599: Where Did Salad Go?

We never decided if we had a pre-show. Oh, apparently we don't. I have a very boring pre-show. It's perfect. Perfect for the summer. Let's give it a shot. What do you got? Let me put it this way. There are times that I'll find out or notice that Marco has removed something that I've said from the show. I would say 70 to 80% of the time, it's a good call. It's for the best. 10 to 15% of the time, I'm like, what the hell, man? And then 5% of the time, you know, it's just something else entirely.

You are probably going to remove it and it's for the best. Is your pre-show something that you think Marco is going to remove? Yes, because that's not a good pre-show because we can't use that as the pre-show. Look at it this way. Anytime I try to come up with the pre-show, we end up going off the rails. Off the rails, not on the rails. It's opposite of that. Off the rails. And then we find something actually interesting to talk about. So here we go. And that's the pre-show that's only for the boot like Marco is going to remove it. Absolutely. Exactly as promised.

Let's start with an apology tour. Let's do some follow up. What happened with the theme song there Marco? Okay, so last episode I accidentally put in the old theme song about Twitter rather than the new theme song about mastodon. My bad ending theme one, which I used for 10 years or whatever it's been. Have a bit of a habit on that one. And I accidentally picked that one instead of picking ending theme 2024. AF. So my bad, sorry. It happens to the best of us.

The offending parties have been sacked as they say. No big deal. I would also like to go on an apology tour. Last episode we were talking about overcast and call sheet and quizz and only today is the day is the one year anniversary of call sheet. But hey rats. Hey, thanks. Are you looking forward to the App Store Connect report tomorrow morning? Yeah, I don't even know this works. I've never had a subscription app before. So I'm scared to look to be honest with you. You know, Mike on analog we talked about this and Mike had advised just expect like half of what you have.

And I had originally and I thought, you know what? He's probably right. That's probably a good place to start is that whatever money I made a year ago just expect half that and hopefully that's a good place to reach and hopefully that's hopefully all the truth. Don't you have to wait more than just like I know is like the anniversary, but like isn't there kind of wasn't there several days between like the announcement and the publication of the episode where you talked about it and when people got around to listen to the episode isn't going to be kind of smeared out over at least a week. Well, that's part of the reason why I didn't plan on looking tomorrow. I figured whenever we hit like September

ish is when I'll start like looking into it or just wait for hopefully a check from Apple that hopefully is more than $10 and say, you know that went well or oh, wow, that really stinks you know one way or the other. So, but we I digress. So we were talking about call sheet and overcast and I made a comment that I thought was very clear what I was saying it appears that a lot of people did not understand because I saw a lot of grumpy people on Reddit which is arguably redundant, but here we are. And I think people would say it's just so I hope we can get a better view on the app and I hope it's going to be a lot more. Thank you. I'm happy. So I'm happy with the comments, I hope you guys learned the content of this. Thank you. And I'm happy with the content because I'm happy with the content. I hope you guys learned a lot. I hope you guys learned a lot. I hope you guys learned a lot, I hope you guys learned a

reached out the, uh, I'm asked it on. And what I was talking about was, and admittedly, I used kind of like a Machi, you know, dorky voice, but what I was trying to say was whenever an app changes its interface, no matter if the change is better or worse or whatever, just by virtue of the fact that it is different, that pisses a lot of people off. And a lot of times what the, what those people will do is they'll run to the app store and do a one star review. Oh, it's

different one star. I stand by that. Now, maybe my delivery wasn't exactly the best, but I stand by that. I still believe it. But a lot of people seem to hear me say, oh, any, anyone who winds about it being different is wrong, which is not at all what I was trying to say. There are legitimate reasons why one could complain about overcast, about call sheet, um, you know, Johns apps are so simple,

nobody could complain about them. Um, but if only that were true. Right. Uh, but all kidding aside, you know, there are very legitimate reasons to complain about the changes that Marco has made, or anything that I have done on call sheet, like they are not above reproach. And I think that that's what people got from what I was saying, which I'm not really sure how or why, but here we are,

but I just wanted to be absolutely clear. I think it was the funny voice. I think the funny voice, you're putting yourself in the place of the person complaining by saying these people sound like this. That's, that's, I think that's the main source of the complain. If you hadn't done the funny voice, I think it would have worked out a lot better because it's like you're making fun of the people who have this complaint. When you do that voice, you're saying these people are not justified in

their complaints. What if they do sound like that though? Still shouldn't make fun of them because

that's just their regular voice. Yeah. I mean, to be fair, like there are a lot of people who do sound like that in their videos, but, but also like I, I see why people do the one star thing because you know, if you think about like the, the perspective of a typical iPhone user, they are, what they are accustomed to is big companies redoing their apps all the time, messing up their habits, messing up their, you know, making their apps worse for their customers with their customers

having basically no power whatsoever. Like, so customers feel powerless and kind of helpless, and the one tool they have, the one lever they can pull that they know will have some effect on every single app is the one star nasty review. Like they know that. And so I understand why people jump to that. Because the entire rest of the market and industry has told them, has trained them,

like that is your only power. And by the way, we don't care about anything else you might do. Like, you know, if you just write into support for most companies, that's going to be, you know, even less effective than emailing me, which is really saying something. But so, you know, so I get why people do it. I still think it's not the nicest thing to do if, you know, so the one star review,

what they are often saying is, I dislike a change that's been made to this app. But what one star, like the lowest rating you can give an app, what that means, ostensibly, is this is a horrible, like broken or dysfunctional app. Like this means this app is like 0% useful to you or to me or to whatever. And so I feel like it is, it's part of the problem with the star rating scale. We see this all over everything uses star ratings, not just apps. You tend to get a lot of people who use

five stars and one star. And what they really, I think, probably mean is like thumbs up or thumbs down. But the scale, the rating scale gives the impression of more granularity and more kind of, you know, consideration on what is this a two stars or three star like it gives the impression of that. And kind of the math is assuming that. But what people actually do does not really reflect that. So what would I get annoyed by is when people are like, this app that I use every day,

change something I don't like one star. Well, you use the app every day. And it's literally, you're giving it the worst rating you can give it. Like that seems like an, like an overreaction or a misrepresentation of the feelings that you're feeling or what you're trying to communicate. But I understand again why people do it because they think this is the only chance I have to maybe do something that works that gets noticed, that gets, you know, that that affects change.

So I see what people do it. It's a crap system, but it is the system we have. And so we have to deal with it as app developers and we have no choice because of the way the app store works. Like, you know, if you do what Apple thinks never adjusted and sell software on your website, for instance, you can choose whether you display star ratings from users or not. And you can kind of sell your

products however you want to sell them. When you're on iOS, you, your only choice outside of the EU, I guess, but your only choice is you have to accept that there's going to be a star rating and random reviews from random people very prominently displayed on your app page before anybody downloads it. So you're stuck with the system that we have and you kind of have to play in it. So that being said, like the one star review dynamic is incredibly dysfunctional,

extremely harmful to lots of developers. But also it's the tool people have and they use it for a reason. I wish they would use it with a little bit more consideration. I wish they would actually use the other ratings that are not just one or five more often. But hey, but it's the system we got, we got to live with it. Yeah, I would agree with that. Although I will say, and I think I'm probably speaking for you, Marco, but you can jump in and correct me if not for me. I don't actually pay close

attention to like reviews and star ratings and whatnot. I do glance from time to time. But to me, the best way to affect change in my apps is to use the in-app contact form, or which is really sending an email. But they effectively send me an email and tell me what's bothering you and why it's bothering you. And for triple bonus points, if you have a suggestion as to what to do differently, you know, like I don't like this. Well, that's not necessarily actionable. I don't like this because,

well, okay, now we're talking or even better. I don't like this because whatever. And I suggest, well, you're my new best friend because now, even if I don't agree, now I at least understand what the problem is, why it's a problem. And here is what you consider to be. And I don't mean this to be dismissive. Like I mean this genuinely. What you consider to be a worthwhile and reasonable

fix for the problem. And that, to me, is way better and way more actionable. And I agree with what you were saying, Marco, that in terms of leverage, the only real leverage anyone has other than,

you know, stopping a subscription or something is a one star review. And I agree with that. But in terms of actually achieving the goal you're looking for, then to me anyway, the best thing you can do is email me or use the in-app feedback or what have you in order to give me the justification for it, not because I'm the king and you know, and I don't want to be bothered because I don't understand otherwise. If you don't give me that justification and just say, well, I don't like the way

this works. Well, I don't know what to do with that. You know, obviously this was the best option I could come up with. So explain to me why or like I said, even better, give me a suggestion. Yeah. And the problem is like the one star review thing does work in the sense that like, like I know I saw some news earlier like Sonos is really, you know, they're still kind of reeling

from their, you know, big app thing. But you know, scare the crap out of me when I saw it. And now, you know, I'm still seeing like my overcast reviews are terrible since the reason, since the reason, like they are awful to the point where like my business is on fire. It's a small fire on a, you know, on a pretty big building, but it is on fire. I need to react. I need to take action. This is not optional. If I do not take action, my business will go away soon. Like not, well, not,

you know, not too soon. I have a lot of, you know, turns out over, you know, when you don't reset your star ratings over 10 years, the math works pretty well in your favor that like it takes a lot to move the average down because it's like even, you know, even a few straight weeks of one star reviews, there is, you know, thousands of reviews to balance it out from the last 10 years, mathematically with the average. But all of these one star reviews that I'm getting are forcing me

to take action. I am being forced to make changes to like, you know, consider, I had to re-add, you know, one tap play. I'm having to make design changes. I'm going to have to add more options to the app. I'm going to have to like add more buttons, compromise my design, compromise my simplicity. I'm actually going to have to make the app in certain ways worse in my opinion in order to placate the one star review people because I have no choice. As an iOS developer,

if you're getting a ton of one star reviewer for something, you have to fix it. If you care about the future of your app because if your star rating goes down like in a meaningful way on the average, you will get way fewer downloads and it's really bad for your business. So the fact is like this method works and I kind of hate that it works. But again, this is the system we're in. We have no choice. If there are that many people leaving you once our reviews, you have to fix whatever they're

complaining about whether you agree with it or not. So it is kind of frustrating as a developer to have to give your customers that much power over what you do because your app design is not a democracy, but they kind of turn it into one in a way. And so I can again, I understand why people use the one star review lever because it's the only lever they have as users. But I also understand why developers are like, I kind of hate that they hold this over me because it is quite a

dysfunctional system and there is no way to opt out of it. Yeah, just to put a bow on this, so it would be absolutely clear. I am sorry that I came across in a not so kind way that I try to be a decent guy and I think I failed there. But again, there's plenty of things that are worth complaining about. Just don't complain just because it's different and that's all I was asking.

We are sponsored this week by Revenue Cat. Now, last week you might recall in the aftershow, Casey brought up that if he could start call sheet all over again, he'd consider using Revenue Cat for managing his in-app purchases. And then he jokingly challenged them to sponsor the show. Well, Revenue Cat's developer advocate is Charlie Chapman, who you might know from his launch podcast, which I think is great and you should go listen to it. It's wonderful. And so

he's a listener of this show and he said, maybe let's actually sponsor them. So they got in touch and here they are. This might be the first sponsor to follow up in a way. So here's the deal with Revenue Cat. They build an SDK and back in infrastructure to make adding in-app purchases and subscriptions to your iOS or Android apps incredibly easy. So let Revenue Cat's engineers keep track of the constant changes to the store APIs and they can even handle your paywall UI with their back

and configurable but fully native paywall UI framework. So you can do stuff with this like run AB tests with the experiments feature. And that's again with a native UI. You can figure on the back end but then it's using native code in the app. So you can do full AB tests with that feature. You can also use Revenue Cat charts to go way beyond what App Store Connect offers for understanding

your business and they're constantly improving. In fact, just this morning they released a new chart called the prediction explorer that uses a predictive model to project how much revenue to expect from users in the future, which is exactly the kind of information Casey was interested in last week. Also, if you're an indie dev, consider joining their hackathon they just launched this week. They call the shipathon to giving cash prizes swag and even some digital billboard space in San Francisco

for the winning apps really. So this is a great thing. This is way beyond what I would ever be able to build myself. So check it out. Come see why thousands of top apps trust Revenue Cat to power their subscriptions at RevenueCat.com. And if you're interested in that hackathon go over their blog for the latest info on that. So once again RevenueCat.com to power your in-app purchase and subscriptions. Thank you so much to RevenueCat for sponsoring the show.

All right, so we had a lot of genuinely interesting feedback with regard to curbside charging in the United States. And I will try to make this as quick as possible, but a bunch of people wrote in and said surprise surprise in some bigger cities. There is curbside charging. So it turns out. Gareth Edwards pointed us to plug NYC, which was apparently in August 2021.

Reading from untapped cities.com. Some neighborhoods in New York City are welcoming plug NYC. The city's new curbside electric vehicle chargers that are being tested as a pilot program run as a partnership between NYC DOT, Con Edison and FLO, one of the largest electric vehicle charging networks in North America, which is interesting because I've never heard of it. But that's right. And initial 34 stations with 100 plugs are coming across the five boroughs.

I do wonder like this is a start of in 2021 where they had initial 34 stations. How many stations are there now in 2024? I don't know. But anyway, it seems like there's a pilot program in New York City, at least one. Then James Brown presumably not the Godfather of Seoul from Berkeley writes Berkeley launched pilot program in 2018 for homeowners to install curbside EV chargers. Part of why it's so impractical, they recommend a homeowner's budget between $5,000 and $20,000

for the install include that's like what half a Rivian repair. Hey, oh, for the install, including $2,500 of permit fees. I've seen exactly one of these ever. And we'll link in the show notes something that James provided with regard to how to make this happen. Keyole from Seattle, right? So I drive an EV in Seattle and we have some city-sponsored curbside fast charging very convenient. We'll put a link in the show notes for that. Vaults is a great podcast about green

technology. They recently had an episode about expanding curbside charging in the US. They provided a overcast link which 404's. So I think I've dug up the right link and I'll put that in the show notes. But if it's wrong, I guess blame me and not keyole. Seth Karris writes Baltimore has been installing curbside electric chargers. See the photo of the chargers along Boston Street, Baltimore's Canon neighborhood. And I don't know if we're going to include the photo, but we saw it

and it would look cool. Juan Boyce writes Paul Volt, P-O-L-E-V-O-L-T. That's very clever. Curbside charging in North Carolina is a thing and included a link to Plug Share where you can see like a photograph of that. And finally, Sam Grover writes neighborhood EV charging also exists in Portland, which I think we've kind of talked about already, but that's right. No, we didn't, never mind. It exists in Portland and there's a link to the information on that from the city of Portland as well.

Seeing all these things of like programs that were started many years ago makes me feel like there was some effort to get curbside charging in some US cities and it just maybe didn't quite get critical mass. But it's good that they're trying. It's good that they're doing it. Every little bit helps. I just hope it really starts to snowball somewhere. Yeah, the problem with charging infrastructure is that I think it's kind of like when companies hired a bunch of consultants to

make their iOS apps and then said, all right, thanks. Bye. And then a couple of years later, like, wait, we need to update the app now because the iOS changed and we have no idea. We didn't budget for ongoing maintenance of this expense. We just thought it was a one time thing. We make an app check done. And that's curbside or any kind of EV charging infrastructure. The problem is it takes maintenance and follow through. And it isn't just like a one time, hey, let's put a bunch of

chargers there and then profit. It's, it takes more than that. It takes ongoing maintenance as we will get to maybe in the after show. It's more difficult than you might expect to maintain these things over time. And at least it seems to be according to the failure rate I'm seeing on

electrified American chargers. Yeah. So the curbside ones is an interesting case of that. And I kind of understand why Berkeley was doing the thing of like basically making the homeowners essentially pay for it and own it because if it's a thing that you paid for, you have some stake in keeping it going because presumably you're using it for your car. That's why you did it. And it's like it's your charger, you know what I mean? And so that's sort of distributing the responsibility

for maintenance for chargers where you like destination charge. I don't know what the right term is like chargers that are like gas station. There's a place where you go that's a charger. And there's a whole bunch of chargers lined up just like there'd be a whole bunch of gas pumps for those type of charger things. DC fast chargers also called level three chargers. Right. But like what I'm saying is they're not they're not like curbside where it's just like

they're dotting the streets. There's a place you go where a bunch of cars park in charge. Right? Yeah. Destination chargers are actually something else. That's like the ones in the hotel parking lot at some hotels. Yeah. Okay. Gratitude level two is yeah. Yeah. Although I would say for the hotel ones, that's an example where you feel like the hotel presumably pays for and owns those chargers or maybe it gets rent for them or whatever. There's some responsible body for the ones that are like

a place that you go that's like a gas station. We would hope. And I think this was the hope, but apparently their economics that don't work out for this that whoever owns that place where the chargers are would maintain them in the same way that someone who owns a gas station maintains the pumps. How often do you go and see pumps out of order gas stations? It happens, but if you live near one, for example, one of the pumps is out of order, you would expect like by next week the

pumps not out of order anymore. The people who own the gas station got it fixed. Right? And I know the economics of gas stations. At least I've read. I think the economics of gas station is very often has to do with selling things from the convenience store and the gas is like a loss leader to get people to have potato chips or whatever. Right? And maybe there's just not enough places where you can

buy potato chips at like Tesla chargers. And I was a bad example because they maintain theirs, but like I feel like the failure rates on electric chargers are so bad is because people have that mindset. It's like, oh, it's electricity. It's not like a gas pump that has to be maintained that inspected, you know, you see those inspection stickers and everything. And it's like all this whole infrastructure of the big trucks come and they fill the big tanks and that the pumps are inspected

and signed off on and people own things like that. It's just a plug. So like the iOS, app you just described once we install the plugs were done, right? It's like, no, someone needs to be looking at every single plug every single day, just like at a gas station, someone who works at a gas station notices if one of the pump stops working because they work at the gas station and someone says, hey, the pump's not working and they're there all day and they say, oh, pump number three is out.

And then they arranged to get pump number three fixed. And it seems like an electric charger thinks, hey, there's nobody there. And be when it breaks, it just is there for months and months and it's just like, is anyone ever going to like notice that this plug has not working? That the cord got yanked out that it's fraying that the machine is on the fritz that the software update failed or whatever. They just need to take ownership. Like they do it. I'm holding up gas stations. It's

a paragon of like responsible stewardship of infrastructure. But honestly, it's, I don't think it's asking too much. Gas stations were able to maintain those and they're just, I would argue mechanically more complex than chargers, if not technologically, more complex. So I hope this does get better. It seems like it could, but maybe the economics needs to work out to like pay someone to sit there and sell you the chips at the Tesla chart. All right, moving along. We've got some color

information. Apparently there's been some leaks over the last few weeks or weeks or so with regard to iPhone 16 16 Pro colors. So we've got a couple of posts from nine to five Mac that include some pictures for the iPhone 16 and 16 plus. We've got white very, very black, blue, green, and pink. And interestingly, this camera bump is different, right? Because it's vertically up and down with a flash kind of separated and not. So I was saying last week, like if you're

expecting that just, oh, it's great when there's, there's going to be top and bottom. It'll be a narrow opening. But no, because you got to have that flash exposed. And unless you want to do like a punch hole cut out for the flash, which you probably don't want to do because it won't be exact in little throw shadows, it's going to end up being like a triangular cutout, don't you think, for cases on the sun? Yeah, probably. Yeah, I think so. But the colors look good. Like the black

in blue in particular look very good to my eyes. I can see why one would like the green. It's a little bit on the bluey like turquoisey side just a touch. But it's, I mean, actually all of them look pretty good. They are more saturated than all, but they seem kind of like pale. It's still a little bit pale to me. And I kind of miss like my daughter's got the purple phone. I think that's more fun. There's no yellow. There's no red. But you know, at least like you said, at least the

black is black and the white is white. Like those seem to be more solid and saturated. And you know, anyway, not a great color year, but not the worst. But that's of course the 16 and the 16 plus. The phones for people who like colors. But if you are a professional, you don't like color. No, you still will not like color this September because according to 95 Mac, your choices are natural titanium, which is what I chose. And actually does look really good.

But that's the end of there. You get natural titanium rose titanium white titanium or black titanium. Now in the defense of these colors, I do genuinely think and I am biased that natural looks really damn good. And this black is freaking black. Like this is a mighty black black titanium. But still can we not have fun colors on professional devices? Yeah, not very very colorful. Like I do, I do like the black and white and I do like the natural titanium and the rose one presumably is

red tinted. We don't have like a picture of that. But that's not really colors. It's just shades of gray and a good a nice set of shades of gray. And one of the shades of gray has a tint of color in it. But that's I mean, just like all the all the all the pro phones that pretty much have ever existed. It's like, well, you can have very light gray, which they call white, very dark gray, which they call some form of black or space or whatever. And then you can have maybe a medium gray that has

a color whipped by it. But it's not. It's basically like and this year was even this year was like commonly bad, but the 15 pro line. And like now we have like four different shades of gray and then a blue gray. I mean, people with cases on most times anyway, it's not a big deal, though. Like I said, my daughter's phone, she has a purple 12 that she had a clear case on. And we recently got a new clear case to replace the old yellowed one. Looks really good in a clear

case. Clear cases do show off the color of the phone. You know, it's like that purple is a great color. She's going to be sad when eventually she has to replace that phone. And her choice, if she had to pick from these colors, I don't know what she would do. I mean, maybe she would like the pink or the pale green, but that purple was great. I miss it. I wonder like if, I mean,

this is wish casting more than actual prediction. But I wonder if assuming that the iPhone Slim rumor actually has something behind it for next year, I wonder if they would take advantage of the likelihood that like I think slim owners might be less likely to use cases than everyone else, just because they would want to like kind of show off the slimness of it. Maybe it wouldn't need a case as much because it would be much lighter. Who knows? Or maybe people would use more clear

cases to help show it off. But I wonder if they would take the opportunity to maybe have some more desirable or more flashy colors in the slim line. We'll see. Well, I guess that last week, if it is going to be the most expensive phone, that means no colors. That's true. I guess yeah, following their trend, like the less expensive phones have the most color. The pros have only many shades of gray. So I guess maybe the slim would only come in like

just an average, you know, 50% gray shade. Like that's it. Just the most average color that is no color. Yeah. I mean, ultimately the pro phones have about as much color in them as my martinis have removed. You just wave it nearby and call it a day. All right. Crowdstrike were there. So we have a

lot of feedback about Crowdstrike from various anonymous peoples. And I will read at least a little bit of one, one anonymous person writes, I am not a lawyer, but I have quite a bit of experience in negotiating and then enforcing software agreements between security vendors like Crowdstrike and large organizations. I can say definitively the type of click through you load and use your license agreement individuals are subject to are not in play when multinational giants do deals.

Each contract is spoke with vendors and customers going back and forth over months before inking deals lasting multiple years and millions of dollars. So any Crowdstrike lawsuits won't add or subtract to case law about ULAs. Crowdstrike Falcon isn't something they sell to just anyone, and for sure not individuals who would click through a one-sided ULA. The final contracts between giants always have clauses about things like software development life cycle, supply chain management,

security practices and service level agreements. It's very common to see these phrases like quote reasonable efforts quote and quote consistent with industry best practices quote scattered around. One of the deals are in excuse me once the deals are in place. They're often squabbles about what reasonable efforts look like, but customers generally win because vendors want to keep customers happy and have a hope of renewal. It's rare for disputes to see the inside of a courtroom since

litigation is so expensive. Most of the time if a vendor isn't meeting their obligations under the contract and shows no sign of improving it's much cheaper to just migrate to a different vendor providing similar capabilities and then bad mouth them to your entire security network. I guess that's the equivalent of one star, huh? This is not a typical outage and there will be tons of litigation both by customers directly and by their cybersecurity insurance underwriters. Today I

learned that's a thing. Seeking to recover damages Crowdstrike clearly fell down on the reasonable efforts part of many clauses around their development and release practices. So there's a pretty strong case. I remember from my joby job we had a contract that basically said that sort of the downtime stuff of like, hey, I'm paying for you to do the service and you're like a web-based

company, but what if your site goes down? That hurts my business. What's the deal there? And the deal was basically like, okay, we guarantee, you know, X amount of uptime per unit from month a week or whatever. And if we fall below the amount that we guarantee we start paying you money every minute that we're down and it's just a negotiation. Just say like, okay, well,

how many hours per month do we need to be up? Like you can have one hour of downtime a month, five minutes of downtime a month, and how much do we have to pay for every minute that we're

down after that? And that is clarifying to all involved, both to the engineers who are running the sites and also to, you know, the organization to try to have quality control and very often, we would come close to, I forget what the phrase was, we would come close to our threshold of the downtime for a month for a particular client or particular contract or all of our contracts

or whatever. And you have the classic change freeze, which is like, you know what? Let's just wait for the next two days to run out so we can clear the end of the month and reset the clock on the the service level agreement, right? And that's one way to do it. But this type of thing is like, you know, in case of catastrophic failure like CrowdStrike, what is the remedy there? What was written into the contract? What contracts do people agree to? Does CrowdStrike have the same

contract with every single person that it sells to? Probably not. So this is going to be quite a mess. Yep. Marius writes, the update was not released by timezone. It was released globally at the same time. I thought that's what we said last episode, but I guess not. No, as we were thinking, like, people in

New Zealand were noticing at first. So my assumption at the time was that it was released like by, you know, timezone, you know, so one part of the world got it first and then slowly as I went across time zones. But according to Marius, that is not the case. Marius continues. The update propagation took a few minutes to almost all their customers. The source of this is the Risky Business Podcast episode 756, which we will link in these show notes. But anyways, Marius writes,

I'm not sure why Australia News, the island reacted first. Maybe it was during their afternoon, but all the customers were affected at the same time. Yeah, this seems even more more bonkers to me. Yeah. I feel like what maybe we didn't say this on the show, but I feel like we knew this at even last episode. I didn't know. So that's why I put it in there. But we have a, we have a source for it from the Risky Business Podcast, equal to the podcast inside. But that's, you know, I believe it.

All right. So another anonymous person writes, a phased rollout approach for CrowdStrike updates has its risks unique to the nature of CrowdStrike's product that bad actors will obtain the early rollout update and through reverse engineering obtain information about ongoing attacks or vulnerabilities and take that information and use it to attack unupdated CrowdStrike customers and also everyone else. CrowdStrike does a great deal of research on the most sophisticated

threat actors in the world. They take that research funded by customers who are at extremely high risk, you know, government news organizations, finance, et cetera, and follow the results into the Falcon sensor product. The exploits used to get the malicious code running are captured and sent back to the CrowdStrike mothership. It's a virtuous cycle that cycles disruptive CrowdStrike cannot respond to new threats in unison by not having patches shoved down to all high risk customers,

blog posts with data, signatures, sample binaries ready for the entire industry. Then CrowdStrike expands access to really bad vulnerabilities to everyone who wants them. All bad actor needs to do is have a bunch of different CrowdStrike subscription accounts on a bunch of different machines and monitor those machines for updates. If you get lucky and get selected for an early update program, analyze the update. I get that. Yeah, this is an argument against the phased rollout, but I feel

like that maybe we weren't specific enough for this. Phased rollout doesn't have to mean like how Apple does it or some companies do it where you release to like 1% on the first day and 10% on the second day and whatever. Phased rollout can be over the course of 30 minutes for the globe, right? It doesn't have to be or an hour or whatever it is. Whatever window is too small for someone to get your update, analyze your binary, figure out the exploit like this. You're racing against

that. How fast can they figure that? If they can figure that out in 10 seconds, then yeah, Phased rollout is difficult, but honestly, any kind of phased rollout, even if it's 10 second gaps between time zones, right? And you just do 24 time zones or whatever. Like even if it's just like any of us, I know for experience, like when you're monitoring during your release and something goes wrong, especially something this catastrophic, everything lights up within seconds. You don't have

the wait for a long time, right? Phone start ringing, email start coming, alerts start turning red on the board. Like things happen. It's not, you know, this is what you're looking for and rolling out with a 30 second gap between time zones, you'll know four time zones in that this is catastrophic and you pull the big stop everything thing. And you can say, well, you stopped everything, now they learn about your exploits. Like it's better than breaking all of your customers like

crowd strike it. So I still think that if Phased rollout is exactly what crowd strike should be doing. I can't tell them exactly what those phases should be and how long the gap should be and what the risk is or whatever, but all wants the entire world is a capability they should have in cases of emergencies, but should not be their standard practice. That's just my opinion. No, I completely agree. Well, it also seems like they didn't even have like a staging environment.

Like before you roll out to anybody public, why don't try rolling out to some test servers or some test clients? Yeah, now that they're obviously their QA process, I'll fell down or whatever. I'm just saying like this as with all security things, it's a multi level thing. You have staging environments. You have test customers, you have a QA plan, you have automated testing, you have validation, you have people signing off and you have a phase to roll out. Those are many different

layers of trying to make it so you don't screw something up. Yeah, they fell down in lots of way. You look at their analysis clearly, you pushed out a thing that didn't work. That's a thing you could have determined before you pushed it out. That is obviously what we're wrong here,

but we're always looking at the very last thing. The last line of defense is if it gets passed, all your other systems and you messed up your QA and all that other stuff, your last line of defense is watch as you roll it out and see if your hosting customer says it goes out. Another anonymous person writes, CrowdStrike's driver is not the Nvidia driver. I'm sorry, I should give some context here. This is with regard to how do you disable a crashing kernel extension?

So back to anonymous, CrowdStrike's driver is not the Nvidia driver. The Nvidia driver keeps crashing. Sure, unload it and continue to boot, but not the cybersecurity driver. I imagine every IT's admin, IT admins had exploded upon reading Tom Warren's quote-unquote brilliant idea to just unload endpoint protection if it crashes enough times in a row. That machine not booting is a much

better outcome than flying blind with my entire organization on the line. That's very much the vibe of a security professional, but I do understand what they're saying. But yeah, I mean, like you still, like this is, we're talking about what can Microsoft do? Microsoft isn't responsible for CrowdStrike's thing, but they make the OS and the OS could be resilient against failure by, you know, if something keeps crashing on load, don't load that thing

next time. But it doesn't mean silently don't load that thing, you know, it could immediately send out some kind of alert through some kind of windows thing to say, hey, you know, I just booted into safe mode because this thing kept crashing. And that should light up somebody's board somewhere

anyway, right? So you don't have to, this doesn't have to imagine that the worst case scenario of like it silently doesn't load your endpoint protection and you're running unprotected for months at a time because, you know, realize like a smart implementation of this feature would light up people's boards in the knock just like any other thing would. It's just that your machine wouldn't

be down, right? Maybe it would just be booted into safe mode where it doesn't actually load anything, but it just says, I'm sitting here waiting for your update me because I couldn't boot all the way. And that is for some people preferable to it, not booting it all. And on that topic, it's the next item. Right. So what happens if you need to recover an un bootable windows machine? Enterprise windows

machines often have lights out management technology. And IT department can reach out and touch windows clients from anywhere, just pull up the ILO integrated lights out management product, you use and remote into your non functioning client. You can push out an EFI application that boots the machine to crypts the disk with the bootlocker key, deletes the bad crowd strike update and reboots the host. You can script windows itself, have your windows clients boot and save mode,

login, delete the bad file and reboot, all via integrated lights out. Yeah, that is a cool feature that you can have, which is essentially like, they say pushing an EFI application. That's like the firmware. That's like before the OS boots is just a firmware that's bringing up the computer before it even starts loading an OS from a volume somewhere. So if you have the ability to sort of remotely push something, push out an EFI application, you can get that part of the machine up

and running, get the EFI program to run. And as they said, to crypt the disk and do the video, that is complicated and invasive. But the thing is not everybody has that. Yes, it's maybe it's industry best practice. But as I think we're learning the Delta lawsuit, even big companies, sometimes don't follow industry best practices that are up to date within the current decade.

That was what Microsoft's big slam on Delta was. They said, you know, because Delta is yelling at Microsoft and Microsoft was like, Delta, unlike some of its competitors has not updated its IT infrastructure. I think something I'm paraphrasing what they said. But yeah, best practices may provide a solution to a non-booting machine, but they're not ubiquitous. Then even just reading

this description, it seems fairly sophisticated and complicated. So I would imagine that there are a lot of companies that don't have that capability, even though they technically could. And then finally with regard to CrowdStrike, Michael Cook writes, do you think there is any chance the CrowdStrike incident will lead to requirements for heterogeneous systems and companies, either in OSs or security software, to try to prevent future incidents from taking out all systems

it wants? Or would it be judged to risky slash expensive for the benefit? I am not the most recent actually employed person that would be John, but to my eyes, knowing IT folks to the degree that I do, I feel like this is a perfectly reasonable question, but I think most IT security professionals that I've ever worked with emphasize simplicity more than anything else and making

their jobs and lives simpler. So yes, what Michael saying makes sense, like if you have a bunch of Macs as well as Windows computers, and if you have CrowdStrike as well as one of their competitors, that does cover this base so that if CrowdStrike breaks everything Windows, you either have Macs that you can use or something that's not on CrowdStrike, but I just don't see that juice being worth

the squeeze from the perspective of IT folks. Yeah, so there's two kinds of heterogeneity here, one is across the industry, and I think we kind of have that, like this affected like one percent of Windows machines, which you know there's obviously not some CrowdStrike was not a 99% of machines, right? So I think across different companies across the entire world, there's enough heterogeneity that not everybody is running CrowdStrike, maybe they're running one of CrowdStrike's competitors,

maybe they're running nothing at all. So I think we have that within a given company, like should Delta Airlines not use CrowdStrike on all their machines, no IT person wants to do that, right? They really want a unified solution because running something CrowdStrike plus a CrowdStrike competitor on half your machines now you have two places where things go wrong, right? And also, it's not like the company can keep running successfully if only half of its computers are affected,

right? You know, 100% half any significant percentage, even just a few in key areas is bad, and I think in general people don't want to, it was just like a CrowdStrike is available for Mac and Linux and everything too. They don't want to have seven different endpoint protection

solutions deployed in their company. It's a hassle to manage, it's difficult to keep up with all those different things, you have to sign seven different contracts, and now your user base slash machine base are divided into sevenths, all of which can fail for different reasons.

I don't think this will change much. It may make companies consider other vendors, then CrowdStrike obviously, and the contact we're going to negotiations for CrowdStrike will probably be very interesting in the coming year for the company, but the company still exists.

Yeah, in the year. But I think that actually the world of computing showed some resilience given that this company and its update was just as catastrophic as you can imagine it, and it was only like a story for a week and only affected 1% of Windows PCs. We're brought to you this episode by DeleteMe. You ever wonder how much of your personal data is out there on the internet for anybody to see and find with like a five minute Google search?

It's way more than you think. Your name, contact info, your social security number, your home address, and all that same information about your family members. This is all out there, all being compiled by data brokers and openly sold and available online. So anybody can get your private details with like five minutes of effort. This can lead to problems for you like identity theft attempts, phishing attempts, harassment or just unwanted calls. So DeleteMe helps you protect your privacy.

So this is a service that goes out there and removes any personal information that you don't want online from these big data brokers, and they continuously monitor to make sure your information stays off. It's a subscription service that removes your info and it removes from the largest people's search databases on the web, and this helps you in all those different privacy protecting ways. So you sign up and you provide DeleteMe with exactly what which information you want deleted

for you and your family members, and then they take it from there. They send you regularized personalized privacy reports showing you what info they found, where they found it, and what they were able to remove. And it's constantly working for you to monitoring and removing this personal information you don't want out there. So they do all the hard work of wiping you and your family's info off the web. When you sign up DeleteMe immediately goes to work scrubbing your

personal information from the big data brokers, the data brokers hate them. So your personal information is therefore no longer theirs to sell. So take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for DeleteMe. Now, it's special discount for our listeners. Today, you get 20% off your DeleteMe plan when you go to joindeleteMe.com slash ATP and use promo code ATP at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to joindeleteMe.com slash ATP and

enter code ATP at checkout. That's joindeleteMe.com slash ATP code ATP. Thank you to DeleteMe for sponsoring our show. There's been a whole kerfuffle as we record this today about macOS Sequoia. It apparently has added a weekly permission prompt for anything, any app that takes a screenshot or does a screen recording or anything along those lines. So reading from 9 to 5 mac, with macOS Sequoia this fall, using apps that need access to screen recording permissions will become a little

bit more tedious. Apple is rolling out a change that will require you to give explicit permission on a weekly basis and every time you reboot your mac. Multiple developers, spoke to 9 to 5 macs, they've received confirmation from Apple that this is not a bug. In the current macOS Sequoia beta, this prompt says, whatever the name of the app is, can access this computer

screen and audio? Do you want to continue to allow this access? This application may be able to collect information from any open applications on your desktop while the app is running. Users can choose to continue to allow that app to have screen recording access where they can click open system settings and immediately be taken to the preferences pane for screen recording permissions. This prompt is designed to appear on a weekly basis. This has made a lot of people

justifiably very, very, very upset. And Jason Snell did the Lord's work. He did the thing that nobody wants to do. He filed a feedback. Oh no. I know. Which generally speaking is an entire waste of time for anyone outside of Apple. But here we are. Jason filed a feedback number 14689927, asking for one week permissions is untenable in insulting. Which John then duped as feedback 14698922 will put links in the show notes. And then I guess the numbers in the show notes, I should say.

And then finally Jason was so fired up. And my favorite Jason is salty Jason was so fired up that he wrote an entire post about all these features because it's basically the Windows Vistaing of macOS. And it's gotten bad. It's gotten real bad. But before we discuss it, the rest of the news with regard to this is a dear friend of the show for Craig Hawkingberry came up with a possible solution. There is a new API or I guess a new entitlement. A new entitlement.

com.developer. Excuse me. com.appl.developer.persistent.hiphon.content.hiphon.capture. This is an entitlement for persistent content capture. Craig writes the issue here is that Apple has provided no documentation. Imagine that. Or any other guidance on how to get this entitlement prevent an app from becoming nagware. In the defensive Apple, they've actually gotten much, much better with their documentation. But I feel triggered whenever I see something like this.

Yeah, click through on the page. That's why I think I quoted there. Persistent content capture. That is the extent of the documentation of what this entitlement is for. Or does there anything about that? Well, is there no overview provided or something like that? I forget about that. No, it's not that bad. But you can take a look at the page for this. It's not particularly

informative. So on this whole topic, just to give a brief review for people who are less familiar with this or just familiar with from the perspective of an end user being annoyed by these dialogue boxes. The thinking behind stuff like this, and it happens on iOS with a different system as well, is Apple is trying to prevent the case where someone gets an application. And that application asks for some very potentially invasive permission. Screen recording permission is a great one.

Because that's like you're allowing this thing to record your screen and you can imagine all the things an evil application could do with that ability. So they get this application and on their initial run up to they were highly motivated to get it because it seemed like some cool game or thing or whatever. And they're like, yeah, yeah, whatever, whatever. The props come up and they're like, allow, allow, go, go. And they want to play the thing. And they're like,

do it. And then they find out it's a scam app or it's stupid if they don't like it or they're just like, I leave it and don't think about it again. But unbeknownst to them, they gave that permission of that app screen recording permission. And on the Mac, maybe it installed it back on agent that they also said, yeah, allow, find or whatever. Now there's this thing that's on their

computer that has the ability to record their screen. They completely forget about it. And so what Apple's trying to do is everyone so long go, Hey, I know maybe you forgot about this, but like a while ago you said that this app could do this extremely invasive thing. Do you still want it to be able to do that? And I think on iOS, it says like no, uninstall the app or whatever, like it's kind of like preventing people from clicking through something and then forgetting about it.

Right? That's the motivation for features like this. Like why wouldn't they just take my answer and just say, I told you it's supposed to be allowed. Don't bother me about it again. Because human nature is that people will sometimes click through those things without reading and that they want to remind you, right? The reverse side of that is, and Apple made one of this in

famous Windows Vista Ed. The more of these dialogues you throw in someone's face, the more you are training them to just say, okay, allow, okay, allow, whatever, okay, just let me use my computer. And doing it once a week plus on every system reboot is way, way, way too frequently. That is annoying people to death. Not only will that make people click through dialogue boxes and say, okay, okay, okay, they're going to be so annoyed and really tore out a previous topic.

They're probably going to think it's the developer doing it. And the developer has no choice because this is an Apple thing or whatever. This is way too frequent. I just, I can't even believe that they would think that this is okay. And this is on a system like Jason's Nelliesman riding this hobby horse for a while. Like on the Mac, where, where in recent years, they've been getting worse and

worse throwing more and more dialogues. At least when iOS does it, I don't know what algorithm it uses, but it's like, you know, just so you know, Google Maps is allowed to use your location while on the background. You wanted to keep doing that. I see stuff like that occasionally, but it's not every week. It's not every time I reboot my phone. And it seems like basically take my word for it

after I've said yes to it, maybe once or twice, right? So like, it's a balancing act. Like, that's what the title of Jason's blog post about this is that Apple's permission to speechers are out of balance. Right. It's not saying that they're good, bad and different. There's a balance to be struck between making something secure while still not annoying people and also not inducing alert fatigue, approval fatigue. And they're just way over that line on macOS. And I really hope that's why I

doped the feedback. Like I wrote my own feedback and I didn't reference this, but I basically filed the exact same bug. I said, this thing or you ask every week and every reboot, it's terrible. You need a way to allow someone to say, you know, allow permanently. When Jason was really angry about it, when I asked on, I was basically saying, and I agree with him, what you're basically saying Apple is that I as a user can never be trusted to give an application permission to record my screen

permanently. That's what you're saying to me that I am so infantile that I am not fully, I cannot never make this, not that I have to be asked twice, fine, ask me twice, ask me, are you sure? Whatever, but that at no point will I ever be qualified to say, yes, I swear to you macOS, it is okay for this application to record my screen. It is my preferred screen shot application. I've been using it for years. I'm saying yes, what you're saying Apple is you are never going to

be able to, you never are never competent to make that decision. And that's insulting. That's insulting to your users. Your users aren't babies like yes, your users are human and fallible or whatever, but there's difference between making sure people are aware of what's going on and deciding that they are not legally capable, not mentally capable ever making that decision. That's absurd. Yeah, it's real bad. And it's incredibly frustrating when you have a new

computer and at least last time I did no s upgrade, it was the same story. It's just okay, I'm finally ready to go. I'm excited. I'm going to use this brand new machine. So pretty and beautiful. Oh, yep, yes, that's loud. That's loud. All right.

Let's start. You're on that front though. Well, apparently, yes. So Jason writes on mastodon, I haven't verified it yet, but it's my understanding that permissions now survive a system migration, meaning that when you migrate, you won't have to approve 200 dialogue boxes

and check boxes and settings to get apps up and running. That'll be great because that is one huge source of the barrage of these dialogues because you kind of do them gradually over time as you install apps, but then you migrate to another Mac or something and to something you get them all at once. And this is what we were saying when we discussed this topic last time, if they can migrate these settings to say, okay, if you already approved these on your old Mac,

they're also approved on your new Mac. That will be great. So hopefully, if they did that work and that seems like it would be a lot of work, hopefully they are willing to hear feedback on this and are trying to make changes, but this weekly screen recording thing, right? And that the the entitlement, right? If they're doing this weekly screen recording thing, they should have

a documented, it'd be announced it in C set. And by the way, if you don't like this, please request the new persistent content capture thing because I don't even know if that persistent content capture thing is the entitlement that will stop these things from coming. And how hard is

it to get that entitlement? How long would it take to get that entitlement? You know, Sequoia is going to come out, not on my not soon, maybe in October, but whoever, like this seems like people who have applications that require screen recording promotions are kind of getting caught with their pants down here of like, wait, what are we doing? What is my app throwing up now? What can I get? Can I get this entitlement with this undocumented title? Is that the thing I should be asking for?

This is just not a great way to support your developers in their applications. And if there is this one that allows you to persist in what's the whole point of alerting for weekly because won't all the backers have requests? This one? How will you stop them from getting it? Maybe this all re-resolved by next week, but it is an upsetting regression in Apple's handling of permissions on that class. Yeah, it's just, it's one of the things where I don't think any of this happened,

you know, spitefully or anything like that. But if you look at a security professionals, we've spoken a lot about this episode, a security professionals job is to come up with effectively infinite amounts of dialogues and and nag screens and so on and so forth because their job is to

make sure that their users are as safe as possible. But as you said, it's a balancing act. And ultimately, I think this pendulum has swung way too far in the in the bad direction to the point that I don't often pay attention to these and I'm the kind of nerd that usually reads every dialogue, you know, and reads every word of every dialogue. And most of the time, I'm just like, yeah, whatever, whatever, whatever. It's just so disruptive and so frustrating. And it's, you know, Apple was

right to poke fun at Vista because it really was that bad. I mean, I don't I think Marco was mostly gone at this point. I was like half an- I never used Vista. Okay. I was half in that world. Like at this point, it was real bad. It was real, real bad. And I would my recollection anyway and admittedly, I have a terrible memory. But my recollection is that this is worse. Like, it's just insescent and it's not helping anyone. And hopefully somebody with a little bit of,

was going to say design sense, but really just like empathy for the user. Hopefully someone will be the voice of reason with an apple and say, well, well, well, let's pump the brakes on this and figure out a better approach because it's not just empathy for the user. It is in the service of better security because, you know, alert fatigue or approval fatigue reduces security. Like, it's a thing you want to avoid for security purposes. So if you're in the security team,

you job is to increase security. You should know enough. And I'm sure they do that too many dialogues, reduces security doesn't increase it because people that's because that's how people react to them. Right. It's it's a people people don't react the same way to one alert that as they do to a hundred.

It changes how they deal with alerts and it changes that that, you know, on a going forward basis for the like from now on, they will be less inclined to read any alert that you're putting for even if you reduce the number massively, you've trained them. I never want to read these. Okay, okay, okay, you make them angry about it, right? That's the last thing you want. That's bad for security. Well, and I can see why, you know, I'm sure Apple's engineers who are and product people who

are making these decisions to add these alerts. They I'm sure they have all the best intentions because the reality is, yes, some of these alerts, especially in iOS, you know, you look at like the possible attack surface, the possible damage done. Some of the actual sleazy things that companies, you know, big and small have done, you can kind of see why they think they have to do this or why

they think this is the best approach moving forward. But there's because there are these downsides in these costs to having these these controls and warnings and everything, both to the user experience and as John was just saying, to security itself. I feel like there has to be a known amount of damage that was being done or that we've seen in the wild being done to prompt this

kind of change. And I just don't I've never heard of that level of damage happening on the Mac that would cause anyone and any user to say, oh, thank God, they're making this, you know, harder for me. I don't I don't think we're seeing where is the justification out there in the wild for tightening these things down. Now, obviously, you don't want to just, you know, let security problems

happen to your users and then only react to them afterwards. But I think there has to be like some balance of like, is there really like a significant threat that's really actually even ever being seen to have happened here? Like, is there a lot of like Mac malware that's using screen recording permissions and not just security holes to cause problems for people? Like I don't

know. We've never, we've never heard of that. Maybe it happened or we're starting to happen and Apple tamped down and that, that, you know, the bud who knows, but we've never seen any evidence of that. So it's hard for us to see as the users. Why, what justifies this level of annoyance and,

you know, alert fatigue? I think the right tool for that, if you have, if there was that type of outbreak and again, maybe Apple would be quite about it, the right tool for that is having Apple having the ability and they probably either already have this ability or can make it easily, to essentially cause all the Macs to reprompt for, you know, a screen recording permission, because like a due to like an acute outbreak sort of nip it in the bud. But that's so different

than every week and every reboot forever, right? That's situational. That's like here's a situation. Everyone, here's a one time push to every Mac out there that's on the network, re-approved the apps or screen recording. Like maybe you could even have a system where you could put a message to that effect that says just, you know, due to a recent outbreak or whatever, like I don't know how you under it, but anyway, like a one time thing, it's understandable. It's

justifiable. Even Apple doesn't want to talk about it. Everyone would just be like, huh, it's weird. I got repromptive for screen recording. But anyway, going on with my life, it's so different than as Jason was snarkly putting it, making a schedule and you're weekly, making a slotting or weekly schedule to re-approved screen recording of the application you've been using since the 90s, right? It's just, it's absurd to just say that the solution is weekly

and on every reboot. That's the wrong frequency. I don't know what the right frequency is, but that ain't it, right? So think again. Yeah, some of you just wrote in and wondered, could this be in response to rewind.ai or limitless or whatever they're calling themselves right now? No. Okay. No, good. I mean, I don't think Apple has anything against rewind. And that's like, that product is so clear. Like, you know, it's recording your screen. It's part of the functionality.

You go back and look at the recordings to find things like that's, that is not the threat actor that Apple has worried about, right? And that would, it would make using rewind super annoying, but you're like, I love rewindies. At all the time, it's important to work flow and I have to approve it every week. And every time I reboot, like if you're like Jason, who I think still, which bothers me, and reboots his Mac every single day, you're, you're approving it every single day,

not every week. We are sponsored this episode by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just starting out or managing a growing brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create your beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything from your products to your content to your time, all in one place and

all on your terms. Squarespace makes it super easy to sell whatever you want to sell. So of course, physical products, digital products, downloads, member gated areas, you can sell exclusive content, you can add a paywall to sell memberships or courses or sell files to your customers, like PDFs, music or ebooks, you can have email newsletters whether they're paid or whether it's just outreach for sales and engaging with your audience. All of this is super easy with Squarespace.

You've even now, of course, added Squarespace AI features. So you can kick start or update written content on any website, product description or email so you can get incident personalized results that no one show your brand, brand identity with their AI generation. So you can explain what you're starting out. It's about you choose your tone and you enter what you need to get short or long form text and of course then you can revise it from there if you don't,

if you want to. And so no matter the placement, Squarespace AI makes it easier to go live, stand out and succeed on your website. So Squarespace is a great platform for all your business and personal site needs. They have so many amazing business site features these days too. I strongly recommend check out Squarespace. The great thing about Squarespace is they have a free trial. So you can go to Squarespace.com, start your site in trial mode. You can build the whole thing

in trial mode and see how it works for you. And I am very confident if you do that, you will stick with it because it's a really great platform. It's so easy. You don't have to be technical. If someone else in your life is asking you to help the build a website, you can just send them there. They won't need your help. It's fantastic. Check it out today at Squarespace.com for that free trial. When you're ready to launch, go to Squarespace.com slash ATP for 10% off your first purchase of a

website or domain. So Squarespace.com for that free trial. Squarespace.com slash ATP for 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show. Google is apparently a monopolist in a US antitrust case. This is reading from the verge. A federal judge ruled that Google violated US antitrust law by maintaining a monopoly in the search and advertising markets. Quote, after having carefully considered and weighed the witness

testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion. Google is a monopolist and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly according to the court's ruling. It is violated section 2 of the Sherman antitrust act. Google's fate will be determined in the next phase of proceedings, which could result in anything from a mandate to stop certain business practices to a breakup

of Google search businesses. Judge Ahmed Mehta rejected Google's arguments that its contracts with phone and browser makers like Apple were not exclusionary and therefore shouldn't qualify it for liability under the Sherman act. The prospect of losing tens of billions and guaranteed revenue from Google, which presently comes at little to no cost to Apple, disincentivizes Apple from

launching its own search engine when it otherwise has built the capacity to do so. Time and again, there's another quote, time and again, Google's partners have concluded that it is financially infeasible to switch the default general search engine or seek greater flexibility in search offerings because it would mean sacrificing the hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, that Google pays them as revenue share. The judge wrote, in 2022, Google paid Apple $20 billion to

be the default search engine in Safari. During the closing arguments, the judge honed in on these payments, wondering how other players in the market could possibly display Google from that position. Quote, if that's what it takes for somebody to do to dislodge Google as the default search engine, wouldn't the folks that wrote the Sherman act be concerned about it? Then continuing in a different post from the verge, according to Eddie Q, Apple senior vice president of services, there's no other

meaningful alternative to Google. During the trial, he said that, quote, there's no price that Microsoft could ever offer to Apple to get the company to preload Bing in Safari. Quote, I don't believe there's a price in the world that Microsoft could offer us. Q said at another point, they offered to give us Bing for free. They could give us the whole company. Geez Eddie.

Sick burn. I think you might want to talk to Tim about that because I'm pretty sure Microsoft is worth more than $20 billion, but maybe before you turn down, Microsoft offered to give you the whole company. He may be running. Obviously, he was humorously exaggerating there, although it is a quote that ended up at a bunch of stories. I love it. Thank you. According to the judge, it's not just that Google pays Apple not to challenge its search

supremacy. It would be unbelievably difficult for Apple to get in on the action at all. Unsurprisingly, both Google and Apple have looked into this and their own internal estimates came out at trial. Apparently, Apple has calculated that quote, it would cost six billion annually on top of what it already spends developing search capabilities to run a general search engine. Meanwhile, in late 2020, Google estimated how much it would cost Apple to create and maintain

a general search engine that could compete with Google. Apple would have to spend something in the rough order of $20 billion in order to reproduce Google's technical infrastructure dedicated to search. I do like that. I love this stuff that comes out in trial. The fact that both Apple and Google had done some math to say, if Apple did make a competitor to Google search, how much would that cost? Apple's estimate is like six billion a year and Google's estimate is 20 billion.

You would think Google would know more because Google has built Google? Apple's like, yeah, probably six billion dollars. Not even as much as the car we never shipped. So, these things take years and years to go. So, there'll be more about this trial or whatever. But this is a verdict. And the verdict is, does Google have a monopoly in search and did they

abuse it? Yes. That's the straight up, there was even a quote in the thing of, I think, some Google argument in court was like, this isn't illegal because we've been doing this for years and the judge pointed out it's like things that you did when you weren't a monopoly. We're okay. But when you come an aptly, they become illegal. And guess what, you're a monopoly. And this is like the Windows, antidrust case where it's like, there is no question that Google is, has

monopoly size market share. How many people run Windows? It was like everybody, right? 90-something percent. Google search is just the massively dominant play, like 90-plus percent in search. It's fine to be a monopoly. Did you abuse that monopoly to extend or maintain it? And the court say, yes, you totally did by various things you do, including making contracts that, for example, dissuade Apple to the tune of $20 billion a year, you shouldn't make a Google search

competitor. Now, they've been rumors for years that Apple was considering making a Google search competitor. And I always looked at those, especially the early days of like, that is not Apple's strength. But one of the strongest arguments with respect to that is the very early spat between Apple and Google over maps. And Apple said, you know what, we're going to make our own maps.

And they were bad. And Apple wasn't good at it. But Apple kept plugging away because there were, you know, there was apparently no no reconciliation between Apple and Google won't regard to maps. And today Apple Maps is a viable competitor to Google Maps. Who would have thought that? I mean, they took years and years, right? And still some people like Google Maps better. But I use both of them on a regular basis. And I'm not going to say Apple Apps is better than

Google Maps. Not even going to say it's as good as Google Maps, but it is definitely a viable competitor. It does some things better. It does many things worse. But Apple built that with tons of money. And that's a competing product to Google. What if Google had been paying Apple $20 billion a year to make Google Maps to the default mapping service? Apple would have never made that. That's anti-competitive, right? I mean, we're not talking about mapping. We're talking about

search. But like, that's what the, you know, the judge isn't saying there's no remedies here. It's not like, what are we going to do about this? That's a whole other phase and they're going to peel and they could appeal all the to the Supreme Court. And there might be overturned. And like, what court cases you don't know what's going to come of this any if anything change administration

could change stuff like there's so many factors here. But this is a significant finding and victory for the Department of Justice of saying Google, you're an Opli, you did stuff that's against the Sherman Institute, I think, to maintain it. And we're going to figure out what that means for you. And the reason the reason this is fun to talk about is because Apple's over there over there going to wait what? We get $20 billion a year for Google for having like a URL on a penis somewhere.

It's the easiest money we ever made. It has essentially 100% profit margins. And this is relevant because Apple's services revenue and the story about services services, where the growth is for Apple. As we, as it came out in the earlier trials when we all kind of learned the magnitude of this, a huge chunk of Apple's services revenue and also services profit services income is that 20 billion. It's like 25% of their services profit. That's not a small

amount. It's not like a 2% thing or whatever. And if their host, if Apple's whole story for their company is like, yeah, the phones aren't growing anymore. And our other stuff is kind of stable too. But you know, services is growing like gangbusters year over year. What if I told you, Apple, that potentially in five years, some court decision could say, yeah, 25% of your services revenue, that's going to zero starting now. That would be bad for Apple, for their stock,

for their story about services growth. I mean, that, I mean, and what did Apple do to bring that about? Like, did Apple do anything wrong by taking that 20 billion? Like the courts would say, no, Apple, you know, the courts would potentially say they could say agreements like the one you made with Apple, those are illegal. So you got to cut off that deal and Apple's like, oh, they have to cut out that deal. We like that money. But according to the courts, then I can see their

point. That money is Apple or Google using its monopoly and search to prevent competition to say, we are dominant and we are going to use that dominant to make sure nobody else ever challenges our dominance. We're going to make sure that Bing doesn't get to be the default because they can't match our 20 billions that were paying Apple. We're going to make sure Apple never makes a competitor, one of the few companies in the world that could potentially even have the funds

to try to make a competitor. We're going to make sure they don't do that because we'll literally pay them off every single year to the 220 billion dollars to make sure they don't even think about making a competitor. That's anti-competitive. But, you know, looking at it from an Apple's perspective, it's like, this sucks. We like getting 20, but I don't think Apple wants to make a search engine.

And Eddie Q's there in court saying, I don't know what his motivation was, but he's basically saying, honestly, it's like, from his perspective, Apple thinks or Eddie Q thinks that Google is better than Bing. And Apple saying, we want to ship the best product to our users when it comes time to choose the default search for Safari. We're going to pick what we think is the best one. And we think Google is the best one. I mean, the 20 billion dollars doesn't hurt, but he's making the argument

that like, you know, Microsoft could give it to us for free. We wouldn't take it because it would be making a worse experience for users on our phone. And, you know, the obviously, you know, the the EU would say, why not give them a choice screen where they get to pick what their their thing is.

And honestly, that's always been a question about the 20 billion. It's like, Google, if Apple just gave people a choice of what they want that default search engine to be, even if they randomized the list, most people are going to pick you anyway because you got to your dominant place, not through like illegal deals or anything, but because people love Google search. So, if you just let everybody pick 95% of the people are probably going to pick Google anyway. But still,

you know, good businesses like, why would I give them that chance? Why would I take that risk? When I can, that 20 billion dollars is money well spent because it prevents Apple from ever wanting to do this. It puts us as the default search engine and the handheld platform with people spend the most money. It's no burner that we should do this. So if the remedies of this court case, if one of the remedies is that they can't do deals like that anymore, I think it makes sense.

And I think it kind of sucks for Apple. But honestly, you know, we've talked about Apple's how services revenue have been distorting Apple for a while. Not with respect to this so much, much more with respect to like, what are your incentives when you're when your when your growth is service revenue in terms of like product design and how many ads you throw on people faces and how many come on you have. But this is another aspect of it. It's like, what does this money

preventing Apple from doing? Right? How is this money causing Apple to become misshapen in its like, you know, decision making to say, well, we could do X and we think it would be better but 20 billion dollars. Like 20 billion dollars is a big counterweight to lots of people who might have notions about things inside Apple like, what about this? What about that? And someone says, 20 billion dollars, you're like, okay, never mind, right? Little things like that. How many little

things just never got going because 20 billion dollars, right? So I think in the end, although it will be painful to remove this 20 billion dollars from Apple, it will make them a more effective organization that makes better decisions. It doesn't at all solve the problem of Apple being motivated to throw stupid come on for their services in our face constantly, which I think is the worst aspect of their services revenue, like sort of focusing on how can we extract more money

from people on a monthly basis rather than how can we satisfy people? But that's a whole separate issue. Yeah, I feel bad not for Apple, but for I think Mozilla people have said repeatedly that almost all their revenue comes from their own Google search deal. And even though I haven't personally used Firefox in 20 years or something like that, nevertheless, it's just, it's too bad. I think Mozilla by and large is doing pretty good work. You haven't been keeping

up with the Mozilla thing. They've been building like adware into their browser to try to essentially get money from like this. The same thing happened to them. This revenue sort of enabled the set of leadership that's like, we got the Google gravy train and now we can get the whole ad tech built into our browser gravy train and like Firefox uses, we're like, we hate this. The reason we use

as Firefox is not to have to deal with this stuff. You're betraying us or whatever. And it's like, if Mozilla didn't have that money from Google and had to find some other way to find itself, one argument is like they'd be gone and there'd be no Firefox, doesn't that suck. But the other argument is they would have been forced to find some other way to make money. And maybe that would

have led them to this ad tech thing faster. I don't know, but like having this amount of money from an op list to just sway you from everything about doing anything except for using them is not healthy for anybody involved. Even though it seems like it is like, oh, it's keeping Firefox alive, that's good. And you know, it's kind of it's from Google's perspective, it's a double benefit of kind of the same way that like Microsoft invested an Apple to keep Apple alive. So they

could say, see, we have a competitor. We're not monopoly. Didn't work out really for them, but not, you know, Chrome being able to say Firefox exists. See, we're not the only browser. People have lots of choices. You can use Edge, you can use Firefox and, you know, but I don't like getting that kind of money. It's not healthy to be getting that money for essentially doing nothing from a

monopolist, right? And I think it just, it makes an unhealthy organization. If only because it's now your organization is susceptible to like, that's what if that money went away, do you no longer have a business? And what were you getting that money for anyway? We were getting that money because Google thinks it's important for there to be some tiny browser that they can think of, that they can point to that says, see, there are competitors and also to make sure no one will ever, ever,

ever compete with their Google searchman, hopefully, right? And that's, that's not healthy. Like, it's, you know, ripping that money away is going to be bad. But again, this is going to be a multi-year case and it might even get overturned and who knows what will happen. So maybe this will all come to nothing. But Apple, Mozilla, all these companies now have a lot of time to think about this. And although I did, I don't think these are connected. I don't know. I don't know if these connected at

all. So take this as pure speculation. But a related story that I forgot to put in the notes is that Warren Buffett, who owns a just absolutely tremendous amount of the Berkshire Hathaway company, owns a tremendous amount of Apple stock sold half of his Apple stock like a few days before this verdict came out. And for years, he'd been saying like, I love Apple. I'm going to hold it, nothing, you know, unless something extraordinary happens, I would never get rid of it or whatever.

Many sold half is Apple stock. And then this verdict comes out. And I don't know if they related. But if Apple's story for the past many years has been service revenue, it's where the growth for the company is. And this one story says, maybe 25% of that service revenue is now gone. Is that a reason for Warren Buffett to sell half of stock? I don't, I don't even pretend to know what goes through the mind of someone like Warren Buffett when deciding to sell. And why would he only

sell 50% and not all of it? And he's really old and how much money does he need? And it just confuses me in many ways, right? But I don't think this is good news for Apple's services narrative. And I hope I hope it makes them reconsider. I really, honestly, I wish they would break that out. Somewhere else, I'm not even included in service revenue because what service are they providing there? It's like monopoly agreement monopoly maintenance payments, right? It's not it's not a service

that Apple is providing. Even without that money, they can leave that same value in the P list and still have Google searches there default. So it makes sense if you are, you know, a professional investor, this, this suggests that Apple's revenue in a high growth area has a pretty high chance of going down like all of a sudden. So I see why somebody would sell the stock that being said, I think it would be better for Apple as a whole in the long run to not have this giant

chunk of this revenue being on their books in this place. Because again, like as you're saying, it kind of suggests a different source of revenue than what it actually is. I'd say it's actually somewhat misleading. Even calling it services revenue, I would suggest as kind of misleading shareholders. I mean, I don't know if that legally qualifies as that. I'm not a shareholder ologist, but it definitely seems like it is a little misleading to say we are providing all these

wonderful services to our users, things like Apple TV plus and iCloud. And it's like, well, where's where it comes from? A huge amount of comes from the Google Commission and App Store taxes. Is that services? And at least the App Store taxes, you could say, well, this is, we run the App Store, and this is the Commission we charge. At least there is a service there, which is the App Store and the inapp payment thing. And Apple will tell you a million different ways about how that's such a

wonderful service. But at least it's a thing that Apple is doing and made. This is just like we accept the check. And in exchange for the check, we do not change this string in our source code. But I think it is not good for Apple, like kind of psychologically almost. And certainly, like, there, it creates some weird incentives that I think it would be better for them if they

didn't make a huge chunk of this money this way. So even though, like, if there is a transition away from this that is forced by the government or whatever, I think that will be some short-term pain for the stock and the earnings and things like that. But I think longer term it will be better for them. But unless a government intervenes, this will never change. It's kind of like an addiction for them. But it's understandable why, of course, they would take this money if they can.

But it would be better off if they were forced not to. Yeah. And the whole point of this thing is like, so, you know, Eddie Q was saying, like, Microsoft could give us a big for free and we wouldn't take it, right? But say this money goes away. Right. So this actually does happen, which is again, this is still not a foreground conclusion. At that point, I think Apple would be receptive to accepting a few hundred million from Microsoft

for to be in a choice screen, for example, or to be an option in settings, right? Like deals could be made. Like, one of the things deals like this do is they don't even allow competitors to get a foothold. And suddenly, if Google is legally forbidden from paying off Apple to stay as the default, the door opens to other people being willing to pay Apple more than zero dollars to say, just put us in a choice screen, just let us have an extension that like anything,

like how much money can we give you in exchange for how much? Leave Google as a default, fine, right? Whatever. But like, can we have like a one button press way to switch us where we can put on our website? Do you want to use Bing as your default? Press this and we'll pay you a hundred million dollars for that or whatever, because Bing is not a monopoly in the search market, right?

How do you, how do you ever get more competition? Right? Google has abused its monopoly, has, you know, has used its monopoly to maintain and extend itself in ways that are legal according to the Zact according to the judge or whatever. And the remedy is let's try to bring more competition back to the search market. It doesn't mean Apple is going to suddenly make a search engine, because I still think that does not Apple strengthen it will be very, very, very difficult, right?

But Microsoft already made one, right? It's called Bing, it exists, it's not as good as Google, but it's never going to get anywhere if it's like boxed out of even even being a choice on platforms like iOS, right? So I mostly agree with the the the verdict here that Mark, what Google was doing was distorting the market and reducing competition and they shouldn't be allowed to do it despite the fact that it's going to end up, you know, hurting Apple. And, you know, I agree with

Marco that like it, it's that Apple should take this pain and move forward from it. And, you know, Jason Stell is a bunch of charts on his story about this that will link showing just how big this is revenue not income, but just how big services revenue is for the company now. Used to be when you look at the graph of where does Apple's money come from. It was like the biggest piece is iPhone and used to be, I think, even closer to bigger than 50% or whatever.

And then you'd see like the Mac and iPad and whatever the other categories were and used to be as a little wedge called services that was a similar size and then services started growing and growing and growing. And now it's like iPhone and the second biggest category services. Now this, you know, to the earlier point, what Apple lumps into these categories, you know, Mac makes sense, it's Mac iPhones makes sense as iPhones, but wearables contains a lot of stuff. iPad makes sense

there and then services a whole bunch of other things, right? But services is getting worryingly large if you don't like the things that Apple has been doing in response to its services. And remember services is really $20 billion from Google in app purchase for games, other app store stuff, and then that's most of services. And then everything else, a whole bunch of low plywood is for like Apple TV plus and low blood. People hear services and they think it's like it's Apple

music and Apple TV plus it's not it's App Store. It's this $20 billion payment and it's mostly games on the App Store stuff, right? So it's not even what it appears to be. And the other graph was products, profits versus services products. So if you combine all the products, profit from all the products, Mac, iPad, wearables, iPhone, that profit and compare it to the services profit. The product profit is spiky because it's like holiday season and stuff or iPhone launch, I don't even

honestly know what the spikes are. But anyway, the products thing is spiky. And then when the product line spikes up, it's way higher than services. But at the current state where we're not in a spike in the yearly product thing, the services line is getting real close to the product line. So as the smell said, and it's article, Apple made $22 billion in profit from products and $18 billion from services. This is in the last quarter. $22 billion versus $18 billion. I think services

are a thing that Apple should provide. And I agree with their new slogan of like the rest of providers are hardware software and services. I just think they need to be more careful about not distorting the other two, the hardware and software in service of the services. Like services should be, it's a prerequisite. You sell hardware and software. Today that's not enough. You have to also sell services because just as hardware is useless without software, hardware and software

these days in the internet age are also essentially useless without services. And if you're not going to provide them, somebody else will. So why, you know, why not make your own services the work the best with your hardware and your software? It's a thing they should do. They should do it even better

than they're currently doing it, right? It doesn't mean they have to make Apple TV plus, but all the iCloud stuff, all those APIs like all, you know, the email address they provide the Apple ID system, you know, and expanding on to, you know, the developer program and yes, Apple TV plus and Apple music, like Apple should be making those things, but they should be careful. Like the values that led them to make great products and great software on those products, they should be careful to say

those values don't matter anymore because services are growing. So screw those values, whatever we need to do to make services grow, we're going to do it. So we're going to start putting ads for our own stuff and settings, right? That is the anti pattern that should be voting. So I don't really care that the services line is getting close to the product line. I care what that services line represents. I care if that services line represents a new set of values that are not the values that

led them to become the Apple that has these great products, right? Because services can infect the products with their with an incompatible set of values and philosophy. That's the problem. I don't care if this graph looks like services are more than 50% in 10 years. That's great. Let them be a services company that sells hardware and software that they work in them. I just want the whole unit to work together based on the values that led to the creation of the original iPhone.

And I think also just continuing to call the services, I think it's really fundamentally dishonest and misleading. I think a better word for most of this money, which is the App Store, you know, taxes and the Google search deal. Because remember, keep in mind the Google search deal, the way it is apparently structured is not a flat $20 billion a year. It is a commission from Google's ad income that results from Safari searches from being the default in Safari.

And I think maybe part of that contract, which is part of the DOJ's problem, I think part of that contract is that Google is the default. But the way it's structured also, you know, Apple has $20 billion of motivation to keep them default because it is a commission from ad income from Google searches. So I would actually call this category, I would not call this services. When you look at it's coming from the commission from Google searches and it's coming from the App Store

tax, I would call this category commissions, not services. Now if they want to call it commissions and services, great. But calling it services when seemingly at least the majority of the money seems to be from commissions on activity generated by other people, not serving, you know, when you, again, services is a very misleading word here. This category should be called commissions. And they should either, you know, break it out separately from services which would look real bad

or call it, call it what it is. Commission services or just commissions. I think I can leave App Store stuff in services because that's a service they run though. At least like App Store they run that. Yeah, I don't, I think that's a very tough call to say the App Store tax is considered a service. I, again, I think this is fundamentally misleading. I don't think they would like the characterization of calling it an App Store tax, but I think

they're preferred terminology would be different. And Tim Cook's terminology was our commission. So I say, hey, let's call it what it is. It's commissions because otherwise, I really do think you're misleading investors into thinking that like, that, you know, that things like Apple Music and I Cloud and Apple TV Plus and be like, you're misleading investors into thinking that that's driving a bunch of revenue to the company that it's really not. While those are successful services,

that is not 28% of their revenue. That is not even close to making all that up. So I really do think that this continued, quote, services narrative is fundamentally misleading to investors and to analysts like us who don't look too much into it because when you look into where this money is coming from, I think most people will be hard pressed to describe that as services.

I don't think they would consider misleading like both legally and just like practically speaking because one of the things that all companies do including Apple is they don't necessarily break down their finances to the granularity that you as an analyst might want. This is for every company. This is true. They don't tell you exactly of how many of each widget of each color,

each style of each whatever, right? And so by lumping things into these larger categories, always the analyst job is to try to suss out what percentage of that is x, y, and they can have guesses and their guesses may be wildly wrong. But I don't think you can say that Apple is misleading. It's just a it's a form of like look how much information we're going to give you like Apple could say you're lucky we're telling you what iPhone Mac, we're okay, we break it down and all we don't

have to do that. We could just say here's our profits, here's our revenue, here's our margins, and we can let you figure it out. And there is a trade off there of like the more Apple tells analysts, the more control over they have what analysts say about them and the more they control control, they have a more analysts think about them. But the less they tell them the more they can hide a bad thing here, a bad you know, a product that didn't sell well there or whatever, like where's

vision, pearl hiding and this thing, is this an wearables or whatever, right? So like you don't want to tell them everything because that highlight that can cause them to like, you know, zoom in on your weaknesses or whatever. But if you tell them nothing, if you just said here's our profits, here's our revenue, here's our margins, just as one big pie thing and we're not going to break it down any farther, then they're left to wildly speculate about how everything is doing and they could have

weird notions that cause a stock to go way down. So this is the dance that Apple has always been playing. And in general, as Apple has become more successful, they have reduced the granularity of the stuff that they tell like a while ago, I think they even used to give unit sales on stuff and they don't

do that anymore at all, right? So I, you know, you could say it's, it is not as informative as if they broke it down more and the name is misleading because of the things they put in the categories, but the names of the categories and the categories themselves have changed so much over the years. Like this is just, this is part of the analyst game of like, can I back solve to figure out the stuff and what we know about this from the like the billions and suit service revenue from the

Google search thing? We only know that because it came out in discovery and court cases, right? Like Apple didn't offer that up, like it was wrenched from them by the law. That's the only reason we even know that and now suddenly we can see into that pie wedge and be like, oh, that wouldn't have been my guess. Like people didn't think it was that high or like that wouldn't have been my guess toward it is, but now we know that and now we're like peering into it or so again, I don't

think it's specifically misleading and I agree the name is not great. The Google thing definitely doesn't belong in there. Maybe app, app store is arguable, but things like Apple TV and Apple TV plus and Apple music certainly are in there and and I cloud and stuff like that. Like anything like do you pay Apple for iCloud storage right? So you can use iCloud for a live. That's a service. They run a bunch of servers. It's a service that works with a hardware and software and that

should be services revenue. But yeah, without without knowing about this stuff, a lot of people can look at that service as revenue like you said before, like just think like Apple TV and Apple music must be doing great. They're killing it. Not not that great. Yeah, well, but the thing is like, you know, you're right. Obviously, you know, they they control the messaging around this for lots of reasons and you know, they they try to figure out what they have to and should break out and

what they don't and they, you know, they they keep a lot closer to the vest, of course. The thing is though, like by making a lot of your money in a way that's kind of cagey and not what people expect can actually work against you as well. So for instance, that first of all, I should go back and clarify because the Google revenue is a commission on Google search revenue. If Apple is forced or if Google is forced to stop the exclusivity clause, that doesn't mean 20 billion dollars needs to go

away from Apple's books. What that means is probably something like Apple has to have to have some kind of choice screen like to do in the EU. It's probably going to be something like that as the remedy to fix this this violation. Yeah, guesses about remedies that are like, I mean, remember one of the guesses about remedies is like on the table is out. Google could be broken up. Right. Obviously, that's probably not going to happen. But like, but I'm saying the spectrum is wide

of possibility. So yeah, they could say you have to have a choice screen or they could say Apple and Google can't do any kind of deal related to search or they could say Google is broken up. Like, or they could say nothing because it's over turned on appeal. Right. So the possibilities are numerous and wide. But you're one of the possibilities is that you can be like, oh, you still have the deal. You just need a choice screen, which I said before everyone picked Google anyway.

Exactly. And so if that's how this goes, if Google just can't be like exclusively the provider anymore, then Apple puts up a choice screen and almost everyone picks Google and then Google continues to pay Apple commission on the ad rates. They probably won't lose much at all. You know, so I mean, obviously, maybe Google's willing to pay a lower rate per user if it's not exclusive because it's, you know, long term less valuable to them. Our Google is smart. Maybe

we would say our price is this, you know, nothing. We're not going to pay you anything. What are you going to do now? Just give people the choice. They're going to pick us anyway, right? Because like, the whole thing is like, we were paying you to be exclusive. And now if we can't be exclusive, we'll take the 90% we're going to get anyway. Right. Exactly. So, you know, there's lots of things that could go there, but like, but here's, here's the problem with Apple calling this services when

it's clearly commissions. Then if they do lose a big chunk of money from this, then the analyst narrative that they have been crafting for years that Apple services are a big revenue based and growth area for the company, then everyone starts saying the wrong thing. Everyone starts saying Apple services took a huge hit. Oh, but they would, the analysts would know and Apple would explain to them. Apple would say, we have a 20% decline in services income this quarter because of the DOJ

Google thing. And analysts would know that and subtract it out. And then what analysts would be doing is saying, okay, we understand where that hit came from when your stock is going to go down. So tough luck. But also next quarter, what we're going to look at is, of the remaining pi wedge,

is that growing? And that's where they would take the hit if that's not growing. Like, and I don't actually honestly know and I don't think anybody knows because we just have these points in time of like, you know, how what percentage of that pi wedge is Google's revenue and is the Google percentage of the pi wedge growing or shrinking? I don't think we actually know if you subtract out the Google payment from services, what is the rate? What has the rate of Apple service growth

been over the past three years? Maybe it's been declining minus that and maybe that's been keeping it up or maybe actually the Google revenue has been declining and it's been growing faster than that. But we won't know that until it's subtracted out. So the first time it disappears, the analyst, they're going to explain it in the analysis. They're going to be, yeah, this is the OG thing. You didn't get the money. You didn't really go, you should have a deal. We're going to punish your

stock for it because everyone, you know, what you lost $20 billion or whatever it find. But the next time they're going to say, now we can look at the remaining services and say, is it actually growing? And from, I don't actually know and not sure anybody actually knows, again, maybe services is growing faster than it has been on a percentage basis about the Google thing or maybe it's been growing much slower to all the growth has been in Google. But we'll find that out only after it is

removed. Yeah, I mean, ultimately, I don't think the classification is really that big a deal because any investors worth their salt is go or any analyst, I should say, that's worth their salt, is going to be able to figure out what this is about. And average day to day investors, you know, like the individuals, they'll, if they decide to sell because the revenue is down, then so be it. I don't really think they're going to sweat that part of this. I mean, I think

they're going to sweat losing that money. But I feel like they can talk their way through it in a way that would probably be satisfactory, at least at first to anyone that's paying attention. And then like John just said, the rubble hit the road, the following quarter to see, you know, can they make up some of that space? And that's fine. I mean, ultimately, I don't have terribly strong opinions about this. I think people choose Google like you both have been saying, like they

choose Google because Google is in many ways the best. And I think where it becomes gross, and this is what Ben Thompson's been saying on like dithering and on his own website, is where it becomes gross is when Google is contractually, you know, entrenching themselves as a monopolist. Like if you got to being a monopolist by being really good, then well, okay, so be it. But if you stay there by way of, you know, contracts and law, that's, or maybe not law, but contracts.

You know, that's where it becomes gross and apparently illegal. Yeah, and also like Google is, Google is the best partially because they have done everything I can to box out competition. So they'll stay the best if you never let anybody who could potentially compete with you from getting better. If you, you know, that like it's, it's sort of, you can't just say, like, well, a Google is the best who's ever in picks them. And everyone picks them because they're the best.

If you don't also acknowledge, like, okay, well, then how is someone supposed to get better and start competing with Google when those exclusive contracts exist that prevent competition? And so I think things like this have been holding back, Bing. It's all speculative. You can say, well, Bing would suck no matter what. Maybe, maybe Bing would suck even if these things didn't happen,

right? But we don't know, right? The whole point is we actually want to have a more level playing field, do not let the dominant player use their dominance to prevent you from ever getting good enough, right? And so even though we're all dismissively saying, well, if you put a choice screen, everyone's going to pick Google anyway. It's like, maybe part of the reason that's true is because Google has made sure no one can compete with them.

Yeah, that's a really good point. And I think the thing that that I'm most interested in about this is what it means for Apple's perspective on services. We glanced off this a few minutes ago, but this is what Jason's post was largely about. And I think the thing that kind of gives me pause and creeps me out isn't really the right turn of phrase, but I can't think of a better way to phrase it, is that we just had a discussion about how the security dialogues,

which are user hostile, are constantly being thrown in our faces. And there's becoming more and more and more of them. And as we discussed already, at a detriment to the user, we're seeing more and more of these. And whoever used to fight against these sorts of things, isn't winning that fight anymore. We're also seeing more and more and more, hey, have you heard about dark matter? Hey, have you heard about that thing with Jake Jones Hall? Hey, have you heard about the MLS, whatever,

whatever? Hey, have you heard about Friday night lights? We're getting more and more of these advertising and push notifications and things and settings and whatnot. In a way that that doesn't feel like the apple that not that I grew up on, but for lack of a better turn of phrase,

that I grew up on. And the fact that all these things are happening, that the people who used to say no to these things apparently can't or won't say no anymore or maybe just aren't there anymore, that's what gives me pause and gives me the PBGB is that I don't want apple, and this was the thesis of Jason's post. I don't want apple to lose sight of what makes apple so great. And why we are so enthusiastic about Apple that we have done damn near 600 episodes of this show,

largely about this silly company. I don't want them to lose that. And I fear that I'm starting to see a little bit of smoke around them losing sight of what makes them so special. And, and things happen, you know, sometimes mistakes are made and maybe they'll course correct and maybe it'll be fine. But I don't love this feeling that I just got this like that they're prioritizing services to the detriment of other things that they're prioritizing security in some ways to the

detriment of other things like the user experience. And I just I don't love that. And I feel like they're they're they're going too far on a few of these things. And I want I want there to be a better balance. And this is one of those things where I want a better balance. Yeah, it was one of the one of the places where some aspects of Apple's corporate structure have helped it in this way.

And I'm not quite sure how this works with the services things. I mean, in a company that was really divided up by like division, you could say, well, the people in the services department are totally incentivized to throw ads on our face because their their whole point is make the line go up on their services, right? It makes sense. But like Apple has had counter bounces against that by for example, having back in the old days, you know, despite some of his bad decisions. Johnny Ive is the

head of user experience or UI or whatever for the whole company for everything. Every single product hardware and software at one point was like Johnny Ive in his department. It's like there's no division like, you know, oh, you're an Apple TV. Oh, I can't tell you anything. No, I cut across the whole company. And I said, I am in charge of the user experience of the Apple

experience of using our product. So whether it's a Mac, an iPhone, a pencil, the, you know, the music player, you know, a music app on Mac OS like software, hardware, anything, you know, someone was overseeing that and that group, well, had expertise and incentives to make good user experience because they were judged on, you know, like, do people like Apple's products? Do they think they're easy to use and pleasant to use? Do they in, you know, induce surprise and delight,

right? That's what they're motivated to do. And maybe you in the Apple TV plus thing is motivated to get more subscriptions. But guess what? You got to go through them because you don't have your own UI team. You've got to go through the Apple-wide UI team. And I forget what they call that type of

organization. But it's like, it's the opposite of divisions, the opposite of having the Mac division, the iPhone division, the iPad division and having them just have their own little kingdoms and their own little worlds, no motivations because that can distort each one of those products because the people in that group are motivated to like sell more iPhones or some iPads or whatever. And for

example, if you had iPod as a division, they'd be motivated to sell more iPods. But sometimes the best thing to do is not to sell more iPods is to have the iPhone totally cannibalized the iPod. That's the best for the company. But if you had the iPod as a division, they'd be fighting tooth and the out-of-the-run that from happening and that's not healthy, right? And I look at things like how the hell do you come on about like Apple Payment and the Apple Card and MLS get into the

Settings app? Like where is the cross-cutting user interface design team on that? Because I know why like the Apple Card people want that to be there. But to your point, Casey, like, shouldn't there be the user experience team saying you may want that, but you can't have that. And how are they losing that fight now? Like, how is that not taking place? Where is that? Like, I know, Johnny, I've gone and maybe they just know, but like that department still exists and it's still as far as

I know it cuts across hardware and software. Does it not cut across services? This is a structural thing that's too much like sort of inside baseball about how Apple works that I'm too far removed from that. I don't actually know, but I would hope that the structures that prevent this when with the hardware software divide would like not having the iPod team, you know, fighting to keep that product alive when it was so clear that the iPhone should sweep it away,

right? Whatever allowed that to happen, I would hope those same checks and balances are still in place. But everything from the services side makes me think that somehow they are excluded from from this, these checks and balances and somehow are able to infect the rest of the products, which is not great. And like I said, it's not about the revenue. I'm not worried about the services

line going up and the product line going down. I would love it. The products were sold at cost or were lost leaders and they made all their profit from high margin services as long as the holistic experience was the Apple experience that I know and love, right? And it wasn't the throw ads in your face, you know, crappy experiences that the services people seem to want. All right. Thank you to our sponsors this week, Revenue Cat, Squarespace, and Delete Me.

And thanks to our members who support us directly, you can join us at ATP.fm slash join. One of our member exclusive perks is that you get a bonus topic every week called ATP overtime. This week, members are going to hear about Kosa, the Kids Online Safety Act, and the role of government in keeping kids safe online. It's pretty interesting kind of thorny topic. We'll be talking about that in overtime. You can hear it by joining as a member, ATP.fm slash join. We will talk to you next week.

And if you're into MasterDum, you can follow them at cas.yl. ISS that's KC list. M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M. anti-Marco armament. S-I-R-A-C. U-S-A-C-R-Q-S-R. It's accidental. It's accidental. It didn't mean too accidental. It's accidental. Tech podcast so long. So, Marco doesn't really believe in the show notes for the most part. And every great once in a while, little snippets will arrive. And sometimes I just, I don't even know. And sometimes I don't even want to know what they're about.

In the after show section of our internal show notes, I see the following. Marco's Rivian drama. I'm sitting down. I'm leaning back. All right, Marco. What's going on? I feel like we already did Rivian drama. Is there could there possibly be more Rivian drama? narrator says, oh wait, there's more. All right. So there's two areas of drama.

One is, uh, remember when John said after I got half of my car disassembled, he's like, oh no, he's like, at some point, if that happened in my car, there'd be like rattles and stuff everywhere. I don't, I don't think there's a pair of paraphrase, but I always said, I worry about if you, if a large amount of a complicated product is disassembled, like in a shop, I worry that

it's not going to go back together the same way it was. Well, I now have a substantial amount, more, um, wind noise coming from the right side of my car than I did before. Oh, um, oh no. So I'll have to get that looked at. It was not perfect before, before the repair, um, if Tiff ever rolled down the passenger side window while the vehicle was in motion, when she rolled it back up again, you'd hear wind noise. Until we stopped, she would open the door

and close the door. That would fix. So obviously like a, a somewhat of a seal issue on that window. So strange. It seems like such an error to have a view. It's, it's, it's brick shape. It's the wind. Uh, now there is substantially more wind noise from the right side and some occasional hums, a certain speed. So you don't need to back into a stump with your other side of the bumper. Yeah, that'll fix it. And you balance out the wind noise. It will cancel out like force

canceling woofers. Yeah. So I have to deal with that at some point. God knows if it's going to be a mess of like who deals with it, the body shop or a Rivian service. Who knows? We'll find that out. That's, that's part of the problem. So I took a, uh, long trip with the Rivian this past weekend. After the first fast charge at a Rivian charger, the Rivian Adventure Network Charger, which is very good.

Um, I pulled away from the charger and I got a bunch of warnings on the dash saying battery fault, uh, service SUV immediately. Oh, that's definitely reassuring as you're presumably two to three to four hours away from home on a multi hour trip that I intend to keep going on, uh, going to an event that, you know, we're going to a friend's wedding in Canada. So I, you know, it's a bit of a drive. So I'm like, well, let's see if I can just defer the service to like at home, um, try to go and,

and I noticed the cars going extremely slowly. Hmm. This sounds all too familiar and I am having real bad flashbacks right now. Mm hmm. It's running on half the number of cylinders. Yeah. So I pulled into a gas station and I'm like, what like it's barely usable? Like what do I do? So I thought, let me try this as a computer product. Yeah, I got to reboot it. I'll try rebooting it. That's it. So, no fails. Never fails. Number one diagnostic technique. Yep. And I had to do this for,

you know, for Tipvine Tesla on a fairly regular basis as well. You know, you figure out like, oh, you push the steering wheel button and something else for a few seconds. So with Rivian, it's so funny. It's like you push the left steering wheel button and the emergency flash share button on the roof. So it's, it feels just like control out delete for a car. Like it is. You should have to hold down the horn as part of it.

But you just hold on the power button and the horn is like, what is that? I was just rebooting everything right? Exactly. So it's, it's this ridiculous process. But I did the full reboot and they even warn you like when doing that, like there's a couple of like, you know, minor reboots. But if you do the big reboot, they even say don't do this more than once an hour because certain subsystems might take that long to come back up. Like, okay, that's, that's a little disconcerting

as well. But fine. We'll deal with that. So anyway, I do the full reboot. The car, you know, reboot, it takes like five minutes to reboot. It comes up. It's fine. Okay. This is basically what happened with Ostephirical correctly. When it, when it came back up, it was not fine for just a moment and then within moments of you driving away if I recall correctly, it was fine. Yeah. This was fine immediately this time. So I'm like, okay, well, I guess I need to

get service. But maybe I can continue this trip and get service like next week and not right now in canceling this, this trip or, you know, getting a rental car and leaving my car in Newburger, whatever. So anyway, so if you need one of the trip, fine. At the next charging stop, when I plugged in the fast charger, now I should clarify it at the next charging stop. This was the only charger in a pretty big area. I knew it was there. And so I kind of took a

risk to get to it. I arrived at it with like 10% charge. It's a pretty low amount of charge. And it was like, if I really had to go to another charger, I could maybe make it. But it would be, it would be a stretch. I really needed the charge here. So I get there 10% and I plug in and the charger will not start every time it's about to start. The car shows a message saying, battery fault, please service immediately. Oh no. So I'm like, oh, now my car won't charge

on a trip when I'm in the middle of nowhere at 10%. This is not good. So I try, let me reboot again. After the reboot comes back up, the problem is fixed. I can charge again. Okay. On the way home, I arrive at this charger. Now I should clarify what this charger is. This is an electrify America charger. Now I have, when I first got the review in a year ago, I believe I said on this show, electrify America chargers are fine. They're plentiful. They work.

They, some of them are pretty fast. So it's fine and it's competitive with, you know, the super chargers in terms of like utility that it offers on, on a long road trip. And vehicle that has a CCS plug and has no supercharger access is fine to own because electrify America stations are pretty decent. And I believe I gave an update to that statement a few months ago that my experience

with them was declining rapidly. That it seemed like even within the span of one year, that electrify America's chargers, which are the primary like decent fast chargers that are not Tesla's port in the US. But that electrify America's chargers were, in my experience, declining quickly that they were way more breakages of them like you show up and like, you know, half of them aren't

working to our earlier conversation. And way longer lines, like you have to actually wait to get to them sometimes because there's been so many EVs sold in the last couple of years in the US. Like, which is great. EVs are taking off. They're everywhere, especially in like wealthy areas

like New York. They're very, they're getting very, very common. But the problem is that the electrify America network and chargers not only have not scaled to the growth, you know, to address the growth, but also are actually getting worse because they keep breaking and it seems like no one is fixing them. So this is what the station was. I stopped there on the way up. It has four chargers in the middle of this giant parking lot. It's ran up by big box retail stores, four chargers on the way up,

three of the only three that were working. And I had to wait 20 minutes. And then when I actually finally plugged in, it was it advertised that it could go up to 350 kilowatts and it went 90. So, okay, not a great showing. When I get to the same station on the way home, only two of them were working. So why would you go to the same one? Go to a different one. There's nothing else around. That's why. So I get there only two of the four are working. They're all full, of course, when I get

there. Now, of course, I do what everyone does when they pull up too much of our America charge that has two open bays because the things are dead. I pull into the one of them and say, let's try it. What the heck? Maybe it'll work for me. And of course, I pull in and it doesn't work for me. So I back out and I kind of get in a position that suggests I'm in line. Because see, this is the problem with with car chargers. It's like the Apple store. Yeah. Imagine the Apple store, but with way higher

stakes and everyone's mad and there's no one working it. And they're the size of cars. Right. So, you can easily jockey for, you know, jostling around to form some amorphous blob of checkout. Imagine that, but with pieces of steel, they can't touch each other. Exactly. Or it'll cost $20,000. So anyway, so the problem with EV charging. Now again, I've, before this, I had Tesla's, of course. So I've done a lot of EV charging EV charging logistics when you're when you're at a fast charger

on the highway trail. Again, these are unstaffed. No one is working the chargers. No one is watching the chargers. No one is policing the chargers. It is just unstaffed. Like almost public infrastructure, kind of, you know, you show up and you hope that nothing bad happens and you hope you, you know, your car can get there and people won't mess with it and other people won't be a problem. Because again, there's no one working it. That's why there should be some potentially chips and a little

hot with the surely teenagers in there. Because then he at least note, hey, one of the things went out and, you know, send an email to somebody who comes and fix it eventually, but with nobody there and with like target, doesn't care. Like, you know what I mean? It's just literally zero people to notice, hey, everything is breaking. Call the people who come and fix it. Like that probably happens on like a week or month lag when just enough people get angry about showing up there and having

a nut work and send some angry email when I get home. Right. Exactly. And so here's the thing is like when when I was, you know, first in the in the EV world, it was pretty much only Teslas that were getting any kind of traction. And certainly I at Tesla's own chargers, it was only Teslas. Super chargers tend to be built with lots of bays. Even even back, you know, when I first got Tesla, I mean, 2016, I think was my first one. It was a while ago. So even back then, the super

chargers that would be built with like six, eight, 12 bays. So like there were a lot of bays. And so and because it was only Teslas and because it was so long ago, there was never a wait. There were there was always capacity. And you would show up. And the only other car that would be there would be some other like nerd or hippie who bought a Tesla. So it was a very different crowd. And a much smaller one than than what is at a modern electrify America charger today. So today,

you show up to these chargers and they are almost always full or almost full. Now the entire idea of like an like an unmonetored unstaffed, unpoliced charger totally falls apart when you have to wait. Because now it's anarchy. Like when you have to wait, now it's like, okay, we're going to like kind of form like a weird queue and everyone's going to kind of get you, oh, you were here first than you then you. But like what happens if someone jumps the line or is a jerk or, you know,

has a dispute over who was first? You should just put your quarter up on the charger. Kids listening to quarter is a unit of currency that comes in coin form. So you thought I was going to explain the arcade thing, but now I'm trying to explain how many kids know what how many kids know what coins are fair enough. I mean, they barely know what cash is anymore. Anyway, so we arrive at this charger on the way home again, I have I have

something like, you know, 12% like I'm not going to make it to the next one. And they're and the two that are working are of course taken and there's another car waiting. So now so I'm going to be the second in line for the next one. And of course, there's nowhere to park that like would form a natural line. It's just like these things in the side of a parking lot with like one of those kind of parking lot through streets right in front of it. So you there's not even really space around

it to like, you know, form a weird queue. So we just kind of pull up near it and, you know, hope for the best. Well, the car on the end, one of the active cars is parked comically diagonally across like two spots like it's just it's a it's chaos. So I'm like, all right, I'll wait, you know, and because EV charging takes, you know, half hour or whatever, most people who charge their car don't stay in it. They get out of the car and they go over to one of the big box stores that's nearby

and you know, go to the bathroom, you know, do some shopping, whatever. Now it's the communal laundry machine at college where it's like the person's not there, but their load is done. So you take those wet clothes out and you shove it on top of the machine and you put your clothes in, but kind of hard to do that with a car. Interesting that you mentioned that. So as we're sitting there waiting, this this becomes a this is a pretty long wait. And so everyone's upset. So the one car waiting

is upset. Everyone else was eventually, you know, one of the cars finishes the one person in front of me, they get they get to take that spot. Okay, so now I'm next in line. The diagonally parked car is still there. It's been there for a while. So I'm like, I wonder how close they are to finish. Let me get out and look, I get out of walkover. The screen says like 81%. I'm like, great. That means this person is going to be done really soon. I'm going to get this spot next. This will be great.

And a few minutes later, a woman walks up to this car and I'm like, yes, this is it. Apparently going to be us. She walked through the car. She opens the door, pulls out of the car, one of those like clear square to go containers full of salad, opens it up and starts eating the salad and closes the car door and walks away with the salad to disappear into like the nearby shopping center. No. And I'm like, oh, she's not leaving, but her cars at this point probably

well into the 80s. Like, what's going to happen? Like, where is she going? No, we go. She wants that 100% and so Tiff and I are like, where like, and of course, so we name her salad. We're like, where did salad go? Like, when salad coming back and like, surely the car has to be like in the 90s by now. And then as we're wondering where salad went, another car pulls up and two dudes get out.

And I use the term dudes with some emphasis here. These are the kind of guys who, if they walk up to a bunch of people at an elevator who were standing waiting for the elevator to come. They're the kind of guys who will tap the button like this. Like really, like just like tap it a thousand times just because they assume of course none of you thought to push the button. And not only do you not think to push the button, but if you push the button very aggressively, maybe the elevator

will come faster. It's those kinds of dudes who come up. They come up, of course, they try both of the other spots that don't work because again, it doesn't work for anyone else. The app says it doesn't work, but hey, maybe that maybe it'll work for these dudes. Of course not. Then they look over at salad's car and they unplug it. Wait, that's possible. I didn't think that was possible. Some of them have locking mechanisms, but not all of them. Exactly. Some of them the cables lock in

for this reason. Keep in mind, like, and this is one of the things like all Tesla has locked their cables in. The reason why is because like, you know, first of all, things like this, but like when Tesla was first entering the market, there was, and still in some places is, but especially back then, there was a lot of like, let's say conservative people who would even like vandalize or try to vandalize EVs, just like their mere existence angered certain people in the US. And so Tesla had

to design their systems to be a little bit defensive. That's one of the reasons why the Tesla plug locks into the vehicle and why like you can't stop a Tesla from charging if the car is locked and the person's like not there. I mean, you can try to cut the cable, I guess, but that would be quite quite an operation. Don't do that, please. Yeah, please. For lots of reasons, like you will probably kill yourself and also you shouldn't do it for lots of other reasons. But anyway,

salad's car is unplugged. Now we are in line right behind salad and we're like, when she comes back, she's going to think we unplugged it. Sure is. And then there's going to be like a conflict that I really don't want. And like I'm like, oh God, like I don't like, this makes me look really bad because these dudes came in unplugged it. And oh, and the dudes motion to me to say, oh come pull up next to her and start plugging it. So they want me to pull up diagonally next to

her diagonally parked car. Oh no. Which of course, I'm like, then I'm going to walk away. She's going to come back thinking I did this. And maybe like, Vanalyze my car or something. They're going to go to $20,000. Like, I just I don't want like, there's so many parts of this that I like, I do not want this. I'm like, now what? So I told these guys, I'm like, no, I'm going to wait for her to come back. Like, I'm not, I'm not taking that. I'm not doing that. But they had unplugged it. They even,

they even then like, closed her like, you know, flap like to the plug. And I'm like, I can't believe the gall of these dudes. Like, what were they driving? Um, the, uh, the Kia thing that I like, the, the, the hatchback E1. The EV6. No, the, the, the good one, the five, I think. The ionic five? Yeah, that's it. Yeah, okay. Nokia. Right. Okay. Whatever. Yeah. Yeah. The ionic, yeah. The head on an ionic five. Anyway. Um, the, now the car's unplugged. It's

starting to rain. I'm like, where the heck is salad? Now it's raining. She stuck in the mall somewhere. I like, now what do we do? Like, oh, God, she's, she's going to come back. Like, she's going to see us. We're going to have to explain to her tips. Like, don't we? I'll explain to her. Like, she'll, I'm a woman. She'll get it. Like, I'm a no. That's not, I, I don't want to leave this. Like, I just, it's like, I'm like freaking out. Like, tips are going to get beat up.

If there was like any other charger nearby, I would have just left. I'm like, I don't want to deal with this. But I, I couldn't go anywhere else. Uh, eventually, like, and the other car, eventually, like the other one that was working, that car finishes. Like, thank God. I'll take that. But I position myself. I would say extremely aggressively as they pull out so that the dude car does not take this spot. Suddenly, you don't care about another $20,000 repair. Yeah.

I'm like, I am not going to have a conflict with salad over this unplugging incident that I would never do. So finally, I like, I pull in, I get my spot. I start. Of course, the dudes immediately go diagonally park next to salad and take her cable. Um, I'm like, if you don't find, what you plugged in, we got out. The dudes get over there. And of course, like, tip was like, the way the dudes use their car was the car version of man spreading. Like, they opened,

they like, park the park next to salad, and they opened up every door and the trunk. And it's the car was just like spread out across like the whole world. Like, of course, these dudes. Um, anyway, so we get at, and we're like, this is perfect. Now when salad comes back, she can deal with these dudes who actually did it. We are out of here. So we go, you know, do some shopping ourselves. Wait, you went to do some shopping. I would be in that car waiting for salads to come

back. There's no way I'd want to miss that. Yeah, I would want to watch. Absolutely. I want the, like, I'm so conflicted with what I'm like, I don't even want to see this. I don't want any part of this. You get splash damage from the, the conflict. Oh, get to defend your car. So, you know, so anyway, we're shopping. The charges going actually impressively fast. That time I went, it went to 150 kilowatts like art. That's good. And then I get a notice as I am shopping that charging

has stopped on my car at about 82%. Oh, well, that's not so bad. I'm like, well, I mean, I need it. I was hoping to get until like 85 90, but okay, you know, that's weird, though. Why did the charger stop charging my car? And the app just said like, waiting on charger or something. I'm like, I bet I bet they tried to unplug me. Does the Rivian lock in? It sure does. But if you push the release button on electrified America charger, it stops charging. So,

they, you are able to stop someone's charge. But if their cable is locked in, you just can't take it. So you've just now stopped it for no reason. And then you're wasting time. So, so sure enough, I go back to the car. Those dudes have since left. Now there are a new, there are two new vehicles waiting. One of them is of course a giant truck with a guy who is exactly what you'd expect the kind of guy to be driving a giant truck. And the other one is just some other

dude. And that you could tell they are having a heated discussion possibly over who goes next. And I walk up and Tiff and I get into the car and I unplug my charger and we just get the hell out of there. I said nothing. I didn't look at them. I said nothing to them. I'm just like, you know what? Screw these guys. They can fight it out themselves. I am getting the hell out of here. We went to the next charger down the road to top off. And it was one of those that's a combo

supercharger and let you fire America in the same parking lot. And there were 12 chargers. Four were occupied. There was a family like playing catch in a field next to them. It was like an oasis of peace. Anyway, it's all I just say. The electrify America charging experience is really I think degrading quite a lot. To the point where even as my car is breaking, oh and I did have to reboot it two more times at different chargers on the trip, even as my car is weirdly breaking and

I have to maybe get it serviced and I'm maybe get it serviced. You have to get it serviced. I hope it's already in the shop. Yes, it's not yet. I have to schedule it now, but I've been traveling until like yesterday. So it's been it's been a deal. But I will never buy any EV for the foreseeable future that cannot at least also use Tesla's superchargers. There's so many great options at the market right now that only have CCS plugs for the next year or two or three maybe and then they'll

convert to NACS. There are certain brands that have deals with Tesla or can use adapters. I will not buy any other EV and I cannot recommend that anybody else by any EV that cannot somehow either natively or through an adapter use Tesla superchargers in the US because the rest of the charging scene is getting bad very quickly. It's only going to keep getting bad and like you know what if you wear in that situation where you have to kind of you know stand up for yourself in a charger and

say you're a woman and the other people in charge are kind of aggressive seeming dudes. Like this could be really bad. This could cause bad situations for sure. Again I have had only positive experiences with Tesla superchargers and I have had so far only quite negative experiences with ultra-friamérica and other you know CCS chargers and so I got to say use Tesla chargers whenever you can people out there with EVs and do not buy any more EVs that can't use them. I hope this whole

experience has made you more prepared for the coming water wars. Oh god. I'm sorry what climate change you know water wars. Go ahead and keep up science fiction but not really science fiction. Now it's science fact. Yeah resource scarcity brings out the best in everyone said no one ever.