ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► We get a lot of listener feedback.

00:00:02 ◼   ► And generally speaking, it's wonderful.

00:00:04 ◼   ► It's good to read, even if we don't reply to it.

00:00:07 ◼   ► Um, we we see it and acknowledge and acknowledge it internally anyway.

00:00:11 ◼   ► And there are occasionally pieces of listener feedback that stand out.

00:00:15 ◼   ► Uh, I don't have the gentleman's name in front of me, but the the

00:00:17 ◼   ► long uh email that turned into a blog post was it Adam One, I

00:00:20 ◼   ► think that's right.

00:00:21 ◼   ► Yes.

00:00:21 ◼   ► Um his name was Adam Filemaker.

00:00:23 ◼   ► Yeah, yep, exactly right.

00:00:25 ◼   ► Uh that was incredible.

00:00:26 ◼   ► We had another incredible piece of feedback that was sent to all of us,

00:00:31 ◼   ► but was really for you.

00:00:33 ◼   ► Can you tell us about this?

00:00:34 ◼   ► Because this was just chef's kiss amazing.

00:00:37 ◼   ► I think this might this might be my favorite feedback I've ever received on

00:00:41 ◼   ► a podcast.

00:00:42 ◼   ► Like I think my favorite piece of follow-up I ever heard on someone else's

00:00:46 ◼   ► podcast was once, I believe it was an old episode of Connected.

00:00:50 ◼   ► Mike said his birthday on an episode, and somebody wrote in the next week

00:00:53 ◼   ► to say, you got your birthday wrong.

00:00:56 ◼   ► This is your actual birthday, and it was correct.

00:00:59 ◼   ► And it like that's that I think is my favorite piece of podcast follow-up

00:01:02 ◼   ► ever.

00:01:02 ◼   ► Um, somebody correcting Mike on his own birthday and being right.

00:01:07 ◼   ► Um I think this might be my second most favorite.

00:01:10 ◼   ► So a million years ago when Overcast first made um the clip sharing feature.

00:01:17 ◼   ► This I can't even remember how many years ago this was.

00:01:19 ◼   ► Well, let me ask you take a guess.

00:01:22 ◼   ► What episode of ATP was entitled automatic kicking machine.

00:01:26 ◼   ► I just take a guess.

00:01:27 ◼   ► So we're currently in the low 700s.

00:01:29 ◼   ► I'm gonna say maybe it's somewhere in the 400s.

00:01:31 ◼   ► I would have thought the same, Marco.

00:01:33 ◼   ► Episode Oh, actually, John, do you know?

00:01:35 ◼   ► I mean, you already spoiled it by saying it's probably less than 400.

00:01:38 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:01:39 ◼   ► Um 210.

00:01:40 ◼   ► Number 34.

00:01:42 ◼   ► Uh number 34.

00:01:44 ◼   ► Automatic.

00:01:45 ◼   ► Oh, oh shoot, wait, wait, I'm a big liar.

00:01:47 ◼   ► We're gonna have to fix it and edit.

00:01:48 ◼   ► 324 is what I'm saying.

00:01:49 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, that's a pretty big difference.

00:01:51 ◼   ► I'm sorry.

00:01:52 ◼   ► I'm sorry.

00:01:53 ◼   ► I win.

00:01:54 ◼   ► Yeah, that no, John Wayne's price is right rules.

00:01:56 ◼   ► My apologies.

00:01:56 ◼   ► In my internal, so I take the show notes that we share, and then

00:02:00 ◼   ► I generate the ones for public consumption, and I had a tra uh typographical

00:02:04 ◼   ► error and I put in I dropped the two in 324.

00:02:07 ◼   ► I'm so sorry.

00:02:08 ◼   ► I was not trying to set you up for failure.

00:02:10 ◼   ► That was a genuine whiff on my part.

00:02:11 ◼   ► But anyway, I don't say generate because people are gonna think you use AI

00:02:14 ◼   ► to do it.

00:02:14 ◼   ► Oh no, no, no, I I create them by hand.

00:02:16 ◼   ► But anyways, May 3, 2019 was when we last spoke about this.

00:02:21 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:02:21 ◼   ► So that was when Overcast for when I'm when I wrote clip sharing and

00:02:24 ◼   ► overcast, um, I was using this API, like this, you know, AV asset writing

00:02:30 ◼   ► kind of API to generate video from a UI I was rendering is how

00:02:36 ◼   ► those clips were created.

00:02:37 ◼   ► Um, I dug through the docs at the time, and you know, this was

00:02:40 ◼   ► obviously many iOS versions ago and many years ago, and uh I I I

00:02:45 ◼   ► had the problem I had was that the system I was using, which I

00:02:49 ◼   ► as far as I knew at the time was the only way to do

00:02:51 ◼   ► this um with Apple's APIs, every so often it would just stall when exporting

00:02:57 ◼   ► a video.

00:02:57 ◼   ► And I realized that if I just if I detected that it wasn't progressing,

00:03:02 ◼   ► and I just canceled the task and shifted the first timestamp like by like

00:03:07 ◼   ► you know, point one in either direction, and just tried it again, oftentimes it

00:03:11 ◼   ► would succeed the second time.

00:03:12 ◼   ► Sometimes it would take two or three times to succeed.

00:03:15 ◼   ► And you would see this as you like, and if this is actually still

00:03:19 ◼   ► in the current app store version of Overcast, um, as you export a clip,

00:03:22 ◼   ► you could see you would see like the little pie chart progress meter get

00:03:25 ◼   ► like most of the way through and then stop for a couple seconds and

00:03:28 ◼   ► then start over at the beginning.

00:03:30 ◼   ► What I had built was, as I described it, an automatic kicking machine.

00:03:33 ◼   ► That if you just if you kick it and make it reset, it would

00:03:37 ◼   ► often succeed.

00:03:38 ◼   ► So I just built when I shipped the feature, an automatic kicking machine that

00:03:41 ◼   ► would just detect when it was stalled, kick it, and start it again until

00:03:45 ◼   ► it succeeded.

00:03:46 ◼   ► Well, David Watson wrote in a couple days ago to say, hey, I believe

00:03:52 ◼   ► I plus ChatGPT and Claude figured out what was going wrong with your clip

00:03:56 ◼   ► generation system and Overcast.

00:03:58 ◼   ► I'm honestly quite frightened that it was possible for AI agents to find this.

00:04:02 ◼   ► Now what David did was it what it looks like he did was have

00:04:05 ◼   ► AI decompile my binary, uh which is a thing people do.

00:04:09 ◼   ► Um I haven't gotten to that point with AI yet, but it's it's a

00:04:12 ◼   ► thing that's happening and it's helping people find bugs and stuff.

00:04:14 ◼   ► So it's great.

00:04:14 ◼   ► Um and he said, the you're using this one API call to composite the

00:04:20 ◼   ► graphic, and if you use this other one, it works.

00:04:25 ◼   ► What?

00:04:26 ◼   ► Incredible.

00:04:27 ◼   ► So I tried it.

00:04:29 ◼   ► It took uh you know, like one or two minor other lines of code

00:04:32 ◼   ► changed around it to to use this other function, this other API for compositing

00:04:35 ◼   ► the image.

00:04:37 ◼   ► And it works.

00:04:39 ◼   ► He was right.

00:04:40 ◼   ► So David Watson wrote in with a correction of my source code from decompiling

00:04:48 ◼   ► my binary with AI and fixed one of Overcast's longest standing most obscure bugs.

00:04:54 ◼   ► Wow.

00:04:55 ◼   ► And and if I'm not mistaken, David provided a sample project to demonstrate this.

00:05:00 ◼   ► Yes, he did.

00:05:01 ◼   ► Incredible.

00:05:02 ◼   ► Just five stars.

00:05:03 ◼   ► He's gonna get a great reward from the Overcast bug bounty program, right?

00:05:07 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:05:08 ◼   ► How about this?

00:05:09 ◼   ► I on Marco's behalf, David, if you want to reach back out and uh

00:05:13 ◼   ► if on Marco's behalf, I'm happy to send you if you're interested in ATP

00:05:16 ◼   ► sticker.

00:05:16 ◼   ► Uh because I don't Marco doesn't have any, I have them all.

00:05:19 ◼   ► So, David, reach back out and in in in thanks for doing Marco such

00:05:23 ◼   ► a solid.

00:05:23 ◼   ► I'll send you a couple stickers.

00:05:24 ◼   ► Yeah, this was incredible.

00:05:26 ◼   ► So, yeah, thank you, David Watson, for incredible feedback and fixing this bug in

00:05:31 ◼   ► like in the most amazing way.

00:05:36 ◼   ► All right, let's do some follow-up.

00:05:37 ◼   ► And since we're talking overcasts, let's continue.

00:05:39 ◼   ► Uh, I would like to report, as I believe John has written in the

00:05:42 ◼   ► show notes, the system works.

00:05:44 ◼   ► John, what happened?

00:05:46 ◼   ► I complained about a feature that I wanted to have an overcast, then I

00:05:48 ◼   ► went on vacation, then I came back and it's an overcast.

00:05:51 ◼   ► The system works.

00:05:52 ◼   ► Uh in uh overcast test flight build 1169.

00:05:56 ◼   ► Uh there is now a basic transcript search, which is what I wanted.

00:06:00 ◼   ► And I tried it and it works.

00:06:02 ◼   ► And yay, uh, there have been many builds there, many builds, at least one

00:06:05 ◼   ► build since then, but just FYI.

00:06:07 ◼   ► Uh coming soon to the app store near you whenever the heck Marco releases

00:06:10 ◼   ► it.

00:06:11 ◼   ► Basic transcript search.

00:06:13 ◼   ► Did you happen to see the build that I shipped about an hour ago?

00:06:17 ◼   ► I did.

00:06:17 ◼   ► Did you happen to see something else there that you might be interested in?

00:06:21 ◼   ► Uh I I saw the priority, the the pre-selecting chapters, which I'm not interested

00:06:26 ◼   ► in.

00:06:26 ◼   ► No, not that, John.

00:06:27 ◼   ► I know what Marco's thinking.

00:06:29 ◼   ► Uh the deleting of the priority things when you're sorting by duration or some

00:06:32 ◼   ► crap.

00:06:33 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:06:33 ◼   ► There was a whole bunch of changes in there.

00:06:34 ◼   ► I didn't see anything that stood out to me, though.

00:06:36 ◼   ► There was the deleting, only keeping three episodes, no matter what you do.

00:06:39 ◼   ► And there's a bunch of stuff.

00:06:41 ◼   ► Yes, there is a bunch of stuff.

00:06:42 ◼   ► And Marco's been going hot and heavy, which I want to ask you about

00:06:44 ◼   ► in a second.

00:06:45 ◼   ► But I believe it's play a podcast from the beginning mode.

00:06:48 ◼   ► Is that what you're thinking of?

00:06:49 ◼   ► Uh-huh.

00:06:49 ◼   ► That's correct.

00:06:50 ◼   ► Replay podcast.

00:06:52 ◼   ► Why do I care about that?

00:06:53 ◼   ► John.

00:06:54 ◼   ► Isn't this what you've been asking about for years?

00:06:56 ◼   ► Me to replay old podcasts?

00:06:57 ◼   ► I don't think so.

00:06:58 ◼   ► What?

00:06:58 ◼   ► Well, on behalf of others, absolutely.

00:07:00 ◼   ► I maybe I'll maybe we've invented this memory together.

00:07:03 ◼   ► But it's not a not a feature that I wanted.

00:07:05 ◼   ► Maybe uh have people been telling me that they wanted it.

00:07:07 ◼   ► I've been passing it on to you.

00:07:08 ◼   ► We've been referring to it as Syracusa mode.

00:07:11 ◼   ► Right.

00:07:11 ◼   ► Maybe for people realistening to hypercritical or something.

00:07:14 ◼   ► Now there was there were two things called Syracuse mode.

00:07:14 ◼   ► One was the um playlist priority groupings, like how priority was grouped.

00:07:14 ◼   ► Yes.

00:07:22 ◼   ► Um that's one.

00:07:23 ◼   ► But this was the other thing that I think you have always wanted.

00:07:26 ◼   ► Maybe people just always do it for hypocriticals.

00:07:28 ◼   ► Maybe that's why we Yeah, I think I think maybe it was just me

00:07:30 ◼   ► conveying other people's wishes.

00:07:31 ◼   ► I personally don't have a need for this, but I've definitely heard people request

00:07:34 ◼   ► this.

00:07:34 ◼   ► Oh, anyway.

00:07:35 ◼   ► So yeah, but it the build I s I shipped an hour ago um

00:07:38 ◼   ► includes a replay podcast feature.

00:07:40 ◼   ► Basically, I this is something I have been wanting to do this for I

00:07:45 ◼   ► think about six years.

00:07:46 ◼   ► I even I wrote the server side code to do this years ago.

00:07:50 ◼   ► But so okay, what it is before I get into that, is I've had

00:07:55 ◼   ► this episode limit feature and I've always hated the episode limit.

00:08:00 ◼   ► I don't even use it myself.

00:08:01 ◼   ► Uh but I you I have it in there because it's very popular.

00:08:04 ◼   ► A lot of people use it.

00:08:05 ◼   ► And I do I use that one, so uh I'm glad you never got

00:08:08 ◼   ► rid of it.

00:08:08 ◼   ► So the problem with episode limit is that it I never came up with

00:08:13 ◼   ► until I think tonight, uh or you know, this week, I I never came

00:08:16 ◼   ► up with how some of the implementation details should work.

00:08:20 ◼   ► 'Cause if you th if you say, all right, I'm limiting this podcast to

00:08:23 ◼   ► the last three episodes.

00:08:25 ◼   ► Okay, well what if you scroll back and add one that's past that?

00:08:29 ◼   ► Should it be instantly deleted?

00:08:31 ◼   ► No, of course not.

00:08:32 ◼   ► You just added it.

00:08:33 ◼   ► Like that would be a terrible experience.

00:08:35 ◼   ► But if you say keep three, and then you go back and add numbers

00:08:40 ◼   ► four and five after you know, from back forever ago, well now the episode

00:08:44 ◼   ► limit feature doesn't look like it's working because then you can look back at

00:08:48 ◼   ► it tomorrow and say, but wait, there's five episodes here.

00:08:51 ◼   ► I said limit three.

00:08:52 ◼   ► Your feature is broken.

00:08:53 ◼   ► And believe me, I get those reports.

00:08:55 ◼   ► I have gotten those reports for many, many years.

00:08:58 ◼   ► Now, the reason why it would work that way before is I've kept a

00:09:01 ◼   ► separate flag on like the user state on each episode on whether that episode

00:09:06 ◼   ► was added manually by the user.

00:09:08 ◼   ► So, you know, if it just comes in because it's new and eventually gets

00:09:11 ◼   ► deleted, that's different.

00:09:12 ◼   ► But if you go through the list and you tap download or add on

00:09:15 ◼   ► an old episode, it would set that flag that the user added added this

00:09:19 ◼   ► episode manually.

00:09:20 ◼   ► And the episode limiter would never delete those.

00:09:23 ◼   ► Problem is if you go through and add a bunch of stuff manually now,

00:09:25 ◼   ► like you have a whole bunch of stuff there, and the episode limiter just

00:09:27 ◼   ► seems like it's not working at all.

00:09:29 ◼   ► Now it's so hard to figure out what should the behavior be in all

00:09:33 ◼   ► these you know edge cases of, you know, okay, well, if if I'm limited

00:09:37 ◼   ► to this, but I add this, what should happen?

00:09:39 ◼   ► And I was I was ranting about this to Tiff a couple of weeks

00:09:42 ◼   ► ago.

00:09:43 ◼   ► And she was like, why don't you just not let people add more and

00:09:49 ◼   ► just pop up a message if they try to add more saying, if you

00:09:52 ◼   ► want to add more, turn off the episode limit.

00:09:55 ◼   ► And I was like, it can't be that simple.

00:10:00 ◼   ► And I was thinking, and I was like, how what are what would be

00:10:03 ◼   ► the downsides of that?

00:10:04 ◼   ► And I've been thinking about it for like two weeks, and I couldn't come

00:10:07 ◼   ► up with one.

00:10:08 ◼   ► I'm like, that I think I think Tiff just solved my biggest feature problem

00:10:13 ◼   ► with Overcast ever of fixing the episode limit.

00:10:17 ◼   ► You've you fussed about this complexity, and justifiably so.

00:10:20 ◼   ► You fussed about this several times over the last several years on this very

00:10:24 ◼   ► show.

00:10:24 ◼   ► And it's all it's a tricky thing to figure out because I might want

00:10:28 ◼   ► to override, like you said, but John might be grumpy that it's past your

00:10:32 ◼   ► limit of three, just like you were describing.

00:10:34 ◼   ► So that's a very clever solution from Tif for sure.

00:10:36 ◼   ► Yeah, I never offer a suggestions to this feature, but I can come up

00:10:38 ◼   ► with lots of solutions that would satisfy me.

00:10:40 ◼   ► But to Marco's point, well, it's easy to come up with something that will

00:10:42 ◼   ► satisfy you.

00:10:43 ◼   ► The problem is making a feature that satisfies the largest number of people who

00:10:46 ◼   ► all want different things.

00:10:44 ◼   ► So I never suggested what I would want.

00:10:49 ◼   ► But uh anyway, I I think the main goal is to have a feature

00:10:53 ◼   ► that is at least understandable.

00:10:55 ◼   ► So even if it's not what people want, they understand how it works.

00:10:58 ◼   ► The problem with the old system was uh it was not understandable to people.

00:11:01 ◼   ► So no matter what happened, they felt justified in complaining that it was broken

00:11:05 ◼   ► in some way.

00:11:05 ◼   ► Whereas if it is entirely understandable but merely doesn't do what they want, then

00:11:08 ◼   ► at least they know well, this feature doesn't work for me, and I understand

00:11:11 ◼   ► why.

00:11:11 ◼   ► They're probably still complain, but anyway, I in your in your notes, you'll I'm

00:11:14 ◼   ► sure you'll as you'll continue describing.

00:11:16 ◼   ► You didn't just do this limit, right?

00:11:17 ◼   ► There is like a little nuance to it.

00:11:19 ◼   ► Yes.

00:11:20 ◼   ► So this limit, this was also, you know, the this limit has always been

00:11:24 ◼   ► imposed server-side.

00:11:25 ◼   ► Uh the server-side logic would, you know, when an episode came in and you

00:11:29 ◼   ► and you'd synced to the server, it would calculate which ones needed to be

00:11:32 ◼   ► marked marked as deleted and delete them, you know, and and it was this

00:11:36 ◼   ► is the this is like part of one of like the hottest parts of

00:11:41 ◼   ► the server code.

00:11:42 ◼   ► Like this is like super high traffic.

00:11:44 ◼   ► It deals with immense amounts of data with massive databases.

00:11:49 ◼   ► And so editing that code over time has been something I really do not

00:11:53 ◼   ► like to do, because it's just incredibly high stress, incredibly high stakes.

00:11:58 ◼   ► And if I get it wrong, ridiculous things happen on the server side, uh,

00:12:02 ◼   ► some of which are very hard to undo.

00:12:04 ◼   ► Um like huge explosions of data and things.

00:12:06 ◼   ► So anyway, uh years ago, I prototyped a different mode for the episode limit

00:12:13 ◼   ► to be in.

00:12:14 ◼   ► Instead of keeping X of the newest episodes, I wanted a mode that would

00:12:19 ◼   ► keep X of the oldest episodes from wherever you currently were.

00:12:24 ◼   ► So that you could basically replay a podcast from the start or even just

00:12:28 ◼   ► play it that way for the you know, the first time through.

00:12:30 ◼   ► Like if you if you had never heard a podcast before when you want

00:12:33 ◼   ► to start at the beginning, but you only want like you know one or

00:12:36 ◼   ► two or three episodes downloaded at once, you don't want to download all 200

00:12:39 ◼   ► of their back catalog all at the beginning and slowly delete your way through

00:12:42 ◼   ► it, you know that that kind of sucks.

00:12:45 ◼   ► So like I wanted to do this with a different mode of instead of

00:12:49 ◼   ► keep X newest, keep X oldest.

00:12:52 ◼   ► And trying to code this up on the server side, I tried so many

00:12:57 ◼   ► times over the last you know six or eight years to do that, and

00:13:01 ◼   ► I could never get it quite right because there's all these optimization server side,

00:13:06 ◼   ► you know, because you're dealing with so much data when you're talking about per

00:13:10 ◼   ► episode status for a pot for every user's podcasts.

00:13:15 ◼   ► Like if you get that wrong or if you defeat an optimization somewhere, the

00:13:19 ◼   ► database explodes.

00:13:21 ◼   ► So the the stakes of it have been very, very high.

00:13:24 ◼   ► And I've been I I kind of just I would put some time into

00:13:28 ◼   ► developing this and I'd test it out and I'd find some badge case and

00:13:31 ◼   ► it would blow my whole thing up and I would shelf it.

00:13:33 ◼   ► I just I couldn't, it was never I couldn't get it right.

00:13:37 ◼   ► Well, I had the idea recently, as I'm rewriting the episode limit to be

00:13:43 ◼   ► this hard enforced thing, why don't I just do it all client side?

00:13:46 ◼   ► Why am I doing any of the server side?

00:13:48 ◼   ► No one uses the web app anymore.

00:13:49 ◼   ► I don't care about the web app anymore.

00:13:51 ◼   ► So like just I don't think that's a surprise to anybody who uses the

00:13:55 ◼   ► web app.

00:13:56 ◼   ► I think the web app looks like it was made in 1984.

00:14:00 ◼   ► But I was saying, like, you know, why don't I do this all client

00:14:03 ◼   ► side?

00:14:03 ◼   ► So when you sync with this new build of the app, the server from

00:14:08 ◼   ► that point forward stops doing any limiting server side.

00:14:12 ◼   ► This build does it all client side, and that was at first I was

00:14:15 ◼   ► like, oh, this was this is the way to get this episode limit being

00:14:18 ◼   ► hard enforced, you know, with the UI warnings if you try to break through

00:14:22 ◼   ► it without causing weird behavior for old clients.

00:14:25 ◼   ► But then I was like, well, now that I have this client side, let's

00:14:29 ◼   ► take another crack at doing the oldest to newest sort, or you know, the

00:14:34 ◼   ► oldest limit instead of the newest limit.

00:14:36 ◼   ► Because that when it's client side, the logic changes dramatically.

00:14:40 ◼   ► And it's way simpler, and there's way less risk of blowing up my database

00:14:44 ◼   ► if I do something slightly wrong.

00:14:46 ◼   ► And it's way easier to validate what it's happening client side, it's way easier

00:14:49 ◼   ► to test.

00:14:50 ◼   ► And so I tried to do it.

00:14:52 ◼   ► I had some AI help, I'm not gonna lie.

00:14:55 ◼   ► And it turns out, and by the way, AI is super good at writing

00:14:58 ◼   ► tests, and it turns out it works great.

00:15:01 ◼   ► And I had to, you know, there were a few like little edge cases

00:15:03 ◼   ► to deal with, but way fewer than doing it server side.

00:15:06 ◼   ► It's way easier because I can just store things in a much more straightforward

00:15:10 ◼   ► way.

00:15:10 ◼   ► So now, finally, Overcast can keep the latest X episodes or the oldest X

00:15:18 ◼   ► episodes.

00:15:18 ◼   ► And I even added a button called replay podcast.

00:15:21 ◼   ► It's in the little you know ellipsis menu on a podcast.

00:15:24 ◼   ► Right below mark all as played and delete all episodes, you can say replay

00:15:27 ◼   ► podcast and it resets all your play stats for that podcast.

00:15:30 ◼   ► Okay, marks them all as unplayed, and from the beginning, downloads the late, you

00:15:35 ◼   ► know, the the oldest X episodes.

00:15:37 ◼   ► And as you play them, you know, if you when you play episode one,

00:15:40 ◼   ► if you delete episode one and you have you know three routined at once,

00:15:44 ◼   ► it'll start downloading episode four immediately.

00:15:46 ◼   ► If once you delete episode two, it'll start to start down downloading episode five,

00:15:50 ◼   ► et cetera.

00:15:50 ◼   ► And so you can kind of listen through back again through a podcast.

00:15:54 ◼   ► Maybe that's the origin of Sarah K and the mode room when I want

00:15:56 ◼   ► to, if I want to listen to something, I want to start from episode

00:15:58 ◼   ► one and go in order.

00:15:59 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:16:00 ◼   ► I'm telling you, you wanted this.

00:15:59 ◼   ► I don't know if you currently it sounds like me.

00:16:05 ◼   ► It definitely sounds like me, because I definitely do that with like television shows

00:16:07 ◼   ► and stuff.

00:16:08 ◼   ► Like I wanna I go back to season one and want to start from

00:16:10 ◼   ► the beginning, and I'm sure I've done it with podcasts, too.

00:16:12 ◼   ► Oh my god, John.

00:16:13 ◼   ► I'm just I'm just saying I don't remember specifically, and it is confusing.

00:16:16 ◼   ► There were two things you were calling Syracuse mode.

00:16:18 ◼   ► But anyway, I'm saying that does sound like me.

00:16:20 ◼   ► I can assure you, someone will go spelunking into like cat ATP.fm or something,

00:16:24 ◼   ► and we will come up with you requesting this.

00:16:26 ◼   ► Now maybe in episode 34, right?

00:16:29 ◼   ► In episode 34, you're exactly right.

00:16:31 ◼   ► Now, maybe it won't be this maybe we didn't refer to this as Syracuse

00:16:34 ◼   ► mode, or maybe we were getting our memories slightly wrong.

00:16:37 ◼   ► Hi, have we met?

00:16:38 ◼   ► But I I I really am on team Marco for this one.

00:16:41 ◼   ► I really feel like you've asked for this in some way, shape, or form.

00:16:43 ◼   ► Uh Marco, before we move on, I have a question for you.

00:16:46 ◼   ► I have been seeing, and we were briefly talking about this privately before the

00:16:49 ◼   ► show started.

00:16:50 ◼   ► I've been seeing so much activity on Overcast over the last, I don't know,

00:16:54 ◼   ► month, if I'm very courteous, maybe a couple of weeks more realistically.

00:16:58 ◼   ► Um I feel like you are in a what is it the peak or

00:17:03 ◼   ► a valley?

00:17:03 ◼   ► I guess you're in a peak.

00:17:04 ◼   ► Um I was gonna say thit or spurred.

00:17:06 ◼   ► I never get when I can never remember which one's right.

00:17:07 ◼   ► Um, but you're you're really making progress here.

00:17:10 ◼   ► What is happening?

00:17:11 ◼   ► Are you just in one of those times when you're super duper productive?

00:17:14 ◼   ► Is are you just the world's best AI dictator director person?

00:17:18 ◼   ► What is happening?

00:17:20 ◼   ► Kind of maybe all of that, or some of all of that.

00:17:23 ◼   ► So, okay, so here's what's going on.

00:17:24 ◼   ► So when I as I described, I was having Fable help me tackle some

00:17:29 ◼   ► of Overcast's longest standing bugs.

00:17:32 ◼   ► These were things that were just stumping me for months or years.

00:17:37 ◼   ► And it was just such a burden.

00:17:40 ◼   ► I was very discouraged because it was so difficult for me to keep working

00:17:45 ◼   ► on overcast, like mentally, because no matter what I did, there were these, like,

00:17:50 ◼   ► you know, this relatively small number of just very difficult bugs I couldn't figure

00:17:53 ◼   ► out.

00:17:53 ◼   ► And all the reviews, all the stars, all of the emails, all the posts,

00:17:58 ◼   ► they would all be dominated by people saying, Yeah, yeah, that thing you did,

00:18:01 ◼   ► that's nice, but why haven't you fixed this?

00:18:04 ◼   ► And honestly, I couldn't blame them.

00:18:05 ◼   ► Like, because many of those bugs were pretty annoying or pretty, uh, pretty, you

00:18:08 ◼   ► know, interfering with uh with people's workflows and stuff.

00:18:11 ◼   ► So I get it, but that just made it so hard to motivate myself

00:18:17 ◼   ► to work on overcast at all because it just felt I was just had

00:18:20 ◼   ► this boulder resting on me that I just couldn't get off and I couldn't

00:18:24 ◼   ► move forward at all.

00:18:26 ◼   ► Meanwhile, all these years, I've had my own wish list of things that I

00:18:31 ◼   ► would love to do.

00:18:32 ◼   ► I know what people request because I read them.

00:18:36 ◼   ► So I know what people want, I know what I want, and all this

00:18:40 ◼   ► time, you know, I just I just told the story about how I've been

00:18:44 ◼   ► trying to build KeepEx oldest episodes for like six years.

00:18:48 ◼   ► There's lots of features like that.

00:18:50 ◼   ► There's lots of things that I have tried to build for years, some of

00:18:54 ◼   ► which I have even started to build or built most of, and then just

00:18:58 ◼   ► couldn't get it past, couldn't get it, you know, to ship.

00:19:00 ◼   ► I couldn't get it good enough to ship, or I couldn't finish it, or

00:19:03 ◼   ► I couldn't account for some kind of edge cases, and therefore like it was

00:19:06 ◼   ► kind of unshippable until I did, or that's why I would shelve it or

00:19:10 ◼   ► whatever.

00:19:10 ◼   ► There are so many of those features.

00:19:13 ◼   ► Now that Claude helped me get by the way, Claude is a past and

00:19:17 ◼   ► probably future sponsor of our show.

00:19:18 ◼   ► Um now that now that using AI, in this case, Claude Fable, but you

00:19:22 ◼   ► know, I'm sure it doesn't really matter which one I'm using.

00:19:24 ◼   ► Um, now that that's helped me find and fix some of these big nasty

00:19:28 ◼   ► bugs, it has like lifted this burden off of me.

00:19:33 ◼   ► And now I am free and empowered to go start working on these other

00:19:38 ◼   ► things that I've been wanting to work on.

00:19:40 ◼   ► And it's delightful because everything you've seen me do in the last few weeks,

00:19:44 ◼   ► like in all these this crazy barrage of of beta builds, yeah, yeah.

00:19:47 ◼   ► None of these are like brand new ideas that I just had today.

00:19:51 ◼   ► This is stuff I've been waiting for years to ship.

00:19:54 ◼   ► And with the help of AI to get me past the crazy bugs, the

00:19:59 ◼   ► test suites, like some of the really boring implementation details, I can now do

00:20:04 ◼   ► it.

00:20:05 ◼   ► And I think I am a pretty good director of AI.

00:20:08 ◼   ► Like when I when I write the spec to a prompt to find some

00:20:11 ◼   ► kind of you know class of bug or investigate something or do an audit

00:20:14 ◼   ► or generate tests, I think I'm pretty good at writing those.

00:20:17 ◼   ► Like I'm I it's proving to be a strength of mine.

00:20:20 ◼   ► And then I look at the code it writes and see there's a couple

00:20:23 ◼   ► of things that that I think really work in my favor.

00:20:25 ◼   ► Like I've seen when you have AI write like a whole app from scratch,

00:20:30 ◼   ► it's kind of a mess.

00:20:31 ◼   ► Like it works, but the code organization is a mess.

00:20:34 ◼   ► The performance in a lot of ways is a mess.

00:20:37 ◼   ► Um, like it's not it's not good when it's totally inventing everything from from

00:20:41 ◼   ► nothing and totally unbounded.

00:20:44 ◼   ► But when you have it work in an existing code base, and you're just

00:20:48 ◼   ► having it like, hey, this feature that I wrote three quarters of six years

00:20:52 ◼   ► ago, please finish it.

00:20:55 ◼   ► It can do that with your code and with your code style and in

00:21:01 ◼   ► your architecture that you designed and built over years.

00:21:04 ◼   ► When it's focused like that, when when it's kind of bounded into a smaller

00:21:08 ◼   ► problem set, it isn't inventing a whole app or a whole feature by itself.

00:21:11 ◼   ► It's like taking what you already did and just adding a couple of things

00:21:15 ◼   ► or fixing a couple of bugs.

00:21:17 ◼   ► Then you look at like the total number of lines of code it's writing

00:21:20 ◼   ► is very small.

00:21:21 ◼   ► So that makes it easier to review as the human.

00:21:24 ◼   ► So I'm able to say, hey, fix this or fix or finish this feature

00:21:29 ◼   ► that I wrote and then I see what it did.

00:21:31 ◼   ► And I'm like and I can review line by line like oh yeah that's

00:21:34 ◼   ► of course that's obvious.

00:21:35 ◼   ► That's fine, that's fine.

00:21:36 ◼   ► And then you know occasionally I catch something like oh it's editing these episodes

00:21:40 ◼   ► one by one I have a batch update function.

00:21:42 ◼   ► I'm gonna rewrite it to use that so I do.

00:21:45 ◼   ► You know it's stuff like you know I'll catch stuff like that catch some

00:21:48 ◼   ► you know performance issues or unforeseen bugs or just kind of bad styles of

00:21:52 ◼   ► code like if it's recomputing the property over and over again that I know

00:21:55 ◼   ► I can just store and cache like I'll store and cache it you know

00:21:58 ◼   ► stuff like that.

00:21:59 ◼   ► But for the most part what I am doing is I'm mining all of

00:22:04 ◼   ► my past half done efforts and having Claude like help me finish them and

00:22:11 ◼   ► test them and prove them and write the boring parts of the UI code

00:22:15 ◼   ► that's so I don't have to write them and then I can go edit

00:22:18 ◼   ► them to make them good.

00:22:19 ◼   ► I'm having it do that kind of thing and because I have banked up

00:22:23 ◼   ► over a decade of features that I have mostly done or that I have

00:22:28 ◼   ► started doing or that I've or that I know I had to do but

00:22:30 ◼   ► I didn't quite know how to do them, I can have it help me

00:22:34 ◼   ► really a lot.

00:22:34 ◼   ► So for instance, um the in the current test flight builds probably probably shipping

00:22:39 ◼   ► in the next couple of weeks um app store review is very very slow,

00:22:43 ◼   ► but we're working on that.

00:22:44 ◼   ► Hopefully shipping soon.

00:22:46 ◼   ► Um, one of the major feature sets that I'm shipping is premium audio effects.

00:22:51 ◼   ► A mono mix down, a full genuine parametric EQ, customizable volume normalization, um, a

00:22:58 ◼   ► DSer, and background noise reduction and isolation.

00:23:02 ◼   ► Now, all of those things except the background noise reduction.

00:23:06 ◼   ► I wrote those whenever I wrote a voice boost too, I don't know, that's

00:23:09 ◼   ► six years ago, whatever it was.

00:23:10 ◼   ► Those have been there that whole time.

00:23:13 ◼   ► When I edit this podcast, I have a Voice Boost command line utility that

00:23:18 ◼   ► allows me to configure all those audio effects, and I pipe each of our

00:23:22 ◼   ► tracks through that every time.

00:23:23 ◼   ► For the last, I don't know, yeah, six years, whatever it's been.

00:23:26 ◼   ► However, I forget whenever Voice Boost to, I have been piping our audio through

00:23:30 ◼   ► basically a channel strip, and I have customizable presets for each of the three

00:23:34 ◼   ► of us for to make this show.

00:23:36 ◼   ► Because that's I wrote this whole audio engine, but none of it was exposed

00:23:40 ◼   ► in the UI.

00:23:41 ◼   ► Voice Boost in the app has just been basically a preset configuration of this

00:23:46 ◼   ► channel strip engine that I built.

00:23:48 ◼   ► And my plan was someday I will write the UI to have people actually

00:23:54 ◼   ► change this and customize it.

00:23:56 ◼   ► That's a lot of work.

00:23:57 ◼   ► And I just it was never important enough.

00:24:00 ◼   ► It never rose above like the threshold of being more important than all the

00:24:04 ◼   ► bugs I had to keep fixing.

00:24:06 ◼   ► And now that all those bugs got easier to fix, I can go back

00:24:10 ◼   ► to this and I say all these features that I wrote years ago that

00:24:13 ◼   ► I just needed a UI for.

00:24:15 ◼   ► Have Claude help me make a UI for God's sake, and then I can

00:24:17 ◼   ► polish it and make it good.

00:24:19 ◼   ► And now I can finally launch these features.

00:24:21 ◼   ► And the background noise reduction is a browser tab I've had open for three

00:24:25 ◼   ► years for one of Apple's audio units.

00:24:29 ◼   ► I knew what it would take to integrate that into my audio engine, and

00:24:32 ◼   ► I knew it was going to be a lot.

00:24:34 ◼   ► And there was just again, there was never like a two-week span that I

00:24:38 ◼   ► had where that was a good idea to use my time to do that.

00:24:41 ◼   ► But now it takes less time because now I can have Claude sketch it

00:24:44 ◼   ► out for me first and build the structure around it, and then I can

00:24:47 ◼   ► look at it and tweak a few things and make it good and release

00:24:44 ◼   ► it.

00:24:51 ◼   ► All of these features that I'm doing now, you know, chapter pre-selection.

00:24:55 ◼   ► My little detail about how like if you uncheck a chapter and that same

00:24:59 ◼   ► chapter appears next week in that show, it skips it automatically.

00:25:03 ◼   ► I've been thinking about this.

00:25:04 ◼   ► That's that was my like clever idea that I had for chapter pre-selection again,

00:25:07 ◼   ► like three years ago.

00:25:09 ◼   ► It never rose to the top.

00:25:10 ◼   ► There was always more important stuff.

00:25:11 ◼   ► The sleep timer fade out.

00:25:13 ◼   ► People have been requesting that for since the beginning of time, since we invented

00:25:17 ◼   ► sleep.

00:25:17 ◼   ► And that I knew again, like I know, you know, okay, do the VRAMP

00:25:21 ◼   ► mole over the array.

00:25:22 ◼   ► Like I knew how to do it, but again, like getting it right would

00:25:27 ◼   ► have taken a few hours probably of my time and and getting it exactly

00:25:31 ◼   ► right, making sure like I covered all the edge cases, but now I have

00:25:35 ◼   ► some help.

00:25:36 ◼   ► So now it's easier to do all these features that I brainstormed six years

00:25:41 ◼   ► ago or half wrote five years ago, or almost finished four years ago, and

00:25:46 ◼   ► like I can finally do them.

00:25:48 ◼   ► So what you're seeing now is me just plowing through my backlog of all

00:25:55 ◼   ► of this technical credit.

00:25:57 ◼   ► It's you know the opposite of technical debt.

00:25:59 ◼   ► Like I have been I've half written so much, you know, I've so many

00:26:04 ◼   ► features I have I've been thinking about and planning mentally so many features.

00:26:09 ◼   ► I've been listening to other people's reports of what they want and try and

00:26:14 ◼   ► planning how I would do that someday.

00:26:16 ◼   ► Now to today is that day.

00:26:18 ◼   ► That day has finally come.

00:26:19 ◼   ► I'm actually able to do these things.

00:26:22 ◼   ► So that's why this is all happening.

00:26:24 ◼   ► It is a combination of it is number one.

00:26:28 ◼   ► I mean, it's it's enabled by Fable and high-end AI models.

00:26:32 ◼   ► And I'm I'm not ashamed to say that because this is a game changer

00:26:37 ◼   ► for indie app developers, like to be able to have that level of bug

00:26:42 ◼   ► finding and that level of like you know, framework generation for UIs and stuff,

00:26:46 ◼   ► like it just is such a difference of what we're able to accomplish and

00:26:51 ◼   ► the quality of what we're able to ship because we have basically like world

00:26:55 ◼   ► class bug fix fixing abilities at our disposal now.

00:26:59 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, I have definitely uh had similar experiences with call sheet.

00:27:04 ◼   ► I got myself wrapped around the axle about something over the last week or

00:27:08 ◼   ► so.

00:27:08 ◼   ► Um somebody wrote in and asked, hey, instead of just picking one Plex server

00:27:12 ◼   ► to you know get now playing off of, why can't we use all of

00:27:15 ◼   ► our Plex servers?

00:27:16 ◼   ► Which was completely fair.

00:27:17 ◼   ► And it was one of those things where it was like, oh, I didn't

00:27:20 ◼   ► realize that some fundamental architectural decisions I made, you know, way back when were

00:27:24 ◼   ► going to make this extremely difficult.

00:27:27 ◼   ► But um I was able to slog through it, some a lot of it

00:27:30 ◼   ► on my own, some with help of AI, but um, especially when Fable was

00:27:34 ◼   ► was cheaper.

00:27:36 ◼   ► Um I I fixed a ton of bugs in Qual Sheet.

00:27:39 ◼   ► This is like four or five Tesla fields ago.

00:27:41 ◼   ► It'll be in the app store similarly in a couple of weeks, I think.

00:27:43 ◼   ► Uh, I fixed a ton of bugs, uh some of which I knew about,

00:27:46 ◼   ► a lot of which I wasn't even aware of, but you know, as as

00:27:49 ◼   ► Fable or whatever is introducing these bugs to me and saying, oh, this is

00:27:52 ◼   ► wrong because this that and the other thing, and then I'll take a look

00:27:55 ◼   ► and try to convince myself, okay.

00:27:57 ◼   ► I see what it's saying, I can or I can reproduce it myself, whatever

00:27:59 ◼   ► the case may be, and figure out, oh, it's it's right.

00:28:03 ◼   ► And in in that sense, I echo what you're saying entirely.

00:28:06 ◼   ► Like to get rid of get through some of that like rote work and

00:28:11 ◼   ► to do so so quickly and easily without feeling like you're back in the

00:28:14 ◼   ► mines, is so refreshing and so wonderful.

00:28:18 ◼   ► And I had a feeling this was you know a little you, a little

00:28:21 ◼   ► of you know your AI du jour, but it's been very impressive to watch

00:28:24 ◼   ► all the stuff fly by.

00:28:25 ◼   ► And I mean, as a daily overcast user, I can't say that I've noticed

00:28:29 ◼   ► anything going wrong or you know, any any more bugs than than I would

00:28:33 ◼   ► have ever seen in any app, you know, including my own.

00:28:36 ◼   ► So uh it seems like it's all coming up mailhouse, as far as I

00:28:39 ◼   ► can tell.

00:28:39 ◼   ► Yeah, and like and a lot of the stuff, like for instance, like the

00:28:42 ◼   ► like I I had Claude sketch out the first version of the transcript, you

00:28:46 ◼   ► know, the find in page functionality on transcripts.

00:28:48 ◼   ► Um I I keep not wanting to call it search because it's it's find

00:28:52 ◼   ► in page.

00:28:52 ◼   ► I I feel like search if you say transcript search, it kind of sounds

00:28:55 ◼   ► like searching across different transcripts, like to find like what episode do I say

00:28:59 ◼   ► this in.

00:28:59 ◼   ► And that's not that yet.

00:29:00 ◼   ► I'm hoping to do that sometime soon, but it's not that.

00:29:03 ◼   ► Um, but you know, to do the transcript find and page thing, that's a

00:29:07 ◼   ► web view, and as I've discussed previously on the show, and I don't know

00:29:12 ◼   ► what what is the web API to highlight to show a bunch of highlights

00:29:17 ◼   ► of text.

00:29:18 ◼   ► I probably would have you know defined a CSS class that's like you know,

00:29:21 ◼   ► puts a square background on the text and everything.

00:29:24 ◼   ► But I I wrote this giant, like you know, two-paragraph long uh prompt to

00:29:30 ◼   ► have Cloud Code sketch out the first version of it for me, and it

00:29:34 ◼   ► knows what the new web AIs or APIs are to do that.

00:29:37 ◼   ► I don't know that.

00:29:37 ◼   ► I haven't been a web developer for 20 years, but like it knows all

00:29:41 ◼   ► the web development APIs now, so it's like, oh, I'm I use this new

00:29:44 ◼   ► API to create you know n changes or you know highlights that don't change

00:29:48 ◼   ► the DOM and you know, whatever I and I don't even know what it

00:29:50 ◼   ► is, but then I I saw it and I looked, I'm like, oh, well

00:29:53 ◼   ► that's pretty clever.

00:29:53 ◼   ► And I've read its JavaScript.

00:29:55 ◼   ► I'm like, whoa, I didn't know you could do that.

00:29:57 ◼   ► And again, like it is enabling me to be the director.

00:29:59 ◼   ► And all these years, I have thought, I'm a decent programmer.

00:30:06 ◼   ► I'm not like an amazing programmer, I'm a decent programmer.

00:30:09 ◼   ► I might even say good, but I wouldn't say amazing.

00:30:12 ◼   ► And now it's like I have the power of an amazing programmer at my

00:30:16 ◼   ► fingertips that I can just direct.

00:30:19 ◼   ► And I think I'm a better director than I am a programmer.

00:30:23 ◼   ► I think my experience being a programmer and being an app developer and listening

00:30:28 ◼   ► to my customers over all these years, plus I think I have decent product

00:30:32 ◼   ► sense to begin with, or at least now at least.

00:30:34 ◼   ► And so I think I'm able to be a really effective AI director.

00:30:39 ◼   ► Because again, like when you give AI not much to work with, it'll make

00:30:42 ◼   ► some really hideous apps.

00:30:43 ◼   ► It's it is terrible at design.

00:30:45 ◼   ► The only thing it's worse at than design is naming things.

00:30:48 ◼   ► Um, but it's really bad at design.

00:30:50 ◼   ► But it's really good at writing code that works.

00:30:53 ◼   ► And it can tell me things like there's this web API to highlight things

00:30:57 ◼   ► that without disrupting the DOM.

00:30:58 ◼   ► Like, great!

00:30:59 ◼   ► I had no idea.

00:31:00 ◼   ► That's awesome.

00:31:01 ◼   ► And then and that kind of works both ways.

00:31:03 ◼   ► I can tell it too.

00:31:04 ◼   ► Like when I found the audio unit to do the uh sound isolation or

00:31:07 ◼   ► the background introduction, I told it, use this API.

00:31:11 ◼   ► And for and first I had it tell me, like, you know, what would

00:31:14 ◼   ► it take to use this API?

00:31:15 ◼   ► The complexity, the trade-offs, the power uh concerns, you know, what would it take

00:31:19 ◼   ► to use this API?

00:31:21 ◼   ► And it did it did all the research and it did the whole breakdown

00:31:23 ◼   ► and and it sketched out what it would take.

00:31:25 ◼   ► And it there are things about it that like when you pipe in this

00:31:28 ◼   ► API, you have to consider latency.

00:31:31 ◼   ► And no part of my audio engine was built yet to consider latency coming

00:31:36 ◼   ► from one of the effects.

00:31:38 ◼   ► I would have had to do all of that manually.

00:31:40 ◼   ► First of all, I wouldn't have even realized that at first.

00:31:42 ◼   ► It would have taken me half a day to realize there was latency, and

00:31:44 ◼   ► because I would just find weird bugs and not know why.

00:31:46 ◼   ► Then I would have figured out, oh my God, I have to account for

00:31:49 ◼   ► latency.

00:31:49 ◼   ► And that would have blown up voice boost complexity the way I would do

00:31:53 ◼   ► it so much.

00:31:53 ◼   ► And then I saw how Claude did it, I'm like, oh.

00:31:57 ◼   ► I would never have thought to do that.

00:32:00 ◼   ► But that's really elegant and way, way smaller and faster and better than what

00:32:05 ◼   ► I would have done.

00:32:06 ◼   ► And then meanwhile, sometimes I get sometimes I get really I get a win

00:32:08 ◼   ► sometimes.

00:32:09 ◼   ► Like I wrote the DSer again, like probably five, six years ago, whenever I

00:32:12 ◼   ► wrote Voice Boost.

00:32:13 ◼   ► And today I had Claude look at it and I said, investigate how I

00:32:17 ◼   ► wrote the DSer.

00:32:18 ◼   ► I actually don't know how DSers are implemented in audio software.

00:32:23 ◼   ► I just guessed based on the tools I had at my disposal how one

00:32:27 ◼   ► might work.

00:32:28 ◼   ► How did I do?

00:32:29 ◼   ► Evaluate how I did.

00:32:30 ◼   ► Tell me what other alternatives exist.

00:32:32 ◼   ► And it turns out I guessed right.

00:32:34 ◼   ► That the DSer I wrote years ago that that actually is how they work.

00:32:37 ◼   ► Like, oh great, all right.

00:32:39 ◼   ► Um and it suggested a couple of minor tweaks, which I did.

00:32:42 ◼   ► Um, but it was like I had it mostly right.

00:32:44 ◼   ► Um, and that's good to know sometimes too.

00:32:46 ◼   ► So like I it is such such a game changer for me to have

00:32:50 ◼   ► this now.

00:32:51 ◼   ► And this is like, this is as bad as the coding AI models were

00:32:55 ◼   ► ever gonna be.

00:32:56 ◼   ► They're getting better.

00:32:57 ◼   ► I it's just it's remarkable to me what we can do now.

00:33:00 ◼   ► And and I am very comfortable taking more of a like half director, half

00:33:07 ◼   ► coder role.

00:33:08 ◼   ► Because I am still writing the code.

00:33:09 ◼   ► I'm just not writing all of the code.

00:33:11 ◼   ► And I'm looking at the code that Claude writes, I'm like, oh yeah, that's

00:33:14 ◼   ► you nailed it.

00:33:14 ◼   ► I'm not gonna edit that because it's good.

00:33:16 ◼   ► You know, the parts that aren't good, as I mentioned earlier, then I'll edit

00:33:18 ◼   ► those.

00:33:19 ◼   ► You know, the parts that need performance improvements or need God, they need UI

00:33:22 ◼   ► tweaks.

00:33:23 ◼   ► But you know, I I tweak the UI, like I have Claude write the

00:33:26 ◼   ► first UI.

00:33:27 ◼   ► I don't have to write the massive amount of like Swift UI boilerplate to

00:33:31 ◼   ► tie things together, have Claude do that, and then I go in and make

00:33:29 ◼   ► it actually a good UI.

00:33:36 ◼   ► I go in and make it you know attractive, more functional, line everything upright,

00:33:40 ◼   ► add the right margins, add the right fonts, you know, do all that stuff.

00:33:42 ◼   ► Like I do, you know, the polishing work that I'm good at, and Claude

00:33:46 ◼   ► does all of the like templating and you know rote work that it's good

00:33:50 ◼   ► at.

00:33:51 ◼   ► I think this is a really, really, really important time in coding.

00:33:55 ◼   ► Uh and I'm very, very happy to to to be finally uh embracing something

00:34:00 ◼   ► as it happens rather than like five years later.

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00:36:05 ◼   ► With regard to me talking about, I want to say it was last episode,

00:36:08 ◼   ► maybe it was the episode before, uh, SonosNet, where Sonos would make like an

00:36:12 ◼   ► ad hoc network, or not ad hoc, like its own private network between devices.

00:36:15 ◼   ► Uh and I'd said, Oh, you can turn that off now.

00:36:17 ◼   ► Well, Will Smidline writes, I have been dutifully checking my Sonus app weekly since

00:36:22 ◼   ► Casey first mentioned the disable SonosNet beta, but the option never appeared for me.

00:36:26 ◼   ► I just discovered that Unify's built-in ad blocking prevents the feature flag service they

00:36:30 ◼   ► are using for the rollout from working.

00:36:32 ◼   ► I disabled that filter and it immediately showed up.

00:36:34 ◼   ► So if you're a pie hole person like me, or if you use Unify's

00:36:36 ◼   ► ad ad blocking or perhaps other ones, you might want to flip that off

00:36:39 ◼   ► just for a moment.

00:36:40 ◼   ► It's like my own personal nightmare of ad blocking and why I'm so paranoid

00:36:43 ◼   ► about it.

00:36:43 ◼   ► Like I would never have think that ad blocking would stop like a feature

00:36:46 ◼   ► from appearing in a beta, you know, like just yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:36:49 ◼   ► Wild.

00:36:50 ◼   ► So yeah, I mean I I don't I don't particularly like ads, but I

00:36:53 ◼   ► I hate things not working because of something that I did.

00:36:56 ◼   ► Yeah, that's totally fair.

00:36:57 ◼   ► Oh, can I can I before sorry, I I totally forgot that like also

00:37:02 ◼   ► in the intervening time since we last recorded because it was there was a

00:37:05 ◼   ► bit of a vacation uh break here.

00:37:06 ◼   ► Um in the intervening time, I also got all of the ubiquity high availability

00:37:12 ◼   ► stuff.

00:37:12 ◼   ► Oh, how's that working out?

00:37:14 ◼   ► Oh man, it's cool.

00:37:15 ◼   ► It's there there was only one snag.

00:37:18 ◼   ► So I got so this was for the overcast Mac mini's data center.

00:37:22 ◼   ► Um, you know, basically getting redundant router, redundant switch, and um the power backup

00:37:29 ◼   ► system.

00:37:29 ◼   ► So that way I can just plug in all the ubiquity stuff into both

00:37:32 ◼   ► sides of the power in the in the data center and not have to

00:37:34 ◼   ► deal with the transfer switch for that.

00:37:35 ◼   ► Um it's really cool.

00:37:37 ◼   ► Like ha configuring the shadow mode for the for the two dream routers was

00:37:41 ◼   ► really fun.

00:37:42 ◼   ► Um and the WAN switch, like you know, having stuff like that is like

00:37:46 ◼   ► I feel really cool.

00:37:47 ◼   ► The only weird thing about the ubiquity redundancy setups that I've that I've had

00:37:51 ◼   ► so far is that the ubiquity redundant power thing.

00:37:57 ◼   ► So as I described last time, the you know, most server gear has two

00:38:03 ◼   ► power supplies and two power inputs because it has to plug into two different

00:38:06 ◼   ► power sources in a data center for redundancy.

00:38:08 ◼   ► Okay.

00:38:08 ◼   ► Ubiquity stuff doesn't quite have that.

00:38:10 ◼   ► It has most of it has one regular power input, and then it has

00:38:15 ◼   ► this big DC connector that's like custom proprietary DC connector on the other side

00:38:20 ◼   ► of the of like the switch or the router or whatever.

00:38:22 ◼   ► And they sell basically a giant power supply thing that you can plug into

00:38:28 ◼   ► your other power source and then connect a whole bunch of these DC cables

00:38:31 ◼   ► to all the ubiquity devices that support it.

00:38:34 ◼   ► Why they do it this way, I don't know.

00:38:36 ◼   ► But whatever.

00:38:37 ◼   ► A second power input would have been fine.

00:38:40 ◼   ► Um, but I I got that.

00:38:42 ◼   ► And these have to be the worst computer cables I have ever worked with.

00:38:49 ◼   ► So the Ubiquity DC power cables that run from the redundant power system, I

00:38:54 ◼   ► think it's like you know the UI RPS or something like that.

00:38:56 ◼   ► Um, to each device.

00:38:58 ◼   ► They are basically the thickness and flexibility of a slightly flat garden hose.

00:39:06 ◼   ► It is the thickest power cable I think I've ever seen for something that

00:39:12 ◼   ► is that is like you know, not like a piece of industrial equipment.

00:39:16 ◼   ► Like it's these super thick power cables that are flat, they sell it only

00:39:22 ◼   ► in one length of like you know, I think it's like six feet long.

00:39:26 ◼   ► So it's massive and heavy, and it comes in this massive box, and they're

00:39:30 ◼   ► like 30 bucks each.

00:39:31 ◼   ► It's the thickest, giantest thing ever.

00:39:33 ◼   ► And then on the ends of it are what look like giant IDE connectors.

00:39:39 ◼   ► Uh they're like they're these like huge rows of two, like two rows of

00:39:45 ◼   ► black pins on each one, and it's the it's gotta be like three or

00:39:49 ◼   ► four inches wide, and they plug into these giant DC ports on the back

00:39:54 ◼   ► of the the routers, as I said.

00:39:56 ◼   ► I'm I so I'm like, I plug everything in, and I I connect it

00:40:00 ◼   ► all up to the DC thing, and I shove these giant cables into these

00:40:04 ◼   ► giant connectors, and they like shove in.

00:40:06 ◼   ► I'm like, I think it's in, it looks like I can't get in any

00:40:08 ◼   ► further, so I guess it's in, but what direction does it go?

00:40:11 ◼   ► Who knows?

00:40:12 ◼   ► Um like I I put it in one way and it like didn't quite

00:40:15 ◼   ► go in all the way, and I'm like, that's probably wrong.

00:40:17 ◼   ► Flipped it over, put it in like a little harder, and it went in

00:40:20 ◼   ► further.

00:40:20 ◼   ► I'm like, okay, I I guess that's right.

00:40:22 ◼   ► Who knows?

00:40:23 ◼   ► So I plug everything in, connect everything up, and I'm like, all right, let's

00:40:26 ◼   ► test it out.

00:40:26 ◼   ► And I unplug everything from the main power.

00:40:29 ◼   ► And I walk back around to this other rack and it's all off.

00:40:33 ◼   ► I'm like, well, that's fun.

00:40:35 ◼   ► Didn't do it right this time.

00:40:36 ◼   ► So walk back in, plug it back in, see how it got.

00:40:39 ◼   ► Got to see how the shadow mode does failover because it considered it a

00:40:42 ◼   ► failure.

00:40:43 ◼   ► So I'm like, okay, great.

00:40:44 ◼   ► Awesome.

00:40:45 ◼   ► Um at least that works.

00:40:46 ◼   ► Yeah, right.

00:40:46 ◼   ► That did work.

00:40:48 ◼   ► Anyway, so I'm like doing like, you know, AI research and YouTube lookups and

00:40:52 ◼   ► how to figure out like how do I how do I connect all these

00:40:54 ◼   ► things?

00:40:55 ◼   ► And it turns out the cables are are like directional.

00:40:59 ◼   ► They can only go in one direction, but you wouldn't know it unless you

00:41:02 ◼   ► look really closely that across those two rows of pins, two of them are

00:41:10 ◼   ► rounded instead of square.

00:41:13 ◼   ► Oh, cool.

00:41:14 ◼   ► And so here I am in like the back of my server rack, like

00:41:17 ◼   ► shining my phone flashlight in, like trying to like see what direction is what

00:41:21 ◼   ► on here, like looking in the ports, and eventually I learned oh, if you

00:41:26 ◼   ► get it right, you can shove it in even harder, and you feel like

00:41:29 ◼   ► you're gonna break the thing.

00:41:31 ◼   ► But if you really shove it, you can get it all the way in,

00:41:34 ◼   ► and then a little light lights up next to it.

00:41:35 ◼   ► I'm like, oh, now it's so anyway.

00:41:40 ◼   ► Trying to put a round peg in a square hole.

00:41:42 ◼   ► Yes!

00:41:43 ◼   ► Or the other way, I don't know.

00:41:44 ◼   ► But oh man, what a giant pain those things were.

00:41:48 ◼   ► And I'm like tearing up my hands, like my fingers are hurting, like trying

00:41:51 ◼   ► to get these things in.

00:41:53 ◼   ► I did eventually get them all in, and it does work, and it does

00:41:56 ◼   ► work great, but I have no idea why the cables are designed the way

00:42:00 ◼   ► they are.

00:42:01 ◼   ► I don't know why they need so many pins.

00:42:03 ◼   ► Like, because there is some communication over them, which is kind of nice.

00:42:06 ◼   ► Like the the ubiquity RPS thing will tell you when it's powering something via

00:42:11 ◼   ► um power, it'll tell you what it's powering, like which device it's powering.

00:42:15 ◼   ► So there is like they are communicating over these pins to tell it, you

00:42:14 ◼   ► know, I'm the switch 48 or whatever.

00:42:21 ◼   ► So that is kind of nice.

00:42:22 ◼   ► I but I still don't know why it needs so many pins and why

00:42:25 ◼   ► the cable needs to be so incredibly thick because it's not, you know, it's

00:42:29 ◼   ► delivering, I don't know, a couple hundred watts at most.

00:42:32 ◼   ► Like it's not, we're not talking about like 30 amp cables or anything.

00:42:35 ◼   ► So I don't know what Ubiquity was thinking with this cable design, but the

00:42:40 ◼   ► functionality of it, once you get them actually plugged in correctly, is quite nice.

00:42:45 ◼   ► Well, I'm glad to hear it's working out well, even though it sounds like

00:42:48 ◼   ► getting there was a bit of a nightmare.

00:42:50 ◼   ► But what are you gonna do?

00:42:51 ◼   ► All right, we talked uh a little while ago about how there is rumored

00:42:55 ◼   ► to be nine gigs of RAM on some upcoming iPhones, and Joe Lyon from

00:42:59 ◼   ► the show wrote in to say nine gigs of RAM is achieved with three

00:43:03 ◼   ► 24 gigabit chips, which have been in production for quite some time.

00:43:07 ◼   ► 24 gigabits times three is 72 gigabits, 72 gigabits divided by 8 bits per

00:43:12 ◼   ► byte equals guess what?

00:43:14 ◼   ► 9 gigs.

00:43:15 ◼   ► 24 gigabit chips are also used to make configurations like 48 gigabytes and 96

00:43:19 ◼   ► gigabytes uh DDR5 server modules, whereas the more traditional 8, 16, 32, 64, etc.

00:43:25 ◼   ► are made with things like 8, 16, and 32 gigabit chips.

00:43:29 ◼   ► Yeah, it's uh kind of like the uh math on um TV refresh rates

00:43:33 ◼   ► and knowing which ones divide evenly by uh, you know, uh or are multiply

00:43:38 ◼   ► out to be to work for 120 and 96 and 24 and 30 and

00:43:42 ◼   ► eight, and you know, and it's it gets complicated for uh multiples that are

00:43:46 ◼   ► not the easy doubling that we're expecting for like powers of two, eight, sixteen,

00:43:49 ◼   ► thirty two, sixty-four.

00:43:50 ◼   ► But nine gigs, it works if you remember that uh eight bits are in

00:43:54 ◼   ► each byte.

00:43:55 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:43:56 ◼   ► Uh TJ Ucian wrote or wrote with regard to multiple Apple accounts.

00:44:02 ◼   ► Uh I am pretty sure that the email address is what needs to be

00:44:05 ◼   ► different for an Apple ID, but the phone number can be the same.

00:44:07 ◼   ► Employer email address, but I still get verification verification texts on my phone, for

00:44:12 ◼   ► example.

00:44:12 ◼   ► There is some awkwardness to actually setting this up, but it works.

00:44:16 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't know what those rules are.

00:44:17 ◼   ► I believe that this has been successful for some people, but uh in my

00:44:21 ◼   ► experience trying to make new Apple IDs, it has it has varying degrees of

00:44:25 ◼   ► insistence uh that uh a new phone number be used.

00:44:29 ◼   ► But it it changes so much with like the two factor versus two step,

00:44:33 ◼   ► and now with pass keys and everything, so who knows what the current rules

00:44:35 ◼   ► are?

00:44:35 ◼   ► So I guess just keep trying.

00:44:37 ◼   ► Just make an automatic kicking machine for your Apple ID.

00:44:40 ◼   ► Keep trying to make that Apple ID until you get through.

00:44:43 ◼   ► All right.

00:44:43 ◼   ► Uh with regard to ditching PlayStation discs, uh, Jess Weatherbed at the Verge writes

00:44:49 ◼   ► Sony's latest quarterly earnings report shows that physical games earned the company just over

00:44:53 ◼   ► 781 million dollars in the 2025 fiscal year.

00:44:56 ◼   ► So discs earned a little less than 800 uh million bucks.

00:44:59 ◼   ► A fraction of what it brought in for digital game sales, which was about

00:45:04 ◼   ► six and a half billion, and in-game purchases, which was about eight and a

00:45:09 ◼   ► half billion over the same period.

00:45:10 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:45:11 ◼   ► So if you're wondering why they're getting rid of discs, uh just the numbers

00:45:14 ◼   ► alone.

00:45:15 ◼   ► The writing has been on the wall for a while.

00:45:17 ◼   ► If I had to guess how lopsided it was, I wouldn't have even guessed

00:45:20 ◼   ► this because yeah, that's that's a big difference.

00:45:23 ◼   ► All right, so we have a bit of news from a friend of ours.

00:45:27 ◼   ► Uh do you want to talk about Super Duper 4, John?

00:45:31 ◼   ► Well, first of all, I'm going to talk about Super Duper, uh, which is

00:45:34 ◼   ► a uh program for making a bootable clone of your disc that I have

00:45:39 ◼   ► been using for a long time.

00:45:41 ◼   ► Um and disclaimer, I'm friends with a developer, and I was on the beta

00:45:44 ◼   ► for the old version and the new version of Superduper.

00:45:47 ◼   ► So keep that in mind.

00:45:49 ◼   ► But anyway, I've been using it for years.

00:45:50 ◼   ► It's part of my backup strategy.

00:45:52 ◼   ► I'm sure we won't get to it this week, but it's an ask ATB

00:45:54 ◼   ► question revisiting backup strategies.

00:45:55 ◼   ► And suffice it to say that I still think a bootable clone of your

00:45:59 ◼   ► drive is one part of a healthy breakfast.

00:46:02 ◼   ► It's part of a good uh backup program.

00:46:04 ◼   ► In addition to all the other kinds of backups you can have, um, perhaps

00:46:08 ◼   ► the uh thing that will get you back up and running the fastest is

00:46:12 ◼   ► a recently created bootable clone of your boot drive.

00:46:16 ◼   ► So if your boot drive fails, yes, you could restore from a time machine

00:46:20 ◼   ► backup, you could restore from uh you know a uh a network time machine

00:46:24 ◼   ► or a local time machine, you can restore from a cloud backup.

00:46:27 ◼   ► But if you want to get back up and running as fast as possible,

00:46:30 ◼   ► just rebooting from a different drive, which is the same as your current drive

00:46:33 ◼   ► as of less than 24 hours ago.

00:46:35 ◼   ► Uh nothing can beat that.

00:46:37 ◼   ► And so I always make that an ingredient in my backup thing.

00:46:40 ◼   ► And there's a bunch of programs that do that.

00:46:41 ◼   ► Carbon copy cloner is one, super duper is the other, super duper, I think

00:46:45 ◼   ► was the first one to sort of pioneer this uh problem space.

00:46:48 ◼   ► Um, and if you've used the app uh in recent years, you can see

00:46:52 ◼   ► it it shows its age.

00:46:53 ◼   ► I believe it was at one point brush metal to give you an idea

00:46:55 ◼   ► how old it is or how old it was.

00:46:57 ◼   ► Um and it doesn't particularly look you know bad or anything, but it does

00:47:03 ◼   ► it it did look dated.

00:47:05 ◼   ► Uh and it and the plain fact is it hadn't changed much uh over

00:47:08 ◼   ► the years in terms of the user experience.

00:47:11 ◼   ► Now, under the covers it's had to change a tremendous amount because Apple keeps

00:47:15 ◼   ► changing how I mean the Superduper's been around for so long.

00:47:19 ◼   ► Uh when it uh started, you could make bootable volumes just by copying files.

00:47:23 ◼   ► There was no uh sealed system volume, there was no read-only partition for the

00:47:27 ◼   ► operating system.

00:47:28 ◼   ► Like everything was so incredibly different.

00:47:29 ◼   ► There was no booting into recovery, like it predates all of that.

00:47:34 ◼   ► So obviously, superdubers had to change tremendously over the years just to continue to

00:47:38 ◼   ► do the one thing that it does, which is hey, make a bootable copy

00:47:43 ◼   ► of my main drive for me.

00:47:45 ◼   ► Um, and it had a bunch of nice features where you could set up

00:47:48 ◼   ► schedules and it would, you know, I always have my computer scheduled to like

00:47:52 ◼   ► wake up in the middle of the night, mount the drive that I want

00:47:55 ◼   ► to clone to, clone the drive, unmount it, and go back to sleep.

00:47:58 ◼   ► Uh, so not only did I have to make sure to run it, I

00:48:01 ◼   ► didn't even have to make sure my computer was awake, I didn't even have

00:48:03 ◼   ► to make sure the drive was mounted.

00:48:05 ◼   ► It would do all of it for me while I was asleep, and I

00:48:07 ◼   ► would just come back and I would always know my super duper clone is

00:48:09 ◼   ► up to date.

00:48:10 ◼   ► Uh, and if there was a problem, it would show me a log message

00:48:12 ◼   ► and I would know I had to redo it.

00:48:13 ◼   ► Anyway, uh that's super duper.

00:48:16 ◼   ► And unfortunately, the product has an exclamation point in the name.

00:48:18 ◼   ► I was hoping that the new version would not have exclamation point because the

00:48:21 ◼   ► beta didn't, but unfortunately, the new one also has an exclamation point.

00:48:24 ◼   ► I protest the exclamation point, I think it's bad, but you know, there you

00:48:28 ◼   ► have it.

00:48:29 ◼   ► So, super duper 4 is out, and it kind of reminds me of uh

00:48:33 ◼   ► Marco's overcast rewrite.

00:48:35 ◼   ► Um maybe people aren't excited about backup software.

00:48:40 ◼   ► I'm excited about backup software.

00:48:41 ◼   ► You yeah, I know.

00:48:43 ◼   ► But this is so you'll have to put yourself in my mindset of like

00:48:47 ◼   ► imagine there's a program that you're super I could not survive your mindset.

00:48:50 ◼   ► Yeah, imagine that there's some kind of program that you really into this program

00:48:54 ◼   ► and you really like it and it's great and everything, and then imagine they

00:48:57 ◼   ► come out with like a brand new version of this, just rewritten from top

00:49:02 ◼   ► to bottom.

00:49:03 ◼   ► Just an entirely new app, and not just new app, like it looks different,

00:49:07 ◼   ► but like it's architected differently, it has features the old one didn't have.

00:49:10 ◼   ► It's just like entirely new.

00:49:11 ◼   ► You're like, wow, that's that seems to be what has happened here.

00:49:15 ◼   ► Uh we'll link to uh Dave Nanian's blog post about it.

00:49:14 ◼   ► Uh and he'll explain it.

00:49:20 ◼   ► And I'll actually have Casey, read the the snippets that I pulled out here,

00:49:23 ◼   ► but suffice it to say that Superduper 4 is basically an entirely new app

00:49:28 ◼   ► in the spirit of the old one.

00:49:29 ◼   ► Indeed.

00:49:30 ◼   ► So Dave Dave Navy Nanian writes Superduper has had an impressive run.

00:49:35 ◼   ► It has lasted in its original form for 22 years, longer than any other

00:49:41 ◼   ► product I've ever been involved with over the so far 43 years of my

00:49:45 ◼   ► working career.

00:49:46 ◼   ► Let me let me remind you right now, as hi, this is Casey.

00:49:49 ◼   ► Uh let me remind you that Marco and I are 44 years old.

00:49:52 ◼   ► Uh continuing from from Dave Nanian, the new version of Superduper is a ground

00:49:56 ◼   ► up rewrite, a tip to tail reinvention of what Superduper looks like, how it

00:49:59 ◼   ► works, what it can do, and where I can take it in the future.

00:50:02 ◼   ► Superduper 4 is much faster than before.

00:50:04 ◼   ► Smart updates are between two times and with the new turbo feature in order

00:50:08 ◼   ► of magnitude faster.

00:50:09 ◼   ► As an example, my two and a half uh terabyte test volume used to

00:50:13 ◼   ► take around 40 minutes to run.

00:50:15 ◼   ► Without turbo, it now takes or I think that should read with turbo, right?

00:50:19 ◼   ► It now takes without.

00:50:21 ◼   ► Oh, I'm sorry, you're right, you're right, you're right.

00:50:23 ◼   ► Uh without turbo, it now takes about 20 minutes.

00:50:26 ◼   ► With turbo, it takes about a minute.

00:50:28 ◼   ► Yeah, so this is so like this is talk about the dream update.

00:50:32 ◼   ► Yes, it's a totally overhauled and developers.

00:50:34 ◼   ► You get a special thrill as a developer of an app of like, you

00:50:36 ◼   ► know, finally I've rewriting all that crufty old code and it's nice and everything.

00:50:39 ◼   ► Like, but what does this even mean for the user?

00:50:41 ◼   ► Well, this is a very simple program, you know, in in in concept.

00:50:45 ◼   ► I was gonna say in in execution, no, but execution no, but in concept,

00:50:48 ◼   ► it makes a bootable clone everything.

00:50:50 ◼   ► What along what axes can this program improve?

00:50:52 ◼   ► Well, it can improve in usability and aesthetics or whatever, but mainly how fast

00:50:56 ◼   ► can it do the thing I want it to do?

00:50:58 ◼   ► And this is not just like we made it 15% faster, like just twice

00:51:02 ◼   ► as fast, just like almost all the time, two X's.

00:50:59 ◼   ► Even that you'd say, Oh wow, double the speed.

00:51:07 ◼   ► But then this new mode where it's like, how about way more than double

00:51:11 ◼   ► the speed?

00:51:11 ◼   ► And I have tried this and I I asked Dave how TurboMode works, and

00:51:14 ◼   ► he hasn't told me yet, but I have some ideas about how it works.

00:51:16 ◼   ► Probably just um my guess is that it's uh keeping track of where it

00:51:20 ◼   ► is in the FS events uh ID log and then saying if I if

00:51:24 ◼   ► the system has not dropped any events since then, I know exactly where I

00:51:27 ◼   ► have to leave off, and so I can save myself a huge amount of

00:51:29 ◼   ► work.

00:51:29 ◼   ► This is something I always wanted um when Apple was talking about adopting ZFS.

00:51:34 ◼   ► ZFS has a way to do uh block level diffs between two volumes so

00:51:39 ◼   ► that you can have two volumes that are kept in sync with each other

00:51:41 ◼   ► by periodic sync jobs, and the sync job doesn't iterate over files or anything

00:51:45 ◼   ► like that.

00:51:46 ◼   ► It knows at the block level which individual disk blocks have changed since the

00:51:50 ◼   ► last time it did this.

00:51:51 ◼   ► So it doesn't have to do any work to say, oh, I gotta crawl

00:51:54 ◼   ► this whole disk and see what has changed since the last time I did

00:51:56 ◼   ► a sync.

00:51:57 ◼   ► That takes such a long time.

00:51:58 ◼   ► Instead, it's like, no, I know exactly where we left off.

00:52:01 ◼   ► I know these seven blocks have changed, and I don't have to do any

00:52:03 ◼   ► work.

00:52:03 ◼   ► I just go one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and I'm done.

00:52:05 ◼   ► That's that's the dream.

00:52:07 ◼   ► Mac OS doesn't quite have that level of stuff, but it does have a

00:52:10 ◼   ► log of file system events, and superduper looks like in turbo mode if it

00:52:13 ◼   ► is able to take advantage of it.

00:52:15 ◼   ► At the very least, it knows which files it needs to look at, I

00:52:17 ◼   ► think.

00:52:18 ◼   ► Again, I don't have technical details, but I can tell you practically speaking, having

00:52:21 ◼   ► been on the beta, and using the released version of it right now, I've

00:52:24 ◼   ► seen a clone update of you know, a a small they call smart update

00:52:29 ◼   ► of my clone drive happen in speeds that I've never seen before, like a

00:52:33 ◼   ► minute, two minutes for 10 literally 10 million files.

00:52:37 ◼   ► It's fantastic.

00:52:38 ◼   ► So, yeah, like just if you don't care about like who cares, someone rewrote

00:52:41 ◼   ► their app, their old craft decode is gone, and maybe the UI looks nicer.

00:52:44 ◼   ► What do I care?

00:52:45 ◼   ► Twice as fast at minimum and way faster sometimes.

00:52:48 ◼   ► Yep, pretty good stuff.

00:52:50 ◼   ► All right.

00:52:50 ◼   ► So switching over to pricing related stuff.

00:52:52 ◼   ► In all the years SuperDuper has been on the market, we've never charged for

00:52:55 ◼   ► updates and never even raised the price.

00:52:57 ◼   ► That's 22 years of free updates, right?

00:53:00 ◼   ► I pushed back on this a little bit because I'm like, wasn't there that

00:53:03 ◼   ► time you charge for the Apple Silicon version?

00:53:06 ◼   ► And he said, yes, but you didn't have to pay for that because the

00:53:09 ◼   ► Intel version continues to work in Apple Silicon.

00:53:11 ◼   ► So I'll give him that on a technicality.

00:53:13 ◼   ► But either way, I'm not endorsing this as a as a software model.

00:53:16 ◼   ► This is not subscription software.

00:53:18 ◼   ► This is a pay once use it forever thing.

00:53:20 ◼   ► And he's never charged for an upgrade in 22 years, except for the Apple

00:53:23 ◼   ► Silicon version, which you didn't even have to buy.

00:53:25 ◼   ► So that is this is not a great business plan, but it is very

00:53:28 ◼   ► nice.

00:53:30 ◼   ► No argument.

00:53:31 ◼   ► All right.

00:53:31 ◼   ► So continuing on, Dave writes, Superduper 4 is a totally new version, far more

00:53:35 ◼   ► capable than before.

00:53:36 ◼   ► And as such, I've decided this is going to be its first paid upgrade.

00:53:39 ◼   ► I've also adjusted the price for inflation since 2004.

00:53:42 ◼   ► So it's the still the same bargain it was back when it was first

00:53:45 ◼   ► released, but in today's dollars.

00:53:47 ◼   ► Superduper 4 is free for qualifying reach recent purchases.

00:53:50 ◼   ► Others Superduper 3 customers who purchased after July 31st of 2020, mind you, that's

00:53:56 ◼   ► six years ago.

00:53:57 ◼   ► Uh receive an upgrade discount of up to 30% based on birth purchase date.

00:54:01 ◼   ► As before, even without a license, you can make a full bootable backups for

00:54:05 ◼   ► free.

00:54:05 ◼   ► And I, yes, it's really me.

00:54:07 ◼   ► I work too much, provide support for both registered and unregistered users.

00:54:11 ◼   ► Yeah, Dave has been doing support just like seemingly 24 hours a day, seven

00:54:15 ◼   ► days a week for just decades.

00:54:16 ◼   ► I don't understand how he does it.

00:54:18 ◼   ► Because as you can imagine, this program has a presumably a high support burden

00:54:21 ◼   ► because people are trying to do backups and it's a complicated thing and they're

00:54:24 ◼   ► and they're fraud, and people are in situations, you know, where the you know

00:54:28 ◼   ► they want their backups to work or they're trying to restore whatever.

00:54:30 ◼   ► It's just again, this is not a subscription program.

00:54:32 ◼   ► This is a pay once program.

00:54:29 ◼   ► So it's amazing.

00:54:35 ◼   ► But uh, I encourage you, we'll link to the blog post.

00:54:37 ◼   ► I encourage you to read it.

00:54:38 ◼   ► We cut out all the parts about how this thing is different, but uh

00:54:41 ◼   ► a couple of highlights.

00:54:42 ◼   ► Uh, like the program is like split up into uh basically a faceless server

00:54:46 ◼   ► that does the work and then like a UI that uh you know may

00:54:50 ◼   ► or may not be running to reflect what's happening with the thing, which means

00:54:53 ◼   ► that it can work when you're logged out and it can work when the

00:54:55 ◼   ► app isn't running.

00:54:56 ◼   ► Uh it's an entirely new cleaner architecture that's based on an idea that Dave

00:55:00 ◼   ► had in 2007, I believe, but they just didn't have time to do it

00:55:04 ◼   ► then because I mean this this will be a familiar story for people with

00:55:07 ◼   ► an ADP.

00:55:07 ◼   ► It's just just trying to keep up with the stuff that Apple was doing

00:55:10 ◼   ► to Mac OS over the past 20 years or so has been so much

00:55:13 ◼   ► like that they just you know, this design of like we should re-architect it

00:55:16 ◼   ► to be like a client server model with a faceless thing or whatever.

00:55:18 ◼   ► It's like we don't have time for that now.

00:55:19 ◼   ► We just need to we need to keep the current program so it continues

00:55:22 ◼   ► to function, otherwise, this program just becomes a dead product.

00:55:25 ◼   ► Like, well, now it can't do the thing you you buy it to do,

00:55:28 ◼   ► it can't do it anymore because Apple made changes.

00:55:30 ◼   ► That wasn't acceptable, so they had to keep it working, and they did heroically,

00:55:34 ◼   ► but now they got the breathing room to do this, and I'm here to

00:55:36 ◼   ► tell you that it is fantastic.

00:55:39 ◼   ► Uh and the and honestly, the beta, the only thing, the only feedback I

00:55:43 ◼   ► had to give on the beta was like all UI stuff, like functionally, uh

00:55:47 ◼   ► you know it it I haven't had any problems with it.

00:55:51 ◼   ► It works better than the old version.

00:55:52 ◼   ► So I I know this sounds like an ad for super before, but honestly,

00:55:54 ◼   ► this is one of my favorite programs ever for the Mac.

00:55:57 ◼   ► I was just I had no idea this was coming.

00:55:59 ◼   ► I'm just so excited to see a brand new version of this.

00:56:01 ◼   ► And I I if you have used the old version, I encourage you to

00:56:04 ◼   ► check out the new one.

00:56:05 ◼   ► It's a brand new program from top to bottom.

00:56:07 ◼   ► It's amazing.

00:56:08 ◼   ► Well, congrats to Dave, genuinely.

00:56:10 ◼   ► Uh, this is a really impressive effort and it's really great.

00:56:12 ◼   ► And I hope that Dave sells a trillion copies.

00:56:15 ◼   ► Yeah, like I like when John said earlier, like you would think this would

00:56:17 ◼   ► be an easy thing.

00:56:14 ◼   ► Just clone this disc to this disc.

00:56:20 ◼   ► Like, that's kind of like saying, you know, Dropbox was just sync this folder

00:56:24 ◼   ► to all of my computers.

00:56:25 ◼   ► Like, that's like you can there's a lot of very complex problems that you

00:56:29 ◼   ► can boil down to one sentence and like that's what the user should see.

00:56:32 ◼   ► Yes, that is true.

00:56:34 ◼   ► But the actual implementation and details of that are a very different level of

00:56:40 ◼   ► complexity than what it sounds like.

00:56:42 ◼   ► And yeah, and I I can't even imagine the level of patience that Dave

00:56:49 ◼   ► Nania must have to deal with Apple's changes over the years with this, because

00:56:54 ◼   ► they have they have not been they have not been small, and certainly Apple

00:57:01 ◼   ► has not been particularly helpful to people who want to clone discs with all

00:57:04 ◼   ► of their changes.

00:57:05 ◼   ► Um so yeah, this this really is a remarkable feat to have an app

00:57:09 ◼   ► like this that lasts so long and keeps up with all of those different

00:57:13 ◼   ► things, all those different waves and new requirements coming all the time.

00:57:16 ◼   ► And you know, Apple really I don't think Apple is intentionally so, but Apple

00:57:21 ◼   ► could not be more hostile towards this kind of use case with their with

00:57:24 ◼   ► their development in the last I don't know, decade or so.

00:57:27 ◼   ► Um, but Dave has kept up, and it's a really, really good app that

00:57:32 ◼   ► solves a surprisingly complex problem very well.

00:57:36 ◼   ► Yeah, at various times Apple has probably unintentionally basically broke the functionality that SuperDuper

00:57:42 ◼   ► needs to do its job because at a certain point when they started doing

00:57:45 ◼   ► like the sealed system volume and cryptographically sealed stuff, the only tools that could

00:57:51 ◼   ► actually make a bootable volume were tools provided by Apple.

00:57:55 ◼   ► And if Apple provided broken versions of those tools, you were screwed because you

00:57:58 ◼   ► had they had to be signed by Apple to do the thing.

00:58:00 ◼   ► Like, you know, the whole chain of trust of like a bootable system is

00:57:59 ◼   ► starting from a known good image or whatever.

00:58:05 ◼   ► Eventually, over the years, necessarily involved using tools and APIs that Apple provided.

00:58:11 ◼   ► And there's no there was no alternative.

00:58:13 ◼   ► And so Apple would ship versions of those that were broken, and Dave would

00:58:16 ◼   ► be like, uh, you broke my program in, you know, and are you gonna

00:58:20 ◼   ► fix it before your release version macOS version, whatever?

00:58:23 ◼   ► And it was always just incredibly fraught.

00:58:25 ◼   ► And like they, yeah, they don't care about these kind of programs, like, oh,

00:58:27 ◼   ► this isn't a thing you should need, or whatever.

00:58:28 ◼   ► It's like, well, great Apple, why don't you make iCloud backup for Macs like

00:58:31 ◼   ► you have for phones?

00:58:31 ◼   ► But they're not doing that.

00:58:32 ◼   ► Uh, and that wouldn't provide bootable backups anyway.

00:58:35 ◼   ► So I'm glad that this app continues to work, and it does still use

00:58:37 ◼   ► Apple tools behind the scenes, which are a major source of its limitations.

00:58:40 ◼   ► Like I was talking about one recently, where like there's a nice feature in

00:58:42 ◼   ► SuperDuper that will it has to let you know about these nuances that you

00:58:46 ◼   ► would rather not think about, but you have to.

00:58:48 ◼   ► When you're cloning your drive, your boot drive, the system the operating system is

00:58:53 ◼   ► on a separate volume from your stuff.

00:58:55 ◼   ► I mean, that's been that way for many years now.

00:58:58 ◼   ► But just to remind you, there's it's an illusion provided you're like, Oh, there's

00:59:01 ◼   ► my bootable hard drive, and when I open it up, I see all my

00:59:03 ◼   ► stuff.

00:59:03 ◼   ► Those are multiple things merged together.

00:59:06 ◼   ► One of them is the bootable version of Mac OS.

00:59:09 ◼   ► Um, and when you do the syncing thing with it, you're like, Oh, it's

00:59:12 ◼   ► just like copying your data files over there.

00:59:14 ◼   ► But what if you update macOS on your main boot drive?

00:59:16 ◼   ► The next time in the old days, when you when you did a super

00:59:19 ◼   ► duper clone, it would also then clone that new operating system onto your clone,

00:59:22 ◼   ► but it can't do that anymore because of the sealed system volume.

00:59:25 ◼   ► So it detects hey, your main disk and your clone are now running different

00:59:29 ◼   ► versions of Mac OS.

00:59:30 ◼   ► Do you want to fix that?

00:59:32 ◼   ► Uh, whereas before you might not think to do that and not realize when

00:59:34 ◼   ► you boot it from your clone, you're using an older version of macOS, which

00:59:36 ◼   ► would work fine, it would continue to work.

00:59:38 ◼   ► It's just, you know, anyway.

00:59:39 ◼   ► Now it says, Oh, do you want me to fix it?

00:59:41 ◼   ► And if you say yes, guess what?

00:59:43 ◼   ► It has to wipe the whole thing because that's the only way Apple will

00:59:45 ◼   ► allow you to do it.

00:59:46 ◼   ► Which is fine, it just takes longer and everything.

00:59:44 ◼   ► But like I asked, can you just update the macOS part?

00:59:51 ◼   ► And the answer was no.

00:59:53 ◼   ► It just literally can't.

00:59:54 ◼   ► Apple says no.

00:59:56 ◼   ► So things could definitely be improved here.

00:59:58 ◼   ► But this program is going to great lengths to try to make it A

01:00:02 ◼   ► seem simple and B, give you every possible option for achieving what you want

01:00:08 ◼   ► to achieve.

01:00:08 ◼   ► Yep.

01:00:09 ◼   ► That's great work.

01:00:10 ◼   ► All right, let's talk Apple upgrade programs.

01:00:13 ◼   ► So if you recall, there was the iPhone upgrade program, which let you uh

01:00:20 ◼   ► let you finance a phone and you could upgrade like every year, or you

01:00:23 ◼   ► could just do it, you know, so that you get you you own the

01:00:26 ◼   ► phone outright after every two years.

01:00:28 ◼   ► And now that's been sunset, and there's an Apple upgrade program.

01:00:31 ◼   ► So Apple Upgrade offers 12 and 24 month leasing options for iPhone and Apple

01:00:36 ◼   ► Watch, and 24 and 36 month leasing options for Mac and iPad.

01:00:40 ◼   ► So our friend John Voorhees over at Mac Stories writes for iPads, the starting

01:00:43 ◼   ► prices range from 13 bucks a month to 25 bucks a month.

01:00:47 ◼   ► Macs range from starting prices of 25 to 49 dollars a month, and the

01:00:52 ◼   ► Apple Watch ranges from 12 to 47 a month.

01:00:56 ◼   ► But again, these are just the starting prices.

01:00:58 ◼   ► You can configure a fully loaded 16 inch MacBook Pro that is just under

01:01:02 ◼   ► 230 a month, and it won't include Apple Care.

01:01:07 ◼   ► Uh back to the newsroom post.

01:01:10 ◼   ► Well, when customers first enroll in Apple Upgrade, they can further lower their monthly

01:01:13 ◼   ► lease payments by trading in their currently owned device through Apple Trade In.

01:01:16 ◼   ► Customers can also earn 3% daily cash back when making their lease payments with

01:01:19 ◼   ► Apple Card.

01:01:20 ◼   ► All applicants will be subject to a soft credit inquiry that will not impact

01:01:23 ◼   ► their credit score.

01:01:24 ◼   ► At the end of the least term, customers can upgrade their device to the

01:01:27 ◼   ► latest generation, purchase it with a one-time payment, or simply return it and exit

01:01:31 ◼   ► the program.

01:01:32 ◼   ► In the Klarna app, because guess what?

01:01:29 ◼   ► Clarn is what's uh the doing the back end of all this.

01:01:36 ◼   ► Uh they can stay on top of all their lease information, including their billing

01:01:39 ◼   ► schedule and remaining payouts.

01:01:40 ◼   ► Customers can add an Apple Care subscription to protect their products, marking or excuse

01:01:44 ◼   ► me, making the return of their current device and upgrade to a new one

01:01:47 ◼   ► even easier.

01:01:48 ◼   ► With the launch of Apple Upgrade, Apple will no longer offer the iPhone upgrade

01:01:52 ◼   ► program and iPhone payments in the United States.

01:01:54 ◼   ► When eligible, customers currently enrolled in the iPhone upgrade program will have the option

01:01:58 ◼   ► of leasing a new device with that with Apple upgrade, financing with Apple card

01:02:02 ◼   ► monthly installments, purchasing the product outright, or choosing carrier financing.

01:02:06 ◼   ► So the Verge has a table where they go through uh some example price

01:02:10 ◼   ► breakdowns and so on and so forth.

01:02:12 ◼   ► Um yeah, the important part on this table is uh how much is left

01:02:16 ◼   ► to pay?

01:02:16 ◼   ► Because that is really the big difference between, I know they're all both start

01:02:19 ◼   ► with you, the upgrade program and what was the old one?

01:02:22 ◼   ► Up update?

01:02:23 ◼   ► Yes, I believe that's right.

01:02:25 ◼   ► Yeah, anyway.

01:02:26 ◼   ► This this new one is a lease, which kind of like leasing a car,

01:02:29 ◼   ► you make a bunch of monthly payments, and at the end of the payments,

01:02:32 ◼   ► you have not paid for the thing.

01:02:34 ◼   ► You don't own the thing.

01:02:35 ◼   ► There is still some amount that you haven't paid yet.

01:02:37 ◼   ► And you can choose to at that point pay whatever is left and buy

01:02:41 ◼   ► it outright, or return the product and have it end the lease, or get

01:02:46 ◼   ► a different product and start a new lease.

01:02:47 ◼   ► And so, how much is left?

01:02:49 ◼   ► You know, so that you obviously you have lower monthly payments because when you

01:02:52 ◼   ► add up all your monthly payments, it adds up to less than the price

01:02:54 ◼   ► of the product.

01:02:55 ◼   ► So when the lease ends, how much is left?

01:02:57 ◼   ► And I was interested in the in the numbers they had in this diagram

01:03:00 ◼   ► here, looking at the the the buyout amount, the rightmost column to say, because

01:03:04 ◼   ► you would love to see the buyout amount and you see like how much

01:03:06 ◼   ► is left on my new iPhone?

01:03:07 ◼   ► A thousand dollars is left.

01:03:08 ◼   ► That means I paid a hundred dollars over 24 uh, you know, 24 months

01:03:13 ◼   ► to be to have an iPhone.

01:03:14 ◼   ► Like that would be great.

01:03:15 ◼   ► Anyway, how much is left?

01:03:16 ◼   ► And as you noted, these are like starting prices for the monthly thing.

01:03:14 ◼   ► So I'm scrolling all the way down to the Mac thing.

01:03:21 ◼   ► Mac Studio, uh $49 a month.

01:03:25 ◼   ► Uh uh at over the over the course of the entire lease, you end

01:03:28 ◼   ► up paying about $1,700 and you have $700 left over.

01:03:32 ◼   ► But that's for like a base Mac Studio that costs $2,500.

01:03:36 ◼   ► What if you want the eight terabyte SSD and 96 gigs of RAM?

01:03:41 ◼   ► What is your monthly payment then?

01:03:43 ◼   ► And how much is left on that?

01:03:44 ◼   ► Do you end the lease with 10 grand left to buy the thing out?

01:03:47 ◼   ► I'm definitely going to be looking at these numbers to see how they work

01:03:50 ◼   ► out.

01:03:51 ◼   ► Because as lots of people noted, like there's no like interest payments or anything

01:03:54 ◼   ► here.

01:03:54 ◼   ► Like there, the the main catch is that compared to the old program is

01:03:58 ◼   ► that there's um Apple Care is not included, so you have to add that

01:04:02 ◼   ► into the price if you're gonna if you want to have it or whatever.

01:04:04 ◼   ► But like, but the bottom line is it's not it's not like uh you

01:04:08 ◼   ► don't own it at the end, you're just leasing it, it's just like a

01:04:10 ◼   ► leased car, and like a leased car.

01:04:12 ◼   ► If your goal is to never have a car that's more than two years

01:04:15 ◼   ► old, like you always wanted to have like a one or two-year-old car, and

01:04:19 ◼   ► you're okay with always having a car payment, you lease a car for two

01:04:22 ◼   ► years and then you give it back, and then you lease a new car,

01:04:24 ◼   ► then you give it back, and then you lease a new car and you

01:04:26 ◼   ► give it back, and you give it in that that way you will always

01:04:28 ◼   ► have a newish car in exchange for always paying a car payment, as opposed

01:04:31 ◼   ► to if you just bought that one car and then paid it off over

01:04:34 ◼   ► five years, you would have that same car for five years.

01:04:37 ◼   ► But then the good thing is at the end of those five years, you

01:04:39 ◼   ► own the car outright, and you can continue to drive it for another five

01:04:43 ◼   ► years and so on and so forth.

01:04:44 ◼   ► So, this is the computer version of that leasing computers, which for most people

01:04:48 ◼   ► doesn't make sense because most people don't need a new computer every two years

01:04:51 ◼   ► or every three years.

01:04:52 ◼   ► Like, like I gotta have a new computer, I gotta have a new computer.

01:04:54 ◼   ► But if you if you're find yourself always buying a new computer every two

01:04:58 ◼   ► or every three years, this program may make sense depending on how much is

01:05:02 ◼   ► left that you didn't pay for during that time and how much you really

01:05:05 ◼   ► really want a new computer every two to three years.

01:05:08 ◼   ► So um, I'm not sure how this is gonna work for Apple.

01:05:11 ◼   ► I know they're always innovating the financial space of finding ways that people can

01:05:15 ◼   ► give them money.

01:05:16 ◼   ► Um but yeah, this is not you know, this is not a radical innovation.

01:05:19 ◼   ► Car leasing has been around for a long time.

01:05:21 ◼   ► I'm just wondering how many customers want this.

01:05:23 ◼   ► The old program, the people who like the old one, it was like a

01:05:26 ◼   ► cheaper, easier way to get a new iPhone every X years.

01:05:30 ◼   ► But the good thing about that was at the end of you going through

01:05:33 ◼   ► one of those set of payments, you owned the phone, and that's not the

01:05:36 ◼   ► case here.

01:05:36 ◼   ► So uh I guess take it or leave it if it's what you want.

01:05:40 ◼   ► But uh, I really really want to see what the lease payments are and

01:05:43 ◼   ► the buyout amount is for the Mac Studio that I'm gonna configure and uh

01:05:47 ◼   ► by the end of this year, hopefully.

01:05:48 ◼   ► God help you.

01:05:49 ◼   ► Uh real-time follow-up, they were both the upgrade program, it's just iPhone upgrade program

01:05:53 ◼   ► or Apple upgrade or Apple upgrade, no program.

01:05:56 ◼   ► Yeah, we'll get to the differences and uh the more of the differences in

01:05:58 ◼   ► a second.

01:05:59 ◼   ► But yeah, definitely check out the the Verge table to see what the uh

01:06:01 ◼   ► the monthly costs are and the and the buyout amounts are.

01:06:04 ◼   ► It's actually not bad for the phones, too, like $35 a month, and at

01:06:07 ◼   ► the end you have 360 bucks left.

01:06:10 ◼   ► So, yeah, like if you want a new iPhone every two years, you don't

01:06:14 ◼   ► have to pay the full cost of an iPhone for two years worth of

01:06:17 ◼   ► iPhone usage.

01:06:19 ◼   ► Yep.

01:06:20 ◼   ► Uh so Ryan Christoffel over at 95 Mac has a really good summary of

01:06:24 ◼   ► you know the basically the old versus the new, if you will.

01:06:26 ◼   ► Uh so the the major differences that Ryan points out are first of all,

01:06:31 ◼   ► it's leasing versus financing, as we spoke about.

01:06:33 ◼   ► Uh Apple upgrade, generally speaking, has lower monthly payments, but that's again because at

01:06:39 ◼   ► the end you don't own the thing, you own a portion.

01:06:41 ◼   ► Well, you don't really own anything, but you sort of kind of figuratively speaking,

01:06:44 ◼   ► own a portion of the thing.

01:06:44 ◼   ► You have the option to pay the rest or give it back.

01:06:44 ◼   ► Right.

01:06:48 ◼   ► Uh, third, Apple care is optional instead of mandatory, though if you're planning on

01:06:53 ◼   ► giving it back, I personally would strongly suggest opting into it.

01:06:56 ◼   ► Uh, and then Apple upgrade also is obviously not limited to the iPhone.

01:07:00 ◼   ► You can do it with a Mac, an iPad or an Apple Watch as

01:07:03 ◼   ► well.

01:07:03 ◼   ► Now, there was some rumblings, I don't know, a week or two ago, that

01:07:07 ◼   ► somebody had found some evidence of some shenanigans that Apple might pull.

01:07:11 ◼   ► Uh, so that there was evidence that Apple would potentially restrict the use of

01:07:17 ◼   ► a phone to only a small series of apps.

01:07:20 ◼   ► And there was some reporting about that by Emma Roth at the Verge, who

01:07:23 ◼   ► writes Apple says it won't limit the capabilities of devices leased through its new

01:07:26 ◼   ► upgrade program if you miss a payment.

01:07:28 ◼   ► In an emailed statement to the Verge, Apple spokesperson Brian Bumbery says there will

01:07:32 ◼   ► be no restricted mode and/or there will be no limitations put on device functionality

01:07:36 ◼   ► due to missed payments or default with the Apple upgrade program.

01:07:39 ◼   ► This confirmation comes after 95 Mac uncovered code in on in iOS 27 beta

01:07:45 ◼   ► for a new quote app managed features quote system.

01:07:48 ◼   ► This would reportedly allow financial partners to perform ongoing status checks on a device,

01:07:53 ◼   ► as well as have Apple system services put a device in restricted mode if

01:07:58 ◼   ► its owner isn't in good financial standing.

01:08:00 ◼   ► Restricted mode would prevent users from accessing most apps on their phone, except for

01:08:04 ◼   ► the basic ones like phone, the app store, clock settings, and wallet.

01:08:07 ◼   ► I love that app store is one of them, but what are you gonna

01:08:09 ◼   ► do?

01:08:09 ◼   ► Yeah, I I don't not quite sure.

01:08:11 ◼   ► I think there was some other stories like, oh, this restricted mode could be

01:08:13 ◼   ► used by other things, like let's say carriers or other companies or whatever, but

01:08:17 ◼   ► it's uh pretty clear messaging from Apple.

01:08:19 ◼   ► They're saying though this feature may exist, we will not use it if you

01:08:23 ◼   ► miss payments in the Apple upgrade program.

01:08:25 ◼   ► Uh, I guess they're not saying what anyone else will use this for, or

01:08:28 ◼   ► if anyone else will use it, but it's nice to know that if you

01:08:30 ◼   ► miss payments, they won't like disable your phone.

01:08:33 ◼   ► But if they do miss if you do miss payments, they will repossess your

01:08:35 ◼   ► phone.

01:08:29 ◼   ► So beware of that.

01:08:37 ◼   ► This whole system kind of like I I don't love that they built this,

01:08:42 ◼   ► you know, because even though they're saying now, oh we're don't worry, we're not

01:08:44 ◼   ► gonna use it for this.

01:08:45 ◼   ► Well, but yeah, but somebody's gonna use it for that.

01:08:47 ◼   ► It's just it's kind of a weird gross system.

01:08:50 ◼   ► I I do not like that they built this.

01:08:51 ◼   ► Well, like I said, I mean, in the end, they will send you to

01:08:54 ◼   ► collections if you stop you stop paying the payments on your lease, just like

01:08:58 ◼   ► they will with a car.

01:08:59 ◼   ► And that in general will not end well with you.

01:09:01 ◼   ► But these systems are worse in that like getting sent to collections and going

01:09:04 ◼   ► through all that at least takes some amount of time and there's some recovery

01:09:07 ◼   ► from it, whereas an electronic off switch like uh you know, kill switch for

01:09:11 ◼   ► your device would be immediate and much more severe.

01:09:13 ◼   ► And it's good that Apple's saying that they will not do this in no

01:09:16 ◼   ► uncertain terms.

01:09:17 ◼   ► Yeah, but like you know, imagine imagine what a government could compel Apple to

01:09:21 ◼   ► do, for instance.

01:09:21 ◼   ► Like there's all sorts of ways this can go very badly.

01:09:25 ◼   ► I I just I I don't like this at all.

01:09:27 ◼   ► Well, I mean, MDM already does all this stuff, so it's not like this

01:09:30 ◼   ► functionality is not already in iOS.

01:09:32 ◼   ► Yeah, but the user can choose whether to enroll in MDM or not.

01:09:35 ◼   ► Yeah, the user can choose whether or not to enroll in this program, like

01:09:37 ◼   ► that's what it comes down to.

01:09:37 ◼   ► Although it it's not clear whether this functionality is only for Apple upgrade phones

01:09:41 ◼   ► or it's available on all phones.

01:09:42 ◼   ► Like I mean, MDM is built into every phone, but if you're not enrolled

01:09:45 ◼   ► in an MDM program for your workplace, it doesn't affect you.

01:09:48 ◼   ► So the that's a question that uh Apple has not answered is like this

01:09:52 ◼   ► this functionality in unreleased OS, is it like MDM where you have to like

01:09:57 ◼   ► opt into it and you know you're getting into it, or is it just

01:10:00 ◼   ► on everybody's phone and we just don't know it, and it's sleeping there?

01:10:02 ◼   ► That I don't know the answer to.

01:10:05 ◼   ► All right, so Joe Rosignal at Mac Rumors answers the question, is it worth

01:10:09 ◼   ► it?

01:10:10 ◼   ► Joe writes, we'll use the iPhone 17 Pro with 256 gigs of storage on

01:10:14 ◼   ► a one-year lease as an example.

01:10:15 ◼   ► In the US, the device costs $1,100 up front, but through Apple upgrade, you

01:10:14 ◼   ► can lease it for 46 bucks a month for a year.

01:10:22 ◼   ► For a year-long lease, your payments would total $551.88, which is lower than the

01:10:27 ◼   ► $1,100 that you would pay what that you would have spent up front.

01:10:31 ◼   ► $552 is approximately half of the iPhone 17 Pro's price.

01:10:35 ◼   ► So Apple is essentially betting that the device will retain more than 50% of

01:10:39 ◼   ► its value after one year in order to ensure that the Apple upgrade program

01:10:42 ◼   ► is profitable.

01:10:43 ◼   ► If you simply want to spend the least amount of money on iPhones over

01:10:47 ◼   ► time, buying them up front and reselling them privately is very likely the best

01:10:50 ◼   ► option.

01:10:51 ◼   ► Uh I didn't take a poll quote out, but Joe makes a very right

01:10:54 ◼   ► point broadly speaking that while that is the best option financially speaking, that is

01:10:59 ◼   ► also way more involved and way more complicated than just handing the phone back

01:11:04 ◼   ► to Apple and walking away and you know with a new one or you

01:11:07 ◼   ► know just returning it.

01:11:08 ◼   ► Yeah, and this is emphasizing the point of like how could why would they

01:11:11 ◼   ► do this?

01:11:11 ◼   ► How do they make money?

01:11:12 ◼   ► They make money because when you give back the phone, you're giving back something

01:11:16 ◼   ► that is more valuable to Apple than the amount that you paid for it.

01:11:20 ◼   ► So like they say, if you paid half the price of the phone and

01:11:22 ◼   ► you give it back after a year, if that phone has it hasn't dropped

01:11:26 ◼   ► in value by at least half, Apple now can make a profit on it

01:11:30 ◼   ► because they can sell it refurbished or they can do you know, like that's

01:11:32 ◼   ► that's the whole idea with this.

01:11:33 ◼   ► Is you're you're they don't make money on like there's no interest payments, they're

01:11:37 ◼   ► not hoping that you'll default on your payments and they'll collect interest.

01:11:40 ◼   ► That's not how the system works.

01:11:41 ◼   ► System works is that they end up with more than they gave you.

01:11:45 ◼   ► You get the phone for a year for a certain amount of money, and

01:11:47 ◼   ► then Apple gets the phone back, and that phone is more valuable to them

01:11:51 ◼   ► than it than the amount of money that you would like, you haven't paid

01:11:54 ◼   ► off that much of the money.

01:11:55 ◼   ► So I'm assuming this program will work out for them because again, car leases

01:11:58 ◼   ► work on the same principle.

01:11:59 ◼   ► Um, although I think they probably have interest payments.

01:11:59 ◼   ► But anyway, I'm sure this will all work out financially for Apple.

01:12:05 ◼   ► It's just a question I have of among uh potential iPhone buyers, how many

01:12:11 ◼   ► people find this type of system attractive?

01:12:14 ◼   ► I think it is understandable and it is you know something people are familiar

01:12:18 ◼   ► with, but is it something that people will look at and say, yes, that's

01:12:21 ◼   ► how I want to pay for my phone?

01:12:23 ◼   ► And I don't know what the answer to that is.

01:12:26 ◼   ► It's it maybe it will attract a new set of customers to iPhones who

01:12:29 ◼   ► previously didn't want to pay the big upfront costs, but I think everybody kind

01:12:34 ◼   ► of understands leases as a again, like with leasing cars, it's not a bargain

01:12:39 ◼   ► way to get into a car.

01:12:40 ◼   ► It's a way for people who always want to have a nice new car

01:12:43 ◼   ► to always have a nice new car with less hassle and basically less money

01:12:48 ◼   ► because you're you know, you you could pay less money overall, but eventually you

01:12:51 ◼   ► would have an older than two-year-old car, right?

01:12:53 ◼   ► Eventually you have a five-year-old car.

01:12:54 ◼   ► And if you just can't stand having a five-year-old car, leases are for you,

01:12:58 ◼   ► right?

01:12:58 ◼   ► But are those customers the type of ones who uh I can't stand having

01:13:02 ◼   ► a five-year-old car, but I wasn't gonna buy an iPhone because it's too expensive?

01:13:05 ◼   ► I don't know if there's a market fit here, but I guess we'll find

01:13:07 ◼   ► out.

01:13:08 ◼   ► Well, I think there's I mean, I think the world has shown that there

01:13:10 ◼   ► is very much market for something like this.

01:13:12 ◼   ► So I mean, so first of all, I'm you know, I I lease cars,

01:13:16 ◼   ► I've leased cars for a while.

01:13:17 ◼   ► I haven't leased all of my cars, but I've leased many of them.

01:13:20 ◼   ► Um, and the main reason I like a lease is that it is predictable.

01:13:26 ◼   ► There is no spike in cost anywhere along the way, and there is no

01:13:31 ◼   ► surprise in cost or trade and value or resale value on the road.

01:13:35 ◼   ► Everything with the lease is pre-set.

01:13:38 ◼   ► So when you sign up for a lease for a car, and then the

01:13:40 ◼   ► iPhone is gonna work the same way.

01:13:42 ◼   ► Um, when you sign up for a lease, you know what you're gonna pay

01:13:44 ◼   ► up front.

01:13:51 ◼   ► And you know, I've I've had I've bought used cars, I've bought new cars,

01:13:55 ◼   ► and I've leased.

01:13:56 ◼   ► And the lease is really nice because of how predictable that all is.

01:14:00 ◼   ► It's way better for cash flow if you, you know, if you don't have

01:14:03 ◼   ► to like suddenly lay out $30,000, you know, it's like all at once or

01:14:08 ◼   ► something, you know, that can be make things a lot easier on people.

01:14:11 ◼   ► Um, it can make things affordable that otherwise wouldn't be affordable or would be

01:14:14 ◼   ► more difficult to be affordable.

01:14:15 ◼   ► Um, and you know, in a low interest rate environment, um, that can be

01:14:20 ◼   ► very beneficial for the buyer.

01:14:21 ◼   ► Um, and in and oftentimes car manufacturers will offer lease incentives where they are

01:14:27 ◼   ► kind of eating some of the long-term interest to to juice their sales today.

01:14:32 ◼   ► And oftentimes lease specials or lease incentives from the manufacturers are oftentimes some of

01:14:36 ◼   ► the best deals in new cars.

01:14:38 ◼   ► Um, if you if you happen to want what they happen to need to

01:14:41 ◼   ► get rid of.

01:14:42 ◼   ► So it can be quite nice.

01:14:44 ◼   ► Um in this case, you know, when you bring it down to like phone

01:14:48 ◼   ► level, I see why people would do this.

01:14:50 ◼   ► Uh, because it does similar things.

01:14:53 ◼   ► It levels out the you know, capex from this giant outlay of money up

01:15:00 ◼   ► front to just pay it every month.

01:15:02 ◼   ► And in fact, if you look around the cell phone industry, many people have

01:15:06 ◼   ► been buying phones through monthly payments for a long time.

01:15:11 ◼   ► All the carriers have things like this, and many people buy phones this way

01:15:15 ◼   ► to you know help absorb the cost of phones.

01:15:18 ◼   ► In those cases, though, they usually own the phones at the end.

01:15:21 ◼   ► In this case, they don't, but also the trade-off here is that, well, it's

01:15:24 ◼   ► also cheaper.

01:15:25 ◼   ► And when you sign up for a lease, like what you are gaining, as

01:15:29 ◼   ► I as I mentioned, you're gaining predictability and kind of a level cost over

01:15:29 ◼   ► time.

01:15:35 ◼   ► What you are losing is flexibility.

01:15:39 ◼   ► So and this again, same thing with a car.

01:15:41 ◼   ► Like with a car, if you know that you're going to want this exact

01:15:45 ◼   ► car for at least three years, and you're gonna put in no more than

01:15:49 ◼   ► this number of miles per year on this car, then you know this is

01:15:55 ◼   ► a good fit.

01:15:56 ◼   ► I will have exactly this car for exactly this time.

01:15:58 ◼   ► I won't have to think about my car.

01:15:59 ◼   ► I won't have to think about service or anything like that, because it's all

01:16:02 ◼   ► gonna be included.

01:16:02 ◼   ► I'm not gonna have to worry about if I'm gonna need some kind of

01:16:05 ◼   ► big expensive repair.

01:16:06 ◼   ► You can just kind of not think about it, and that's it.

01:16:09 ◼   ► This will do that for Apple products.

01:16:12 ◼   ► There is a market for that.

01:16:14 ◼   ► It is not everybody.

01:16:15 ◼   ► Like if you again, like flexibility is key.

01:16:17 ◼   ► Timeline flexibility, usage flexibility.

01:16:21 ◼   ► In this case, I don't I don't have any kind of usage limits, but

01:16:24 ◼   ► there certainly are time time flexibility uh trade-offs.

01:16:27 ◼   ► So if you want to buy a phone, or you know, maybe a phone

01:16:30 ◼   ► is a bad example, but if you want to buy like you know, a

01:16:32 ◼   ► MacBook Pro and you want to always have the newest MacBook Pro, first of

01:16:36 ◼   ► all, I mean, I don't even do that.

01:16:38 ◼   ► That's kind of ridiculous.

01:16:39 ◼   ► But if you if suppose you wanted to do that, a lease ties you

01:16:43 ◼   ► to a timeline.

01:16:44 ◼   ► So if you buy one now and you say, all right, I'll uh I'll

01:16:48 ◼   ► get a two-year lease or a three-year lease, and then in in three years

01:16:51 ◼   ► or whatever, I'll upgrade to the you know the M7 or eight or whatever,

01:16:56 ◼   ► you don't actually know when that's coming out.

01:16:58 ◼   ► And so you might you might you know it might come out and you

01:17:02 ◼   ► still have six more months on your lease.

01:17:04 ◼   ► Or it might come out and and your release ended six months ago and

01:17:08 ◼   ► you had to figure out something else to do, you know.

01:17:10 ◼   ► Um so like there it does introduce limitations and trade-offs like that, but for

01:17:16 ◼   ► many people they just don't care and they just want to know that I'm

01:17:20 ◼   ► gonna buy a phone, I'm gonna maybe give it a three-year lease, and then

01:17:24 ◼   ► at the end of three years, I'm gonna bring it to Apple, and I

01:17:27 ◼   ► don't have to worry about trade-in prices.

01:17:29 ◼   ► I don't have to worry about resale sites, I just bring it into Apple

01:17:33 ◼   ► and I swap it for a new one.

01:17:36 ◼   ► That's pretty appealing, especially if the price is right, which in this case, I

01:17:41 ◼   ► think Apple's doing everything they can to make the price right because there is

01:17:44 ◼   ► no interest.

01:17:45 ◼   ► Now, they're not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, neither is

01:17:48 ◼   ► their partner Klarna.

01:17:50 ◼   ► Like Klarna is a is a big buy now pay later company.

01:17:53 ◼   ► Those companies make money in various ways.

01:17:55 ◼   ► It seems like, oh, you're giving an inter interest-free loan for uh, you know,

01:17:58 ◼   ► X months or years.

01:18:00 ◼   ► Yes, but a lot of people will be a little bit late on a

01:18:03 ◼   ► payment and incur huge fees.

01:18:06 ◼   ► So it's not out of the goodness of their hearts, like they do make

01:18:10 ◼   ► money off people being imperfect.

01:18:13 ◼   ► They also will find ways, you know, with buy now pay pay later, they'll

01:18:16 ◼   ► usually find ways to like, you know, charge the retailers more or something like

01:18:20 ◼   ► that.

01:18:20 ◼   ► In in the case with Apple and Klarna, I don't know how that's worked

01:18:23 ◼   ► out between the two of them uh for this deal, but rest assured, they're

01:18:27 ◼   ► gonna make money.

01:18:27 ◼   ► Like Klarna's gonna make money, Apple's gonna make money, but Apple's gonna also just

01:18:31 ◼   ► make money on the sale of the device, however it happens.

01:18:35 ◼   ► Uh so even if Apple gives, you know, a couple of percent to Klarna

01:18:40 ◼   ► for their service part of this, and then Apple's hands are clean and they're

01:18:42 ◼   ► out of it, they made their money on the device sale.

01:18:45 ◼   ► So that's fine.

01:18:46 ◼   ► Um, so it makes sense for them, and again, I I think it makes

01:18:49 ◼   ► sense for a lot of people.

01:18:49 ◼   ► I even would consider it for like things like laptops, where like I'm not

01:18:54 ◼   ► buying a new laptop that often.

01:18:56 ◼   ► You know, I'm I'm getting usually about three years out of them these days.

01:19:00 ◼   ► Um, so you know, maybe it would make sense for that.

01:19:03 ◼   ► But the other thing is businesses.

01:18:59 ◼   ► This is a huge.

01:19:07 ◼   ► Now, Apple has done business leasing for a lot of their products for a

01:19:10 ◼   ► while.

01:19:10 ◼   ► You have to, you know, go through the business reps.

01:19:12 ◼   ► I off the top of my head, I've never done it, so I don't

01:19:14 ◼   ► know what products it covers.

01:19:15 ◼   ► I think it has covered max uh at least, and I think even iPhones,

01:19:19 ◼   ► if you were like a big enough business.

01:19:21 ◼   ► But businesses love leasing because it makes things more predictable.

01:19:25 ◼   ► And again, a business, a business does not want to deal with trading in

01:19:31 ◼   ► 19 phones every couple years.

01:19:33 ◼   ► Like they want to just have this be taken care of.

01:19:35 ◼   ► That's why business leasing is is such an attractive option.

01:19:39 ◼   ► There's a lot of small businesses too that would have that same need that

01:19:42 ◼   ► we're just never big enough to, you know, to have Apple's business rep program

01:19:45 ◼   ► and everything like that.

01:19:46 ◼   ► And when you think about like oh, those are just families where that's true.

01:19:50 ◼   ► For like if you have a few, if you you know, a couple with

01:19:53 ◼   ► a few kids, you might have four or five devices that you replace every

01:19:57 ◼   ► few years.

01:19:58 ◼   ► Do you want to deal with sending four or five box kits in to

01:20:01 ◼   ► trade them in to see like, oh, I I'm I sent it in a

01:20:04 ◼   ► week later and they changed the price and now it's worth less money, or

01:20:07 ◼   ► you know, leasing saves a lot of hassle.

01:20:10 ◼   ► For a lot of people, it's not worth it.

01:20:12 ◼   ► For a lot of people, it is.

01:20:14 ◼   ► Uh so I think it's really good to have this option.

01:20:16 ◼   ► It seems like they're doing it in what looks like a pretty straightforward way,

01:20:20 ◼   ► and you always have the option to buy it at the end, so that

01:20:23 ◼   ► kind of takes care of a lot of you know risks there.

01:20:25 ◼   ► Again, I think what you're mainly you're what you're mainly giving up is timing

01:20:29 ◼   ► flexibility.

01:20:30 ◼   ► You have to know, okay, I'm really gonna keep this for two years or

01:20:33 ◼   ► three or three years or whatever.

01:20:35 ◼   ► Other than that, it seems like a pretty good option, as long as they

01:20:38 ◼   ► don't pull any of this remote remote disabling crap.

01:20:41 ◼   ► You mentioned something uh dealing with car leases, and I haven't never done one,

01:20:45 ◼   ► but I'm vaguely aware that there are usually clauses in a car lease about

01:20:50 ◼   ► maximum mileage they expect you to put on it, and if you go over

01:20:53 ◼   ► it, maybe there's some penalties, and also often there's stuff about like cosmetics and

01:20:56 ◼   ► wear and tear, like you can't just like cut up all the seats and

01:20:59 ◼   ► spill milk inside it or whatever.

01:21:01 ◼   ► Like I I'm sure you know automobile leases have stuff like that in them

01:21:06 ◼   ► because if they didn't, you know, they would they'd probably lose money, especially based

01:21:09 ◼   ► on how people treat their cars.

01:21:10 ◼   ► And but you mentioned, like, you probably think there's not a usage uh limit

01:21:14 ◼   ► on the phones, but it makes me wonder if there is something in there

01:21:19 ◼   ► about the condition of the phone that you turn back in, and not just

01:21:22 ◼   ► like, oh, it can't have a shattered screen or whatever, but I'm thinking like,

01:21:25 ◼   ► you know, the way people drive rental cars.

01:21:27 ◼   ► Hey, this is just a leased phone.

01:21:29 ◼   ► I'm gonna charge it to 100% all the time.

01:21:32 ◼   ► I'm gonna leave it in the hot sun, I'm gonna do everything through MagSafe.

01:21:34 ◼   ► Like, I'm gonna abuse this battery, so by the time I give it back,

01:21:38 ◼   ► it's gonna be like redlining on like, you know, maximum battery capacity 52% after

01:21:43 ◼   ► two years of use.

01:21:44 ◼   ► Yep, you know, fast charge it every day to 100.

01:21:47 ◼   ► Right.

01:21:48 ◼   ► Is there something in the lease about that?

01:21:50 ◼   ► Or is that like, hey, the lease didn't say anything about the condition of

01:21:53 ◼   ► the battery?

01:21:53 ◼   ► I just used it like an iPhone that you know it's not cracked, it's

01:21:56 ◼   ► not broken, it's fully functional.

01:21:58 ◼   ► I just used it, but I used Apple chargers, like, you know, I do

01:22:01 ◼   ► wonder about the fine print and the leases there, and if they're gonna get

01:22:04 ◼   ► burned on that, because if it's your phone and you're trying to like, oh,

01:22:06 ◼   ► I paid so much for this phone, you're inclined to like at least think

01:22:10 ◼   ► about maybe I should baby the battery a little bit.

01:22:12 ◼   ► But you know this phone is going back in two years, you're just gonna,

01:22:15 ◼   ► you know, just ride it hard, man.

01:22:18 ◼   ► Like and send I'm I this cut it occurs to me now because I

01:22:21 ◼   ► I'd mentioned that with my 16 Pro, I set an 80% battery limit when

01:22:25 ◼   ► I bought the phone two years ago ish.

01:22:27 ◼   ► Um, and I recently uh I'm like look I'm in the home stretch now

01:22:31 ◼   ► and actually at 80% battery limit a couple of days I was I felt

01:22:34 ◼   ► like the battery's getting a little bit low so I cranked it up to

01:22:36 ◼   ► 90% and then recently when I went on vacation I pushed it up to

01:22:39 ◼   ► 100.

01:22:39 ◼   ► I'm just gonna leave it on a hundred because I'm getting a new phone

01:22:41 ◼   ► in September anyway, right?

01:22:42 ◼   ► So I'm just like even me like at the end of this phone's life

01:22:45 ◼   ► uh you get a hundred percent battery I mean it's great the battery's doing

01:22:48 ◼   ► great you know the 80% thing I fully endorsed if you could possibly do

01:22:51 ◼   ► it.

01:22:51 ◼   ► But that's because I mean this this device is my phone is going to

01:22:54 ◼   ► the Pokemon mines obviously it's not gonna not gonna be resold as going to

01:22:59 ◼   ► my wife who will add it to her fleet and she will bump down

01:23:01 ◼   ► one of her phones.

01:23:02 ◼   ► We have a strange system going on here.

01:23:03 ◼   ► But um when it is your phone or when it's going to be passed

01:23:07 ◼   ► on to play Pokemon Go for somebody like you do care about the battery

01:23:10 ◼   ► but if this was going back to Apple I would have had it 100%

01:23:13 ◼   ► from day one because I wouldn't have cared.

01:23:15 ◼   ► So that's something to watch for as this program rolls out and if it

01:23:17 ◼   ► does get adopted to see if we start seeing stories about like I returned

01:23:21 ◼   ► my perfectly pristine phone but the battery was a little bit uh wonky and

01:23:24 ◼   ► Apple wouldn't give me the you know the Apple made me pay something for

01:23:28 ◼   ► it or whatever.

01:23:28 ◼   ► Well and one of the pieces of documentation I read and I I don't

01:23:31 ◼   ► think I can put my hands on it right this second, but they said

01:23:34 ◼   ► kind of in a wink wink nudge nudge way that hey you're probably want

01:23:38 ◼   ► to gonna want to get Apple care because that'll make oh didn't I read

01:23:41 ◼   ► that earlier that it'll make turn in way easier.

01:23:44 ◼   ► You know I forget what I read that actually said I mean it's just

01:23:46 ◼   ► like a leased car and having car insurance.

01:23:48 ◼   ► If you get a leased car and you crash it I mean you have

01:23:50 ◼   ► to have car insurance on a car in most states anyway but like that's

01:23:53 ◼   ► Apple Care is the car insurance of your phone.

01:23:55 ◼   ► Right.

01:23:55 ◼   ► And if you if you get a leased car and you and something damages

01:23:59 ◼   ► it more than their allowable damage.

01:24:01 ◼   ► So you know lease cars usually they will allow some degree of minor wear

01:24:05 ◼   ► and tear.

01:24:06 ◼   ► Like if you get like a little scratch in the clear coat, it's fine.

01:24:08 ◼   ► You know, they they have or even if you get like if a pebble

01:24:11 ◼   ► hits it, like they have thresholds of like, okay, well, if it's easy.

01:24:14 ◼   ► I know, well, not that kind of pebble.

01:24:16 ◼   ► Not that kind of pebble.

01:24:17 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:24:17 ◼   ► But like, you know, but they the thresholds, like, oh, a scratch can be

01:24:20 ◼   ► shorter than a couple of inches, or a dent can be, you know, shallower

01:24:24 ◼   ► than this and smaller than this, and or they'll have like a dollar amount,

01:24:27 ◼   ► like it has to have less than $1,500 worth of minor scrapes and scuffs,

01:24:32 ◼   ► and and you know, if you go over that, they'll charge you fees.

01:24:34 ◼   ► Or what you're supposed to do is if your car, if your leased car

01:24:38 ◼   ► gets that much damage, you're supposed to actually go through insurance and go to

01:24:42 ◼   ► a body shop and have it fixed before you turn it in.

01:24:45 ◼   ► Um, and that's that's what this is the equivalent of with Apple Care on

01:24:48 ◼   ► the leased phones.

01:24:49 ◼   ► It's like the lease is not going to cover if you shatter the screen.

01:24:52 ◼   ► So if you have Apple care, you know, they maybe maybe they will just

01:24:56 ◼   ► do it for you when you turn it in if it's in if like

01:24:58 ◼   ► the Apple store is involved, or maybe they'll make you like do an Apple

01:25:01 ◼   ► care repair first and then turn it in.

01:25:04 ◼   ► But whatever it is, like that's all under one roof.

01:25:06 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm I'm I don't know if they would combine it, but for sure,

01:25:08 ◼   ► they what they want back is a phone in pristine working condition, plus or

01:25:13 ◼   ► minus, whatever allowable next and scratches are.

01:25:14 ◼   ► So if you do have Apple Care and you come with a cracked screen,

01:25:17 ◼   ► they're gonna be like, oh yeah, use your Apple Care to fix that screen,

01:25:20 ◼   ► and then we'll take it.

01:25:21 ◼   ► And maybe they'll do that in a single transaction, but the point is it's

01:25:24 ◼   ► not gonna save whatever it would cost you to get your screen fixed with

01:25:26 ◼   ► Apple Care, it will still cost you that same amount to get your screen

01:25:29 ◼   ► fixed with Apple Care.

01:25:30 ◼   ► Just like it would cost you the same amount to go through your insurance

01:25:31 ◼   ► to the body shop.

01:25:32 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, I can tell you when we leased the Volvo, one of

01:25:35 ◼   ► the things they offered, uh well, they offered several add-ons, because of course they

01:25:38 ◼   ► did.

01:25:38 ◼   ► But one of the things that we actually did do was because we didn't

01:25:42 ◼   ► know if we and we still don't know, actually, and we'll talk about this

01:25:44 ◼   ► later, probably, but we don't know if we're gonna keep the car, turn in

01:25:46 ◼   ► the car, whatever.

01:25:47 ◼   ► Um, one of the things they offered was for not a terrible amount of

01:25:51 ◼   ► money, uh, some program, I don't remember the name of it, that basically said,

01:25:54 ◼   ► Hey, if you've curbed that snot out of your wheels, which coincidentally I curbed

01:25:58 ◼   ► Aaron's wheels, she didn't do it, I did it.

01:26:00 ◼   ► But anyway, or one of the wheels.

01:26:02 ◼   ► Um, but anyways, if you curb the snot out of one of the wheels,

01:26:04 ◼   ► we'll forgive you.

01:26:05 ◼   ► You know, you pay us something like a thousand bucks up front or whatever

01:26:07 ◼   ► the case may be.

01:26:08 ◼   ► And if you curb a wheel, it's fine.

01:26:09 ◼   ► There are a few other things that are part of that.

01:26:12 ◼   ► So, generally speaking, if you if we were to turn in the car with

01:26:15 ◼   ► one of the wheels the way it is, then we would have to pay,

01:26:18 ◼   ► presumably, to replace the whole wheel, or at the very least, like not resurface

01:26:21 ◼   ► it, you know, repair it.

01:26:22 ◼   ► Um, but because we did check the box on this whatever program, that will

01:26:26 ◼   ► be forgiven and it's not the end of the earth.

01:26:28 ◼   ► And it's like Marco was saying, you know, there's a small, there's a small

01:26:30 ◼   ► amount of wear and tear that they consider completely reasonable.

01:26:32 ◼   ► But anything more than that, there's going to be some sort of like penalty

01:26:36 ◼   ► or something like that at the end of our lease that, and this is

01:26:38 ◼   ► our first lease, so I don't really know what I'm talking about, but there'll

01:26:41 ◼   ► be some sort of figure you're figuring out time where we need to figure

01:26:44 ◼   ► out with Volvo, you know, okay, what do we need to fund or pay

01:26:47 ◼   ► for, and what are they just gonna eat?

01:26:48 ◼   ► And that flies in the face of uh the way people use phones, which

01:26:53 ◼   ► is the expectation that you get a phone and then use it until it

01:26:57 ◼   ► literally disintegrates in your hands.

01:26:58 ◼   ► We've all seen people out there with phones like how how is that still

01:27:01 ◼   ► running?

01:27:02 ◼   ► And that's something people do because they don't it like it still works and

01:27:05 ◼   ► they don't want to buy a new phone and it's expensive.

01:27:07 ◼   ► But if you're on this lease, that's not an option for you.

01:27:10 ◼   ► I mean, you can do that as long as you want, but when the

01:27:11 ◼   ► time comes and the lease ends, you can't turn that thing back in with

01:27:14 ◼   ► like a shattered screen and a huge nick off the bottom and like the

01:27:18 ◼   ► the thing separating, like you they Apple will not take that back.

01:27:21 ◼   ► So you either need to have Apple Care and have Apple Care repair it,

01:27:24 ◼   ► probably a pretty large expense because Apple Care doesn't make all your repairs free.

01:27:27 ◼   ► And the worse it is, the more it costs, or you have to pay

01:27:31 ◼   ► the remaining balance on that phone that is destroyed.

01:27:34 ◼   ► Uh, and so it's just like you had bought it up front, uh, only

01:27:37 ◼   ► in smaller pieces at zero percent interest, which may still be attractive to people,

01:27:40 ◼   ► but like that's the one place where the lump sum gets you.

01:27:42 ◼   ► Yes, it's even steady payments, but when the even steady payments are over, you

01:27:46 ◼   ► know, you've been paying 20 something bucks a month.

01:27:48 ◼   ► Now it's $300 lump sum, please.

01:27:50 ◼   ► Or uh pay to have the phone repaired.

01:27:52 ◼   ► And with Apple Care, it may be around $300 to get it repaired when

01:27:55 ◼   ► it's that condition because people just use their phones for way longer than you

01:28:00 ◼   ► would think they would.

01:28:00 ◼   ► Because like if if it still functions and is not actively slicing skin off

01:28:04 ◼   ► their fingers as they use the touchscreen, they'll just keep using it.

01:28:07 ◼   ► You are describing my youngest brother, 100%.

01:28:10 ◼   ► The phones that I've seen him, and he refuses to use a case despite

01:28:13 ◼   ► having an even worse history than I with his phones.

01:28:16 ◼   ► Um, but his they can be shattered to smithereens, and as long as they

01:28:20 ◼   ► still function and do not, to your point, actively cut him, he's gonna still

01:28:23 ◼   ► use them.

01:28:23 ◼   ► They put the screen, my sister has a screen protector on her phone because

01:28:26 ◼   ► it covers up the gigantic crack going from one corner of the screen to

01:28:30 ◼   ► the other.

01:28:30 ◼   ► So now you look, you can't feel the crack anymore.

01:28:32 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:28:33 ◼   ► You can see it.

01:28:35 ◼   ► So do either of you plan to lease anything with as you know it

01:28:38 ◼   ► today.

01:28:39 ◼   ► I mean, I'm gonna look at the Mac the lease prices for the Mac.

01:28:41 ◼   ► I'm definitely going to look at it.

01:28:43 ◼   ► I'm not sure that I'm gonna do it because as you've seen, I'm not

01:28:45 ◼   ► the type of person who gets a new Mac every two years.

01:28:48 ◼   ► Uh but I'll look at it, but especially because we're in this weird, I

01:28:51 ◼   ► wouldn't consider it at all if we weren't currently in this very weird time

01:28:54 ◼   ► where everything is super expensive, and you know, so I will look at it.

01:28:58 ◼   ► I don't think it's attractive to me for phones because again, I use them

01:29:01 ◼   ► for two years and they go to the Pokemon mines, and it's a system

01:29:03 ◼   ► that works well for me.

01:29:04 ◼   ► Yeah, for me, I I don't particularly care for having leased.

01:29:09 ◼   ► I don't disagree with anything you're saying, Marco.

01:29:11 ◼   ► And you can make a very strong argument that hey, instead of paying, you

01:29:14 ◼   ► know, a thousand dollars for a phone, you can pay 50 bucks for the

01:29:17 ◼   ► first month and invest most of the rest of that thousand dollars, you know,

01:29:21 ◼   ► and have that 900 bucks or 950 bucks, whatever, work for you rather than

01:29:25 ◼   ► just handing it to Apple.

01:29:26 ◼   ► And intellectually, I 100% understand that.

01:29:30 ◼   ► But I really don't like owing people money.

01:29:32 ◼   ► So for me, well, you shouldn't have a house then.

01:29:29 ◼   ► Yeah, tell me about it.

01:29:36 ◼   ► Um for me, I don't I don't think that there's any chance I would

01:29:40 ◼   ► do this for a map for excuse me, for an iPhone or a watch

01:29:44 ◼   ► or an iPad.

01:29:46 ◼   ► But I was I had told myself prior to Ramageddon that this was probably

01:29:52 ◼   ► gonna be the year that I would upgrade my Mac.

01:29:54 ◼   ► I love my Mac, I have an M3 Max MacBook Pro, but the M3

01:29:58 ◼   ► Max MacBook Pro that I do not want to go backwards from, has 64

01:30:03 ◼   ► gigs of RAM, which is bad.

01:30:05 ◼   ► But as I've mentioned many times on the show, it has an eight terabyte

01:30:08 ◼   ► SSD, uh-huh, which means this is like a $90,000 computer now.

01:30:13 ◼   ► And because of that, if I choose to upgrade this year, there is a

01:30:18 ◼   ► very good chance that I would lease rather than buy, because I'm gonna look

01:30:22 ◼   ► at the sticker price for whatever it is that I'd be potentially buying and

01:30:25 ◼   ► vomit all over myself.

01:30:27 ◼   ► So I don't know.

01:30:28 ◼   ► That's kind of where I sit today.

01:30:30 ◼   ► Ask me again in 10 minutes, I'll change my mind.

01:30:32 ◼   ► What about you, Marco?

01:30:33 ◼   ► I also don't like owing people money.

01:30:35 ◼   ► I don't think I would do it for something like an iPhone, because I

01:30:40 ◼   ► think the the timeline is pretty short on that.

01:30:43 ◼   ► Because I because I buy a new iPhone almost every year.

01:30:46 ◼   ► I have but bought one every year, and so I don't know if I'm

01:30:50 ◼   ► gonna do that forever, but I am currently doing that.

01:30:53 ◼   ► And so, you know, to split it across 12 payments and then have to

01:30:56 ◼   ► deal with it at the end, like maybe that might be worth it.

01:30:59 ◼   ► I I it's it's a bit of it's not quite as much of a

01:31:02 ◼   ► of a slam dunk for me.

01:31:03 ◼   ► But when I look at something like my main Mac, like you were just

01:31:06 ◼   ► saying, this is like I think when I bought this Mac, it was something

01:31:10 ◼   ► like six or seven thousand dollars.

01:31:12 ◼   ► Yeah, I think mine again, M3 Max was roughly five grand, give or take

01:31:17 ◼   ► a little bit.

01:31:14 ◼   ► I don't remember exactly, but with similar you know, order of magnitude.

01:31:20 ◼   ► Yeah, like mine's also an M3 Max, you know, it's now what is it,

01:31:23 ◼   ► three years old now.

01:31:24 ◼   ► Wait, your desktop laptop is also an M3 Max?

01:31:27 ◼   ► I've I'm sure I knew that, but I'd forgotten.

01:31:28 ◼   ► Yeah, my my laptop laptop is a is a regular M4.

01:31:31 ◼   ► No Pro No Max, just a regular M4.

01:31:34 ◼   ► Um, but my yeah, my desktop laptop is an M3 Max.

01:31:36 ◼   ► Uh the first one was an M1 Max, I got an M3 Max.

01:31:39 ◼   ► Um, and I'm probably gonna get the M whatever they do with the M6

01:31:43 ◼   ► line that is rumored or the M7, whatever whatever like the next big boom

01:31:46 ◼   ► is, I'm probably gonna jump to that, but we'll see, you know, pricing and

01:31:49 ◼   ► performance and everything like that.

01:31:51 ◼   ► But when I do replace that, like you said, like it's it's spec'd up,

01:31:54 ◼   ► it's probably gonna be like eight eight thousand dollars or nine thousand dollars, it's

01:31:56 ◼   ► probably gonna be a you know a big a big purchase, and I'm gonna

01:31:59 ◼   ► use it for more than the lease term, probably.

01:32:02 ◼   ► Like if I if I do say a two-year lease, that gives me a

01:32:07 ◼   ► two-year interest-free loan on a eight thousand dollar purchase.

01:32:12 ◼   ► That's interesting.

01:32:13 ◼   ► Especially since I know I will use it for that time.

01:32:15 ◼   ► And then at the end of it, I would probably just buy it out,

01:32:18 ◼   ► right?

01:32:19 ◼   ► Oh, you know, and because it's either way, like it's the same amount of

01:32:22 ◼   ► money at the end, I just get an interest-free loan for ha for half

01:32:25 ◼   ► of it for most of that time.

01:32:28 ◼   ► That is compelling, especially like, you know, if if the business pays for it,

01:32:32 ◼   ► again, that kind of helps like it helps c you know, cash flow in