing platform to be like moving to a different country
01:12:07 ◼ ► in terms of like disruption to your day to day life. Which also comes up having to do with Trump.
01:12:17 ◼ ► what do we do if we disagree with the political moves of the person at the top of Apple?
01:12:23 ◼ ► What do we do about that? Do we stop buying Apple products? Do we get rid of the ones we have? Do we
01:12:29 ◼ ► move to different platforms? And I think you can, it's a direct parallel to like, if your country
01:12:36 ◼ ► gets bad leadership, if you have a bad election, you get bad leadership. Do you move to a different
01:12:42 ◼ ► country? And I think, obviously, like there are certain aspects of moving to a different country
01:12:47 ◼ ► that are, that people are like, well, that's a ridiculous analogy to changing operating systems.
01:12:51 ◼ ► It's much easier to change operating systems. But in some ways, it's easier. In some ways,
01:12:55 ◼ ► it's harder. Like, as Casey was saying, like our entire businesses are related to Apple,
01:13:01 ◼ ► and in many ways, intricately tied to Apple. Like, it would be difficult for us to continue
01:13:07 ◼ ► doing this show and continue making our apps if we all stop buying Apple products and try to move
01:13:13 ◼ ► off of all of them. Like, that would be difficult. It would, you know, we could maybe make apps for
01:13:16 ◼ ► other platforms and, you know, and you can, again, look at the country analogy of like, well,
01:13:22 ◼ ► are the other platforms like much better in these regards? Do the other platforms have much better
01:13:28 ◼ ► leadership? Because if they only have like, sometimes better leadership or slightly better
01:13:39 ◼ ► like where are you going to go? Is there some big tech company that's not playing this game?
01:13:47 ◼ ► - Yeah, so like, and that's the problem. Like, when you look at what other platforms, like,
01:13:51 ◼ ► you know, there's whole, you know, the whole like, we can move through the woods and use Linux
01:13:53 ◼ ► thing. But like, even that's probably, you know, like you don't know who's running like all the
01:14:02 ◼ ► - Right. Like, there's so many, like, you know, gotchas when you, if you try to look around for
01:14:08 ◼ ► like, a country that has no bad political problems, or an operating system, or a major tech platform
01:14:14 ◼ ► that has no bad people funding or running it, you're not going to find one. It's like, it's
01:14:19 ◼ ► like when you get mad at an airline, like, I'm never going to fly, you know, United again or
01:14:25 ◼ ► - Yeah, I mean, United is terrible. But like, you say that, but then like, well, there's only like
01:14:32 ◼ ► - Because these are systemic problems. They're not problems due to like, one bad person or the
01:14:37 ◼ ► CEOs are all evil. And it's just, it's the system. The system is bad. And it gets to the question of,
01:14:42 ◼ ► do you fight to fix the system or do you flee to Canada where nothing is wrong and their system is
01:14:49 ◼ ► - Right. And that's the thing, like, you know, when I think that's, it's useful to think of
01:14:53 ◼ ► that way of like, what, you know, are we going to move to a different country because we don't like
01:14:57 ◼ ► Trump? Like, no. But it's not, that's not to say that we never would. That's not to say that our
01:15:02 ◼ ► tolerance for that is infinite, but things have to be pretty bad for that. And the alternatives
01:15:08 ◼ ► have to be substantially better. And I think in this case, we don't have that dynamic. You know,
01:15:22 ◼ ► - In every aspect, every aspect we're talking about in terms of like, you know, donating to Tim
01:15:27 ◼ ► Cook donated personally, the other companies donated directly from the company. If you care
01:15:30 ◼ ► about the environment, if you care about diversity and inclusion, like, show me the companies that
01:15:35 ◼ ► are all better than Apple on all these fronts. Like, it's either a wash or Apple is still ahead.
01:15:39 ◼ ► - Right. And that's why I think like, you know, the same reason when people, when people complained
01:15:44 ◼ ► to us, like, if you don't like, you know, X, Y, Z, whatever thing we're complaining about that,
01:15:47 ◼ ► that month, if you don't like this thing Apple's doing, why don't you leave? And it's like,
01:15:57 ◼ ► - And by the way, on talking about what we do, I mean, maybe this is just for my background,
01:16:14 ◼ ► I mostly view as being an Apple critic. Like, I wrote reviews of Mac OS X, which were not
01:16:28 ◼ ► does not impair my career. In fact, mostly is my career. And I think that applies to both of you
01:16:32 ◼ ► as well, with the exception of developing apps for the platform, which is slightly different,
01:16:35 ◼ ► right? Which is not as big a part of my business, my income as it is both of yours. So that is that.
01:16:41 ◼ ► But like on the podcast, criticizing Apple, just like a political podcast, political podcasts don't
01:16:46 ◼ ► go away when the party that they support wins or loses an election. Like, criticism is just as
01:16:53 ◼ ► valid commentary as praise. And I feel like, you know, we could still make a good podcast when we
01:17:01 ◼ ► Yeah, but, and I think the right way to address this as an Apple fan is to be vocal about it.
01:17:09 ◼ ► You don't need to move to Jupiter. Like, you can just, you know, obviously, maybe support Apple less
01:17:17 ◼ ► Yeah, like make your position known that this is not okay, and why this is not okay. Like,
01:17:25 ◼ ► what you think of this. And, you know, in ways that supporting Apple is optional, maybe don't.
01:17:32 ◼ ► Like, you know, if I was like, you know, about to develop a Vision Pro app for some reason,
01:17:46 ◼ ► No, actually, it's a good one. Because that's like, it's not the Tim Cook donation thing that's
01:17:50 ◼ ► stopping people from Vision Pro. But there's tons of other things that people don't like about Apple
01:17:57 ◼ ► Right. And like this, this kind of, just like all the App Store, you know, in-app purchase BS, like,
01:18:03 ◼ ► this, this kind of sentiment accumulates and can kind of affect mood. And that overall mood can
01:18:11 ◼ ► cause problems for the company when they try to do something like Vision Pro and no one wants to
01:18:15 ◼ ► support their new platform. Like, there are lots of knock-on effects that are hard to evaluate,
01:18:20 ◼ ► like, the numbers behind them. It's hard to put a cost on alienating a whole bunch of your own
01:18:26 ◼ ► employees and your customers to support a corrupt dictator wannabe. Like, it's hard to put a number
01:18:33 ◼ ► on that. So maybe Tim Cook can understand it. But it absolutely has massive value destruction.
01:18:38 ◼ ► But the right answer here is fight it from the inside. Like, because you can't really, like,
01:18:43 ◼ ► I'm not going to go buy a PC to fight this. Like, that's not going to do anything except ruin parts
01:18:48 ◼ ► of my life. So instead, I'm going to try to fight it from the inside, because that's all I have.
01:18:52 ◼ ► In the same way that I'm fighting this terrible, corrupt government that we're about to get from
01:18:57 ◼ ► the inside of my own country. I think part of the understanding of the damage that is done by
01:19:03 ◼ ► Tim Cook doing this is reflected in Tim Cook doing it personally, because what that means
01:19:08 ◼ ► is when he retires, some of the badness goes with him, because you can put some of the blame on him
01:19:15 ◼ ► personally. Oh, Apple did this bad thing when Tim Cook was in charge. Remember when he donated to
01:19:19 ◼ ► the Trump thing, but now he's gone. Like, I think he does recognize that, and I think that's one of
01:19:27 ◼ ► the positive effects of him personally donating instead of making Apple do it, is that it
01:19:32 ◼ ► transfers a tiny bit more of the badness to him. And so when he's gone, that tiny bit goes with
01:19:38 ◼ ► him, as opposed to trying to reshape Apple as a company that supports Trump, which he's not
01:19:44 ◼ ► attempting to do. Someone in the chatroom asked if Nvidia had donated. I believe they have not,
01:19:48 ◼ ► but there's a story on The Verge that we will link in the show notes about Nvidia flattering
01:19:53 ◼ ► the Trump administration to what? To get fewer regulations on selling AI chips than Nvidia makes.
01:19:59 ◼ ► So lest you think that Nvidia is the one morally upstanding company that would never engage in this
01:20:05 ◼ ► kind of corruption when it comes time to stop the Biden administration for that matter, making
01:20:11 ◼ ► rules that say Nvidia can't sell as many chips as it wants to whoever it wants, Nvidia says,
01:20:16 ◼ ► "Trump, you're not gonna do that, right? You're our pal, right?" It's all just so gross.
01:20:21 ◼ ► And we're not gonna forget. When Tim Cook retires, this sticks with Apple, because this is entirely
01:20:57 ◼ ► This is giving him a million dollars. It's hard to be worse, except giving him even more,
01:21:04 ◼ ► But his personal wealth has very little effect on anything, and he's not getting this money
01:21:24 ◼ ► Him accumulating more money is so pointless now. He's just one of those, like, just blind. He's got
01:21:29 ◼ ► the blinders on him, where he just thinks, "This is what you do. You amass money." And it's just like,
01:21:33 ◼ ► for what? To what end? Like, there's no, you know, there's no helping him there. We just need to
01:22:27 ◼ ► for my new app available to ATP members. So it's not there now, so people in the chat room
01:22:33 ◼ ► don't run off to ATP.fm and look at your member page. But after we finish recording this episode,
01:22:42 ◼ ► That means you go to ATP.fm, you log in, and on your member page, if you click on membership
01:22:48 ◼ ► in the nav bar or whatever, you will see near the top a thing that says, "Hey, do you want to go on
01:22:52 ◼ ► the test flight for this thing? Here you go." And it will give you a link. You will need to install
01:22:56 ◼ ► the test flight app on your Mac if you don't have it already. I linked to that as well.
01:23:00 ◼ ► And you'll be able to install the test flight and try it out and totally destroy your disk and then
01:23:05 ◼ ► not blame me. Yeah, so, obviously, if you were interested in the test flight and you do install
01:23:14 ◼ ► it, you will know the name of my app. So I have to reveal the name of the app on the show now
01:23:32 ◼ ► I didn't want to say whether, uh, I said at that time that I had already chosen a name,
01:23:37 ◼ ► but I didn't want to say whether I had chosen a name that was recommended by somebody or whether
01:23:42 ◼ ► I had come up with something on my own. And I have to say, and I said in a later episode that I think
01:23:49 ◼ ► people aren't going to like the name I chose based on, based on all the people who were sending
01:23:54 ◼ ► feedback about the huge list. They're like, I like this one. I like that one. Like people eventually
01:23:58 ◼ ► voted with like giving their opinions on the many names that we listed. And nobody was interested in
01:24:03 ◼ ► any name that was anywhere close to the name that I chose. So it is what it is. Uh, as I think I
01:24:08 ◼ ► described before, I wanted the name to be, have some chance of being discernible as an app that
01:24:15 ◼ ► finds duplicate files and replaces them with clones. Like I didn't want it to just be like
01:24:19 ◼ ► Lavender or like just some fanciful name that is not connected in any way. Uh, I didn't exactly
01:24:24 ◼ ► hold that rule as well as I had hoped, but it's because one name, uh, grabbed my attention and I
01:24:31 ◼ ► initially didn't think it was that great, but it just hung on and eventually ate away. And it was
01:24:36 ◼ ► like, all right, fine, fine. You're the name. Uh, this name was suggested by a listener.
01:24:50 ◼ ► Uh, and that name is hyperspace. That is good. I do like that. You can see how it ate away at me.
01:25:00 ◼ ► Okay. So let's start here. Hyper, uh, my website, uh, my old podcast, hypercritical, right?
01:25:12 ◼ ► It's not great. It's kind of something about getting space back. It's got space in the name.
01:25:19 ◼ ► And the one that kills it, Star Wars, Star Wars, hypercritical, storage space. The three of them
01:25:27 ◼ ► together ganged up on me and made me pick this name. Now, am I going to be sued by Lucasfilm?
01:25:36 ◼ ► that I'm using hyperspace as the name of my app. And then they'll won't notice me because I'm too
01:25:41 ◼ ► small and it'll be fine. Uh, but yeah, that's what the app is called. It's called hyperspace.
01:25:46 ◼ ► Uh, I dig it. I was going to intercap it, switch classes intercapped intentionally because I love
01:25:51 ◼ ► intercapping. That is the, uh, the tradition from the classic Mac OS days where Macintosh
01:26:00 ◼ ► another capital letter, like Mac, right? Capital M capital W Mac paint, capital M capital P. It
01:26:06 ◼ ► wasn't always just with Mac something, but there was a lot of that Mac, right? Mac paint, Mac draw,
01:26:10 ◼ ► all that stuff, right? Super paint capital S capital P. I think anyway, intercapping was big
01:26:15 ◼ ► back in the day. Uh, switch glass is capital S capital G. Uh, and I almost did hyperspace,
01:26:21 ◼ ► capital H capital S, but Star Wars doesn't do that. So I didn't don't tell them anyway,
01:26:27 ◼ ► hyperspace capital H no other capital letters. That is the name of the app. Uh, if you want to
01:26:33 ◼ ► try it, you can for the test flight people. I have some instructions. This is difficult because I
01:26:39 ◼ ► didn't want to junk up my app with a giant dialogue that pops up in your face that tells you about the
01:26:50 ◼ ► on either side of it in honor of Casey on the member page that tell you, please read this first.
01:26:55 ◼ ► And it tells you things about the test flight that you might need to know, including the one thing
01:26:59 ◼ ► I put in the test flight release notes in all caps, which says this build will not actually
01:27:15 ◼ ► pretend that it's working. It will tell you that it works. It'll be like, I reclaimed, you know,
01:27:20 ◼ ► five megabytes of disc space. It didn't, but it did everything up to that point. So please use the
01:27:26 ◼ ► app as if it will do that thing, but know that it will not. Why am I doing this? I know this for
01:27:32 ◼ ► multiple reasons. First of all, I don't want to destroy our discs in the first beta. So this one
01:27:37 ◼ ► will not actually modify any of your precious files. It will just do stuff off to the side,
01:27:42 ◼ ► but it will do all the work except for that final part, which just swaps it in for your file. Right?
01:27:46 ◼ ► So please do test that. The second thing is if you use this app and get rid of all your duplicate
01:27:51 ◼ ► files, you can kind of only do that once and then all your duplicate files are gone until you
01:27:56 ◼ ► generate more somehow. And so I want to kind of save that to the end because it's not useful.
01:28:00 ◼ ► If everyone uses the very first beta, it rids their entire drives of duplicates and then says,
01:28:06 ◼ ► okay, well, how am I supposed to test the next beta? There's no work left for me to do. Should
01:28:10 ◼ ► I artificially make some duplicate files? So keep in mind that this, this beta and many of the betas,
01:28:15 ◼ ► many of the test flight builds that come will not actually reclaim disc space, even though it will
01:28:19 ◼ ► say it's doing it. It's totally not, which lets you repeat the process over and over again, which is
01:28:24 ◼ ► good for my testing. Second thing to know, if you haven't been on a test light before test light
01:28:29 ◼ ► builds will not actually charge you money. The purchase stuff is in the test light build.
01:28:34 ◼ ► You can do scanning for free, but as soon as you try to reclaim space, it'll be like, oh,
01:28:38 ◼ ► you got to pay. Feel free to click those buttons. They will not actually charge you money. I believe
01:28:42 ◼ ► you. I will tell you, oh, by the way, this is not going to really charge you. It does, but it's easy
01:28:46 ◼ ► to miss. Yeah, but it will not like just I'll link to it in, in the documentation that you're all
01:28:51 ◼ ► going to read links from the member page. I linked to the Apple page that says, I swear it will not
01:28:55 ◼ ► charge you money. Like it looks like it does, but it doesn't only the test flight build the real
01:29:00 ◼ ► builds that you get from the app store will charge you money, but this one will not, but please do
01:29:04 ◼ ► test the purchase part. This is probably the part of the app that I have my least the least
01:29:07 ◼ ► confidence in because I've never done it before. And it's not easy to test. Please test the
01:29:13 ◼ ► purchase part, like buy it, pick like there there's a bunch of things and prices in there.
01:29:17 ◼ ► We may or may not talk about, but like they just ignore the prices. Don't like, obviously it's not
01:29:22 ◼ ► charging you real money. Prices may change the ways you can buy. It may change. Lots of things
01:29:26 ◼ ► may change, but like, please do test that. Right. About subscriptions, cause some of the options
01:29:32 ◼ ► are subscriptions in test, slight subscriptions, renew at an accelerated pace. Again, I will link
01:29:37 ◼ ► to the Apple page that talks about this. They say that they renew, uh, uh, renewed daily up to six
01:29:42 ◼ ► times within a one week period, regardless of the duration. So even if you get a one year
01:29:46 ◼ ► subscription, it's going to renew every single day. And I think they expire after like seven
01:29:49 ◼ ► days. Like the time it's not real time. That's what I'm saying. So don't be freaked out of like,
01:29:53 ◼ ► Hey, I bought this supposed free fake subscription. And then the next day the app said I needed to
01:29:58 ◼ ► charge money again. Is that a bug that may, I'm not entirely sure, but it may be the nature of
01:30:04 ◼ ► the accelerated renewal thing. Again, I haven't done this before. Um, finally feedback. You can
01:30:11 ◼ ► send feedback on the beta through the test flight app itself, through the app on your Mac called
01:30:17 ◼ ► test flight, not in hyperspace, but there's, there's an app called test flight that you will
01:30:21 ◼ ► use to install the test flight beta. It's like a blue icon with a propeller thingy blueprint on or
01:30:25 ◼ ► whatever. Um, you can send feedback in that app. If you launch the test flight app on MacOS,
01:30:31 ◼ ► find hyperspace in the sidebar and then click on the send feedback button. You can use that to
01:30:36 ◼ ► send feedback, touch screenshots, so on and so forth. You can also just email me. There'll be an
01:30:40 ◼ ► email address in the documentation that you're all going to read when you should remember page that
01:30:48 ◼ ► placeholder. Uh, it does not have feet, but it's all right. All right. It is not the final icon.
01:30:55 ◼ ► Don't worry about that. Now, uh, as for what I want you to send feedback about literally anything,
01:31:00 ◼ ► I can't figure out the app. I don't understand this. I didn't know what this button did.
01:31:12 ◼ ► ATP members are not the general public, but they are perhaps the type of people who might
01:31:17 ◼ ► buy an app like this. So please just any feedback, you don't have to give any feedback. You can just
01:31:20 ◼ ► look at it and throw it in the garbage. You don't have to join it, but if you decide to give feedback,
01:31:23 ◼ ► don't feel like, Oh, he probably doesn't want to hear this. Just, it doesn't have to be a bug
01:31:27 ◼ ► report. It doesn't have to be a feature request. It could be just your opinion, your experience,
01:31:31 ◼ ► what you thought, where you were confused, things you didn't understand, depending on how much
01:31:39 ◼ ► people's experience using it. If they can make heads or tails of it, when you work on an app
01:31:44 ◼ ► for a long time, it starts to become like obvious to you where everything is and how it works. And
01:31:48 ◼ ► it's not that complicated of an app, but if you don't have that background knowledge and you're
01:31:51 ◼ ► just faced with this UI, it may not make sense to you. So I'm open to any and all feedback about
01:31:57 ◼ ► every aspect that you see before you, including the pricing, which again, we may get to in a
01:32:02 ◼ ► moment here, but like the pricing is not final or real in the app and everything is free. So
01:32:06 ◼ ► it doesn't matter. But like, if you have opinions about that, throw your feedback over the wall.
01:32:11 ◼ ► I'm glad to hear it. I do value ATP listener feedback a lot because you all, if you have
01:32:17 ◼ ► been listening for a long time, know a lot about me and a lot about app development stuff from
01:32:23 ◼ ► listening to us. So please give your opinions, show the app to someone else who doesn't listen
01:32:28 ◼ ► to the show to get a more outsider opinion, if you want. And then tell me what they thought,
01:32:37 ◼ ► coming as soon as you listen to this episode. A couple of quick addendums. I'm speaking for you,
01:32:43 ◼ ► so tell me I'm wrong if I'm wrong, but once the app is released on the proper app store,
01:32:52 ◼ ► That is true. Although I don't think you can make it go away immediately. Doesn't it go after 90
01:33:01 ◼ ► you know, you're on the test flight, but this is a specific test flight for ATP members.
01:33:05 ◼ ► This test flight will end when the app is ready to be released. Actually, you might be able to
01:33:11 ◼ ► expire all the builds, but if you have more than a handful of builds, that'll take a freaking year to
01:33:16 ◼ ► go through and expire them. I didn't even know how to do that in App Store Connect. Oh yeah,
01:33:19 ◼ ► one final thing. This is a fun note on how little I know about testing in-app purchase stuff or
01:33:24 ◼ ► whatever. I installed the test flight version of my app on my own computer and I was testing the
01:33:29 ◼ ► purchase flow in the test flight build of my app and I subscribed to my own app with one of the
01:33:35 ◼ ► subscription options to see how it worked. I was like, "Great, you subscribed, you know, didn't
01:33:39 ◼ ► charge me money. Okay, fine." And then I was like, "All right, well, I want to take screenshots of
01:33:45 ◼ ► what the sunscreen looks like when you haven't paid for the app, but I've already paid for it,
01:33:49 ◼ ► so I just got to find a way to cancel that subscription that I just made." And I do have
01:33:56 ◼ ► a managed subscription button in my app that uses the Apple approved API to bring up the managed
01:33:59 ◼ ► subscription interface, but my subscription to my own test flight build of my app was not in my
01:34:05 ◼ ► subscription list. And so I couldn't unsubscribe to it. I Googled for it and I asked people who
01:34:12 ◼ ► knew, they're like, "Well, it should be in your subscription list, you know, like, I swear to you
01:34:16 ◼ ► it's not there. Like, I just don't see it. Is it an App Store Connect somewhere?" I didn't use a
01:34:20 ◼ ► Sandbox Apple ID, which I do have a separate account with a Sandbox Apple ID. I know how to
01:34:23 ◼ ► deal with that one, but that's not this. I use my real Apple ID that is on the test flight to
01:34:29 ◼ ► purchase from the test flight version of my app, and I just could not for the life of me figure out
01:34:34 ◼ ► how to cancel that subscription. And yeah, it's renewing like once every day or whatever. And
01:34:38 ◼ ► some people said they thought it would expire after seven days, but it hasn't been seven days
01:34:42 ◼ ► since I did that. Could not figure it out. You know how I eventually solved this problem, Casey?
01:34:46 ◼ ► Please tell me, because I haven't solved this problem myself with testing subscriptions.
01:35:03 ◼ ► there's, you know, you can make a button that says, like, go to manage subscription. What it
01:35:06 ◼ ► does is it launches the App Store app on macOS, and it shows you your list of subscriptions.
01:35:10 ◼ ► But test flight things are not there. Well, there is the same API in iOS, and guess what?
01:35:23 ◼ ► flight version of call sheet, has a thing in settings where you can go to manage subscription,
01:35:27 ◼ ► and it calls that API that brings up a sheet that shows you all your test flight subscriptions. And
01:35:32 ◼ ► lo and behold, hyperspace test flight subscription was right there inside Casey's app, and I just
01:35:45 ◼ ► I guess, Maggie, what you can do is make a stub application, like a stub iOS application,
01:35:54 ◼ ► and lo and behold, in iOS, it has that little square bracket sandbox section that shows,
01:35:58 ◼ ► you know, call sheet and all your other betas. Ridiculous. I cannot believe—thank you to Craig
01:36:02 ◼ ► Hockenberry for pointing that out to me. I would never have guessed that either making a stub iOS
01:36:06 ◼ ► application or launching call sheet would be the solution for me to unsubscribe to my own app.
01:36:11 ◼ ► I'm glad I could be there for you, Jon. That's the solution, Marco, if you want to figure out
01:36:18 ◼ ► I'll see if I can find a link to that and to put in the show notes. But Casey's at the link because
01:36:21 ◼ ► he literally has the code for it in his app. Well, I was just talking to Craig about this a couple
01:36:24 ◼ ► of weeks ago, so I should be able to dig it up from when we were talking, because he had asked me,
01:36:28 ◼ ► you know, how do you get the managed subscriptions thing? Yeah, here it is. Managed subscriptions
01:36:33 ◼ ► sheet is presented. I will put a link in the show notes and in the chat room and so on and so forth,
01:36:38 ◼ ► but this is how you do it. Oh, I see. Marco's putting in our Slack all the people who own
01:36:44 ◼ ► hyperspace stuff. Yeah, there's just so much hyperspace stuff. There is—speaking of—one
01:36:49 ◼ ► of my old competitors, Epic Healthcare, like I worked for a competitor to them back when I had
01:36:54 ◼ ► my jobby job, they have a thing called like hyperspace something or other like chart or
01:36:58 ◼ ► whatever. Yeah, if someone comes and sues me, I'll have to change the name of the app, so we'll be
01:37:02 ◼ ► back to the naming thing, but for now, I'm going with this. Yeah, I think from a cursory look
01:37:07 ◼ ► through things, I think you are reasonably safe because, you know, trademarks are on certain types
01:37:13 ◼ ► of goods and services. Like you have to narrow it and say, well, this is what I'm claiming,
01:37:17 ◼ ► and if you look through like there's one that's a little close, but it looks like it's a dead app,
01:37:20 ◼ ► actually, so everything else looks pretty far away. I think you're okay. But the actual truth is,
01:37:26 ◼ ► if literally anybody comes after me for any legal reason, I'm just going to fold immediately.
01:37:30 ◼ ► What am I going to do? I'm going to fight them in court over like—no, you never get there.
01:37:35 ◼ ► Is the law of like people with money win? Like I'm not going to invest any money in battling
01:37:40 ◼ ► this type of thing, so just, you know, just don't tell anybody, and we'll just have this little hyperspace
01:37:43 ◼ ► app off in our corner, and Lucasfilm will never come knocking on my door. Yeah, the best defense
01:37:49 ◼ ► for like disputes like this is obscurity. Yeah, and if not, I'll just change the name of the app. Like
01:37:54 ◼ ► Steve Jobs would say, just change the name, no big deal. Not that big of a deal, I believe it was.
01:37:59 ◼ ► Speaking of pricing, how should I price my app? I will give only one constraint to my co-hosts,
01:38:07 ◼ ► after which I will hear their advice, and my constraint is this app is going to be free to download.
01:38:11 ◼ ► And the idea is it's free to download, and it's free to scan to find duplicates, because the whole
01:38:17 ◼ ► idea is, hey, if you don't find any duplicates, don't buy the app. It's not going to do anything
01:38:20 ◼ ► for you. I don't want to like take people's money when they literally don't—they're not going to
01:38:23 ◼ ► save them any space, right? But on the flip side of that, if they scan some folder and it's like, oh,
01:38:28 ◼ ► you could save eight gigabytes, now suddenly they have a concrete motivation to give some amount of
01:38:33 ◼ ► money to get that eight gigabytes back. And so that's the constraint. Free to download, free to
01:38:38 ◼ ► scan, free to do everything except that final step that gets you that space back. So I'm open to any
01:38:44 ◼ ► and all pricing structures, and in fact, if you, for the people who have the test flight, you will
01:38:48 ◼ ► see that I have implemented every possible pricing structure. It does not mean that they will all be
01:38:52 ◼ ► there in the release version, I was just trying to make sure that I knew how to code all of them,
01:38:57 ◼ ► and so they're all in there. Well, the obvious pricing structure is 100% consumables, and so
01:39:03 ◼ ► you get, you know, 10 cents per gig saved, and that's how you do it. This is not iOS, Casey.
01:39:09 ◼ ► I mean, first of all, that's not that crazy of an idea, but one thing I think that you need to know
01:39:15 ◼ ► is how much space people have—people stand to save on average. And I have no idea right now.
01:39:22 ◼ ► Do you have any kind of analytics for the test flight that will report that back to you? No,
01:39:26 ◼ ► that's why I ask people to give me reports, like, so my—I have zero analytics, zero—my
01:39:31 ◼ ► privacy policy is this app collects no data, like, I collect nothing. I probably will never
01:39:36 ◼ ► collect—I have no telemetry, I have no data, I have nothing. I only know what people will tell me.
01:39:41 ◼ ► I know what I see on my disks, and like, this is my family, but I have no telemetry. And I
01:39:46 ◼ ► understand from a business perspective, that's stupid, you should have some. But I just, at this
01:39:51 ◼ ► point, I just don't want to deal with the privacy implications of collecting literally any data from
01:39:58 ◼ ► anybody, and so I'm not. I mean, honestly, that's fair. I mean, that's—look, I make forecasts, and
01:40:03 ◼ ► the only, you know, data I have from that is if the app checks the Sparkle RSS feed for auto updates,
01:40:14 ◼ ► extent of my—and I don't even know if you can opt out of those. Yeah, I don't think you can. But
01:40:19 ◼ ► yeah, so I think it's hard to know what the value will be of it without knowing how much space people
01:40:26 ◼ ► stand to save on average. So I think, like, if you look at other, like, disk space saving apps in the
01:40:33 ◼ ► Mac App Store, prices are kind of all over the place, but it generally ranges from like 10 to 20
01:40:39 ◼ ► bucks for this kind of thing. There are free ones. That one I talked about that does basically the
01:40:44 ◼ ► same thing as my app but not as fancy is like six bucks upfront one time, pay. Yeah. On the other
01:40:50 ◼ ► hand, you are John frickin' Syracuse, so you can charge a premium based solely on not only, you
01:40:57 ◼ ► know, your fame here, but also the reputation that you have of being a good developer, especially
01:41:03 ◼ ► regarding knowledge of the file system and how it works. So this is like—people trust you,
01:41:08 ◼ ► rightfully so, to know how to do this safely. Well, they should not trust me. People have said
01:41:13 ◼ ► this. My enthusiasm for the file system does not translate into an app that has fewer bugs. What I
01:41:17 ◼ ► will say is that I think my app is more full-featured and nicer and more careful than a lot of the other
01:41:25 ◼ ► apps simply because I've spent a lot of time—I mean, you can judge for yourself. Like, I know
01:41:30 ◼ ► what my source code looks like. I know what their feature set looks like. I think I have put a lot
01:41:34 ◼ ► of work into this and have worked hard to make it safe. That may be why—like, why can you charge
01:41:39 ◼ ► more money? So we talk about this, like, Mac apps can charge more money than phone apps because
01:41:44 ◼ ► they're bigger on the screen. Like, there's something to that. The idea that, like, physically
01:41:48 ◼ ► it is larger, therefore it is worth more money. Like, the things that translate into people being
01:41:53 ◼ ► willing to pay more money are wild. So anyway, I think seeing the feature set maybe or the interface
01:42:01 ◼ ► or, I don't know, the performance—like, does it look like it was more carefully constructed than
01:42:07 ◼ ► this other app? Doesn't mean that it was, but does it look like it was? Does it look like a more like
01:42:11 ◼ ► a native Mac app? Does it look—you know, anyway, that's—that is influencing my thinking about
01:42:17 ◼ ► pricing. I'm not going to undercut my competitors. I'm going to probably end up charging more than
01:42:21 ◼ ► they do. Yeah, so I think if you were doing, like, a more full-featured, like, cleanup unnecessary
01:42:29 ◼ ► files, like, you know, that kind of app—there's lots of those—then I think you could be up around
01:42:33 ◼ ► 20 bucks. But those are a little janky if you've ever used those, and I have. That's true. Those
01:42:38 ◼ ► look shady sometimes. Oh, those look shady most of the time. But, you know, the fact is those are
01:42:45 ◼ ► going to recover more space and have more utility than most apps will. Especially—Those are going
01:42:50 ◼ ► to remove files, and mine will not. Well, right. But that's a distinction that many people will
01:42:55 ◼ ► not draw. This is a space-saving app, you know, regardless of how that happens. I mean, my app is
01:43:00 ◼ ► trying very hard to draw that distinction, but—and my marketing will try to draw that distinction,
01:43:05 ◼ ► but, like, really, my app will only appeal to the people who understand that distinction. Otherwise,
01:43:08 ◼ ► why would they get it? I mean, fair. But anyway, so I think you should, you know, free up front
01:43:14 ◼ ► to find out how much you have, and then to delete the files, I think 10 bucks. Doesn't delete any
01:43:18 ◼ ► files, Marco. To recover your space, hyper-relief, 10 bucks. Without removing files. Traveling without
01:43:25 ◼ ► moving, Marco. Another movie you haven't seen. Yeah, you're right. All right, yeah, so I think I
01:43:30 ◼ ► would—and I think 10 bucks is the premium price for what you're doing. 10 bucks for what? For the
01:43:38 ◼ ► deletion. Or, excuse me, for the traveling with that, yeah. For the non-deletion. Yeah, well, like,
01:43:44 ◼ ► well, you pay that once, and then it's, like, a one-time purchase and unlock forever? I think so,
01:43:50 ◼ ► because, you know, you're not offering people a lot of reasons to run this frequently. You know,
01:43:56 ◼ ► it's the kind of thing that you're gonna run once, you're gonna recover a hunk of space,
01:44:00 ◼ ► and then maybe you'll forget about it for a year or more. Like, and then you run it again,
01:44:06 ◼ ► and you get, like, you'll recover a smaller hunk of space, but most of the value that you're gonna
01:44:10 ◼ ► deliver to most people is gonna be up front on that first run. So, 'cause that's when the most
01:44:15 ◼ ► space will be saved, in all likelihood, over the lifetime of them using the app. So that's why I
01:44:19 ◼ ► think you should have it be a one-time purchase, 10 bucks, you can delete as much as you want after
01:44:25 ◼ ► that. Actually, non-delete as much as you want after that. Mm-hmm, reclaim, I call it. You're
01:44:30 ◼ ► reclaiming space. There you go. Casey? I think Marco's answer, although I think you could charge
01:44:38 ◼ ► more than 10, I think you might be able to swing 20 bucks, but I think, broadly, Marco's answer
01:44:42 ◼ ► is probably the right answer. This doesn't necessarily strike me as a subscription app.
01:44:48 ◼ ► I think you could do it, but I think it would be a tough sell. I think, well, first of all,
01:44:55 ◼ ► I love the way you're doing the paywall. I think that's brilliant. I mean, it's somewhat obvious,
01:45:00 ◼ ► but it's still brilliant that you're getting right up to the point of reclaiming, not deleting,
01:45:06 ◼ ► Marco, gosh, but reclaiming space. You're gonna have to delete files. Right? I could delete all
01:45:11 ◼ ► your files for free. That's right. But anyways, getting right up to the point where this is what
01:45:16 ◼ ► you would have saved. And I think, by the way, as a quick tangent, you should make it very clear,
01:45:21 ◼ ► particularly at that step, that this is not, like, reiterate at that very last step. This isn't a
01:45:27 ◼ ► deletion. It's a reclamation. And, you know, you're not losing anything. You're getting this
01:45:32 ◼ ► effectively for free. Somebody in the chat, and I lost who it was, and I apologize, but somebody
01:45:37 ◼ ► in the chat, oh, Philco, said, "You should refer to the Apple SSD upgrade pricing. We just saved you
01:45:42 ◼ ► $5,000 worth of files, which is eight gigs or whatever," which I think is very funny. But I think
01:45:50 ◼ ► the rightest answer is probably to do a one-time unlock everything in app purchase at that point,
01:45:55 ◼ ► like you and Marco both said, or, well, Marco definitely said, and you've kind of hinted at.
01:45:58 ◼ ► But I think something that could be fun to play with is doing, and I said it jokingly at first,
01:46:07 ◼ ► but the more I think about it, the more I think there may be something to it, is to do some sort
01:46:10 ◼ ► of consumable. So, as an example, you can run this one time or use it for a day or whatever, but
01:46:18 ◼ ► I'll probably run it for one time, and that's $10. You can get a three-pack for $20, or you can get
01:46:28 ◼ ► a lifetime unlock, run it as often as you want, and maybe if you wanted to, you could even have it,
01:46:33 ◼ ► like, install a cron job or something like that, and that's, like, $80 or something like that.
01:46:37 ◼ ► I don't know if I'm standing by this crackpot theory, but it's an interesting theory, and this
01:46:42 ◼ ► is one of the very few apps I can think of where that might actually make sense, because you are,
01:46:47 ◼ ► like one of you just said, you are only going to run this once a year, maybe, and for most people,
01:46:52 ◼ ► and then other people will go bananas and run it once an hour, but generally speaking, you're going
01:46:56 ◼ ► to run it, like, once a year. You could do consumables, assuming they're supported on MacOS,
01:47:04 ◼ ► - The problem is that when you first run it, you're going to recover way more space than
01:47:16 ◼ ► a gig, I'm going to save up my ticket to use until later. Like, I'll come back to this in a year,
01:47:22 ◼ ► and then you make zero on that person or whatever. Like, I think it's an unlock one time and that's
01:47:28 ◼ ► it, because the utility will vary so much per person, but it will almost certainly be mostly
01:47:36 ◼ ► and I said before that I implemented every possible thing, but I didn't implement consumables. That's
01:47:45 ◼ ► but it just feels so gross to me, and it doesn't feel, like, Mac-like for whatever that's worth.
01:47:49 ◼ ► Yeah, the ones I did implement, like, setting aside the pricing, but just who knows if I
01:47:59 ◼ ► mostly because I think all the options make sense in a certain scenario, and I haven't priced the
01:48:04 ◼ ► options against each other to try to motivate one over the other. There's no price advantage
01:48:08 ◼ ► to choosing any of the options that I have available. In terms of running the app multiple
01:48:14 ◼ ► times, here's the thing to factor in here. So first of all, this is discussed a little bit in the
01:48:21 ◼ ► documentation fact thing that I'll link to, but, like, the, especially the test-like version,
01:48:27 ◼ ► but probably the 1.0 version of this app, are extremely conservative. I'm trying not to break
01:48:32 ◼ ► anything. So there are whole swaths of people's discs that I will just not touch. I will just
01:48:38 ◼ ► ignore 100%, including large areas that people want me to look at for duplicates. I would just
01:48:43 ◼ ► will not do it until I can have some confidence that I can do it safely. An example is iCloud
01:48:50 ◼ ► Drive, or anything that is, like, any file that is owned by, like, backed by one of those things
01:48:55 ◼ ► that makes the file magically appear when you click on it, like the ones that use the file
01:48:58 ◼ ► provider API, like OneDrive or the new version of Dropbox or obviously iCloud Drive. I will not
01:49:03 ◼ ► touch those files at all, because I have no freaking idea what will happen if I try to do my
01:49:09 ◼ ► magic to them. So it's just like, I'm going to reclaim duplicates in iCloud Drive. My file will
01:49:14 ◼ ► complete, my program will complete instantly and say, nope, can't save you anything because it will
01:49:17 ◼ ► refuse to touch them. I will not touch anything in your library directory, even though my library
01:49:22 ◼ ► directory has 12 gigs of stuff that I could reclaim. Why? Because I'm terrified of touching
01:49:30 ◼ ► I won't touch anything in your photo library. I did it to my photo library with the Perl script.
01:49:36 ◼ ► I'm not ready to do it to yours. So if you think you're going to recover space from your photo
01:49:40 ◼ ► library, you're not. My thing will totally ignore it. I have so many limitations on this thing.
01:49:48 ◼ ► And maybe I have to dial them back. And I can dial them back. And I almost added a UI for
01:49:52 ◼ ► dialing them back. But I'm like, you know what? 1.0, let me just see. Which means that subsequent
01:49:57 ◼ ► versions of this app will surely have some of the guardrails either removed or optional, which means
01:50:04 ◼ ► that over time, as I develop this app, if you purchase it, you will be able to find more space
01:50:10 ◼ ► to recover. Not because you've created more duplicates, but because my app is becoming more
01:50:14 ◼ ► brave, or you're becoming more brave with your settings in my app, of what you're willing to
01:50:19 ◼ ► examine for space. So there's that. Second thing is, an app like this, there is an ongoing
01:50:30 ◼ ► especially with little picky file system stuff like this. So if I want this app to continue to
01:50:36 ◼ ► work and continue to be on the market, I will have to continue to develop it, which makes me
01:50:40 ◼ ► not want to do a one-time purchase from my other two apps. Someone paid $5 for my app five years
01:50:45 ◼ ► ago, and I'm never getting any money from them again. And they run it 24 hours a day. Like,
01:50:51 ◼ ► Which is fine if you think the app like Switch Glass is going to be feature-complete and you
01:50:56 ◼ ► never really have to do anything to it again. But this app, I feel like, is going to have an
01:50:59 ◼ ► ongoing burden, and I feel like I'm over time going to make the app braver and braver. So I
01:51:04 ◼ ► was looking for some way to potentially fund what I see as the multi-year development life cycle of
01:51:10 ◼ ► this app, up to and including things like a privilege helper tool that can do stuff outside
01:51:15 ◼ ► the sandbox that you could secretly install, like I did with Switch Glass, right? They can do stuff
01:51:20 ◼ ► across accounts, or things that run in the background scanning for duplicates. There are
01:51:24 ◼ ► many more ambitious goals that will never be achieved unless there's some form of funding
01:51:30 ◼ ► that is more than just someone paid for this once, one time five years ago, and you're never
01:51:33 ◼ ► going to get any more money from them. So I did want to add some kind of option for ways to get
01:51:39 ◼ ► money on an ongoing basis. But I do recognize that most people will either run it once and then just
01:51:43 ◼ ► never run it again, or run it once and then run it five years from now. So the options that you'll
01:51:48 ◼ ► see in the test flight are, there is a buy-it-all-up-front thing for so much money that no one
01:51:52 ◼ ► will ever pay it, right? But it's there. But like we always talk about like, what's the right amount?
01:51:57 ◼ ► Should I ever have an unlock forever option? What's the right amount I should put there?
01:52:00 ◼ ► I feel like I gave myself like a five-year runway with the buy-it-all-at-once option for people who
01:52:09 ◼ ► once with Overcast and is still supporting it, and people regret it, but like, how should that
01:52:14 ◼ ► be priced? Whatever, it's basically a deterrent, like, don't buy this. The other things you can buy
01:52:19 ◼ ► are time-spanned one-time purchases, because people hate subscriptions, so I've divided up
01:52:26 ◼ ► my purchases into subscriptions and one-time purchases, and yeah, there's the unlock forever
01:52:30 ◼ ► one-time purchase, but there's also the unlock for one month one-time purchase, and then there's the
01:52:35 ◼ ► unlock for one year one-time purchase. Non-renewing, do people know that? Can I communicate that
01:52:41 ◼ ► successfully in the UI? Who knows? We'll see what people think. But like, if you want it for a month
01:52:47 ◼ ► is enough time to like make sure, yeah, I found all the stuff that I care about that one point
01:52:50 ◼ ► I was going to find, and that's it. It never recurs, it doesn't rebuild you or whatever,
01:52:53 ◼ ► don't touch the app for three years, come back to it in three years, scan, oh, but found some more
01:52:57 ◼ ► stuff. Should I buy another month? Sure. It's kind of like the consumables, but not really,
01:53:02 ◼ ► because during that month you can run it as many times as you want, right? During that year you can
01:53:06 ◼ ► run it as many times as you want, and then the subscriptions are exactly the same price, they
01:53:11 ◼ ► just renew for people who want something that's renewing. I don't know why anybody would, but
01:53:16 ◼ ► there's no price advantage to not doing it. I'm not competing, I'm not saying, oh, the subscriptions
01:53:20 ◼ ► are cheaper, so you should do them so you forget about it and auto renew. No, there's no advantage.
01:53:23 ◼ ► If you don't want something that renews, you have multiple options. One month, one year,
01:53:28 ◼ ► they didn't do one week or one day, it seemed like too short or whatever, or forever, and then
01:53:32 ◼ ► subscriptions, which are exactly the same price as their one-time thing. That's probably too many
01:53:37 ◼ ► options, I should probably get rid of some of these. That's part of what the test flight's
01:53:40 ◼ ► going to do. I'll let people tell me, oh, I think your prices are insane, I would never pick this
01:53:44 ◼ ► option, I would pick that one. It didn't find any files, it found 20 gigs of files. I'm hoping I get
01:53:50 ◼ ► some actionable information on this. But in the end, what it might come down to is, I don't freaking
01:53:55 ◼ ► know, I'll release something, and if no one buys it, I'll change it. Marco has changed the business
01:54:02 ◼ ► model and pricing in his apps many, many times. That just seems to me to be part of the process,
01:54:07 ◼ ► and I'm willing to, maybe the only way for me to learn that is to learn it myself, despite all
01:54:12 ◼ ► these people giving me advice based on their experience. There's all sorts of things I can
01:54:16 ◼ ► tell myself, like, well, their experience is on iOS, or their app's not like mine, or I want to
01:54:19 ◼ ► do it this way. But it may be one of those things that I just have to learn the hard lessons myself,
01:54:24 ◼ ► and part of that could be launching a 1.0 that no one wants to buy. And then I change it, and
01:54:29 ◼ ► launch a 1.1 and change it. As frustrating as that sounds, I actually relish that process of learning,
01:54:37 ◼ ► because for me, for an app like this, it's low stakes, it's not a big deal, this app is not going
01:54:40 ◼ ► to be a big app or whatever. But in the same way that I kind of perversely enjoyed fighting with
01:54:45 ◼ ► the in-app purchase system, like doing a part of my app that had nothing to do with my app,
01:54:50 ◼ ► and had everything to do with dealing with the app store, one of the reasons I wanted to do this app
01:54:54 ◼ ► was to play with that code, to hope that I got it right, and also playing with pricing strategies.
01:54:59 ◼ ► That's another thing that I actually kind of look forward to. Granted, it will be based on no
01:55:04 ◼ ► information, because I'm not collecting any information, but that's all part of the game
01:55:07 ◼ ► for me. So, I don't know, we'll see. I haven't finalized anything, but in the meantime, I want
01:55:12 ◼ ► TestFlight people to try all the options and give me your opinions on them. If this was a real app,
01:55:18 ◼ ► I would pick X option, I would pick Y option if it was half the price. I wish there was a Z option.
01:55:23 ◼ ► Let me know what you think, because honestly, the main customer base for this app right now are
01:55:36 ◼ ► because the name isn't really self-sustaining. Oh, by the way, the name is not just that.
01:55:39 ◼ ► It's, you know, what's the name of your app, Casey? My app? CallSheet? No, that's not what it's
01:55:44 ◼ ► called. What is it called? Oh, FaceBlaster? No, that was the other one. FlookUp, right, sorry.
01:55:48 ◼ ► No, CallSheet. What is it actually called, though, on the app store? Oh, I don't remember.
01:55:52 ◼ ► Like, LookUp Casts and Crew or something like that. CallSheet colon LookUp Casts and Crew.
01:55:56 ◼ ► What is your app called, Marco? I believe it's Overcast Colon Podcast Player, I think. Yeah. And
01:56:00 ◼ ► my app is Hyperspace Colon Reclaim Disk Space. Yep, there you go. And part of this is because
01:56:06 ◼ ► that's how the app store game is played, even though Casey refers to his app as CallSheet.
01:56:15 ◼ ► that's part of how it's played. And the other reason is Hyperspace, I think, was already taken
01:56:19 ◼ ► by the Epic app, so I had to put colon something. I probably would have anyway, but yeah, that's the
01:56:23 ◼ ► only chance anyone finds me in the app store as they search for, like, disk space or something,
01:56:28 ◼ ► and mine comes up because of the subtitle and my keywords or whatever. But you have to put
01:56:32 ◼ ► store a QSI as a keyword, you know? Yeah, I don't think that I think they would have worse SEO than
01:56:36 ◼ ► Hyperspace if that's possible. No, so I mean, for your like, you know, subscription ongoing stuff,
01:56:44 ◼ ► I think that can work when you add more ways to recover space. But I think you're going to have I
01:56:52 ◼ ► think it's going to be a challenge when you're when you're quote only doing this particular method of
01:56:57 ◼ ► recovering space. I think you're going to be compared in people's minds to all the other disk
01:57:02 ◼ ► saving tools that like delete temp files and stuff. Yeah, the ones that delete files though,
01:57:06 ◼ ► I don't feel like are my competition. Maybe they are, maybe that's what people really want. Like,
01:57:09 ◼ ► they already have had people say, "Oh, I don't want to actually recover space, I just want to
01:57:13 ◼ ► find files that are duplicates and delete them." I mean, I can always add that feature. Obviously,
01:57:17 ◼ ► I know where all the duplicate files are and it's really easy to delete stuff, but yeah, we'll see.
01:57:21 ◼ ► Maybe that's a thing that I'll learn is that the function my app performs is not desired.
01:57:27 ◼ ► Right? It's desired by me. That's why I made the app, but we'll see. Well, it's desired,
01:57:31 ◼ ► but I think it's a, if you want it to be an ongoing revenue app, I think that needs to be
01:57:38 ◼ ► one function of multiple functions that are all responsible for keeping your disk space minimal
01:57:43 ◼ ► or recovering more disk space than what that can do. Yeah, I will say, like, I mean, it's not like
01:57:48 ◼ ► ongoing, it's more like punctuated, like use it once, wait two years, use it a second time,
01:57:54 ◼ ► but when I use it the second time, I want you to pay again. All right? You know what I mean?
01:57:57 ◼ ► Unless you've unlocked it forever, but like, that's what, like, if I get the pricing right,
01:58:01 ◼ ► you'll be like, "All right, you know, a one month unlock is plenty. I'm not going to use this thing
01:58:04 ◼ ► for a whole month. I'm going to be done with this in two days." So you pay what you, hopefully you
01:58:08 ◼ ► think is a low price, you use it for a month, forget about it for two years. Two years later,
01:58:12 ◼ ► you come, "Oh, I should do more space." And you download the app and you do the exact same thing.
01:58:22 ◼ ► but it does make the second use potentially, you know, a transaction, right? Obviously,
01:58:28 ◼ ► if it was 99 cents to do it, everyone would do it. They'd be like, "Oh, just pay 99 cents and do it
01:58:31 ◼ ► for a month or whatever." It's like the question is how high can you make that month thing? And
01:58:35 ◼ ► really that depends on, to your point, Margot, that first big number when you do it, when you
01:58:39 ◼ ► find all the duplicates the first time. But like, what I was saying earlier is that it could be that
01:58:43 ◼ ► your second run actually finds more space than your first because two years pass and now my app
01:58:48 ◼ ► is brave enough to delve into darker recesses of your Mac where the real space can be recovered.
01:58:53 ◼ ► Like I said, my library directory has been the largest source of duplication that I've found,
01:58:57 ◼ ► but I'm just not ready to go there yet. - I think subscription is gonna be a tough sell. I
01:59:01 ◼ ► really do. Like, I get what you're saying. It makes sense. - I don't see why anyone would do it either,
01:59:05 ◼ ► but if it's the same price and if that's what people want, eh. - You gotta reach for more
01:59:10 ◼ ► disk space. Like, I think, again, like you gotta go for the library. You gotta go for the photo.
01:59:21 ◼ ► the more value you will have to people. So I think you have to go for those. - Yeah, it would also be
01:59:26 ◼ ► nice if I knew at what rate duplication is generated because that's one of the questions
01:59:30 ◼ ► people have. They're like, why would there be any duplicates? I'm not sure I know the answer. All
01:59:34 ◼ ► I know is that there are duplicates. Like, I don't think I was creating duplicates, but I've got
01:59:39 ◼ ► just so many of them. How did they get there? Like, I can explain some of them, but not all
01:59:44 ◼ ► of them. Like, they're finding duplicates. I'm like, how in the world do I have two of those
01:59:47 ◼ ► that are not clones of each other, but somehow I do. So I don't know at what rate does new garbage
01:59:53 ◼ ► get generated. If new garbage gets generated real slowly, then yeah, no one's ever gonna want to run
01:59:57 ◼ ► this app again. But if there's something, some part of some process, especially in the directory
02:00:01 ◼ ► that I'm not looking in now, like library or photo libraries or something, if there's some, like,
02:00:09 ◼ ► then maybe running this once a year is not a ridiculous thing to do or even continuously
02:00:13 ◼ ► monitoring or something. So there's just so many unknowns here. And, you know, if I'm not willing
02:00:18 ◼ ► to add any telemetry, I'm not sure how those unknowns are gonna become knowns, but presumably
02:00:22 ◼ ► slowly through feedback. We'll see. - Thank you to our members who supported this episode for us.
02:00:28 ◼ ► You can join us at atp.fm/join. One of the person membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus
02:00:35 ◼ ► topic. This week on Overtime, we're gonna be talking about Honda's announced EVs at CES
02:00:40 ◼ ► in partnership with Sony, which I didn't even know was a thing until this moment. So this is
02:00:46 ◼ ► kind of cool. So anyway, we're gonna talk about Honda's EV announcement at CES in Overtime. You
02:00:50 ◼ ► can join us at atp.fm/join to hear that and every other Overtime we've done and all the member
02:00:56 ◼ ► specials as well. It's a pretty cool membership. So atp.fm/join. Thank you, everybody, and we'll
02:02:13 ◼ ► Yeah, I think we've got a little bit of after-show car stuff to match up well with the overtime car stuff.
02:02:22 ◼ ► And I didn't really think about winter car performance until the snow started coming and I was like, huh.
02:02:29 ◼ ► I've got a new car in the snow and I'm not talking about how the car drives in the snow.
02:02:34 ◼ ► Because, you know, it's front-wheel drive Honda with all season tires. It's pretty much in known quantity.
02:02:38 ◼ ► I don't think there's anything remarkable about this car. I'm talking about the other stuff.
02:02:43 ◼ ► About having a car in the snow, which is basically when you wake up in the morning and it's time to get in the car and go to work.
02:02:52 ◼ ► What does that process look like? Now, if you have a place where all your car is fit in your garage, maybe that's not a big part of your life.
02:03:05 ◼ ► Cars, with the exception of one, are all on the driveway. That means they're getting snowed on.
02:03:11 ◼ ► That means in the morning you've got to go out there and defrost your car and scrape it all off.
02:03:16 ◼ ► And depending on the weather you had, you could be brushing away snow, you could be scraping off ice.
02:03:26 ◼ ► I guess I hadn't thought too much about it for so many years because so many of our cars have been the same.
02:03:32 ◼ ► We have two of the same generation of Honda Accord. We had a bunch of Honda Accord and Honda Civic before that.
02:03:50 ◼ ► And along with the first car having carplay, there are other firsts in this car as well. I'm not sure all of them are good, but some of them are just a fact of life.
02:04:08 ◼ ► That is a thing that I have to be aware of and avoid when removing snow from the back of the car.
02:04:21 ◼ ► Now hold on, are you not doing the time-honored tradition of moving your windshield wipers to the upright position when snow is pending?
02:04:30 ◼ ► Well, I'll get to that. So first of all, the wiper on the hatch does not do that at all as far as I can tell.
02:04:41 ◼ ► And yeah, when the snow is on it, you may not be aware of exactly where it is. But the second thing is, the hatchback also has a little sprayer thingy for spritzing water for the wiper to wipe away.
02:04:56 ◼ ► That is in the middle of the glass. That is another thing. You do not want to hit with your giant ice scraper as you're scraping the ice off the windshield with big, long, powerful strokes.
02:05:11 ◼ ► Just for the purpose of argument here, have you not considered just turning the car on and turning the rear defroster on and just coming back in five minutes?
02:05:19 ◼ ► Five minutes, eh? I'm not sure where you live, Parker. But five minutes is not going to make a dent when you have freezing rain that has put a centimeter-thick sheet of ice over your car.
02:05:36 ◼ ► You do what you can. You give it 15, 20 minutes, but sometimes you're running late. Sometimes you don't have time to let the car sit in your driveway and defrost.
02:05:43 ◼ ► You don't want to just be sitting there, just spewing fumes into the atmosphere with your internal combustion engine for all this time.
02:05:49 ◼ ► Yeah, obviously you put on a defroster. Obviously you turn the car on. Obviously you want it to warm up. Obviously you turn the heat on inside.
02:05:55 ◼ ► You do all that stuff, and yet still, you want to get going. You want to get out of the driveway. You're late to where you want to go.
02:06:01 ◼ ► You've got the ice scraper out there you're scraping, so have to be aware of where that little nubbin is.
02:06:07 ◼ ► And that's setting aside the other thing that you have, which my wife does not care about, but I absolutely do, which is all the ceiling around all the glass.
02:06:14 ◼ ► And you have to be aware of what that is, so you don't take your scraper and jam it into the ceiling around the thing.
02:06:21 ◼ ► It's fragile, right? It's made of soft plastic or rubber. Your ice scraper can damage it.
02:06:30 ◼ ► Other people in my household are not of that opinion, so I'm trying to preserve this car.
02:06:35 ◼ ► And obviously you've got the side windows, which have their own seals around them, right?
02:06:40 ◼ ► But you also don't want to hit, that you're also trying to scrape off, that you're also trying to point the vents to so they help to rust it.
02:06:49 ◼ ► So first of all, this is a thing that I've gathered a lot of more modern cars do that I don't like, which is they want to get the wipers out of the Airstream.
02:07:05 ◼ ► Which means you can't just take them and pry them upwards, because they won't go, they'll hit the top of the hood.
02:07:12 ◼ ► What you have to do is go into the car, and depending on whatever your car is, do whatever incantation that tells the car,
02:07:24 ◼ ► And of course, you can't put them back until you, you know, so that dance is stupid on the car, because you have to like start the engine and then turn it off,
02:07:34 ◼ ► Which is harder when you don't have a key, because the key you just turn halfway, but then you've got to push a button anyway.
02:07:43 ◼ ► The second thing is, and I don't know if this is just a Honda thing or this is a new modern car thing, but I'm, I have two minds about this.
02:07:51 ◼ ► All my previous cars that I've ever owned had the squirty things, where they squirt, you know, windshield wiper fluid onto your windshield.
02:07:59 ◼ ► Just like I have one on the back, little squirty nozzle, you know, sprays out, and usually there's like two of them.
02:08:16 ◼ ► And I understand why they do this. What it has is the wiper squirty things. They're not in the blades.
02:08:22 ◼ ► I mean, they take regular wiper blades. You can just replace them with any wiper blade.
02:08:31 ◼ ► So the stuff squirts out basically just in front of the wiper blade, right? Like right there with the wiper blade.
02:08:40 ◼ ► So as you swipe the wiper blade, it is squirting stuff in front of the wiper blade as it goes.
02:08:45 ◼ ► Now, I would imagine that our motivation is this. First of all, with the old one, when you pull the little stalk or whatever and it goes squirt, squirt, squirt,
02:08:53 ◼ ► there are situations where you could effectively be blinding the driver in a quickly moving car.
02:08:59 ◼ ► Because that spray sprays onto the windshield and instantly freezes into ice or smears some mud or dust that was on there or whatever.
02:09:06 ◼ ► And now you're waiting like, "Oh my God, I can't see anything." You're hoping those wiper blades come and sweep away the mess you just made.
02:09:13 ◼ ► And if you're lucky, they do. And if you're unlucky, it like flash-froze onto your thing because your windshield washer fluid was the wrong concentration.
02:09:23 ◼ ► You don't want to be in a situation where you spray a bunch of gunk on your windshield and then rely on the correct functioning of the blades to swipe it away.
02:09:31 ◼ ► With this technique, where they're on the blades, the only place you're putting it is right in front of where the blade is about to move into.
02:09:38 ◼ ► And you're not spraying the entire window all at once. You're just spraying the region in front of the blade.
02:09:43 ◼ ► So maybe there's a safety issue there. Maybe it is a little bit better. Maybe it's a more efficient use of liquid so you're not spraying most of it into the air.
02:09:51 ◼ ► So it's just blowing over the car. How much of it actually contacts the windshield? How much of it stays on the windshield? Here you're squirting it directly on the windshield.
02:09:58 ◼ ► But now, you've got this problem where the little arms have little hoses on them and little squirty things.
02:10:04 ◼ ► And it's just one more fragile thing to go wrong and not mess with when you're there fumbling in the ice and snow.
02:10:10 ◼ ► Maybe people who don't live around snow think that snow is like, I don't know, invisible or easy to deal with.
02:10:18 ◼ ► But wet icy snow that's frozen onto your car and everything. It's not as simple as this fluffy white powder that just moves out of the way.
02:10:27 ◼ ► It can encase your car in hard stuff that you want to chip it out of but you don't want to chip. It's like chipping out a baby from a giant stone thing.
02:10:38 ◼ ► You want to get the stone off but you don't want to use a jackhammer because you'll kill the baby. My car is the baby in this scenario.
02:10:44 ◼ ► So there's ice coating everything. I can't even get the blades up into service position because everything is frozen in place.
02:10:51 ◼ ► But I don't want to crack them out of the little tubes going into the arms to go up into the squirter thingies.
02:10:57 ◼ ► And in the old way, at least I could know where the squirters were and try to clean off the nozzle.
02:11:02 ◼ ► They have a clear shot but now the squirters are facing down and they're inside the ice encrusted blades.
02:11:19 ◼ ► But again I kind of see why they do it. But it is making the process of chiseling my car out of its icy prison.
02:11:57 ◼ ► But nevertheless, I think in general in decent conditions I like having them in the wiper blade.
02:12:14 ◼ ► And then they arrived and I went to install them in the car and whatever the mounting situation was for the wipers I got was in direct physical conflict with the sprayer for the wiper fluid.
02:12:25 ◼ ► So I quickly ended up saying I'm not going to bother with this and trying to research what third party thing will work.
02:12:31 ◼ ► And so I just pulled a Marco and threw money at the problem and just went to Volvo and got some new wiper blades from them.
02:12:37 ◼ ► Oh yeah, and on that front, wiper blades aren't usually really any more expensive than good third party ones.
02:12:43 ◼ ► Unlike so much OEM things where it costs a bazillion dollars to get the official one from your car manufacturer.
02:12:48 ◼ ► Wiper blades are not the case. Now maybe they're not as good as the third party ones you would get for the same price.
02:12:52 ◼ ► But if you're worried about any wiper blades that exactly fit my car, the OEM ones are not that expensive.
02:13:11 ◼ ► That's probably true. But one way or another, I like having them, leaving the replacement issue aside, I like having them in the blade.
02:13:18 ◼ ► My car, both of our cars do the hideaway, the blades thing when the car is in a steady state if you will.
02:13:27 ◼ ► But I don't really mind that generally speaking. And again, I don't have to deal with snow on a regular basis.
02:13:39 ◼ ► I certainly did on her old car. I think I do on mine. I'm sure I could figure it out fairly quickly but I don't remember off the top of my head.
02:13:59 ◼ ► And speaking of modern, well actually before we move on, how is the on-road performance of the Civic?
02:14:11 ◼ ► We were on the streak of me just not driving. First I was not driving because I didn't want to be the first one to screw up the wheels but then she screwed up the wheels.
02:14:16 ◼ ► But still, I didn't drive it. You didn't want to break the streak but she was away for a while and I had to move cars so I did actually drive her car to move it out of the driveway.
02:14:28 ◼ ► I bought this car because I can barely fit in it because it's got a sunroof so I would not choose this car for myself but she likes it.
02:14:38 ◼ ► Fair enough. For me, I have a little bit of car follow-up. I am mad with power, gentlemen, because I have installed Home Assistant which I think we briefly have touched on a handful of times.
02:15:10 ◼ ► Anyway, maybe this has been here for a while and I just didn't realize it, but there is a community integration between Home Assistant and Volvo's APIs for controlling the car.
02:15:27 ◼ ► And oh baby, I don't even know what I'm going to do with myself because I installed this integration which was challenging for uninteresting reasons.
02:15:35 ◼ ► But I installed the integration like three hours ago and within an hour of it being installed, I've already written an automation such that if it's a weekday and the car is plugged in at about ten minutes before she leaves in the morning to drop the kids off at school, it will precondition the car.
02:15:53 ◼ ► This is stuff that Tesla owners have probably been doing for ten years, but now I can do it.
02:15:57 ◼ ► And the other thing is, I bet you I could do this in the Volvo app, but I don't care. I can do it through Home Assistant now.
02:16:01 ◼ ► I've got a hammer, everything's a nail, baby. So this is very exciting for me. I can get a readout in Home Assistant of the battery level of whether it's charging or not.
02:16:21 ◼ ► Yep, don't know why I would, but I could. Now I feel like you've nerd sniped me, I just kind of want to see if I can.
02:16:27 ◼ ► But anyways, this is way too much fun, and I feel like, again, everything is a nail because now I've got the world's biggest hammer.
02:16:39 ◼ ► Marco, how's your car in the snow and everything else? And how was it on the long trip?
02:16:43 ◼ ► So far, it's been great. I mean, I haven't had it in many demanding, snowy environments.
02:16:51 ◼ ► So I don't know how it compares to actual off-roaders I've had before, because the iX is not an off-roader.
02:17:00 ◼ ► It has all-wheel drive, the same way most modern BMWs have all-wheel drive, and it has the benefits of electric drive of very high torque and everything.
02:17:23 ◼ ► I don't know. I'll have to check. But they do have the squirters in the blades, which I also had in the Land Rover.
02:17:33 ◼ ► So I actually prefer the squirters in the blades because not only does it, as you mentioned, Jon, you have less blinded time as the wind is sprayed,
02:17:44 ◼ ► but also it uses way less fluid to get a full sweep because you don't have to hold it down for a second and then the wiper blade goes across and scoots it over,
02:17:55 ◼ ► and then you squirt a little bit more to get under the blade. You don't have to do that dance.
02:17:59 ◼ ► You can just squirt a little bit of it and it coats the whole windshield way better with less fluid.
02:18:08 ◼ ► You know the people who have their squirters are not aimed correctly and you're driving behind them and they just send off this spout like a whale and it just splatters onto your windshield?
02:18:27 ◼ ► I've had a couple of minor software things where sometimes the iPhone won't unlock it very quickly,
02:18:35 ◼ ► and I think honestly that's probably the iPhone's fault because I usually run beta iOSes and they change the Bluetooth details all the time in iOS betas for some reason.
02:18:54 ◼ ► In fact, there was a story that breezed through the news today real quick that apparently BMW's next-gen iDrive system,
02:19:09 ◼ ► It's going to keep having CarPlay just in the main screen and not in the secondary driver cluster.
02:19:14 ◼ ► But as far as I can tell, I don't think my car supports the driver cluster second screen anyway.
02:19:21 ◼ ► And the iMac is supposed to have one of their most cutting-edge iDrive systems and one of their most cutting-edge CarPlay integrations.
02:19:29 ◼ ► I mean, it's a few years old now. The model's a few years old now, so maybe it's not as new as the newest ones.
02:19:35 ◼ ► But I already don't have the second screen, and I don't think I would want the second screen.
02:19:43 ◼ ► This is probably a bigger discussion for a different day, but I think CarPlay, the way it is implemented in most cars,
02:19:57 ◼ ► They should never have tried to branch out any more than that, because that was never going to work and there's other downsides to it.
02:20:03 ◼ ► And I think having it be in that screen keeps the automakers happier about keeping it there, achieves a nice balanced functionality with the users and everybody.
02:20:20 ◼ ► Things like when you have an assisted driving feature, it will usually have some option to show in the middle, like, here's your car, and here's a map ahead of it,
02:20:29 ◼ ► here's the car that we think is there, and kind of show a visualization of the cars around you as the car sees them, or your following distance, or your cruise control settings, or whatever.
02:20:38 ◼ ► That all goes in the main cluster. So I like having CarPlay in its little, or in the case of the iMac, in its giant rectangle on the main screen.
02:20:48 ◼ ► I don't think it needs to go anywhere else. I think having it try to take over everything was probably the wrong strategy for Apple.
02:20:55 ◼ ► And also, Apple doesn't put a lot of effort into CarPlay, so I think having it be in its rectangle on the main screen matches the amount of effort Apple puts into it.
02:21:07 ◼ ► I don't think Apple makes CarPlay good enough, bug-free enough, or reliable enough, or full-featured enough to have it take over the whole dash.
02:21:28 ◼ ► Yeah, that's, I mean, look, they're walking away whistling, like, that's gone. We all know that's gone. It's up in Apple heaven with AirPower.
02:21:36 ◼ ► I think Apple is still insisting that this is still coming from some car manufacturers, but they keep revising, I think they announced it in 2022, nowhere to be seen, and Apple's story for all of 2024 is totally, it's coming in 2024 from one of these manufacturers. That did not happen.
02:21:56 ◼ ► Anyway, so I love having CarPlay in what is a good version of regular CarPlay. It's still the one rectangular screen in the middle of the car. It's a good version of that on a nice, big, good screen. So I like that a lot. And yeah, otherwise I'm very hyped about the car.
02:22:14 ◼ ► I disagree slightly with regard to the multi-screen CarPlay thing. It is nice to have, like in Aaron's car, it'll do multi-screen, and it is nice to have a map right there in the instrument cluster rather than only in the center screen.
02:22:29 ◼ ► I think perhaps you've been tainted by having many cars where the screen was, you know, this giant thing in the center and there's little to nothing in the instrument cluster. But one way or another, I do like having it there. It's not critical, but I like it.
02:22:44 ◼ ► And I think a lot of the brouhaha with regard to BMW, from what little I read, is that it is a regression in so far as they were supporting that previously in most of their cars, perhaps not the electric ones, and they soon will not be anymore. And people were pretty grumbly about that.
02:23:01 ◼ ► But all in all, I mean, I do quite like having CarPlay. I still will not buy a car without it. You know, people keep saying to me, especially with regard to our conversations a few weeks ago, "Oh, you should buy the Rivian R3 when it comes out because it'll surely be cheap enough."
02:23:16 ◼ ► Sure. But I'm not going to buy a car without CarPlay. I just won't. And you might think me a moron for that. And that's fine. I don't care. Like, I will not buy a car without CarPlay because I just don't want to do it. I don't want to rely on an automobile manufacturer's software in order to have the infotainment that I want on my car.
02:23:37 ◼ ► I don't want to have to use Overcast via Bluetooth. I want the damn CarPlay app. And I just, I will not buy a car without it, at least. And so I'm hopeful that CarPlay is not dead in its entirety, even though it does appear that next-gen CarPlay was never born, much less has died or anything like that.