00:00:00 ◼ ► Hi, everybody. We're live. That's it, huh? That's the show? Well, that was fast. Thanks for listening, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week. Did Casey just disappear? I don't know. What happened? He just muted himself. He's moving the cursor around. Type to us, Casey. Tell us. Are you here, Casey? Spirits, are you listening? God damn it. Am I here now? Yes. Jesus Christ. I've been talking for the last two minutes.
00:00:30 ◼ ► This is user error. User error. The recording is fine. The recording is fine. Marco, the recording is fine. Jesus Christ. This is the most Casey moment I've had in a little while.
00:00:40 ◼ ► The funny thing is, I had said to Marco before we recorded, before John was even on the call, you know, I'm feeling a little overwhelmed. I have no reason for it. I just am. Well, no reason other than gestures, wildly. But I'm feeling a little overwhelmed.
00:00:53 ◼ ► Anyways, so my ritual when I start recording is, I don't know why this is, but I need to go into system preferences. We talked about this like months ago. I need to go into system preferences, need to go into sound, and I need to change
00:01:06 ◼ ► change the input to my bespoke input for the USB mix pre 3.2. Otherwise, if I don't do that, when I hit record in audio hijack, audio hijack is like, what mix pre 3.2? It doesn't exist. It exists up until I hit record. And the moment I hit record, it doesn't exist.
00:01:29 ◼ ► Why are you into system settings is what it's called? And why are you going into there instead of, you'd love menu bar icons. You could put a menu bar icon that will let you pick the input source.
00:01:39 ◼ ► How? I don't know. I mean, you're probably right. I have no idea how, but it doesn't matter. So anyway, so this time I did it for mix pre 3.2, which is the physical connection to the mix pre 3.2.
00:01:50 ◼ ► But what I should have done is, and there was a reason for this during the USB pre days, that Marco, for good reason, had me set up a loopback interface for when I record.
00:02:02 ◼ ► And I think it was because I was piping y'all's audio back to you for some strange reason. I don't recall why that was.
00:02:08 ◼ ► It was probably, so no, it was probably because the setup I do with USB pre 2 is I have channel 2 being what you two are saying.
00:02:17 ◼ ► And that way, in my recording, I have both me and you two, both as a backup and also to help me sync up with the, you know, with the double ender method afterwards.
00:02:27 ◼ ► Right, right, right. So anyways, I'd selected mix pre 3.2. I did not select USB mix pre 3.2 for zoom, which is the loopback one.
00:02:36 ◼ ► And as soon as I selected that, you guys could finally hear me. That's right. I was, I was realizing as this was happening, and I didn't realize you couldn't hear me that I wasn't sure which one of the two pre shows.
00:03:21 ◼ ► Okay, so we are recording on Monday, March 31st for travel-related reasons, and I wanted, or we really wanted to call attention to the fact that today is Trans Day of Visibility.
00:03:37 ◼ ► I'm not sure if that's really the appropriate way of phrasing it, but this is meant in good spirits, and I hope you take what we mean and what I mean by saying this.
00:03:44 ◼ ► So if you're not familiar or aware of this, we will put a link in the show notes, but reading from GLAAD's website, each year on March 31st, the world observes Transgender Day of Visibility, or TDOV, to raise awareness about transgender people.
00:03:58 ◼ ► It is a day to celebrate the lives and contributions of trans people while also drawing attention to the disproportionate levels of poverty, discrimination, and violence community faces.
00:04:12 ◼ ► Trans people deserve to be loved and treated and have the rights of any other kind of person.
00:04:23 ◼ ► And if you do feel otherwise, you can feel free to turn the program off right now because, you know, this program is not for you if that's how you feel.
00:04:31 ◼ ► So to those of us who are – to those of you who identify as transgender, we are here with you to the degree that, you know, three straight white old dudes can, and we support you to the degree that we can, and we believe in you and hope the best for all of you.
00:04:48 ◼ ► Yeah, this is kind of a – the name of this holiday is kind of a statement about where things are right now.
00:05:06 ◼ ► And, like, if you're my age or older, you might remember a time when lots of different types of people face similar discrimination, as in it would be more convenient for me as the default human to not have to think about people who are different than me.
00:05:26 ◼ ► And then I wouldn't have to think about them, and it would make me feel so much more comfortable.
00:05:34 ◼ ► And the sooner you realize that, the sooner you can get on board with the idea of, like, huh, maybe other human beings exist.
00:05:40 ◼ ► And it's a journey for a lot of people, especially if you didn't grow up thinking about this at all.
00:05:46 ◼ ► But I have some confidence that everybody listening to this, if they're not already on board, can eventually get on board by just slowly breaking it down and thinking, people exist.
00:06:06 ◼ ► If you are not trans, the existence of trans people doesn't threaten you or make your life worse in any way.
00:06:38 ◼ ► And every generation and every year, some other group of formerly oppressed people tries to fight for their rights, and other people resist it because it just doesn't seem like that's the way things should be.
00:06:53 ◼ ► So, anyway, so, again, if this phrasing is incorrect or inappropriate, I genuinely apologize.
00:06:59 ◼ ► But to the degree that I don't know the right way to phrase it, happy Trans Day Visibility.
00:07:46 ◼ ► My reminder in due for every March 29th at 7.50 to give me a little bit of time to get ahead of it is
00:07:51 ◼ ► John announced independence on 476 on 30 March 2022, and I re-listened to the after show of that episode, and it is so freaking delightful because as much as I hate you for keeping this from Marco and me until it had already happened and you are already past your two-week notice, it made for a truly delightful after show.
00:08:12 ◼ ► And I was sitting at Wegmans this morning where I typically go to do my ATP prep, and I was beaming from ear to ear listening to Marco and I just lose our minds over the fact that you would not only quit your job but had done it two weeks prior.
00:08:30 ◼ ► You had presumably queued it up and so on and so forth and then actually hit go during recording because you said, oh, there's a blog post about it.
00:08:51 ◼ ► I was just doing the math wrong on my head and said, boy, I've been independent for two years now.
00:09:02 ◼ ► Like a lot of these stories about people going independent, like the day, the moment or the day or the time or the date that I might celebrate is kind of, is always going to be different from like the day that like, you know, you're picking like the announcement day on the podcast or whatever.
00:09:15 ◼ ► It's like Mike Hurley's story with his shoelace breaking and him thinking if I buy another pair of shoelaces, I'll just, you know, I'll just continue the cycle of going back to my jobby job.
00:09:34 ◼ ► And for me, maybe it would be like the day I decided I'm going to quit or the day that I like put in my two weeks notice, something like that would be, you know, that's the one that's significant to me.
00:09:43 ◼ ► So, which is why I can never remember like the day after keeping the secret for multiple weeks, I announced it on a podcast.
00:09:51 ◼ ► And if you want to know how I posted on my podcast, the most recent member special will tell you.
00:10:02 ◼ ► So if you want to hear that members episode and support John's independence, atp.fm slash join.
00:10:07 ◼ ► But no, truly, if you haven't heard episode 476 or even if you were around for it, you know, three years ago, almost to the day, it is worth a quick relist.
00:10:17 ◼ ► And this jerk made us go through an entire episode like nothing had changed and then drops this on us in the after show.
00:10:32 ◼ ► And also, thank you for quitting your job because it made you like do a whole bunch of stuff for the podcast.
00:10:39 ◼ ► We weren't doing before, like, you know, we talked a little bit about this before, listeners, but like, since John quit his job, the podcast became John's job.
00:10:48 ◼ ► And he has been doing so much work behind the scenes on the CMS, on the membership system, on all these different technical things, member support issues, merchandise development.
00:11:01 ◼ ► And, like, there's so much that John has done since then, stuff that, like, you know, Casey or I either, you know, kind of had on our back burners or never even would have thought to do.
00:11:14 ◼ ► So, John has been, like, having an unemployed John fully deployed on our project here has been really quite something.
00:11:35 ◼ ► I mean, we also want to thank you for writing those three apps because it gave us a bunch of content for the show.
00:11:39 ◼ ► No, actually, it's funny hearing you discuss, you know, because I was giving you a lot of, you know, stick about, well, what are you going to do?
00:11:47 ◼ ► And you had started to say, well, you know, I might write an app or something like that.
00:11:50 ◼ ► And, you know, having come to this episode not too long after the release of Hyperspace, it was quite delightful to hear, you know, your expectations, which, to be fair, were mostly met as far
00:12:03 ◼ ► So, again, if you have, you know, 25 minutes to kill, I strongly suggest listening back to that after show.
00:12:20 ◼ ► Like, I mean, I'm so, like, cautious in these type of things that I did, like, I didn't feel like I was in position to quit my job until I was sure that even if things went disastrously wrong, I would still be mostly okay.
00:12:38 ◼ ► And, obviously, my, you know, everything about my income in my life has been scaled back slightly.
00:13:21 ◼ ► In fact, if you ever want to know who owns a Vision Pro, just say something inaccurate about it on AT&T and they'll let you know.
00:13:29 ◼ ► This was with regard to Marco and I both lamenting how difficult it is to change the volume on the Vision Pro.
00:13:35 ◼ ► I had said that what I like to do is if you look at the back of your hand, you get, I forget what it is.
00:13:46 ◼ ► The standard way of doing this is if you twist the digital crown and then there's two little orbs that pop up.
00:13:55 ◼ ► So you have to twist the digital crown, look over to the volume orb, and then as you continue to twist the digital crown, you'll adjust the volume.
00:14:02 ◼ ► D. Griffin Jones wrote, as of Vision OS 2, there's a setting to make the digital crown adjust the volume by default rather than the environment.
00:14:11 ◼ ► And we also had somebody write in, Victor Prieto wrote in with a link to the support guide, if I'm not mistaken, or maybe it was a screen capture.
00:14:27 ◼ ► Every time we talk about this topic, I'm reminded of a clip I saw from, I think, an Irish stand-up comedian, a clip I saw on YouTube talking about how panicked the people, his parents would get if they left the house and they left the immersion on.
00:14:46 ◼ ► I keep thinking of, do either of you have any idea what immersion means in the context of the stand-up comedian saying that you left it on before you left the house?
00:15:10 ◼ ► It's like older, you know, way back in the day, people growing up in the 70s in Ireland.
00:15:21 ◼ ► I was afraid the house would burn down or you'd be wasting electricity or you'd be costing yourself money.
00:15:26 ◼ ► It's hard to exactly tell what the complaint is because obviously this was an Irish stand-up comedian talking to an audience that understood what he was talking about.
00:15:37 ◼ ► With regard to Apple and new EU regulations or timelines or what have you, Karan J writes,
00:15:42 ◼ ► Working in global banking, our work prioritization basically goes, number one, production stability.
00:15:50 ◼ ► Karan continues, a good regulator consults with the regulated entities before setting the timeline.
00:16:04 ◼ ► Tom continues, the interoperability requirements set out by the DMA were clear from the start.
00:16:09 ◼ ► Despite Apple getting special treatment in the form of constant communication with lawmakers, something us ordinary citizens would never get, Apple has utterly refused to do anything to improve interoperability.
00:16:40 ◼ ► Well, so the main reason you'd care about how hard compliance is going to be to them is if you care about them eventually complying.
00:16:47 ◼ ► If you don't care about them complying and instead you just want to essentially punish them for not following your earlier instructions,
00:16:55 ◼ ► But I would imagine most parties involved, for the reasons we discussed last episode, want the end result to be Apple to comply.
00:17:01 ◼ ► So that's why if you care about that, you should care how hard it is for the people to comply.
00:17:06 ◼ ► Because if you give them something that makes them think it's impossible, it's going to decrease the likelihood that they will comply.
00:17:18 ◼ ► Now we're just into the punitive phase and we no longer care whether they ever comply with anything.
00:17:26 ◼ ► But I think most parties involved, including all of the European companies that want to be able to make products,
00:17:37 ◼ ► The other angle is like, oh, they just want Apple to leave entirely so that European smartphone companies can spring back to life.
00:17:45 ◼ ► And while that might be great and eventually happen, I think the companies that have lobbied for these regulations are companies that exist now and would actually want to sell things to iPhone customers.
00:18:00 ◼ ► I don't think this entire regulation was a backdoor to just chase Apple out of the EU so that currently non-existent or tiny European smartphone companies can spring up to take its place.
00:18:14 ◼ ► Even if you're just going to make an Android phone like everybody else, there's a lot of competition already.
00:18:21 ◼ ► Illustro writes, it's pretty clear there's been non-public communication between the EC and Apple prior to the release of this decision.
00:18:27 ◼ ► See paragraph 19 of the decision text where it states, bullet, future functionalities of the P2P Wi-Fi connection include, A, confidential, B, confidential.
00:18:41 ◼ ► So Apple has told the EU about future plan functionality of at least one of its features.
00:18:45 ◼ ► To me, this shows that this decision was made with detailed knowledge of Apple's future plans.
00:18:50 ◼ ► From working in the insurance industry in the EU, these types of behind-the-scenes discussions with EU regulators come with questions of how long it is expected the planned features will take to develop.
00:19:00 ◼ ► And those timelines are taken into account when making such decisions, with the regulator consulting with technical experts on the feasibility of such changes.
00:19:07 ◼ ► The characterization that this is a decision made by people who don't know any better is likely wrong.
00:19:15 ◼ ► And this actually gives me some hope that I didn't have before that there were actually substantive discussions about timelines between the regulators and Apple's.
00:19:24 ◼ ► Previously, we had heard like, of course, Apple, we'd always say, Apple's, of course, talking behind the scenes with the EU.
00:19:29 ◼ ► And like, we just assumed that was happening, but we weren't privy to those conversations.
00:19:36 ◼ ► Because it seems like what they say in the public makes it seem like they're not actually cooperating.
00:19:40 ◼ ► But once you see something like this, where it's confidential Apple features that were clearly communicated to the EU with Apple said, like, don't put this in your docs.
00:19:50 ◼ ► And that does give me much more faith than I had in the last episode, that perhaps the timelines that have been outlined are things that Apple has not agreed to.
00:20:05 ◼ ► It gives me more confidence those timelines are not entirely arbitrary, because if they had just like been yelling at each other in public and not having any kind of conversations behind the scenes, except for negotiations about like, well, we think we're complying.
00:20:18 ◼ ► The giant timeline they laid out was just, you know, something you could never do without knowledge of Apple's plans.
00:20:28 ◼ ► Of course, even if they're talking behind the scenes and even if they have some kind of agreement, like, yeah, this is reasonable.
00:20:34 ◼ ► As we've seen through every past thing that Apple has ever done to try to comply with the DMA, what Apple thinks is compliant is very often not what actually is compliant.
00:20:54 ◼ ► It's like all people have to do is let us audit their tax records for the rest of their lives and give us their firstborn and fill out this form and then wait an undetermined amount of time for it to see if we respond to their request to become a third party allowed earbud manufacturer.
00:21:09 ◼ ► And like they did with all the other things, you know, often called malicious compliance, but also called Apple will never give up control if they could at all possibly help it.
00:21:21 ◼ ► But sort of certain knowledge or confirmation that they have been talking with Apple behind the scenes on substantive issues like specifics of the features that they're being required to open up as evidenced by redacted things inside the document definitely increases the chances that what they're being asked to do is plausible.
00:21:42 ◼ ► Finally, David Scherer writes, in your discussion of how Apple might comply with EU rules to open up their platform, you didn't mention the possibility of Apple simply removing the controversial features in the EU.
00:21:51 ◼ ► Apple did this in Britain, discontinuing advanced data protection rather than implement the changes Britain wanted.
00:22:03 ◼ ► Obviously, this works better for minor features like AirDrop than for major products like Apple Watch integration.
00:22:09 ◼ ► Yeah, so some of the things, well, first of all, the Britain thing, what they did had really no bearing on what the UK wanted.
00:22:30 ◼ ► Anyway, setting that aside, if it's just like disabling a feature here and there, fine.
00:22:35 ◼ ► But the list of things that the EU wants Apple to open up is so long that if you removed all of them, you're really hampering the functionality of the phone.
00:22:44 ◼ ► Like essentially, you wouldn't be able to use AirPods with an iPhone to quote unquote drop the feature.
00:22:51 ◼ ► Or like AirPods would only work in Bluetooth mode or something like the peer-to-peer wireless stuff or the payment things.
00:22:58 ◼ ► Like you wouldn't be able to use Apple Pay because they didn't open up the payment thing.
00:23:00 ◼ ► Like I think the list is too long for it to be feasible for Apple to comply by removing the functionality because they'd be, you know, damaging the functionality of their own products so much that it would become uncompetitive, I feel like.
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00:25:16 ◼ ► I don't know what's stopping JG from making progress on Siri, but clearly something is.
00:25:27 ◼ ► I knew him pretty well, and in every interaction, he proved himself to be intelligent, knowledgeable, competent, inventive, and effective.
00:25:41 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, and the problem is, like, we don't know, like, what, we don't even know if John, Gene, Andrea was, like, you know, the problem, in quotes.
00:25:51 ◼ ► When you put people in companies and the structure and the incentives and all the messiness that comes around, like, you know, people working together, the structure itself can often be to blame.
00:26:04 ◼ ► It can often just be, like, this dynamic between this person, this system, these people around them at this time in this company didn't work very well for some reason.
00:26:13 ◼ ► And you can take that exact same person and put them in a different company or a different structure or a different time, and they can do great.
00:26:37 ◼ ► And so maybe this context just didn't work very well for him, or maybe nobody could have succeeded in this context.
00:26:44 ◼ ► Like, maybe if you took Gene Andres' position and put anybody else in it at that time with those people, maybe nobody could have done any better than he did.
00:26:58 ◼ ► On a recent episode, which at this point was, like, two months ago, you read some feedback from a listener who said they wanted Netflix integration with the Apple TV app so they could use the cross-service search functionality.
00:27:11 ◼ ► I searched for Queer Eye, Squid Game, and The Crown, all Netflix exclusives, and they appeared in the search results with links to open in Netflix.
00:27:35 ◼ ► Like, this is part of the difficulty of the tvOS interface, are inconsistencies like this.
00:27:52 ◼ ► and everything's always the same and uniform, or it's not, and customers really have no idea what to expect.
00:27:59 ◼ ► Like, Ryan was going to write it and say, yeah, I really wish they could be integrated so they would work in search.
00:28:08 ◼ ► But he had never realized that because once you internalize that Netflix isn't part of the whole thing, you think they're not part of the whole thing.
00:28:21 ◼ ► It's not, you're not actually providing value with an overarching interface if it doesn't actually include everything.
00:28:28 ◼ ► Of course, that's all part of Netflix's strategy, which is like, you know, deny Apple the ability to unify everything by being,
00:28:36 ◼ ► by refusing to participate because we're such an important player that if we refuse to participate,
00:28:45 ◼ ► Because if it doesn't have Netflix, I mean, come on, we're a pretty big streaming service.
00:28:48 ◼ ► And so far, that strategy has mostly worked to make the tvOS interface seem not as good as it could be if it really was unified.
00:28:58 ◼ ► This was back when it, this original item was from the episode where it changed accidentally somehow,
00:29:20 ◼ ► Someday you're, well, I don't know, someday both of you are going to have to buy new TVs,
00:29:35 ◼ ► I mean, I'm in a very enviable position right now where I have been spousily greenlit for a new home TV purchase.
00:29:44 ◼ ► I just haven't gotten around to doing it yet because we've been busy with the restaurant.
00:29:49 ◼ ► So I have, and because, you know, we want to like wall mount it and stuff when we get it.
00:30:17 ◼ ► Sony didn't even launch one last year because the A95L was still the best TV that you could get last year.
00:30:25 ◼ ► But the LG G5 this year is pretty impressive because it uses the tandem OLED from the iPad.
00:30:43 ◼ ► But this item here was originally a follow-up item back when we talked about CES, but it just aged out of that role.
00:30:49 ◼ ► And particularly when we were talking about in, like, the episode after we talked about CES, the Hisense 116UX, which was this very large, very expensive television.
00:31:05 ◼ ► So instead of just having a white backlight, it had, you know, red, green, blue, independent backlights.
00:31:13 ◼ ► But if you don't turn them on, you can make the backlight match the color that you want the pixels to be.
00:31:45 ◼ ► It's one of the weaknesses of every OLED TV that has WRGB pixels because it's got a white subpixel.
00:31:51 ◼ ► Color volume is like, okay, so you can be real bright when everything's all white and whatever region, you know, your brightness is.
00:32:00 ◼ ► It's like, well, yeah, because then now we only, we're blocking light from all the subpixels.
00:32:05 ◼ ► We have to turn off the white subpixel, block all the light from the white subpixel, like, or turn off the OLED white subpixel or block all the light from the other color pixels.
00:32:14 ◼ ► Well, if you have a red backlight behind a red pixel, that makes it more red than if you have a white backlight behind a red color filter or whatever.
00:32:28 ◼ ► And at the time, I had mentioned that Sony had an RGB backlight technology years ago, back when I was looking to buy my first flat screen TV.
00:32:34 ◼ ► I ended up getting a plasma, but I was also considering, I couldn't remember the brand name at the time, and now I've already forgotten what it is again.
00:32:41 ◼ ► But some, maybe it started with a Q, some Sony LCD television back in the plasma days, and its innovation was that it had RGB backlights, that instead of just a white backlight, it had red, green, and blue backlights.
00:32:59 ◼ ► They were more expensive than plasma, and it turns out they weren't as good as plasma, so I ended up getting a plasma.
00:33:03 ◼ ► But anyway, so this is not a new thing, but apparently it is, it has been historically proven difficult to do, and Hisense had this TV at CES, and it was $30,000.
00:33:13 ◼ ► But now Sony has made an announcement that they have their own RGB backlight technology.
00:33:21 ◼ ► But anyway, they're claiming that it can go to 4,000 nits, and they're claiming that it, like, the color volume is close to QD OLED.
00:33:48 ◼ ► Like, the LCD panels are a well-proven technology, and most of the innovation is happening in the backlight and in the controller software.
00:33:56 ◼ ► And in particular, if you want a really, really big TV, you just keep making the LCD bigger and bigger.
00:34:13 ◼ ► So, if you want, like, a 115-inch TV, your only choice, other than, like, micro LED, which will cost $100,000, is a mini LED TV.
00:34:22 ◼ ► You can't get an OLED that big, because OLEDs are expensive and difficult to manufacture, and they just don't make them in that size.
00:34:28 ◼ ► But the problem, of course, with mini LEDs is the color volume is not as good as the QD OLEDs, and also, it's not per-pixel light control.
00:34:42 ◼ ► And if any one of those thousands of pixels is supposed to be lit up, you've got to turn on the whole backlight behind it.
00:34:54 ◼ ► Like, that's where the Sony's A95L and the Samsung QD OLEDs are doing really well, because they can produce the purest colors,
00:35:04 ◼ ► because QD OLEDs only have RGB sub-pixels, and they are self-emissive, and that's all the light that's coming directly from the pixels.
00:35:13 ◼ ► Like, whatever that Rec. 2020 color volume thing that other TVs get to, like, 60% of, and that, like, the QD OLEDs get to, like, 80%.
00:35:26 ◼ ► Anyway, people are very excited about this, because you get a huge TV with great color volume.
00:35:37 ◼ ► I'll put it in the show notes to two YouTube videos, one for digital trends and one for HGTV test.
00:35:49 ◼ ► Like, any TV technology that doesn't let you control the light coming from individual pixels exactly is never going to be, like, the future of TV tech.
00:35:58 ◼ ► I know people like it because you can make a big TV, and the color volume is better, and it's really bright, and yada yada.
00:36:03 ◼ ► But it's like, okay, let's put up a star field where everything is black except for pinpricks of white light.
00:36:16 ◼ ► But, like, look, if you watch these TV reviewers, there are situations with real content where you can see, oh, yeah, no.
00:36:24 ◼ ► And even if the other TV is bigger and it's brighter and it's, like, quote-unquote, better and people would prefer it, from my perspective, I care about per-pixel lighting control.
00:36:38 ◼ ► But on a television, when you're watching TV content, that, I feel like, should be the standard.
00:36:43 ◼ ► And so, unless you absolutely, positively must have a television that is bigger than, at this point, 83 inches, still, OLED's the way to go.
00:36:52 ◼ ► The scary thing about Sony and Sony talking about this and bragging about it is, like, people are thinking, okay, when Sony rolls out its 2025 TVs, are they not going to do an OLED as their flagship TV?
00:37:04 ◼ ► Are they going to claim that this RGB backlight thing that they have is their new flagship TV because it is brighter and has better color volume?
00:37:12 ◼ ► I hope not because they're going to lose in all the TV shootout tests because they'll be brighter and they'll have better color volume.
00:37:19 ◼ ► But they won't be able to handle challenging lighting situations as well as a screen with per-pixel lighting control.
00:37:37 ◼ ► I would say the difference in color reproduction and viewing angles were a wash at best.
00:37:41 ◼ ► I generally prefer the picture from the OLED in the most challenging comparisons, and I think a lot of OLED TV owners would probably agree.
00:38:00 ◼ ► And having people from The Verge go there and look at it and go, yeah, it'd still take the A95L.
00:38:10 ◼ ► I'm just waiting for them to, waiting for the shoe to drop and for them to reveal what they're going to consider their flagship TV.
00:38:16 ◼ ► Samsung did this a little while back, too, where Samsung was insisting that their flagship TVs were their LCD TVs,
00:38:25 ◼ ► It's like, well, the company can say what their flagship is, but the market decides in the end which is the best TV.
00:38:34 ◼ ► I think it is a boon for people who don't care about per-pixel lighting control like I do,
00:38:50 ◼ ► But as far as I'm concerned right now, the top end is still per-pixel lighting control and OLEDs.
00:38:56 ◼ ► And this is relevant for Macs, by the way, because 2026 is the rumors that you had OLED screens in the MacBook Pros and so on and so forth.
00:39:25 ◼ ► I know why people wouldn't necessarily want it for certain reasons, but for my preferences, it's amazing.
00:39:31 ◼ ► And so I very much look forward to having that in a MacBook Pro and maybe even a desktop Pro display at some point.
00:39:45 ◼ ► Like the real innovation here on the OLEDs, and I hope Apple does with the OLED stuff, is what they did with the iPad.
00:39:55 ◼ ► It's just basically sandwiching another light-emitting layer in the OLED stack so you drive all the light-emitting layers at less power.
00:40:04 ◼ ► That's why the LG G5 this year is doing so well, because LG G5 gave up the microlens array, didn't go to QD OLED.
00:40:16 ◼ ► Still not as good as QD OLED in some things like viewing angle and still not quite there in color volume, I think.
00:40:28 ◼ ► Every year, like Samsung and LG come out with their TVs at CES, and then everyone just has to wait around to see what Sony's going to do.
00:40:34 ◼ ► Because there's no sense in doing a comparison of saying, what's the best TV of 2025, until all the 2025 TVs have been out.
00:41:10 ◼ ► But the G5 may actually be the better choice for a lot of people than the 895L at this point, depending on their size, preferences, and viewing situation.
00:41:21 ◼ ► Are we in another situation where it's going to take somebody gifting you $100,000 to get anything but a Sony TV or anything but a Honda Accord?
00:41:37 ◼ ► It just so happens that in the following years, the best TV available is also a Sony, but might be an LG this year, depending on what Sony does.
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00:43:36 ◼ ► All right, there's been some reports over the last few months, predominantly from Mark Gurman, of course,
00:43:51 ◼ ► Apple designers are developing something akin to a giant iPad that unfolds to the size of two iPad Pros side by side.
00:43:58 ◼ ► Apple's been honing the product for a couple of years now and is aiming to bring something to market around 2028.
00:44:04 ◼ ► Apple's goal for a foldable device is to avoid the crease that current products have when they're in the open position.
00:44:11 ◼ ► Prototypes of this new product within Apple's industrial design group have a nearly invisible crease.
00:44:19 ◼ ► Samsung, which launched its first foldable phone five years ago, has tried unsuccessfully to remove the crease.
00:44:28 ◼ ► Microsoft prototyped something similar with the Courier more than a decade ago and then announced a dual-screen tablet called the Neo in 2019.
00:44:34 ◼ ► The company abandoned both attempts and the conclusion of the Neo cancellation was that consumers weren't clamoring for a dual-screen tablet.
00:44:45 ◼ ► It's YogaBook 9i, which sells for less than $2,000, has dual 13.3-inch OLED screens that work side-by-side.
00:44:51 ◼ ► Apple's approach would be different because it wants the screen to look like a single uninterrupted piece of glass.
00:45:11 ◼ ► I know this is a while ago, and I know it's like a rumor about a thing that's going to come in 2028.
00:45:15 ◼ ► But like the story, this was the origin of this item, which has been in the notes for a while.
00:45:30 ◼ ► Especially given the current state of iPadOS and the current non-touch operable state of macOS.
00:45:54 ◼ ► I mean, I'm still looking at this and thinking, well, this just sounds like something you'll be toying with internally.
00:46:01 ◼ ► But like, if this is a Mac, a bunch of stuff has to happen between now in 2028 to make that plausible.
00:46:14 ◼ ► Last week, this was again in December, a document alleging to show Apple's display plans was posted on Twitter.
00:46:31 ◼ ► That roadmap also suggests that the MacBook Pro will switch to OLED screens in 26 with the MacBook Air following in 27.
00:46:40 ◼ ► Yeah, so that's from December and just I think just last this week, like the 2026 date for OLED screens has been repeated multiple times, including very recently.
00:46:48 ◼ ► So like the M6, I think by then M6 based MacBook Pros from the OLED screen, Apple's taking its sweet time rolling out these screens.
00:46:56 ◼ ► And it's kind of interesting that the iPad Pro has now kind of become the technological test bed for the most advanced basic technologies.
00:47:04 ◼ ► It gets the, you know, I think it looks like it's going to get the M5 chip first, just like it got the M4 chip first.
00:47:10 ◼ ► It got the tandem OLED, what's going to turn out to be years before they appear on Macs.
00:47:18 ◼ ► But it's, it just seems weird to me that like, that's, that's the way the timelines have aligned because I don't know how many iPad Pros they sell, but surely they sell more MacBook Pros, right?
00:47:28 ◼ ► Maybe they're just selling all MacBook Airs and they actually sell more iPad Pros than MacBook Pros.
00:47:39 ◼ ► We should, I guess we should just be glad we've had them on the phones for so long because they make such a difference and on the watch for so long because they make such a difference on those devices.
00:47:55 ◼ ► Then Mac rumors rights in a mid to late February, uh, another week, another alleged leak regarding Apple's fabled foldable iPhone.
00:48:07 ◼ ► While they have lacked consistency, they do suggest that Apple has tested various prototypes with the hinge, seemingly the biggest challenge Apple has been trying to overcome.
00:48:19 ◼ ► Our latest information about Apple's foldable comes from Weibo based leaker digital chat station.
00:48:26 ◼ ► According to the Chinese leaker, the device has a five, basically five and a half inch outer screen that resembles the new Oppo find N5.
00:48:54 ◼ ► Uh, says the leaker with the foldable iPad also expected to arrive within the same timeframe.
00:49:09 ◼ ► Like, it's it's hard to have it for a long time and be folding and unfolding it and not have that part of the screen look and or feel not exactly the same as the flat parts of the screen.
00:49:22 ◼ ► So it is a challenge, but, uh, yeah, they're, they're folding all the things over there.
00:49:26 ◼ ► It's just this entire lab of like, can we make a folding HomePod, you know, folding Apple TV?
00:49:32 ◼ ► Just if it has a, I guess if it has a screen, let's try to make a folding version of it.
00:49:39 ◼ ► And I don't, I mean, look, there is a huge benefit to if you can have a small device that then unfolds into a big screen when you want it.
00:49:57 ◼ ► I mean, I think number one trade-off is these phones are very expensive when they do this.
00:50:02 ◼ ► And you better believe if, you know, if the Android brands are making their phones two grand-ish to be good foldables, you know, Apple's going to be probably even above that.
00:50:13 ◼ ► So, I mean, and to be fair to the Android makers, I guess evidence, because like they, they, they actually are in pretty fierce price competition with each other.
00:50:21 ◼ ► They can't be that cheap because they're taking the most expensive part of the phone, which is the screen, and often tripling it.
00:50:28 ◼ ► Because like the foldable phones have three phone size, essentially three times the pixels.
00:50:35 ◼ ► And then when you open it up, there's inside there, the two halves are one continuous screen.
00:50:45 ◼ ► Given the current cost of screen technology, you can't make a folding phone in that style that is not just so much more expensive than just a regular phone.
00:51:06 ◼ ► There's significant water resistance and dust resistance challenges because you're adding a lot more moving parts than a regular phone has.
00:51:24 ◼ ► But, you know, what the rest of the computing world has done when it comes time to try to train and try to get these things to market is they kind of throw their hands up and say, well, here are all these trade-offs.
00:51:41 ◼ ► Apple does not like to expose certain types of trade-offs in their released products to the world.
00:51:47 ◼ ► They kind of, you know, I think in the sense, in the context of putting out a foldable phone, they're either going to have to be very patient or they're going to have to really hold their nose when they release something or both.
00:51:59 ◼ ► You know, there are certain aspects about this that I would be surprised if they could overcome.
00:52:08 ◼ ► And they might just have to hold their nose eventually and say, you know what, we're going to release this anyway, even though we know this trade-off kind of hurts us to release.
00:52:14 ◼ ► Like the Vision Pro, I mean, that's kind of evidence that they are able to ship things that have trade-offs that they kind of have to hold their nose about.
00:52:23 ◼ ► Like, and I think the results kind of speak for themselves with the success of the Vision Pro.
00:52:34 ◼ ► I don't know if they wished it could have been cheaper because if it had been, you know, a quarter of the weight and twice the resolution, I think people would be snapping them up at $300 or $100.
00:52:45 ◼ ► And, like, in the wider world of Android where there are many, many competitors, many companies are motivated to, you know, ship what we have.
00:52:54 ◼ ► And Apple is essentially waiting on the sidelines, letting other people iterate, letting the technology advance.
00:52:59 ◼ ► Meanwhile, those companies are making money from these things because in a wide market where there's not just one company, where there's lots of Android phone makers, there's going to be a company that says, we're going to try it.
00:53:13 ◼ ► But because we're the first folding phone or the biggest or the best, we'll get some sales that are significant to us.
00:53:29 ◼ ► And I think they shipped a product that has exactly those compromises you were talking about that, like, that Apple tends not to want to put out into the world.
00:53:38 ◼ ► But they decided they had to do it anyway because, I don't know, they just, they felt like they wanted to be at the forefront of this.
00:53:48 ◼ ► So it makes me think that eventually, you know, in a year or two, they're going to ship something foldable.
00:54:01 ◼ ► Like, you know, sometimes those tradeoffs, you know, those nose holding tradeoffs, sometimes they just can't get past them.
00:54:06 ◼ ► Like, for instance, I know I use this metaphor a lot sometimes, but, like, when you go back to when the iPad was first being rumored, and we were all talking about, like, what's Apple going to do about text input?
00:54:43 ◼ ► It was like, well, this isn't ideal, but here are two ways you can do it anyway that both kind of work okay and have tradeoffs.
00:55:14 ◼ ► Like, there are certain inherent downsides to folding phones that, you know, we might think, I wonder how Apple has solved.
00:55:24 ◼ ► Like, typically, if a solution to a substantial, like, physical reality problem is not apparent to us before Apple has released a product into a category, odds are they haven't solved it either.
00:55:39 ◼ ► Like, if no one else has figured out how to do a good job of some kind of physical challenge here, odds are Apple hasn't either.
00:55:51 ◼ ► High price, you know, mechanical complexity, fragility, maybe, you know, this is what everyone else has suffered from.
00:56:01 ◼ ► And they will probably design with those in mind and say, okay, well, it's not going to have, you know, the water resistance or whatever.
00:56:08 ◼ ► Or it's not going to have, you know, certain, you know, it's going to be, you know, thick when you fold it up.
00:56:15 ◼ ► You know, but for the people who are willing to tolerate those trade-offs, here is a big foldable, you know, unfolded into this big screen.
00:56:23 ◼ ► And I got to say, people who have those foldable phones and who use them all the time, who aren't just gadget reviewers, tend to love them.
00:56:30 ◼ ► Because it is like having an iPad in your pocket that you can take out and unfold whenever you want.
00:56:40 ◼ ► If you want to take out your phone and work on, like, a document or a spreadsheet or just watch a movie or something, yeah, when you can unfold that screen into a much bigger one, that's way more valuable to you.
00:56:52 ◼ ► And that's why people are willing, not in, you know, massive numbers yet, but that's why some people at the high end are willing to buy these super expensive, very fragile, huge trade-off folding phones because there is that big value on the other side.
00:57:05 ◼ ► And if Apple is going to have the iPhone be such an important part of their business as it is, I think they should do more crazy experiments once the market has shown, like, this type of thing is possible and it has a lot of utility to certain people.
00:57:23 ◼ ► You know, I think Apple, we know that they came late to the game for big screen phones.
00:57:28 ◼ ► You know, it took them a while before they got to that party because they at first thought nobody wanted that.
00:57:33 ◼ ► Then it turns out Android covered it pretty well and Apple's like, oh, hmm, turns out everyone wants that and we're not doing it.
00:57:43 ◼ ► I don't think the folding phone phenomenon is anywhere near that big or universal and I don't think if Apple puts one out, it's going to have anywhere near that kind of effect.
00:57:58 ◼ ► So if somebody else makes a really, really good kind of cell phone and Apple doesn't have something in that category and it's proving to be like a pretty good idea for certain people, I encourage them to put out experiments and to try riskier things.
00:58:16 ◼ ► They should put out cool stuff like that and if other people can do it, they can do it too and they can probably, if they put their minds to it, do a better job.
00:58:24 ◼ ► So despite all of the inherent tradeoffs and weirdnesses about folding phones, the fact is people use them, people love them, and they can be pretty good.
00:58:36 ◼ ► So I want Apple to make one and I'm glad whenever I hear these rumors that it seems like they're taking that seriously and will actually put one out even though I know it will have massive tradeoffs.
00:58:48 ◼ ► The iPad had massive tradeoffs but I'm glad Apple released an iPad and this is the same thing.
00:58:52 ◼ ► Yeah, I feel like a folding phone is one of those things that sitting here now, I'm like, yeah, I guess that's neat.
00:59:16 ◼ ► All right, listeners, I've been told, breaking news, that I'm not allowed to jump ahead even to make a relevant point.
00:59:35 ◼ ► According to the Weibo-based Leaker digital chat station, one of Apple's engineering prototypes features an 18.8-inch foldable screen with a, quote, metal superstructure lens, quote,
00:59:45 ◼ ► that integrates the receiver and transmitter components of Face ID for under display facial recognition.
00:59:53 ◼ ► One of your problems you have is, like, oh, now we have, like, less room underneath the screen for stuff.
00:59:59 ◼ ► And this combines with all the rumors about upcoming iPhones having things under the screen.
01:00:04 ◼ ► The notch gave way to the dynamic island, which could give way to a hole punch, which Android phones have had forever.
01:00:15 ◼ ► Maybe we can get the cameras under the screen and finally achieve the goal of a complete screen iPhone with no notch, no hole, no nothing.
01:00:40 ◼ ► This is another place where Apple has been sitting it out and saying, other people are doing underscreen stuff, but their underscreen stuff isn't as good.
01:00:47 ◼ ► Remember the underscreen fingerprint readers on Android phones and Apple's like, yeah, we'll stick to Touch ID.
01:01:25 ◼ ► But this is a summary of everything that, like the consensus leaks about the foldable phone as of like yesterday.
01:02:09 ◼ ► Or have they figured out some way with a middle superstructure lens to put Face ID underneath the screen of the thing?
01:02:32 ◼ ► And at a glance, like I wouldn't say it looks like an iPhone or anything like that, but you can tell that it was competently done.
01:02:40 ◼ ► I think MKBHD said it's roughly the same thickness as a 15 Pro or 16 Pro Max, I believe.
01:02:46 ◼ ► Well, most importantly about the thickness, because when we talk about the thickness of the phone, the most relevant thing is when it is unfolded, how thick is it?
01:02:55 ◼ ► Because if the phone has a port on it of any kind and the Oppo Find N5 does have a port, you are limited by, here it is, we talked about it years and years ago, the thickness of USB-C is the limiting factor in the thickness of the phone.
01:03:15 ◼ ► You will see, when unfolded, the USB plug plugs into one of the parts, and it is literally the thickness of a USB plug with the thinnest piece of metal above and below it.
01:03:28 ◼ ► Unless, you either go portless, or you have some kind of, like, magnetically attaching dongle or thing, or, like, but if you want to plug a USB-C port in, Oppo's done it.
01:03:37 ◼ ► They have made it, it's the thinnest thick, now they can make the other half thinner, I suppose, to remove the overall thickness, but that's, that's something, right?
01:03:47 ◼ ► And if you're wondering, like, Oppo, this is a shipping product, not a prototype, not a rumor, not a thing, it's a thing that you can buy with money right now.
01:03:54 ◼ ► And the beauty of it is, when you do fold it up, if you're watching the video, it looks, MKBHJ makes this point, because he's been reviewing these Android folding phones forever, it looks almost like a regular phone.
01:04:07 ◼ ► When it's folded up, you're like, it doesn't look like, because the old ones will basically look like, originally, like, two giant iPhones stuck together, like, they were huge when they were folded.
01:04:17 ◼ ► Sometimes they didn't even stick all the way together, because the crease, remember the one that, like, didn't actually close?
01:04:20 ◼ ► Like, the crease wouldn't close all the way, as it was, like, teardrop shaped when it was closed.
01:04:25 ◼ ► They used to be giant, but the Android folks have been working and working, and now the N5, it looks almost like a regular phone.
01:04:33 ◼ ► And that's, like, now we're getting into the territory where you look at that, and you're like, okay, now Apple should feel comfortable.
01:04:43 ◼ ► And that means they can, Apple can ship a folding phone that basically looks like a regular iPhone, but happens to unfold.
01:04:57 ◼ ► And the thesis is basically, look, when it's no compromise, the way I'm summarizing it doesn't make it sound very interesting, but he does a good job of coming up with something, or distilling the thought of once it's no compromise, then that's when consumers will buy them.
01:05:13 ◼ ► And as I was starting to say before I was told I was not allowed to continue, that, you know, I'm looking at this Oppo Find N5, and it, again, is extremely competently done.
01:05:22 ◼ ► I'm not sure that it's something I want, but it's clearly competently done in a way that I haven't seen folding phones done previously.
01:05:30 ◼ ► And I can imagine finding an Apple version of this to be quite attractive, maybe not aesthetically, but in terms of, like, I want one of these.
01:05:39 ◼ ► I don't feel like I have a folding phone-shaped hole in my life, but I think if this were to come out, you know, assuming the cameras aren't utterly crippled, which is tough because they might be, because, you know, each of these halves has to be so darn thin.
01:05:55 ◼ ► But assuming the cameras aren't utterly crippled, I would probably get this and at least have it for a year and see what I think.
01:06:03 ◼ ► But I would definitely give it a shot in a way that I do not plan to get the alleged 17 Air because the camera situation is so crippled.
01:06:17 ◼ ► I feel like I need them and I feel like I use them and I'm not willing to give those up.
01:06:20 ◼ ► And so if and when the 17 Air or whatever it's called arrives, I don't plan to get one because I don't want to give up the cameras.
01:06:47 ◼ ► One of them is you need enough to make this happen within the constraints that Apple usually applies to their products, right?
01:06:54 ◼ ► Although, again, Vision Pro is a counterexample here, but you would imagine and the rumors are for the for the iPad, for the iPhone Air that Apple doesn't want to massively compromise on battery life for having a thin one.
01:07:04 ◼ ► The rumors, again, the rumors about the 17, the slimmer 17 iPhone 17 is that the battery life won't be horrendously worse than the regular phones.
01:07:14 ◼ ► There have been advances in battery technology that allow for reasonable battery life in a phone that has three screens.
01:07:22 ◼ ► Because, first of all, all three screens aren't lit up all the time and most you have, you know, two screens, but it's like three area wise.
01:07:35 ◼ ► And the second, I forget this new chemical formulation for batteries that helps give them higher capacity with a lower thickness.
01:07:44 ◼ ► Another enabling technology for Casey, to Casey's point, is if you don't want to compromise on cameras, you need some way to get decent cameras into a thin case.
01:07:52 ◼ ► The rumors are that the iPhone 17 or iPhone 17 Air or the Slim 17 is going to compromise on camera because they don't have the ability to put as good or as many cameras in such a thin phone.
01:08:06 ◼ ► Foldable is going to have to be thinner than that if it's not going to be a giant chonker, you know, thinner than the Air.
01:08:35 ◼ ► It's a problem because you only have half that width or maybe you have like three quarters of that width if one if it's not uniform thickness when you open it up.
01:08:45 ◼ ► And Apple also has to deal with Face ID, which they were just talking about in that rumor about the iPad.
01:08:57 ◼ ► Are you going to have an underscreen Touch ID, a thing that Apple has never done or that they decided was never up to their quality standards?
01:09:03 ◼ ► So there are still like there's enough enabling technologies for Oppo to put out this phone that I think is meets the criteria of like this is almost like a normal Android phone, except horrendously expensive.
01:09:23 ◼ ► But Android world doesn't have the same standards for face, ubiquitous Face ID and or Touch ID of the quality and security of Apple's.
01:09:37 ◼ ► They've been willing to ship phones without Face ID forms with fingerprint sensors that are not secure as Touch ID or whatever, because it's a bigger market.
01:09:50 ◼ ► I'm not I don't think right now, 2025 is the right time for Apple to ship a foldable phone because I don't think enough technologies are available.
01:09:58 ◼ ► And I feel kind of like the the the slimmer 17 is like a trial balloon, not just a marketing test of like, let's test our ability to make things thinner.
01:10:14 ◼ ► Are they going to be like Casey and say, oh, I would buy it, but I won't compromise on camera like that will help them decide should we go with the foldable phone or not?
01:10:22 ◼ ► Like, are you know, are the tradeoffs desirable enough that, you know, the market want the Apple market wants it?
01:10:28 ◼ ► And to that end, one of the most interesting things I thought was in this video is MKBHD musing on the supposed utility of folding phones based on his personal experience.
01:10:56 ◼ ► It's one of the reasons Android tablets have never really caught on because there's not a lot of, you know, development and applications to to like make good use of the larger screen available, even if you go from a phone all the way up to a tablet.
01:11:10 ◼ ► So with folding phones, first of all, you need all the apps to be at least aware enough that they have a much larger screen to deal with and scale to that.
01:11:22 ◼ ► Like why you have the screen, you know, why are you why are you paying this money for so much more screen space if all you're going to do is take your existing apps and make them really wide?
01:11:39 ◼ ► But if it looks like an iPhone or an Android, it looks like a phone aspect ratio rectangle when it's folded.
01:11:51 ◼ ► It becomes an iPad mini in terms of area, like, you know, you know, the square centimeters or whatever.
01:11:59 ◼ ► So if you watch, for example, a television or a movie like a 16 by 9 or like a letterbox movie on there, there's a huge amount of wasted space.
01:12:16 ◼ ► And the video is bigger on the iPad mini, despite the fact that they're both similarly sized because the aspect ratio doesn't match.
01:12:22 ◼ ► And if you make the aspect ratio when it's unfolded be suitable for like like an iPad on its side, like watching videos on a plane or in bed at night like I do.
01:12:36 ◼ ► So that's another kind of compromise where I'm not sure what Apple is going to do there.
01:12:42 ◼ ► I mean, I presume everyone wants to do what the N5 did, which is like make it phone size when it's folded.
01:12:50 ◼ ► Apple has an advantage there in that I think they'll be able to revise their applications, take advantage of that.
01:12:56 ◼ ► There's more iPad apps available that might be able to sort of port their iPadness to the phone.
01:13:00 ◼ ► You know, like I think that Android has real problems in there for a lot of reasons that Apple doesn't.
01:13:08 ◼ ► I don't think an unfolded foldable iPhone will be as good a video video viewing device as even an iPad mini, let alone a full size iPad.
01:13:18 ◼ ► Yeah, I think it'll be fascinating, as you've said many times, to see what tradeoffs, you know, what levers Apple pulls and what levers they push, if you will, and to see where this goes.
01:13:36 ◼ ► You know, I think there's problems and foibles and Marco, I'm sure you're happy to jump in and explain some of them if you'd like.
01:13:46 ◼ ► And I think that whether or not you, the listener, are a fan of the Vision Pro, I think we should all celebrate that they're trying something.
01:14:12 ◼ ► And let me tell you, I still miss my, to a degree, miss my Motorola Razr from the early aughts or maybe it was mid aughts.
01:14:25 ◼ ► And, you know, I'm sitting here telling you, oh, I don't want an iPhone Air because I don't want to compromise cameras.
01:14:37 ◼ ► So what do you think about, I know we sort of ran through it a little bit here, but what do you think about the gigantic 18-inch folding iPad thing?
01:14:46 ◼ ► Because that, I think, is a product without much precedent in the market, mostly because Android tablets aren't particularly possible.
01:14:53 ◼ ► And I know there's that we mentioned it in the other story, like there's laptops that are like that, essentially Windows laptops that are one big giant screen that you fold.
01:15:09 ◼ ► Is that a MacBook Pro with a screen keyboard, which you used to make jokes about with the butterfly keyboard days?
01:15:14 ◼ ► Are they just going to make it all screen and you open it up and there'll be a software keyboard?
01:15:17 ◼ ► What is that product and do you find that kind of product enticing in any way in the same way that you might have a foldable phone?
01:15:23 ◼ ► I mean, I think the problem with that is like, does iPadOS allow enough utility to take advantage of that larger size, first of all, and then to be worth carrying it and paying for it and all these other.
01:15:44 ◼ ► Like, you have to buy these things and iPads are already, like, the high end of iPads are already very expensive.
01:15:53 ◼ ► And add all this, like, you know, crazy folding stuff that's going to be, like, very cutting edge and, you know, that's definitely going to impact costs in very large ways.
01:16:06 ◼ ► That's going to have to have a lot of utility to people to make it worth the money cost alone, let alone the cost of carrying it around.
01:16:33 ◼ ► But I think this is possibly going to be an area where Apple's hardware prowess for the iPad family is, as always, kind of waiting for the software side of iPad land to provide more utility to more people.
01:16:54 ◼ ► If it runs Mac OS and it's basically like the M7 MacBook Pro fold, like, that's the thing that I'm thinking about is, like, okay, I can see that product.
01:17:17 ◼ ► Like, what is the utility of having the keyboard part of your laptop essentially be replaced by a screen?
01:17:23 ◼ ► Well, one of the utilities is if you pick it up and unfold it and it has, like, a kit stand, you can have a much bigger screen, and then you just bring, like, a portable keyboard, like an iPad-type keyboard with you.
01:17:33 ◼ ► So it's like it folds up in your backpack, but when you're setting up at a table, instead of having to look at a 13-inch screen or a 15-inch screen, you can look at basically a 19-inch screen or a 20-inch screen.
01:17:46 ◼ ► When you don't have it folded that way, do you want to use a software keyboard on the screen part that's laying on your desk?
01:18:04 ◼ ► Like, if you really, really need a portable computer with a 20-inch screen, I mean, they sell 20-inch laptops, I guess, but they're huge.
01:18:16 ◼ ► Is someone out there right now and they're saying, well, I really hate working on my laptop.
01:18:29 ◼ ► This is such a fascinating rumor because it doesn't make sense to me as an iPad product.
01:18:43 ◼ ► This would not be mass market because it's like – honestly, I think the high-end iPad Pro is already somewhat specialized merely for price reasons alone.
01:18:51 ◼ ► And, you know, once you start going – I'm sure this would definitely be above $2,000 and possibly even above that.
01:19:00 ◼ ► And, you know, you start looking at, like, okay, well, who is such an iPad power user that they would be willing to spend that and carry that around and have all the tradeoffs that comes with that?
01:19:20 ◼ ► Well, the problem with the iPad Pro, folks, is don't a lot of those high-end ones, like, use it as, like, a graphics tablet with the pencil?
01:19:26 ◼ ► And now the crease concerns come into sharp focus because try drawing on a screen that has, like, a subtle crease down the whole center of it.
01:19:35 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, that's why, like, I – this is – this, I think, is even much more of a moonshoot than a foldable phone.
01:19:51 ◼ ► Anyway, this is so much more of a risk than the foldable iPhone because the foldable iPhone, we already see foldable phones out there that are – that have high utility, that are worth their price to a lot of people.
01:20:09 ◼ ► I don't think we've ever seen a device like this kind of, you know, dual-screen laptop thing or, you know – I don't think we've ever seen anything like that that had any success whatsoever in any market.
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01:21:30 ◼ ► And let me tell you, every fall, we typically – the family typically goes to a particular apple orchard over in Charlottesville.
01:21:51 ◼ ► And I immediately cooked them up, and they reminded me immediately of my beloved orchard doughnuts.
01:22:00 ◼ ► We also got some croissants, some tear-apart pecan rolls, some chocolate chip cookies, some spaghetti.
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01:23:11 ◼ ► Anyone who has ever sent feedback or a suggestion knows the pain of the feedback black hole.
01:23:16 ◼ ► My suggestions and bug reports for Overcast Call Sheet and even Witchsmith have gone to DevNull.
01:23:29 ◼ ► How do you all as individual developers deal with feedback or bug reports for your applications?
01:23:48 ◼ ► I'd be interested to know how each of you deal with such things since your apps are very in size, complexity, and platform.
01:23:53 ◼ ► For me, I don't think that's a fair comparison to compare the operations of single individuals to one of, if not the richest company on the planet.
01:24:09 ◼ ► But for what it's worth, I would say whenever I am sent a question about Call Sheet, I typically try to answer it.
01:24:26 ◼ ► And to answer Tony's question, if it's something I think is actionable, I'll make a new GitHub issue for it, and I will track it.
01:24:49 ◼ ► I wish I had the time to be able to treat it with the respect that I want to, but I just don't.
01:24:56 ◼ ► And I got to assume that, Marco, you feel even strongly the same way, even more strongly the same way.
01:25:09 ◼ ► And, you know, to be brutally honest, there's also a question of lifetime customer value versus the time it's going to take and, you know, what is it worth?
01:25:19 ◼ ► How much of our time is it worth, you know, trying to, like, handhold one person through a problem?
01:25:26 ◼ ► You know, when you look at, like, traditional, what we consider support, typically that can range from I have a quick question and I can type out a four-word reply.
01:25:35 ◼ ► Or, more frequently, I have a long thing that's going to take you a while to read and understand, and then you might have to do some work to answer it, and then that's going to cost, you know, that's going to take you a half hour or something.
01:25:47 ◼ ► And then when you look at the maximum lifetime value that you're likely to earn from that customer, the more of those emails you spend that kind of time on, the more you are losing, losing, losing money.
01:26:01 ◼ ► People, I think, develop a sense of customer support based on products and services in their life that they're paying a lot more for, frankly.
01:26:09 ◼ ► You know, if you have a problem with, like, you know, your cable service, well, you're giving them $80 a month.
01:26:16 ◼ ► You know, the lifetime value of you as a customer is pretty high to them, so they can afford to have somebody answering your questions for you.
01:26:23 ◼ ► When you're, you know, looking at an app that you got for free or maybe you're paying a few bucks a year for, that's a lot harder for that developer to be able to afford to walk you through things or to answer questions individually one by one.
01:26:36 ◼ ► So there is that significant difference in scale and in just plain old dollars and cents.
01:26:43 ◼ ► And then as Casey said, you know, as one person, there's a total amount of time that we have to spend on work every day.
01:26:50 ◼ ► And when you are answering individual emails, that is not a great way to leverage the limited time that you have.
01:26:58 ◼ ► You're better off kind of taking all the emails as an input and saying, hmm, a lot of people are finding this button confusing or whatever.
01:27:08 ◼ ► And then you make the product better for everyone, and that's kind of an indirect way to fix it.
01:27:15 ◼ ► You know, obviously it would be great if we had time and resources to answer everything the way it deserves to be answered.
01:27:22 ◼ ► But when you're dealing with individual one-person types of businesses where they stand to make very little money from each person and they have a lot of emails,
01:27:33 ◼ ► So the way I, you know, kind of square this in my head is I set expectations accordingly in the app.
01:27:51 ◼ ► And if you look at the Apple feedback system and what we are told about it, the problem we have with it is that we are repeatedly told over and over again by lots of people on Apple,
01:28:07 ◼ ► And then, you know, the reaction we get when we actually do file bugs is crickets and it's, the system shows us it's wasting our time.
01:28:14 ◼ ► Whereas I think what I'm doing by not responding to most emails to Overcast, I think it's different because I'm setting the expectation right up front, right in the app, right where the email form is.
01:28:24 ◼ ► I'm saying I will read most emails but will not respond to most of them because I don't have time to respond to most of them.
01:28:32 ◼ ► So I'm setting the expectation before you've even emailed me and you can, of course, get to that screen before you've paid me a dime.
01:28:43 ◼ ► And so I think, again, in a perfect world, yeah, you'd have to, everybody would have time to respond to everybody and everybody would get what they want.
01:28:51 ◼ ► In the actual world that we're in as indie businesses where we can't afford to respond to every single thing and give people the support that they sometimes want,
01:29:02 ◼ ► I think the best way to do that, to handle that, is expectation setting so that people are told right up front before they've invested a bunch of time, you know, going through your process.
01:29:20 ◼ ► And sometimes I will tell people who get very mad at me, sometimes I'll say, like, listen, it sounds like you want a level of support that I can't provide, so you should probably use a different app.
01:29:38 ◼ ► And, like, for those people who demand a more engaged developer or team behind their apps, there's other apps out there that offer that.
01:29:53 ◼ ► To me, I've made that, you know, cost-benefit analysis and decided I'm not going to change the way I operate my entire business for what seems to be a fairly small percentage of the audience that really can't take the way I do it.
01:30:05 ◼ ► Yeah, the thing I'd add is I would imagine when people hear us give our usual answer to this is, like, well, Apple's the biggest company in the world and has billions of dollars and we're individual people.
01:30:29 ◼ ► Like, if you are an individual developer, like, you don't have a company, you don't have any employees you're hiring to do support or anything, it's just a single person.
01:30:40 ◼ ► If you are successful enough with your app sales for it to be any kind of reasonable income or any kind of reasonable augment to your income, like, you know, if you make maybe not enough money to just live off your app, but, like, enough money that it's not just pocket change.
01:31:06 ◼ ► So, like, the ratio, like, if you are even remotely successful as an individual, you have too many customers that you can't spend your time responding to them.
01:31:15 ◼ ► Like, there's no business, unless you sell, like, I don't know, you sell an app for $50,000 and you sell, like, two copies of it or something.
01:31:21 ◼ ► Like, there's no business that you can have as an individual where the number of customers is tractable, where you do have time to give people individual support and also that your business is successful.
01:31:33 ◼ ► Because if you have an app and two people download it, you can spend all day emailing with those two people and supporting them at a very personal basis.
01:31:39 ◼ ► But two customers is not enough to support you unless your app is tremendously expensive.
01:31:44 ◼ ► So, and I know because I'm usually on the other side of that because I have three apps now.
01:31:50 ◼ ► They are not particularly successful, which means that I don't have that many customers, which means when customers email me, they're much more likely to get a response.
01:32:09 ◼ ► But still, even with the amount of customers that I have, I have to make the same exact trade-offs, which is, you know, some customers who email me about apps, like, they gave me $5 once five years ago.
01:32:19 ◼ ► And I've spent just, you know, dozens and dozens of hours going back and forth over the course of months helping them debug a problem.
01:32:28 ◼ ► No, because one of the things that you have to do as an independent developer is, like Marco was saying, figure out how best to spend your time.
01:32:36 ◼ ► And if there's some problem and some bug that never happens to you that you can't reproduce but that you know some portion of your customer base has, if you get one person who, like, contacts you about that bug and they're willing to be, like, your remote debugging buddy, the time you spend with them is going to pay dividends for all your other customers.
01:32:57 ◼ ► And maybe for a future version of your app or whatever, like, you're spending a lot of time with them not to help solve their problem, but because that person is helping solve a problem that lots of other people have experienced.
01:33:08 ◼ ► And it's basically the interactive version of what Marco was talking about is, like, if you take your feedback in aggregate, you can figure out where the pain points are and concentrate on them.
01:33:16 ◼ ► But if you're trying to find a problem, like, oh, I know this is a problem on my app, I can't debug it because it never happens to me, but I know it's happening to customers out there.
01:33:24 ◼ ► What you need is, like, one hero to come through and, like, someone who is just, they want to get it figured out, too.
01:33:35 ◼ ► And I treasure those people because sometimes you need just one person out there who's got a problem who's going to pull the logs for you and go back and forth and figure it out.
01:33:54 ◼ ► If it's just, you know, if it's 17 pages of me trying to debug their entire life, they're just not going to get a response at all.
01:34:00 ◼ ► But if I know there's some problem somewhere or there's some issue or whatever, like, in Switchglass, I had such problems with, like, screen identification of, like, you know, figuring out which screen is this for a variety of both hardware and software-based reasons.
01:34:15 ◼ ► Hardware having to do with, like, identical monitors lying about their serial numbers and software having to do with how Apple exposes which monitor is which.
01:34:29 ◼ ► And you want it to always remember, this is a screen on my left and this is a screen on my right.
01:34:48 ◼ ► Can you run this test program for me that dumps a bunch of information from the IO registry?
01:35:03 ◼ ► So, yeah, a lot of people, especially listening to the show, think, like, apps are just, like, a, you know, a fun thing or, like, a privilege to be able to make them.
01:35:11 ◼ ► But like Marco said, it is also a business or, in my case, attempting to be a business.
01:35:27 ◼ ► And sometimes it means figuring out what you have to do to improve your app so that you actually do get more customers.
01:35:39 ◼ ► But, yeah, anyway, all I just wanted to say is that the trope about Apple is big and we're small, so we should be excused.
01:35:45 ◼ ► Even acknowledging that they also have more customers, the math just still doesn't work.
01:35:54 ◼ ► And there's this gap, by the way, when you have enough customers to be significant, but before you have enough customers to hire a support person.
01:36:02 ◼ ► And there's this gap where it's like, we really should hire a support person, but we can't because we don't have enough customers.
01:36:08 ◼ ► And eventually you get enough customers that you can hire someone and should hire someone to do support for you.
01:36:19 ◼ ► In big corporate software, it's often said that Big Bang releases are bad and small incremental releases are good.
01:36:26 ◼ ► And you might be able to argue that they're good for users in terms of avoiding a huge deluge of new bugs at once.
01:36:32 ◼ ► As Apple has also moved this direction in the past few years, it makes me wonder, what about Delight as a user priority?
01:36:37 ◼ ► The experience of going to a new major version and having a bunch of cool new features to bring to life now seems diminished, since all the features are sprinkled out over the year.
01:36:46 ◼ ► It makes me wonder whether we've traded away something important in order to get more stability.
01:36:54 ◼ ► I like having incremental releases, and we're actually going to talk about something that I'm going to be releasing real soon in the after show.
01:37:11 ◼ ► Like, the experience of having a cool new, a big new version with cool new features in it.
01:37:16 ◼ ► The thing about the, like, Big Bang releases and, like, just a release where you change a whole bunch of stuff is that is not a formula for Delight for the end user, really.
01:37:27 ◼ ► That is a formula for you broke tons of stuff that worked before and all the new things you rolled out are buggy.
01:37:33 ◼ ► There's the essay from Joel Spolsky from 2000 talking about things you should never do, part one.
01:37:39 ◼ ► Quoting from that, Netscape made the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make.
01:37:57 ◼ ► That is sometimes a good instinct, but the right way to do that is still in incremental pieces with the goal of eventually replacing it all and doing important parts first or whatever.
01:38:09 ◼ ► But you can't do all that work internally and just, like, say, we're working right here and we won't release until we've rewritten everything from scratch.
01:38:16 ◼ ► And then one day we'll have the old thing and the next day we'll swap out the old thing and put in a new thing.
01:38:26 ◼ ► It's like, it's so hard to do that and not end up angering more people than you delight because the old code has all the bug fixes in it and all the wisdom of all the people who've left the company.
01:38:37 ◼ ► Like, that's why it's accepted wisdom that you shouldn't give in fully to the desire to just wipe the slate clean and start over.
01:38:58 ◼ ► But his larger point was like, even, and he didn't hedge about this, which is what you didn't hedge back in the 2000s when you were a blogger.
01:39:20 ◼ ► You know you want to do this, especially if you're a programmer, but you should resist that and only do it in careful ways under certain circumstances, yada, yada, yada.
01:39:30 ◼ ► And that is a very boring blog post to read, so it's much better to say, this is the single worst mistake you should make.
01:39:35 ◼ ► And as evidenced, by 25 years later, people will still quote this article and say, well, Joel Spolsky said you should never do it.
01:40:06 ◼ ► And you sign yourself for another decade of finding and fixing bugs that you already found and fixed before you get to the point where you can find and fix the bugs and the new stuff you added.
01:40:19 ◼ ► If anything, Apple should be more judicious with the features it rolls out and maybe more judicious with the features it announces.
01:40:26 ◼ ► Because the real way to surprise and delight users is to take the features they know and love and use every day and make them better and better and better over time.
01:40:47 ◼ ► Also, I mean, in all fairness, you know, I think Tom's question here, it isn't just about, like, big rewrites.
01:40:53 ◼ ► It's, I think it's more about, like, the features that we're already delivering instead of staging them out, like, on every, you know, 18.1, 18.2, 18.3.
01:41:02 ◼ ► Like, you know, having each one of those deliver a chunk of what was announced at WVDC.
01:41:07 ◼ ► Instead, like, have the one big release in the fall deliver everything that was supposed to be in that OS, you know, major version, as opposed to, like, you know, month by month by month.
01:41:17 ◼ ► So, there is certainly a question of, you know, whether, you know, dropping everything all at once in a big bang is better.
01:41:28 ◼ ► That is definitely better for making a big splash in marketing if it's hard for you to get a lot of attention otherwise.
01:41:37 ◼ ► Apple can, you know, fart and they'll get attention from all the major press outlets, you know.
01:41:45 ◼ ► And when you have that kind of status, it's actually good to trickle things out because then you kind of stay in the press constantly.
01:41:58 ◼ ► Although, I don't think that's why Apple does it because Apple used to do the thing where all the OS features were supposed to launch in the .0.
01:42:07 ◼ ► Like, so clearly, they used to release features that were at the same doneness state as the ones they don't release now.
01:42:20 ◼ ► Now, they just hold it for the .4, which I think is the right decision because I think the Big Bang release, despite us being excited by seeing it at WWDC, like, ooh, we're all going to get this as soon as the .0 is out.
01:42:39 ◼ ► But so anyway, like, if you have, like, one strategy for marketing is trickle stuff out to constantly remind people about you.
01:42:46 ◼ ► This is why you can buy, like, a single sock from a website once, and they will start emailing you literally every single day after that, telling you all of the breaking news in their sock specials.
01:42:58 ◼ ► Before your sock even arrives, you've got nine emails from them reminding you of all the great news happening in socks.
01:43:05 ◼ ► But you don't think that's why Apple, like, marketing is not dictating that Apple holds things to the .3, right?
01:43:13 ◼ ► But I think Apple appreciates the benefit that it, like, I don't think they are artificially holding stuff back to trickle stuff out.
01:43:20 ◼ ► You are probably right that it is engineering-driven, however, um, I, I do think that, that this is a benefit they enjoy, that it, it does spread the press splash for their stuff throughout the, the, the whole year, rather than just happening in the summer and fall.
01:43:34 ◼ ► But, when you are an indie, and you don't have the kind of far attention that Apple gets from the world with everything you do, there is some value to having those big splashes.
01:43:45 ◼ ► Like, when you are pretty much anybody who's smaller, you know, even, like, a medium-sized company, like, you know, if you, if you have, like, you know, like, Evernote, I think they're dead now, but, you know, something, like, that, that size company of, like, you know, if you, you can make a big, you know, 3.0 or whatever, and have a whole bunch of stuff all drop at once in that one big version.
01:44:04 ◼ ► And everything John just said about, like, you know, having a big release, also having a bunch of bugs, that is true, um, but that does get a big PR splash.
01:44:15 ◼ ► So, there are times where you would want that strategy, for sure, um, but, when it comes to delighting users, I mean, maybe this is just my style as a developer, my favorite ways to delight users are with small features.
01:44:31 ◼ ► They might not even, they might never see an announcement for it, but they might run into it in the app sometime.
01:44:37 ◼ ► That is, you know, if you're optimizing for delight, that's a little bit different from, like, wowing people.
01:44:44 ◼ ► I think the big PR feature drops, that's to wow people and maybe get new attention to your app.
01:44:50 ◼ ► But if you want to delight your users, I find it way more fun and way more delightful to offer them something helpful or nice or fun at a random time that they weren't, like, necessarily looking for that.
01:45:11 ◼ ► This has been, like, when I did the big overcast rewrite that I should never have done, thanks to Joel Spolsky, um, when I, when I did that, the big rewrite last year, I improved so much about the app.
01:45:23 ◼ ► The thing that people love the most, they constantly tell me they love the most, is undo seek.
01:45:29 ◼ ► Because a lot of times, it turns out, people accidentally seek in a podcast by dragging the bar accidentally with their finger or whatever, and then having the undo thing pop up right there, undo seek, and you tap it and you undo it.
01:45:43 ◼ ► It was not a big PR splash, but it's something that they run into when they are using the app.
01:45:49 ◼ ► And as you are, you know, developing an app and serving your users over time, you can add little things like that whenever you want.
01:45:57 ◼ ► And, you know, the sooner you get it in there, the sooner people are going to start being delighted by it.
01:46:02 ◼ ► So, I think there, there is a way to optimize for designing for delighting users, and it doesn't actually require big bang, big drop releases.
01:46:15 ◼ ► I think the delight that Tom was asking about is like, like the Christmas morning feeling of like watching the, the announcement video and say, look at all these goodies, and I'm going to get all of them.
01:46:27 ◼ ► But it's just so nice, like now finally I'm installing iOS and plus one, because it's been publicly released.
01:46:42 ◼ ► Oh, or, uh, you know, just have, they could just simply announce fewer features and release them all on day one and just release fewer things throughout the year.
01:46:49 ◼ ► I think what they're currently doing is a reasonable ish compromise, which is announce all the things in your big video and then release them over the course of the year.
01:46:57 ◼ ► As long as over the course of the year, a actually fits within the year, which hasn't worked out that well for Apple's, uh, intelligence stuff.
01:47:04 ◼ ► And B that, that you don't get like the last bushel of things in like the end of December.
01:47:10 ◼ ► And it includes like really important features, like spreading it over the year, maybe try to spread it over the first half of the year.
01:47:16 ◼ ► Cause honestly, if you're, if you're planning features and they're taking your whole year to roll out in any reasonable form, you probably put too much into the year.
01:47:25 ◼ ► And I would say the, uh, the seek undo, that's an example of polishing an existing feature seeking that was done in 1.0, whatever needs to be done with seeking, but people use seeking all the time.
01:47:46 ◼ ► I'm going to go revisit the seeking feature, which I've never needed to touch because it works perfectly fine.
01:47:57 ◼ ► Cause you could always just slide it back and figure out where you were, but it makes some part of seeking better.
01:48:12 ◼ ► Like every single thing I do every day in macOS is like, this has been this way for 10 years and it's not improved.
01:48:24 ◼ ► Those dialogues, that whole interface, that whole experience has not gotten better in so long.
01:48:30 ◼ ► And I wish someone would come and give me the finder file sharing equivalent of undo seek.
01:48:34 ◼ ► You know, bringing both these ask ATPs together, my favorite support email to get, which I always respond to, is, hey, just FYI, you know, you have all of these ages for these actors on, you know, this movie.
01:48:50 ◼ ► But they're all wrong because, you know, Pierce Brosnan isn't 35 anymore and that's what it says he is in, you know, Goldeneye or whatever.
01:49:32 ◼ ► Like, all of our apps have situations like this, which is like, how can I make this clear without cluttering up the app with a bunch of instructions that once you know it,
01:49:44 ◼ ► Like, but if I had just seen it without any information, what I have known, this is one of the problems of app design.
01:49:59 ◼ ► And if anyone doesn't understand what it is, they'll write you and you'll tell them and they'll be happy.
01:50:04 ◼ ► Well, and actually, now that I think about it, I embraced TipKit just the teeniest bit.
01:50:17 ◼ ► And so now that I've gone down the TipKit line, for lack of a better word, you know, perhaps the right answer is to add a tip for this.
01:50:25 ◼ ► So the first once or twice that they see it, they'll get the little pop-up that says, hey, this is how old these actors were when the movie was released.
01:50:47 ◼ ► If you want to say obnoxious, like I posted on Mastodon asking about a shopping list app or whatever.
01:50:55 ◼ ► But anyway, in the course of trying all of the suggestions, I saw just how aggressive, like, the average iOS app is about sending you BS notifications.
01:51:07 ◼ ► And I would be like, allow notifications just because, like, I want to see how the app works.
01:51:15 ◼ ► So I install the app, enable notifications, use it for two seconds, close the app, go back to the app store.
01:51:42 ◼ ► But, yeah, apps just, apps that don't respect, you know, their intrusion into your life.
01:52:08 ◼ ► There's about 15 to 30 minutes, usually, of a whole other topic that you aren't hearing if you're not a member.
01:52:13 ◼ ► So if you want to hear all these, if you just, after hearing, you know, two hours of us, you're like,
01:53:20 ◼ ► So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-G, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-
01:53:56 ◼ ► And I'd been kicking the can down the road on a lot of these, in some ways because I was scared
01:54:02 ◼ ► of them, in some ways because I just didn't think it was the right time, in some ways because other
01:54:06 ◼ ► things were a bigger priority. The number one on the list was having multiple lists of pins. And
01:54:12 ◼ ► we've talked about that already. It launched, I think, a month ago or something like that.
01:54:17 ◼ ► And another one that I probably should have prioritized higher, but honestly I was a little
01:54:22 ◼ ► scared of, was universal links and a web presence. And I don't mean like a marketing page. I still
01:54:28 ◼ ► don't really have that. But what I mean is when you go to share like a movie or a show or a person
01:54:34 ◼ ► in CallSheet, I present you with a prompt in the released version of the app that says,
01:54:40 ◼ ► do you want to share a CallSheet link, which is the CallSheet colon slash slash URL scheme that
01:54:46 ◼ ► only works if you have CallSheet installed on your device? Do you want to share a movie database
01:54:53 ◼ ► link where you just go straight to the movie database? I feel like there might have been one
01:54:56 ◼ ► other option, I don't recall. But the user has to make a choice, right? And if they send a CallSheet
01:55:03 ◼ ► link, like, you know, say my close friends and I share a link for a movie, what's getting sent in like
01:55:12 ◼ ► an iMessage is CallSheet colon slash slash, you know, in some URL, which is presented as a completely
01:55:19 ◼ ► useless URL in messages. There's no web component to it whatsoever. So there's no poster, there's no
01:55:26 ◼ ► title, there's no anything. I have no idea what I'm looking at other than looking at the URL and
01:55:31 ◼ ► knowing if it's a movie, a show or a person. And that kind of sucks. And it's always kind of sucked.
01:55:36 ◼ ► And even leaving aside the growth hacking of like having a nice web link to, um, to, to point people
01:55:45 ◼ ► to, it's just icky to look at messages. Like even for people who love the app, you know, I really like
01:55:51 ◼ ► the app. And when I send these links to like Aaron or my friends or what have you, they're gross. And so
01:55:57 ◼ ► what I knew I wanted to do was have, um, some sort of universal link and like web presence such that
01:56:03 ◼ ► when you share a link, instead of sharing CallSheet colon slash slash, you're sharing a link to some
01:56:09 ◼ ► website. And then when you open that link, it will at the, at the very least, you know, show a presentable
01:56:17 ◼ ► version of that website that, um, that you can then from that webpage, click a link that, you know,
01:56:23 ◼ ► sends you into CallSheet or, uh, for double bonus points, you open that URL, say for messages and it
01:56:29 ◼ ► immediately hops you right into CallSheet, deep links you to the particular, you know, uh, thing that you
01:56:35 ◼ ► were, you, you were, uh, looking at. So as an example, you know, if I sent to the two of you, the link to
01:56:41 ◼ ► the hunt for October in iMessage, I would expect to see the poster for the hunt for October. I would
01:56:45 ◼ ► expect to see the title. I would expect that if you tap on that link, you know, you would open CallSheet
01:56:50 ◼ ► and, and dive directly to the hunt for October. And on the surface, this shouldn't be that
01:56:57 ◼ ► complicated, but the complicated thing was I, and slightly because of Marco, but mostly because of
01:57:04 ◼ ► me, I have a deep aversion to running any sort of server component at all for any of my apps.
01:57:09 ◼ ► I don't want to bother with, I don't want to bother with it. I don't want to mess with it. I don't want
01:57:13 ◼ ► to deal with it. I don't want to scale it. I don't want to think of it. So that's a large part of the
01:57:20 ◼ ► reason why I've been kicking this can. And the obvious answer is, well, you dum-dum, you already
01:57:24 ◼ ► run a server for your website. Just tack on the side of that. And yeah, I could, but like my website
01:57:30 ◼ ► is old and creaky. See the recent, I remember special. And although it works perfectly for the
01:57:35 ◼ ► needs I have of it today, I think extending it for this purpose is not really the right idea.
01:57:39 ◼ ► So then I need to like stand up a whole new thing. And do I want to stand up an entire new,
01:57:45 ◼ ► like Linode, Nano, and you know, another VM in the cloud somewhere just to service this
01:57:55 ◼ ► I don't. And so I just kept kicking this can down the road and I kicked it and I kicked it
01:57:59 ◼ ► and I kicked it and I kicked it and then lo and behold, and this is the lesson that Marco
01:58:05 ◼ ► and I have both learned many times and keep trying to unlearn and then keep getting reinforced
01:58:13 ◼ ► And so, um, an extremely kind listener who I did not, uh, get blessings to use their name
01:58:20 ◼ ► one way or the other. So I'll just call them Josh S. Um, an extremely kind listener late last year
01:58:25 ◼ ► said, Hey, I'm tired of sending links to people for call sheet that are so hideous. So I stood
01:58:30 ◼ ► up my own little baby, uh, setup that, that does it for you. And so what Josh had done was
01:58:40 ◼ ► but I'm not a hundred percent certain. And basically these were a single service service,
01:58:45 ◼ ► single serving pages sort of, sort of kind of, and what, what it would do is it would mimic
01:58:49 ◼ ► the call sheet colon slash slash URLs, but it was an actual website, right? And it used the movie
01:58:55 ◼ ► databases, uh, API on the client side to load details about the film or the show or what have
01:59:02 ◼ ► you. So you get this really nice landing page for the hunt for October and it has the poster and,
01:59:07 ◼ ► and the background of the page is like, uh, uh, uh, faded out like, uh, image from the movie.
01:59:13 ◼ ► And it was just really, really good. And I don't have a link in front of me and I don't want to
01:59:18 ◼ ► swamp his setup and I don't know how long it's going to last anyway, but it was incredible.
01:59:22 ◼ ► And I immediately reached out and was like, Holy crap, may I steal this please? And again,
01:59:27 ◼ ► procrastination to save the day. And Josh was extremely, uh, gracious and courteous about it.
01:59:34 ◼ ► And I was like, yeah, absolutely steal it. Have fun. And that was months ago. Oh, over the last
01:59:38 ◼ ► week, over the last week, I finally decided to get off my butt and, uh, actually try to implement
01:59:44 ◼ ► this. And this, to, to make this a little broader and not all about me, me, me, I feel like I learned
01:59:51 ◼ ► a really good lesson from this experience because I knew I didn't want to listen to John and stand up
01:59:57 ◼ ► a new, you know, VM in the cloud. I wanted to do something serverless, which is a buzzword that
02:00:04 ◼ ► I've heard more in the past, a little bit, not as much recently, but I've heard plenty of times.
02:00:08 ◼ ► Um, and I don't really even know what that means, but I know that it means I don't have to deal with
02:00:18 ◼ ► That's what I was getting at when I said, yes, you want to do that. Uh, because I wanted you to have a
02:00:23 ◼ ► website, but like what you're talking about now is an implementation detail, which is like, okay,
02:00:27 ◼ ► what answers when I make an HTTP request, what is on the other end of this thing answering my
02:00:32 ◼ ► question? And it could be a computer in Iraq somewhere. It could be a virtual machine inside
02:00:36 ◼ ► a computer in Iraq somewhere, or it could be a quote unquote serverless endpoint, which is a bunch of
02:00:42 ◼ ► software running on a computer inside Iraq somewhere. But it does, it does change like your perspective
02:00:48 ◼ ► in that like, am I responsible for running a machine? Am I responsible for like instantiating
02:00:55 ◼ ► and running a VM or am I not responsible for any of that? And instead my responsibility begins and ends
02:01:00 ◼ ► with me uploading a blob of code or an executable into this magic bucket. And then I'm not responsible
02:01:05 ◼ ► for anything that runs it. And the only thing that can be my fault is there's a bug in the code that I
02:01:10 ◼ ► uploaded. So I should upload a new version of it, but everything else is essentially not my fault.
02:01:14 ◼ ► And that is what it sounds like you're looking for. That is the quote unquote serverless is like,
02:01:17 ◼ ► I don't want any of this to be my responsibility, but there are other trade-offs with quote unquote
02:01:22 ◼ ► serverless, which have to do with things that aren't your problem may become your problem. If there's
02:01:28 ◼ ► something like you can't fix them, if there's a problem, so you want it to be reliable and also
02:01:31 ◼ ► surprisingly costs. Sometimes serverless can save you, save you huge amounts of money depending on what
02:01:37 ◼ ► you're doing. If what you're doing is let's say extremely simple and low traffic, putting it as
02:01:45 ◼ ► a tiny little thing on some existing VM you have could save you more money than paying per request
02:01:50 ◼ ► to a serverless thing. So, uh, I, I get you wanting to do it because it's like cool and you haven't tried
02:01:55 ◼ ► it before and you should check it out and it might be the best choice for what you're doing, but also it
02:02:00 ◼ ► might end up being way more expensive than putting a static page on the cheapest static hosting you
02:02:05 ◼ ► could find. Yeah. And you hit the nail on the head that I wanted to, I wanted to leverage as much of
02:02:14 ◼ ► somebody else's infrastructure as possible in just care about the thing I actually care about. And I
02:02:20 ◼ ► think, you know, I'm, I'm stealing a little bit of Marco's thunder, so to speak, in that you've said this
02:02:25 ◼ ► many times, I believe Marco and summarize it probably better than I'm about to in that, you know,
02:02:28 ◼ ► our value add is probably working on the native app and being a Linux administrator is not really what
02:02:35 ◼ ► you or me or John is. Well, maybe John, but not what Marco and I are meant to do. And so I don't want to
02:02:40 ◼ ► do that for this particular context. And so I decided to bite, bite the bullet. That's probably a terrible
02:02:45 ◼ ► turn of phrase. I decided to learn how to, um, how to do this. And what I ended up doing was looking at
02:02:52 ◼ ► Cloudflare pages, which, uh, from what very little I know, and I'm sure I'm going to get some things
02:02:58 ◼ ► factually wrong here, but the gist is that you can send them static HTML or some, you can use some
02:03:06 ◼ ► very, very, very basic, I guess, web frameworks to do, um, very, very, very basic websites. I think
02:03:12 ◼ ► this is kind of spiritually similar to GitHub. Um, what is it? GitHub pages, GitHub something rather
02:03:17 ◼ ► that they'll host a website for you as well. Um, it's Cloudflare's cut of that. Um, but the problem
02:03:24 ◼ ► is, is that I wanted this to be dynamic and I'm putting huge air quotes in there insofar as I don't
02:03:30 ◼ ► want to have to, and I don't have any mechanism really of sending all the data to this page.
02:03:35 ◼ ► Like I don't, I could send a title as like query string or whatever, but that would look ugly. And,
02:03:40 ◼ ► and I don't, how am I going to send an image? What am I going to base 64 and code an image and put
02:03:47 ◼ ► this website slash webpage or what have you would need to do is make its own request to the movie
02:03:53 ◼ ► database and get the data it needs based on just an identifier. And that's what I did. And so it turns
02:03:58 ◼ ► out Cloudflare pages also uses or offers Cloudflare functions, which I guess in turn are just like,
02:04:06 ◼ ► uh, slightly rejiggered versions of Cloudflare workers, which all of that is to say you can basically
02:04:13 ◼ ► push HTML and JavaScript to Cloudflare. And as long as they're not super intensive and as long
02:04:19 ◼ ► as you're not getting a gazillion hits, it's as far as I know, it is literally free for me to host this
02:04:25 ◼ ► so far. I haven't paid for an SSL cert, which I know is not that common anymore. I haven't paid,
02:04:29 ◼ ► I mean, I already paid for the domain like a year and a half ago, but, um, I'm not paying for hosting
02:04:33 ◼ ► yet. Uh, obviously there could change and I might need to, you know, I might get so much traffic that I
02:04:39 ◼ ► need to, um, start paying them, but the, the free limits are extremely generous. I don't remember
02:04:44 ◼ ► offhand what they are, but they're very, very generous. And now you can go to call sheet app,
02:04:49 ◼ ► a call sheet app.com slash movie slash one six, six nine as an example. And you can see the hunt for
02:04:55 ◼ ► October. Um, and you can do that for people. You can do it for TV shows. You can do it for TV shows,
02:04:59 ◼ ► TV show seasons and TV show episodes. And I'm really, really pleased with this. And the look
02:05:06 ◼ ► and feel of it is 98% Josh S I did change a couple of things here and there, but the overwhelming
02:05:13 ◼ ► majority of it was Josh, uh, the, the, the JavaScript again, make it air quotes backend code,
02:05:19 ◼ ► so to speak. Most of that was Josh. Again, I tweaked it and changed it and so on and so forth. But
02:05:24 ◼ ► what I think the, the, a couple of big lessons for me that may be relevant to everyone, I guess I'm
02:05:30 ◼ ► trying to channel, uh, under the radar here a little bit. Uh, first of all, this was something
02:05:33 ◼ ► I deeply feared and I was able to put it together in a few days. Uh, similarly, uh, I deeply feared
02:05:39 ◼ ► lists of pins and that took longer, but as it turns out for both of these, I was capable of it. Like
02:05:46 ◼ ► I didn't think I was, but I was, and I think what I need to take from this and maybe someone else
02:05:52 ◼ ► listening is in similar, in a similar position. Like I've been doing this for a long time. I
02:05:57 ◼ ► shouldn't, I shouldn't doubt myself the way I have been on a couple of these things. Like normally
02:06:01 ◼ ► every everyday stuff, I've got that no problem. But some of the stuff where I'm outside of my comfort
02:06:05 ◼ ► zone, I don't need to be doubting myself as much as I do. And I'm pretty decent at my job and I can
02:06:12 ◼ ► figure stuff out. Like, as I've said, probably on the show before, and I've said certainly in many
02:06:17 ◼ ► times in the past, you know, when I went to school and I think I speak for all of you, probably when
02:06:22 ◼ ► I went to school, I did learn some marketable skills, but ultimately what I learned was how to
02:06:27 ◼ ► learn and I can learn things. And I knew this intellectually, but I don't know, for whatever
02:06:33 ◼ ► reason, I just got so scared about this and I didn't need to be. And you know, then I, I was able to
02:06:38 ◼ ► put all this web stuff together again, thanks so much to Josh S. And then I was able to, again,
02:06:44 ◼ ► thanks to some tutelage from him, get it so that I, you know, when you open these URLs, if the app is
02:06:49 ◼ ► installed, it will automatically deep link into the app, which was not challenging, but was something I'd
02:06:53 ◼ ► never done before. And you have to get, you know, a certain file on the web server in a certain spot.
02:06:57 ◼ ► And Marco's probably done all this 15 times, but you've put a certain website or a certain page on,
02:07:02 ◼ ► or a certain file, excuse me, on the web server in a certain spot. Then you got to report into Apple
02:07:05 ◼ ► about, you know, what domain do you bless? And does the, does the blessed domain, does the domain
02:07:10 ◼ ► bless you back? And so on and so forth. But ultimately I have feared this for months, probably
02:07:17 ◼ ► a year now, year and a half now. And I ended up conquering it in just a few days. So if you're in
02:07:21 ◼ ► a position where there's something, be it a work issue or a programming issue or a life issue that
02:07:27 ◼ ► you've been fearing, stop kicking that can. Don't be like me. Don't procrastinate, except when it's
02:07:31 ◼ ► useful, but don't procrastinate and just give it a shot because you'd be surprised what you're capable
02:07:35 ◼ ► of. And, and I'm sure there's problems with this. I'm sure someone will find a bug and I'm sure there
02:07:39 ◼ ► will be an issue, but ultimately it's, it's there in, at least in the happy path that works. I'm really
02:07:46 ◼ ► pleased with it. And the best part of all gentlemen is if I need to change something, I change it,
02:07:51 ◼ ► I upload it and I wait about 15 seconds and then it's live, which is so frigging refreshing. And I
02:07:58 ◼ ► know that this is so obvious, but I'm so used to living in native app land where even a test flight
02:08:03 ◼ ► takes like 10, 15 minutes to go through. I am so loving the world of the web where when I upload
02:08:23 ◼ ► That's true. And, you know, I know that there are plenty of other technologies that would work for
02:08:29 ◼ ► this. I don't know why I chose Cloudflare to be honest with you. I just had heard of it.
02:08:34 ◼ ► Yeah. And I mean, that's the other thing. It's like AWS scares the piss out of me because
02:08:38 ◼ ► there's so much to it. There's so many nooks and crannies that I, and I know almost nothing about
02:08:48 ◼ ► specific that I would just not even, I would take so long for me to even understand the
02:08:52 ◼ ► terminology I needed to ask the question that, um, I don't, I don't think I would ever turn
02:08:57 ◼ ► to AWS. Now, John, if I recall correctly, you have plenty of experience with AWS. So maybe
02:09:01 ◼ ► for you, if you were to go down this route and if you wanted quote unquote serverless, maybe
02:09:08 ◼ ► No, because, because like AWS as the market leader is not, uh, incentivized to offer as generous
02:09:18 ◼ ► scale where AWS will make the most sense for me. I would imagine Marco probably already is
02:09:22 ◼ ► at that scale. And we've discussed that many times in the past, but it is terrifying. You
02:09:26 ◼ ► are right to be scared. Uh, and that's, that's the sort of competitive niche that like companies
02:09:31 ◼ ► like fastly and cloud flare, like they are able to offer services that are aimed at people like you,
02:09:38 ◼ ► like people who are, are, are, you know, potential customers of many of their services and may
02:09:42 ◼ ► eventually pay for them. But right now aren't like needy kind of a user-friendly on ramp and maybe don't