I've been having a bit of a confusing couple of weeks. uh with my eyes oh no oh no so it's nothing bad this is like you know compared to you know the reality that most people live with with any kind of you know eye correction this is nothing we're gonna find some way to blame this on the vision pro No. Give him time, John. Give him time. You took it out of the drawer for one day. Now look what happens. No, I just, you know, so as I've...
As I discussed, I think like a year ago, I said I was trying different reading glasses and I tried like some progressives from the Internet. My lack of close distance focus now with my, you know. 40s presbyopia, whatever that is called, is annoying enough in my life now that...
Whenever I am wearing reading glasses and I see, like, my phone or my watch, I'm like, oh, man, that's so good. Why can't it look like that all the time? So I've tried, you know, progressives, which, you know, for those that don't know, it's... It's kind of doing what bifocals used to do, but where you don't see the line that differentiates between the bottom part that magnifies and the top part that doesn't.
where it's just kind of a smooth transition, which results in lots of oddities. And so anyway, I decided, like about a month ago, I decided, let me actually like, since it's annoying enough now in my life not to be able to see sharp things very, you know, up close. Let me try to actually give progressives a real shot. Not get like...
internet ones where I measured my face with an app and hope for the best, but actually go to a real eyeglasses place that sells the best progressives, which I gathered through research are the Zeiss individual, whatever, whatever ones. I was like the, like a nice optic.
in the city that was like you know on Zeiss's like best recommended list and you know got some really nice frames and talked to the experts there that work with this stuff all the time like yeah this is what you want so anyway I've been trying to wear Progressive's
For long spans, like not just while sitting at my desk, but like while walking around, doing stuff around the house, walking around the city, like doing stuff like, you know, not I have I'm not wearing them while driving or using a computer because.
I don't need them for those distances, but kind of, you know, while doing like general... purpose stuff you know while eating dinner it's so nice to be able to see my food really sharply or like at restaurants be able to read the menus really sharply in low light like that's all really nice and so I've been trying and you know what
You know what's great about progressives? They let you see far and close in one. You don't say. You know what's not great about progressives? Everything else. Everything else. Oh, my God. Do you like seeing the world look like Jell-O?
Progressives may be for you. Well, tell me more about this because my eyes are such crap that I have to wear hard contacts. We've talked about this many times. Have you ever looked in a funhouse mirror? Is that what it's like? No, it's not. Well, okay. The problem with progressives is that in order to have magnification at the bottom,
And in my case, no correction at the top. But whatever your correction is at the top, in order to have a transition between two different optical characteristics, there has to be some like – transitional zones where there is some degree of warping of the image. Now, the really good progressives, I can tell between my internet ones and my fancy Zeiss ones now,
The Zeiss ones are better. Their blurry zones are much smaller. There is much less distortion. It is the best type of progressive I've seen so far. However... there is still some warping, especially like what they warned me was don't like run upstairs really quickly. And I'm like, what does that mean? And I found that immediately. Why? Because, you know, the problem with...
With reading glasses, any kind of magnifier is when you look at something through the magnification part, you can see close things really sharply, but anything that's not close, it looks not only blurry, but it's also... you're altering your perception of distance slightly because it's just magnifying. So things that are far away appear at the wrong distance compared to where they actually are. And so...
The result of this is with progressives since the bottom of the magnify stuff and you look down at your own feet, they're in the magnification zone, not the nothing zone. So you look down at your own feet and your feet are both blurry and they appear... Like further away than they really are. So the result is it's really easy to trip on stuff because you don't know where your feet are. So anyway, I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing to solve this problem. If listeners.
In order to solve needing a very, I have a plus one reading prescription and no other optical correction needed. Is there a better solution than progressive glasses? Why don't you just use reading glasses? I have them everywhere. They're fine. But the problem with reading glasses is that you can't always have them on. You get one of those things that puts a little chain around your neck so they're always on you.
I still have two McDinney to wear one of those. Like, I'm just, I'm too, I can't, I can't do that. I just, I can't. You can do what I do. So I hate progressives so much that I'm fighting against them until I can't anymore. And right now I still can. And I have two pairs of glasses. I have what I call my driving glasses. Yeah, we've talked about this. Even I remember. Yeah. And then I have my around the house glasses.
which I use for using the computer. I'm lucky enough that I don't need any glasses to use my phone because my up-close vision is good. But the point is I have two pairs of glasses. And how do I handle it? I just wear my non-driving glasses all the time around the house. And anytime I leave the house, I wear my driving glasses. And that's my solution. They're literally always on my face. Something is always on my face.
I don't mind. That's why I try to be progressive. If there is one kind of eyeglasses that I could just wear all the time and correct close and far, I'm willing to do that. The problem is...
Apparently, that's not really possible without them being progressives, which has a bunch of other trade-offs. But that's not what I'm doing. When I'm in the house and wearing my in-the-house glasses, I cannot see distance well. I'm making that sacrifice because most things aren't too far away from me in the house.
And I wear my driving glasses when I watch TV. The TV is too far away for me to see. Although if it's a show that I don't care about, maybe I'll just sit closer or whatever. But yeah, basically what you're deciding is, what distances do I really need to see stuff at? And for me... I need to see my computer. And when I walk around my house, I need to see stuff that's, you know.
few feet in front of me, but I know what's in my house. It's fine, right? So you should just get whatever glasses that you feel comfortable using your phone and your computer with. Get a pair of glasses that does that and just wear them all day in the house. And yeah, that means that stuff that's far away from you and your house will be blurry, but so what? I don't think that's possible. I mean, so the problem with reading glasses is that the...
The depth of field, so to speak, like how much distance from you is in focus is not that much. It's only maybe a few feet. That's actually really in focus. Your eyes aren't fixed focal length. They squish and stretch to let you focus on things at different distances. So it's just a question of as you get older, your eyes get, your lenses get stiffer and less squishy and you can't squish them as much, but you've got some squish left in your lenses there. So you...
you know, how much can you squish without feeling eye strain? I bet you can squish from phone distance to computer screen distance with the correct prescription. And that's what you go to the eye doctor for. You say, doctor, I want to be able to see my phone and my computer screen and my computer screen is this far away from.
me and my phone is this far away from me and i want to be able to do that comfortably with my current eye squishiness ability it's it's so frustrating because like right now like my computer screen is you know whatever you know it was like two and a half feet in front of me perfectly sharp i like
No glasses needed for me to see computers right now. I mean, maybe in a few more years, that might change. But right now, if I hold my arm out, everything more than wrist distance away is perfectly sharp. It's just like... When I'm holding my phone or looking at something closer, that is not.
And it's very frustrating that there seems to be no correction. My vision is basically the opposite of yours. For me, everything from the tip of my nose to about a foot and a half away is sharp, and then everything else is blurry.
Yep. I'm basically the same without contacts. Although I think my range is considerably less than yours, but same basic idea. Genuine question, Marco. I'm not trying to troll you. What's wrong with bifocals? I've never tried them. Maybe they're garbage. I have no idea. Would that not solve the... like fun house mirror problem.
Honestly, I haven't tried them yet. I just kind of assumed that I am too young to be seen wearing bifocals. Well, that's fair. Okay, so maybe the social angle is enough to dissuade you from them, which I'm with you. I get it. But I wonder...
if maybe that would be a better solution and maybe you'd end up enjoying them more he doesn't need bifocals he needs those ones that are like the bottom part of bifocals only yeah they yeah like those like half readers like yeah i've seen those yeah exactly so then you look Franklin or whatever. Yeah, I think I'm also... I think I'm both too young for those and also, yeah, I live...
200 years too far in the future for those i think you just you know that the whole clear part of the lens is doing nothing for you just eliminate that part so you've got your little reader your benjamin franklin reader half moons uh hanging off the end of your nose and everything else is straight through
We are all waiting for more football follow-up, especially Marco. You know, I saw a football game. You did? I did. Well, I hope for your sake it wasn't the Giants, because holy crap, are we terrible. No, it was the Texas versus other Texas college game. Oh, you watched college football? Why? We were visiting friends and they are from one of the Texases and wanted to see it beat the other Texas. Were they A&M or were they University of Texas Longhorns fans?
Our friends are the Longhorns fans. Okay. I don't actually have a horse in this race, but having lived in Austin for a couple of years. Sorry, it took me a second. That joke was better than I gave you credit for. Anyways, I don't have a cow nor horse in this race, but I spent a couple of years.
in Austin as a middle schooler and I did not understand really what college was at that point but i knew more than anything in the world that the aggies sucked and the longhorns were the only team that mattered didn't know what that meant but i knew it it took me halfway through the game before i finally asked my friend
why is that team called the Yankees? That doesn't make any sense. And then I was mishearing them say Aggies the whole time. I'm like, oh, that makes way more sense for a team from Texas. Yeah, okay. Well, I'm very proud of you for watching some college football. That makes me very happy because...
I enjoy me some college football. And if you don't, that's fine. But I enjoy me some college football. What I don't enjoy these days, though, is New York football giants because, God, they suck so bad. They played on Thanksgiving. And it was, God, it was terrible. They lost the Cowboys, who was Gruber's team. I feel like America wins when the Cowboys lose, but America did not win on Thanksgiving because the Cowboys won.
It's sad times, but here we are. But the problem with the other problem with the Giants playing on Thanksgiving is that it was nationally televised. So my whole big contraption that I've set up for myself, it didn't do me any good because the game was televised.
literally the entire nation. But this coming Sunday, I believe they play on Fox at one o'clock, if I'm not mistaken. And so hopefully I will put my apparatus to use, which the reason I'm bringing all this up is because I was reminded by John Fischetti about a... a checkbox, a very important checkbox in the channel's DVR server app that I completely forgot about. So I told you where we left our hero last week was that...
I attempted to get TV Everywhere logged in through my friend's Spectrum account. I don't have his credentials. He just logged into it on my server. And I didn't get any of the local channels. I was really bummed about that because that was the whole point. point of this was that we started with an antenna specifically because all I want is local channels. I don't think he gets HBO or anything like that. I'm not looking to get HBO or anything like that. I just want the local channels.
And tried to suck it in via TV everywhere, and it didn't work, and I was very sad. And then John wrote to say, wait a second, did you check the following checkbox? Local networks via TV everywhere. Some major metropolitan areas offer access to ABC, CBS, and Fox stations via TV everywhere. And it was unchecked. And then I checked it. And guess what came in?
local networks via TV everywhere. So I now have hypothetical and theoretical access to all of these via channels, via TV everywhere. So I'm very much looking forward to giving this a shot on Sunday. I will report in with what will hopefully be the final bit of football-related follow-up next week. Is this still the device that's in your friend's house in Connecticut that is running channels? And that's why when you check this checkbox in his house, then he can get ABC.
CBS and so on. Correct. From Connecticut. Okay. Yeah. I mean, hypothetically, if he were willing to password share, which I didn't ask him to do, to give him, give me a password or anything like that. I literally told him, look, the computer's sitting in your network. Just log in, you know, go onto these.
URL and just, you know, and log into your, it's basically like an OAuth dance and, you know, log into your cable provider if you don't mind. And then I'll be able to slurp down stuff via TV Everywhere on occasion. But again, like, I mean, hypothetically, I could just cancel my.
cable subscription, but I'm not, I'm genuinely not looking to do that. This isn't about, you know, about saving money by, by, well, it's kind of saving money by cheating the system, but I'm not trying to be honest. That's definitely what it's about. I'm not trying to cheat like Verizon.
or anything like that. I just want to be able to see things that I can't see locally. And so, yeah, so he logged into, he got on the channel's web, you know, configurator, if you will, logged into Spectrum using his credentials. I never saw them. I don't think channels strictly...
ever saw them and then that now it's all enabled on the server in his house and then my server will through some channels magic will talk to his server well it's really both of them are mine servers but for the sake of discussion my server will talk to the remote server maybe that's a better way of phrasing it, and that when they'll cascade those channels down, or the programming down to me. Unrelated to all that...
We talked last week about, well, we've been talking regularly about Apple Vision Pro immersive content. And I was very sad that I couldn't come up with some sort of BS homework assignment for Marco to have to oblige to this week. So my apologies to you, Marco. I'm sure.
You're just devastated that you didn't have any Vision Pro homework this week. I'll survive. There was an Apple PR email about a bunch of Vision Pro stuff. We did. And I was genuinely happy to see it. I hope that they send more of those emails. But Marco doesn't read those. No, I did read it.
love more Vision Pro content. If we're to the point now where they have so much that they can send us emails containing lots of new Vision Pro content, that's a great problem to have. I look forward to there being so much content that that's really a thing that we need.
Yeah. But a friend of the show, underscore David Smith, wrote, after listening to your discussion last night, obviously this was last week, about the latest Vision Pro thing, I made a little spreadsheet of all the Vision Pro immersive content, adding up the cumulative runtime that they just passed.
a meaningful milestone. There is now slightly longer immersive content at 131 minutes than the 2023 WWDC keynote which included its introduction at 126 minutes. So let me say that again, rephrase it slightly. The entire WWDC keynote, of which a part of it, a large part of it, was the Vision Pro, that was 126 minutes. And as of last week, there is 131 minutes of immersive content. So we did it, Joe. We passed the threshold.
and we'll put a little graph that underscore put together in the show notes, and perhaps it'll be the chapter art for this little section. It made me laugh quite a bit, that underscore, and it's a very underscore thing to do to put this together. He continues.
On average, they have released three minutes and seven seconds of immersive content per week since launch, if you include the launch content. If you take the launch content out and just look at new content launched since February 2nd, the average new release rate is 17 seconds per day. or about two minutes per week. I love this. I love this so much. Oh, it made me so happy.
All right. We got some feedback a little while ago from Paradise Pete on Mastodon, I believe, who writes, I tried cleaning my keyboard using the screensaver method, but I also had unlock with Apple Watch enabled, and now all of my devices are conspiring against me.
makes it too easy to unlock your computer i can't get near it with my wrist to clean it because as soon as i go near it and it opens up with my watch imagine if apple's laptops also had face id then you'd be trying to clean and it would unlock because you'd be facing it so you'd have to look away take off your apple watch and then look away
Don't look at it. And then you can clean the keyboard. Uh, anyway, once again, we'll link to cleanup buddy, uh, an application that will help you lock your screen. And of course, a couple episodes ago, we had that weird key combo that you can do to shut your thing down and make it so it doesn't wake up and you hit the keyboard. Struggle is real. People want to clean their keyboards. Imagine if laptops were waterproof, then it would be a lot easier to do this.
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Alex wrote in with regard to app sizes. I think another big contributor to app sizes is that companies don't split out their apps based on their offerings either. It's quote one app per company. Tesla has a whole suite of functionality for their battery and solar offerings that somebody with just the car will never see.
Software-as-a-service companies with business-to-consumer and business-to-business offerings also frequently use the same app for both. The B2C customers get a lot less functionality, but both groups have to download the same app. This does contribute to the app size in the sense that you think about all the different screens. In the example here, in the Tesla app, you have all the different graphics that represent the power walls or the different things versus all the different cars.
Yes, that is true. However, the problem is still that they don't really care to minimize such things. There are ways to have an app that has images and... various assets and has lots of different functionality. That is not... 400 megabytes like they the thing is they really again like we were saying last time there really is not much of a culture in modern software development around minimizing
the size or even, frankly, resource usage of apps. That's why you have apps that are RAM hogs, too. Because modern computer hardware is so vast and fast that, for the most part... No one's really picking apps based on their efficiency. And then when it comes to something like a company app, like the Tesla example here, if you have a Tesla vehicle or Powerwall or multiple things... you don't have any choice but to use their app. That's how you get the function. It isn't like you have...
five different apps you can use, and you might pick one that takes up less space on your computer. No, you don't have the choice. When you're dealing with these corporate apps, usually it's their app or you don't use the product. That's yet another reason why they have no incentive to use resources efficiently because where else are you going to go? You're going to make all the Tesla people send you links to third-party apps they use to control their cars. Thanks.
Fun fact, Underscore and I almost wrote one back a long time ago. I know. You should know that they exist. You have to preempt this. Yes, we know third-party apps exist. By the way, I just looked at the app that I used. The app for my washing machine, 500 megabytes. Oh my word. So how much functionality is in that? It sends me notification when the wash is done.
Oh, my God. 500 megabytes that can be replaced by a speaker. It also sings a little song. You can also upload a name to wash cycles. You can pick any combination of various features and then give it a name and then upload. Please wash these sweaters on Bob.
yeah i think so like to alex's point i think this app works with every lg appliance that has any smart functionality so if you get a refrigerator or a dryer or washing machine or any model or anything that's this is this one 500 megabyte app is for all of them If you'll permit me a tangent, gentlemen, which, again, I know this never happens on the show. I have become one of those home assistant people, and I feel like...
I'm doing a good job of not being, you know, like a CrossFitter or a Home Assistant person where all I ever talk about is Home Assistant. Give me time. I'm sure I'll get there. But I bring this up because... A Christmas gift that I've asked for and I happen to know will be arriving on Christmas. Spoiler alert. Did Santa tell you? Santa told me. No, he told Santa. He went to the mall and told him. Yeah, that's exactly it. That's why he was.
10 minutes late today. That's why I was late to the recording. I needed to explain to Santa what home assistant was. In any case, after hearing John talk about his, what was it, Yolink thing for the refrigerator, I decided I would like to do something similar and over-automate and over-complicate something that really has no business being this complicated. And I thought I could get, I forget the term for it, but proximity sensors for the mailbox.
and then hopefully send myself a push notification when the mail gets here. I'm very excited about this. Don't yuck my yum. But the reason I bring all this up is because the other thing I really, really want to do, and I haven't figured out the right way to do it, but I've been contemplating, like, is there, like, an accelerometer version of the O-Link sensors or whatever? I want to know when the washing machine...
dryer are done and i don't want to do that via like intercepting and doing like a intercept and intercepting the power and like reading the voltage or amperage or whatever that's or wattage that's being used i i feel like there's a way to sense this using some sort of
crappy Yolink sensor. And I haven't put too much thought into this, but it's on my list of things that I don't need to automate or whatever. But I want to do it anyway as a fun project. Do you own, still from having young children, a video baby monitor?
No, actually we don't. Oh, okay. I was going to say you could like just... point that at the washing machine and then carry the screen somewhere and then that's solved you know yeah that's an old old ipad or an old iphone you could shazam the song that it sings when the load is done and then have a shortcut that says when shazam
recognizes this song, send a push notification. Can you do that? I don't think you can actually do that. I don't think it's constantly listening. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you just leave it in the Shazam app running constantly. I don't know. There's probably some shortcut way. The whole point is that they make some kind of noise when...
when the cycle is done, right? So you just got to listen for that noise. Yeah, that's true. I mean, there are other ways to solve this problem. How big and are well insulated is your house that you can't hear that? I think we can hear our laundry machines no matter where we are in our house. We can hear it generally speaking.
our house is a little over 2000 square feet. It's really not that big at all. I mean, it's bigger than John's, but not that big. And so anyways, when the kids are really, you know, I was going to say getting into it, but that implies bad. But then again, if the kids are really getting into it or just really playing.
You know, oftentimes we can't hear it. But again, this is a problem that I don't really need to solve. Same thing with the mailbox. Does it really matter? No. But would it be a fun thing to fix? I shouldn't even say fix. A fun thing to do?
Yeah. I think it is somewhat, I mean, before I had my washing machine that sends me notifications, my normal thing is you put the stuff in the laundry, you put it in, and then you take out your phone, which you always have with you, and you say, remind me to change the laundry in 35 minutes.
or whatever the cycle says it's going to take because you don't want to leave the wet clothes, especially in the summer. You don't leave the wet clothes sitting in the washing. I know they've been spun, but they're still damp. So you can be like, you know, doing stuff and you get lost in work and then you're like, oh, it's 5 p.m. and there's been wet laundry sitting in there for three hours.
So just give yourself a reminder. You don't have to hear anything and your phone will just boop until you change the laundry. Yeah, but the problem is washing machine time estimates are kind of like football time. There's nine minutes left in the quarter. All right, I'll see you in an hour. You just got to know how long loads actually take.
If your numbers on your thing lie, you still kind of know, like, how long is this really going to take? And then just set the timer for that. Or set the timer for, like, give yourself some margin of error. Like, set it for, like, 15 minutes past. You're just trying to not leave damp stuff in the washing machine for several hours. That's fair. Anyway.
Well, I don't know if I'll ever do this for the laundry machine. And obviously, Santa has committed to bringing me the proximity sensor. It's not proximity sensor. I forget what it's called. But you know what I'm talking about. For the mailbox. It is. It's a little door thing. It's got two little contacts in there together. Yeah.
Exactly. Yep. I think there's a better name for it. I can't place it right now. It doesn't matter, but you get the idea. Contact sensor, maybe. Yes! Actually, I think that is it. Thank you.
All right, anyways, why don't you tell me about what Jonathan Dietz Jr., a friend of the show, Jonathan Dietz Jr., has to say about Mac SSDs, please. They're in the news, and we'll talk more about them in a little bit, but here we go. Jonathan Dietz Jr., always lots of technical info for us. He says, Apple SSDs. utilize multi-chip packages, each of which contains a single MSP or memory signal processing die, along with two to 16 NAND flash memory dies.
And while the NAND dyes Apple uses are bog standard, the MSP is a proprietary special sauce. Apple developed their proprietary MSP in-house using IP and engineering talent gained through the acquisition of Anobit in 2011. Apple's NSP technology delivers what AnoBit claimed prior to the acquisition is a 20x increase in NAND endurance, meaning like how long it takes before it wears out.
The NAND packages for some Apple M series SSDs found in desktop Macs are located on proprietary removable modules. We talked about them in the last episode. These modules are not SSDs. They're merely part of an SSD. It is trivial for third parties to reproduce the printed circuit boards for these modules, which again, we talked about a company that did that last episode, and populate them with the necessary passive components.
However, the NAND modules with Apple's proprietary MSPs are not available through any legitimate channels, making third-party upgrades a non-starter. That's what I was wondering about. Because all these videos are like, look, we made the printed circuit board for the little module. And you just take these NAND chips and you put them there. And it's like, okay, where did you get those NAND chips from?
jonathan is saying there is no way to get them because those those individual like those nand dies on there is nand but also apple's memory signal processor which needs to be on there it's on a single die it's not a separate thing or it's not a single little rectangle i don't know if it's single die inside there Anyway, continuing. The videos of people upgrading the storage on M-Series Macs are using NAND packages pulled from other devices, which is often why they include a reballing step.
There will always be a small supply of legitimate parts available to the repair community that are pulled from non-functioning devices or new machines that have been parted out. Then again, there will also be parts illegally diverted from the supply chain or coming from chop shops that break down stolen devices.
Swapping NAND modules or packages with pulls from other M-Series Macs will only work if the NAND configuration you present to the controller is one that Apple has implemented and provides firmware for. If you have one of the packages with an extra NAND die, it needs to be in MSP0 position. That means...
even when swapping two modules of a four terabyte SSD in an M1 generation Mac studio won't work. So like the Mac studio had two modules in it. It is like saying, if you just take those two modules that came from Apple and you swap their positions, you know, in the different slots, even that won't work because.
One of them with MSP position zero has to you know want the one with the extra NAN die has to be in position zero If you try to plug a module that supports four PCIe lanes into a two slot or vice versa It's not going to work. For example, the modules from the M4 And m4 pro mac minis are neither electrically nor mechanically compatible. I mean mechanically
they can go in the slots. I know what he's saying. You can't swap these things because the number of PCI lanes on the M4 versus the M4 Pro SoCs are different. There's also a good chance that swapping SSD components between M-series Macs of different generations won't work. If you move the NAND to another Mac, the data will not be readable. Even if FileVault isn't enabled for any of the volumes on the disk, the disk itself is encrypted with AES XTS.
and the encryption keys are stored by the secure enclave integrated into the M-Series SoC. This is why swapping SSD components, even the official Apple SSD upgrades for the Mac Pro, requires performing a DFU reset from another Mac connected via a USB Type-C cable.
I'm curious why Dostude1, that was the person who did the upgrade in the video we talked about, I'm curious why Dostude1 thought you needed to use blank NAND modules because it should matter in the slightest. That's the whole point of the DFU restore. So, yeah, the important bits of information here are those little NAND modules that they always say, oh, you just take these and you solder them right on.
You can't get those. That was my question. Where do those come from? Right. Like I know this company we're going to talk about in a second, this French company is making the printed circuit boards, but you need the actual flash memory chips to go on them. And those chips have an Apple proprietary thing inside them.
Apparently there are sources from them. I mean, Jonathan Dietz talks about a whole bunch here. You know, sometimes you can get them from old Macs. You can get stuff that's been illegally diverted from the supply chain. You can get used things, right? There's ways to get them, but they're not readily available. And the other thing is that because these are just part of an SSD, you really have to match the board and the chips.
with the mac and the soc that know how to read them because it's it's not like there it's not like an interface standard like the m2 things or whatever where there's there uh nvme standard where it's like oh if you just comply to the standard this will work in any machine that can understand this thing it's like apple just tailor makes them okay the m4 pro has this many pci lanes we're gonna make
this kind of slot with this voltages or make this printed circuit board to go along with it i'm going to put these nans on it and it's very very custom so when you're buying a memory expansion you're buying it for a particular mac sometimes with a particular soc in it
I mean, I think this just shows, like, the idea of, all right, we have all of these, like... custom Mac models now that have some kind of proprietary or permanent or soldered on, in some cases, storage and memory and everything else. Apple is selling them saying this is not upgradable, really. Or in the case of the Mac Pro, it's upgradable only from us.
Like that's Apple's position and you see there are certain technical reasons for that as well or physical reasons for that as well. And we have this recent spate of people who are coming up saying like, we're going to sell cheaper modules for this. starter or whatever. But I think if somebody can get off the ground and somehow do that and somehow survive with that as a business, both legally and supply chain wise, good for them. But as a buyer, as a customer...
I would strongly advise that you don't throw your money at these people until those businesses are established. And that may never happen. Because what it looks like is this is a hard problem.
We don't know what Apple's going to do in reaction yet. If they're depending on Apple for supply of certain... proprietary chips or things like that in some way like that's that could be a problem well they're not depending on apple because apple won't give them these things but they're i mean it's not actually a complicated problem it's complicated basically essentially legally like where can you legally apparently you can't legitimately get those little
memory chips everything else about it like a it's a printed circuit board like those components you can get right uh and we'll talk about in this next item in fact the third parties who are doing this say they're actually improving on apple's design by adding some protections that apple doesn't include right but those memory chips those little squares that you see them soldering onto there
There's no legitimate place to get them, apparently. Apple won't sell them to you. Apple suppliers are not supposed to sell them to you. You could get them from old Macs that are broken, but the SSD is fine, but then it's basically a used chip. Or, you know, maybe they're...
quote unquote, diverted illegally in the supply chain where the company that is making and selling these to Apple on the side will sell some, you know, out the back door to some other people or whatever. But all of the difficulties in this procedure are not. technical are merely business related that apple doesn't want there to be a market for a third-party upgrade so these computers despite the fact that the ssds are removable and i think we discussed this last episode that
One of the obvious reasons Apple would want to make them removable is because it makes their repairs cheaper. If the SSD goes bad, they don't have to throw out the whole logic board. Obviously, on laptops, they've been soldering them down because it's a very small area.
size is a constraint but on their desktop macs even in the mac mini there's enough room in there that you can make it removable arguably you could still kind of make it removable on a laptop so for whatever reason apple's been soldering down the ssd chips but that makes any kind of repair like if one of those ssd chips goes bad or something
So expensive because you have to chuck the whole thing out and give an entirely new logic board. Now on their desktop Macs, you don't have to do that. If the SSD goes bad, Apple can just replace it under warranty with one of those little module that costs them a price that is much lower than what we would pay for it. And speaking of third-party storage upgrades...
reported on Mac rumors, French company Polysoft has successfully reverse engineered Apple's proprietary storage modules for the Mac studio and plans to offer more affordable upgrade options starting in January, 2025, following a successful Kickstarter campaign. It raised a little.
under $100,000 from 144 backers. They plan to offer two terabytes for $420, which is about 30% less than Apple's $600. They plan to offer four terabytes for about $850, which is again about 30% less than Apple's It's $1,200 and 8 terabytes for a little less than $1,200, which is...
Over 50% less than Apple's $2,400. And remember, those prices for Apple are not the price that they will sell you that module for because they won't sell you those modules. That's the price for upgrading from 512 to that amount. So if we're going from 512 to 2 terabytes, you're paying for... 1.5 terabytes for 600 so if they were to sell you these individually like they do on the mac pro the eight terabyte one would probably be 2800 or something like that right but yeah for the eight terabyte one
They're undercutting Apple. They're saying, well, for half price, you can get eight terabytes in your Mac studio for half price. And note that what they're selling here is third party SSD upgrades for the Mac studio. You can't just buy these and stick them in your Mac Pro or in another computer. It's very specific because they have to be matched to the SoC and the whole motherboard and all that other stuff, right? But I see this and I think, wow, look.
storage competition it kind of opens my like if they're successful and marco listed many reasons why they might not be and we'll get to some more in a little bit but if they are successful
This would actually put some competitive pressure on Apple and it might bring us back to the days where we say, oh, if you're going to get a Mac, get it with the smallest amount of storage available and then just chuck that out and buy one of these upgrades from a third party because it's the exact same part. In fact, it might even be better.
but it can be as cheap as half price. So apparently Luke Miani, Miani, Miani, I'm sorry, tried it. I didn't get a chance to watch this video before we recorded. So what's going on here? Yeah, it just is.
bought one of these things and installed it in his uh mac studio and in fact he installed it backwards for the first time he didn't realize that what that one's got to go in one slot and one's got to go in the other slot and it didn't work right right but he eventually figured it out um but yeah it's a lot easier than soldering you just buy this
thing from somebody it comes in the mail you open up your mac studio which is annoying because there's this stupid circular foam thing you have to cut off with adhesive anyway apple could really make these macs easier to open but anyway You open it up and stick the things in, and he got 8 terabytes in his Mac Studio for half the price that he would have if he bought it from Apple. And you can check out the video, but mostly I put it in there to show...
that this is i mean i guess he's he's kind of an apple centric thing but this seeing videos about upgrading mac storage this is the topic of the day for these desktop macs i mean obviously this is about the mac studio but also the mac mini like if apple's going to put these in modules People are going to look at that and say, I should be able to upgrade that. And Apple will say, but you shouldn't. But yeah, I should be able. I can physically remove it.
it's here in my hand can i get another one of these but not buy it from you it's kind of like the app store stuff where it's like everyone's like yeah we want to sell things to customers but we don't want to give apple 30 is there a way we can do that
Once once you, you know, if you conceive of the possibility, can you imagine selling software without Apple getting 30 percent? Well, anyway, people have that conception in their mind because this thing that used to happen all the time and people don't forget. Uh, or even the people who weren't alive then, the old people can say, kids, we used to sell software, uh, through the web and Apple wouldn't get any percentage of it. Can you imagine that? Uh, but yeah. How do things work then?
We used to be able to upgrade storage. How did Apple not go bankrupt? Right, right. We used to be able to upgrade. Well, they almost went bankrupt. Anyway, we used to be able to upgrade storage. And now here it is again. These new Macs, their storage, it seems, it comes right out. This is interesting. And so I... I, you know, we'll see how this goes. It's a Kickstarter. Um, you know, anyway, so we should read Jonathan Dietz's analysis of how he thinks this is going to go.
Indeed. So Jonathan writes, I stand by what I said in my previous email. I don't see how they can legitimately gain access to a sufficient supply of NAND packages with Apple's proprietary MSPs. I'm also not sure they sufficiently differentiated their design so as to avoid legal action from Apple.
Polysoft does say that, quote, the main risks are the supply of certain specific components, which is why we have set up an extensive inventory, quote. However, it concerns me that Polysoft hasn't come out and addressed the MSP issue head on. I'd love to hear their take.
the legal thing makes me think oh that's the way apple will go like because the printed circuit board like so they reverse engineered apple's printed circuit board by basically sanding off the layers like uh the the luke miani uh video shows some pictures from that that's how they figured out how the circuit board works
they we have a legit one that works we'll how do we reproduce this slowly sand off the layers of the printed circuit board so you can see what each layer does and look at all the surface mount components and maybe upgrade a couple components uh and then you just got to get those in the end chip so you know um
They're worried about the supply of certain specific components, which has got to be those proprietary NANDs. And I have no idea they're getting them. And I imagine they don't want to say anything about the MSP because why would they... Why would they say that they're doing something illegal? Like someone's selling them these things on the sly who shouldn't be. So, yeah. I mean, and I assume most of them are new, but again, they could be from like Macs that are, you know.
old or broken in some other way but the ssds are fine so we'll see how this goes but uh if i was looking to save money on storage on a mac i'd be willing to at least try this uh just because Storage price on whatever my next Mac is is going to kill me because i'm pressing up against my four terabyte i really pressed to get the four terabyte in my mac pro in 2019 it was like the most expensive upgrade that i applied to this machine i think was just increasing the storage and i'm
you know the only other choice i have that's bigger than four from apple is eight and that's gonna like double the price of whatever the next computer i get so i'm i'm watching with interest how this goes and i think a lot of other people are too and like
I like to see this. I want Apple to feel competitive pressure. If you make a removable component and someone can figure out how to make that same removable component and sell it for what must be still, and Jonathan said this in his email, but I didn't quote it, must still be really... healthy margins for polysoft just not apple healthy just not 6.5 times market rate maybe it's only three times market rate but it's still a good business to be in you could undercut apple
you know sell the eight terabytes for half the price that apple sells at less than half the price because again that's the price of just the upgrade from 512 sell for half price still make a healthy profit Maybe that'll put some pressure on Apple. Maybe people will, if this becomes a legit business, people will stop paying the giant Apple prices and just go back to the conventional wisdom of, oh yeah, get that desktop Mac with the lowest amount of storage and upgrade it from a third party later.
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Let's do some topics. Let's start with threads. Maybe we should, before we get into the topic, can we do a quick temperature check on how much all of us are using threads? For me... I feel like I started using it a fair bit three-ish months ago, something like that.
I was starting to really like it. And then I don't know if I was feeding the algorithm poorly or if the algorithm changed or something like that. But I started falling kind of out of love with it maybe a month or two ago. So it was only like a month or two that I was really kind of into it.
And then Blue Sky kind of found the juice after the election. And I've been paying more attention to Blue Sky than Threads recently and generally enjoying it more. But that's where I am. Marco, where are you on Threads and Blue Sky? I'm really not there. I have accounts on both of those services for both me and Overcast. And we maintain ATP accounts. That's a separate thing. John does that, I think, entirely. But anyway, so for my stuff...
I have my personal account and I have Overcast accounts on Threads and Blue Sky and Mastodon. I only use Mastodon regularly of those three. As I pulled away from Twitter... over the years I learned that I didn't really need Twitter for my business it was really just a place I enjoyed hanging out personally sometimes sometimes it was not enjoyable
And it was a huge time sink for me. The whole reason I made an app called Quitter was that I was having trouble not spending all day on Twitter when I was supposed to be working. But I was spending all that time on Twitter. Because I thought it was necessary for me to reach customers and my audience and things. So it was necessary for business reasons. And what I have found out when I left...
Twitter and spent only really started spending time on Mastodon. Mastodon, I have a way smaller audience there, not even close to the size of the Twitter was. And yet my business metrics didn't go down at all. In fact, nothing went down. And what's interesting, too, is that over the last year or so, I've also really pulled back a lot from just social media in general. I pulled back a lot. I hardly ever post on Instagram anymore. I don't.
post that much on mastodon um and it's mostly you know just dropping in here and there and also is my my numbers didn't really go down um with overcast stuff Building an announcement mechanism in the app to reach my customers in the app was way more effective and benefited way more people than using the social media channels for that purpose.
And so what I'm finding is I don't really have much of a business need to maintain a strong presence socially. So it's really just what do I like to do personally? And what I like to do personally is... And more and more as I get older, I want to just hang out with my friends.
And that's different from broadcasting publicly into a room full of strangers, most of whom want to yell at me that I didn't broadcast publicly correctly. Social media has gotten so much less fun over the years as everyone's gotten... angrier um the recent election did not help at all um but you know even before the election everyone has been getting angrier for so long that what's left on social media is
A bunch of stuff to make me angry about things I mostly can't control that are going on in the world. And a bunch of people who have been made angry. So when I come and try to post about programming, I'm mostly...
you know, posting in front of all those people who are angry about other stuff. And then sometimes that blows back on me. And I'm just like, I don't like, what am I doing this for? I just want to hang out with my friends. I'm no longer interested in like, sharing what's going on in my life just for the sake of sharing like that's that's part that's a big reason why i pulled back so much on instagram you know if i take some picture of you know like me and my new glasses
Who cares? The people close to me care about it. The people who have to see me every day, they care about it. No one else needs to care about that. What about when I take a trip somewhere? I find this new restaurant in the city. It's really cool. Who cares? No one's following me for that. So what I'm learning is I don't want to just be performing my life on social media to try to, I don't know, gain followers. That's not really what I'm there for.
I don't mind sharing my life, but I'd rather do it with people I actually know, like my actual friends and family. And so I have found relatively little place in my life now for social media besides... Casual browsing and sharing for professional or business reasons. So if I want to talk about Swift or, you know, some kind of app technical thing.
Mastodon's great for that. I go there for that. If I want to ask a question about code, Mastodon, perfect for that. If I want to read, just catch up on what my friends are up to. Instagram is good for that, but I consume mostly and don't post much. So it's becoming primarily a read-only medium for me. So what am I going to use threads in BlueSky for? Well... It seems like Threads and Blue Sky are mostly successful.
for people who want to be like really jacked in to social media this is like journalists uh people who were like information junkies people in certain verticals that those are are maybe strong in like i know sports is kind of over on Blue Sky from all the Twitter refugees and stuff. And politics are obviously a huge part of all that. And so when I dip into these services, what I mostly see... is a bunch of people who are probably just going to make me upset or angry.
based on what they're talking about or what's going on that day. What are we all mad about today? Join the pylon. I don't want that anymore. I don't have a place in my life for that anymore. I have other things that I want to spend my time and attention on. All that is to answer your question in the longest way possible. No, I don't really use Threads or Blue Sky very much. Fair enough. Thank you. Thank you for that succinct reply. John.
And when I left Twitter, I went to Mastodon and the critical mass of the people that I care about hearing from are also on Mastodon. So I feel like I'm there and my people are there. That's my main place where I am and have been for a while now.
Uh, I have, uh, I was excited about blue sky back when it was announced way back in the day as a spinoff project from Twitter. And I signed up for a blue sky account on like day one and I've had it forever, but I haven't really used it that much. Uh, threads. I also signed up on a day one just to see what that was like. For Threads in Blue Sky, one of the things that annoys me about both services is their third-party client ecosystem is poor.
Yes. I don't think there's any third-party clients for Threads, and there's some for Blue Sky. but none of the clients do work the way I want them to, and there's just not as many as there are Mastodon clients. There are so many Mastodon clients to choose from. There are some really, really good ones, and that makes a difference to me. um it makes a big difference in how i use them i do check um threads and um blue sky
Every single day. I recently promoted those two apps out of a folder on one of my other screens up to there on now on page two of my, you know. home screens so the second home screen not in a folder because i just i'm i'm checking them every single day usually multiple times a day but what i'm doing there is i'm essentially monitoring people who are trying to communicate with me there
right? Because I do have accounts there and so I manage the ATP accounts that are there as well. And if people who are there are trying to communicate with me or with ATP or with Rectifs or with my hypercritical account, I actually have a bunch of accounts on all those things. Um, that's what I'm doing. I'm not reading the timelines on threads or blue sky much. Occasionally I peak, but it's just like, it just confirms that that's not, that there's not much there for me.
And we'll get to that in a second when we talk about what this actual topic is about. But yeah, I'm looking at them all the time to see who's at mentioning any of those four accounts that I have in all the systems. And having to deal with either the first-party clients or the not-so-great third-party clients. Not so great.
Third-party clients for Blue Sky, a lot of them are really good. They're just not suited to what I'm doing, which is shuffling through four different accounts, checking for mentions. that's not a normal pattern for most users, right? Most users are reading their timelines and replying to people and stuff. And I am basically using it as a essentially customer support type of thing. In terms of reading.
I'm looking at Mastodon mostly. I follow a list of people on Mastodon that gives me things that end up in this show. I'm also looking on threads in Blue Sky for things that end up in this show. They're just harder to find because people are talking about different stuff. Most of the tech... people i have found to follow our mastodon there's fewer of them elsewhere so yeah i'm using all those apps every single day i'm checking them diligently
But I don't like the clients and I don't spend any personal time there. All my personal time, if I'm spending any personal time or following people or just like friends or post interesting things, that's all on Mastodon.
Yeah, and just to build on that for a moment, the client thing really heavily affects me as well. The reason why I got so into Mastodon was that... I learned what I really liked about Twitter was the experience provided to me by TweetBot, both on the phone, but also more often on the Mac. And what Tapbots did when Mastodon became big and Twitter shut down their API to third-party clients...
They basically adapted the code base that they had for Tweetbot and made the app Ivory, which is basically Tweetbot for Mastodon. And because Mastodon is a very Twitter-like service, what that ended up doing was... It let me not really change any of my habits or workflows. I just changed the app name that I was using from TweetBot to Ivory. And I was able to move...
you know, to move my habit into that and I just kind of fit right in and didn't have to think about it and could keep working the way I always did. That is not, at least at the moment, as far as I know, they don't have anything like that for Blue Sky, which at least has an API.
threads doesn't even have the right api for that as far as i know and probably threads probably never will but blue sky does have a bunch of pretty good third-party clients yeah like knowing facebook they're never going to have like a a client read and write kind of api like they want you to add value
to them by posting to them they have an api for posting but i don't think they're ever going to give you an api that will let you build a reading client um so you know that's not really going to happen for threads which is where most of the people are blue sky i mean look if if blue sky ends up like continuing its growth and sustaining all the people, which is hard and not super likely. I'm glad they're having a moment. They're having strong growth right now.
A lot of people love kicking the tires on a new social app that they hear is where, quote, everyone is going. Keeping them there after a little while, that's hard. That doesn't often happen. We've seen that before. I mean, look, we even got people to go try out app.net for a little while.
Then everyone left. That's the throwback. That's why Ivory was as possible as it was, because they adapted TweetBot to App.net, so they had to generalize it. And once they did that generalization, even though App.net went away, when Mastodon came along, they said, we've already done the work to generalize it. our Twitter-like client app, and so it was easier from what I heard to slot Mastodon in.
Yeah, we can actually somewhat thank the success of Mastodon among our community of Apple nerds to NetBot, which none of them would remember. No, I remember, but yeah, I'm with you. And by the way, for anyone who's making a Blue Sky client or whatever, like...
uh ivory i also use ivory even though twitter was my first and uh biggest love on ios uh tweetbot is also very good and if you're wondering what kind of features are useful for people like me who are monitoring lots of accounts just copy everything that ivory does They make it easy to switch between accounts with a small number of taps and gestures. I think I counted it the other day. I think threads requires three times the number of actions to do anything that I do on a regular basis.
It's maddening. Yeah, and everything is very compact and they have really good multiple account support. And when you're replying, you can choose which account you want to reply from just at the last moment.
That's not why most people are using it. They're just using it because it's a really good client. But it's a really good client for a single person reading a single account. It's also a really good client for someone monitoring, quote unquote, brand accounts or, you know, doing customer service or whatever.
Yeah, and what I'm doing is monitoring three different accounts, two of which mostly just for replies. And then my personal one, I'm kind of posting and replying here and there. But I'm monitoring three different accounts. Even if, you know, suppose, I don't know what, you know, if Tapots is planning on making a blue sky client or not, or, you know, adapting it into ivory. I don't know that, but...
Suppose they did what I think would be the best thing for my personal preferences, which would be... modify ivory to also support blue sky in one unified app that would be great um i think maybe that would be great but you know then what then i have you know two different personalities on two different services that I'm kind of cross-posting to, and that's always difficult, and there's always little...
little gotchas and little crappinesses that go along with you trying to use cross-posting and trying to appear that you're really there in two different services. So, like, that's... That's difficult. That's a difficult problem to solve. You still wouldn't have threads, which is where by far the most people are and will probably continue to be. So you have all those logistical and mechanical problems of trying to juggle multiple services.
Ultimately, Twitter back in the day, for all of its faults, was overall better for most people. Because it was one place that you could be pretty sure like anybody who you would want to reach that way was probably there. Anything that you wanted to follow, any kind of informational feed from government agencies or businesses or scientific agencies or whatever, it was probably on Twitter. It was great having that all in one place.
Always a train wreck, even long before Elon bought it. They've always been a train wreck as a company. They were just train wrecks in different ways than they are now. And maybe overall, maybe less of a train wreck. It was good back in the day when it was one place where everybody was. Now, when there's all these different places that everyone has split up to, I don't really love any of these services enough to really use them.
heavily the way I used to use Twitter, which honestly has been a huge benefit to my life to not have that anymore. Having to go to multiple apps to monitor these things, though, is annoying. Not that we're going too deeply, but just to... Let people know and preempt some feedback. There are apps that let you read multiple services at once. The latest version of the reader app, R-E-E-D-E-R, is multi-service. You can do RSS feeds, Blue Sky Threads, Twitter. Not Twitter.
Maybe yeah, Twitter. Oh, no, not with the API anymore. But anyway, you can do multiple stuff. You can do at least Mastodon and BlueStay. There's Icon Factory has an app that they're working on. I think it's still in beta that lets you have essentially a single timeline with multiple different... services mixed into them um that like margot was saying i'm for reading kind of like treating it as like it's an rss reader but you can also read uh social services uh with it as well that's cool
um but it's not quite the same thing as participating in the timeline where you're conversing because you'd be it would be like if if uh every one of your messages threads in the messages app was in a single conversation view Yeah, now you can see everything that everyone's saying to you, but...
When you reply to one person, like you reply to someone who posted something on Blue Sky, but then another person replies to something and they're on Mastodon and they didn't see either of those two that were on Blue Sky, but you think they did based on what they say and you reply to them as if they saw those, but oh, you got to scroll up and look, there was a little tag that said that.
one was from blue sky like keeping track of an interleaved chronological timeline of seven services and trying to have conversations with the people on those services i don't think is a good experience which is why a lot of those Reader apps like R-E-D-E-R and the Icon Factory app are focused on reading primarily. They're not there for you to have conversations, but it is there for you to have a single timeline that you can catch up on. Kind of like an RSS reader. You're not...
You're just reading different websites, right? That's there. And of course, there's the federation aspect. Mastodon is federated. And in theory, independent of any single company. Blue Sky wants to be federated, but is not. It's centralized, but they're working on it. They've been working on it for years. Wake me up when they get somewhere.
of course says oh yeah no we're totally going to federate a proprietary service with uh with activity pub and mastodon and they've been doing it in bits and pieces but they're doing it so slowly and so piecemeal i can follow the you know the president
soon unfollowed but anyway you can follow big accounts that are on threads i can follow them for mastodon but you can't really have a two-way conversation now finally they can follow you but if you've only if you've replied from them and it's confusing because someone looking for me will find that i do have an account on threads
It's not the one that I use. I use the one in Mastodon. So someone on threads will probably follow me on threads. They wouldn't follow me on Mastodon. And it's, you know, maybe someday the Federation will actually work. And then I could have an account on Mastodon and not feel like I'm missing anything happening on threads. But today is not that day. They're just taking baby steps in that direction. So the bottom line is I am now checking.
at least three different social services. I mean, I have accounts on Instagram as well for some things, but mainly those three services where once I had to only check one of them. And that is...
not as pleasing and more annoying but that's the reality we're in you just you got to do what you got you got to go where the people are i can't there's nothing i can say or do that's going to make everybody go to mass thon or everybody go to blue sky or everyone go to threads people are going where they're going maybe they'll settle in some position you know and the people when i say everybody i'm talking about like listeners to this show which are not
representative of the general population which is why so many of them are on mastodon but in the general population mostly people are on threads because they leverage the instagram social graph and blah blah blah and then blue sky is you know is big now right but those people who are going to blue sky are probably not as many ATP listeners as we're already on Mastodon. So anyway, that's the situation we're in. Now we can finally get to what I thought was going to be a short topic on threats.
You thought wrong. Threads is testing the option to choose your own default feed. Reading from The Verge, Threads will now let users decide what feed they want as their default when opening the app. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the news in a post saying you'll be able to choose between the For You following or any customer.
Yeah, so speaking of threads... uh one of the things that has been true with the threads app from day one uh is that when you launch the app it puts you into the algorithmic timeline which is the right default for most people because most people don't do what i do which is carefully follow a list of people and then read everything that they post no they check you into
algorithm timeline and you can have your complaints about the threads algorithm it is what it is but that's where it checks you when you launch the app but if you like pull down on the screen and go up to the top or whatever, you'll see that there's the like, whatever it's called for you. And there's the following one. Like there's another tab at the top of the screen that brings you to essentially a chronological timeline of the people you follow.
And remember when threads launch, they're like, oh, there'll be an algorithmic timeline and there'll also be a chronological one. So it's whatever you want. If you want the algorithmic one, you got it. The threads will try to show you posted it thinks you're interested in and mix them with the people you follow. But do you want it to be like...
Old school for the weird fuddy-duddies like me who want to read a chronological timeline of the post from the people they follow. It's right next to it. You just tap that and now you're reading a chronological timeline. Well, guess what? From day one, the Threads app...
lets you do that and click on the following tab and get a chronological timeline. But every single time you relaunch the app, it says, oh, here's the algorithmic timeline. You can go to the chronological one if you want. It never remembers. intentionally it always wants you to go to the algorithm it could remember it's just a simple preference they could save the fact that i went there they could save the fact that i always wanted to go to the chronological one
They could save the fact that literally the first thing I do every single time launch the app is go to that one. But no, they won't. Save it. It's one of the most user hostile things a piece of software can ever do is intentionally ignore what they know you want because it's not what they want. They want you to see the algorithmic timeline because they think they know better.
think we get more engagement when we force people to see our algorithmic timeline doesn't matter what they want because our testing has shown if we let people make that preference sticky. If we remember that they went to the chronological timeline and we keep it there, we get less engagement from that person. And it doesn't matter what they want. It only matters what we want, what metrics that we care about. So from day zero,
Threads app has been doing this and I've hated them for it. And it's like, well, it's Facebook. What do you expect? But here's this story from this is from November 25th. This story. Oh, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, the big CEO says, hey, guess what? And this was around the time Blue Sky was getting popular because of the election or whatever. So, oh, competition. Threads us feel in the heat. People are going to Blue Sky. They got to do something. Even just the slightest bit of competition.
the slightest idea that anyone might know Blue Sky exists. makes the CEO of the company, Mark Zuckerberg, come out and say, oh yeah, now we're working on the secret technology that will allow you to see the chronological timeline. We finally figured out how to save a Boolean and a preference. We did it. We finally...
figured it out and how did they figure it out nothing to do with blue sky we just we just thought this would be a cool feature that you might like so we decided to roll this out for no reason and it's being announced by the ceo of the company so incredibly user hostile feature that only, you know, gets reversed when there's even the hint of competition. But here's the thing. As they say, they're testing this option. I still don't have it.
Every day I go to threads and every day I check, do I have it? Am I being AB tested? Have they done the update? No, they haven't. That was November 25th. And I'm still waiting to be able to get this stupid app to remember that I always.
want the chronological timeline every single time. Instead, it's kind of like the, you know... you know crop uh you know format original or whatever a crop aspect original thing that for every time i went to photos and resized an image 65 000 times or whatever it was i came up with
That was just an oversight. This is them legitimately doing a thing that I don't want them to do because it's better for them. And they finally say that they're not going to do it in November. And here we are, December 5th, still not out. So I'll keep you updated on this, but like. I want this option because I never want to see the Aquamanic Timeline. Ever. Ever. Please.
It's almost like they got the PR boost of saying, hey, the CEO said we're going to stop doing this incredibly evil thing we've been doing because of the slight hint of competition for Blue Sky, but then they don't actually do it. Did they just take the PR window announcing that they're thinking about doing it?
Yes. So I know it might take them a while to figure out how to implement that. You know, they really have to test this feature. Really, really test them. I don't want to screw up the whole application, but saving this preference off. This is driving me nuts. But if you're out there and you have this feature, and by the way, the way they implement it is insane. have to go to let me just pull up the app to figure out what you have to do you have to go to uh well again you have to
go to following, just hold down on following and say edit feeds. And then you have create new feed and then you see for you and following. If you have the feature, there will be little reorder grippers in for you and following and you change it so that following is on the top. and whatever's on the top will be the default. That's how they implemented it. I had to look this up to say, do I have this feature? Yeah, I don't have it yet. I have no grippers. I can't reorder them.
I'll keep you posted. But anyway, Mark Zuckerberg is terrible. Facebook is terrible. I don't like threads. Wait, so what do you do? You... Say that again? I want to see if I have it because it'll make you so upset. Go to the Threads app. See the little at sign at the top where it says for you and following? Yeah, yeah. Hold down on following. Oh, on following. Edit feeds.
And then you see Create New Feed for you and following? Yeah, you don't have little grippers? You don't see the reorder grippers on for you or following? Oh, I absolutely do. Well, you've got it, but I don't. I'm just messing with you. I'm just messing with you. I don't have any grippers. No.
That someday, Mark said in November, they're testing this option. Maybe they're going to test and say, you know, it'll be less engagement. So forget it. We're not doing it. Yeah. I mean, what do you expect? It's Facebook. Okay, so breaking news as of a couple of days ago, Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of Intel, is out reading from The Verge. On Monday, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger abruptly decided to retire after less than four years on the job. That was the official story, anyhow.
Reuters, Bloomberg, and the New York Times had a different one. The board of directors pushed him out. Three and a half years ago, Gelsinger announced an ambitious plan to turn around the troubled chipmaker within four years. Now he's reportedly been kicked out of the company before he could see it through. It happened so abruptly that Intel doesn't have a planned successor in mind. Cool. And so completely that Gelsinger won't even stick around as an advisor. He's gone.
Intel's been in a tailspin for years. It missed the smartphone revolution. It has been plagued by quality control issues with its chips, lost customers like Apple to alternative processors, and is now at risk of missing out on AI too. If Intel's falling apart, this isn't just a business story.
The United States government has called it a national security story, too. Intel isn't just the world's former leading maker of computer chips. It's one of the last companies to do both design and manufacture of them in itself instead of outsourcing the latter part of the manufacturing to Intel.
asia it's one of the only level levers the u.s can pull to reduce dependence on taiwan for chips should china decide to exert control some of that might be in jeopardy because of what intel's management has or hasn't done or might newly be in jeopardy now that the board is kicked Belsinger out.
Now, with regard to splitting Intel into a chip designer as one standalone business and as a fab business as another, Intel can't spin off its own foundries very easily, particularly now that it's receiving nearly $8 billion in Chips and Science Act. Thank you. of the new company or lose its voting rights the commerce department wants to make sure intel will still fulfill its u.s manufacturing promises
that could make it difficult to fully spin out. Quote, the economics of Intel's Foundry are so challenged that I don't know how a spinoff is even feasible without a massive cash infusion, quote Ben Bajarin writes. Ultimately, I hope a buyer for Intel Foundry emerges who can help the U.S. gain an... in domestic semiconductor manufacturing, as this is far more strategically important geopolitically than many realize. Ooh, there's a lot there.
So the sad story of Intel. Our perspective on the Apple side of things was that, you know, Apple, Intel was the enemy. Then Apple went over to Intel when they had the best chips. And then they left them when they didn't anymore. And in between, a lot of stuff has been going on at Intel. Obviously, for the young people to remember, there was the Wintel duopoly, which was Windows for Microsoft and Intel chips.
Those two companies dominated the personal computer age from the dawning of the PC until basically the internet age. Intel was powerful because of, you know, legacy and history and the duopoly power that they had. And also for a while there, they were powerful because they were the best at manufacturing silicon chips. Their fab, their fabrication facilities for silicon chips was better than everybody else's.
people who dislike x86 will say that's how they can make the ugly pig that is the x86 construction set uh be the dominant chip in the world because their fabs were so much better. They had finer processes than other people. Their processes were multiple years ahead of the competition. They were the best in the world. When Apple went over to them, that was true.
best chips in the world it just so happens the chips they made were x86 but whatever you could make that pig fly if you put it on a fad that's two years ahead of everybody else during that time when they're making all that money
uh they were blinded by their success they missed out on the smartphone resolution because they're like we make all our money selling these x86 chips we're the best in the world we sell the best pc chips that's where the show is we sell server chips that's great who cares about phones we're not interested in that
uh intel owned a big stake in a company they made arm chips uh so did apple for that matter uh and intel said you know what we don't think there's any future in arm chips and they sold it whether or not that was a smart move that you know they also didn't make their own mobile chips uh for the ai machine learning stuff or even like the crypto things or whatever were
Nvidia was out there, you know, is now what was briefly the biggest company in the world is now the size of Apple, thanks to all the AI training they do on their GPUs. Intel missed out on all that as well. Speaking of GPUs, Nvidia, AMD will make GPUs. gpus uh intel tried to make gpus a couple of times they're currently making gpus they're not very good at it one of their products by the way i remember um i had someone who i worked at a job with who left the job to go work um
at Intel on this project. Do you remember the Larrabee project? Let's make a GPU. Let's make a graphics card out of tons and tons of tiny x86 chips because that's what Intel knew how to do. We make x86 chips. Can we make a graphics card out of those? What if we make... a whole bunch of little tiny x86s and put a ton of them on the chip can we make a gpu out of that that was the larabee project you know who's in charge of the larabee product project pat gelsinger
right he was trying to make a general purpose like gpu massively parallel computing thing that project didn't go well um But during all this time, Intel has been like, yeah, but we make all our money on our other chips. And so we're doing fine. But then a bad thing, another bad thing happened. Yet another bad thing. Apple, or not Apple, Intel, which used to be the leader in fabrication, lost that lead. They made the wrong bet, uh, stupidly on what the next generation of silicon, you know.
fabrication would be they actually made the right bet they invested in this company that would be the future of that they invested in this euv uh you know technology but then they said you know what even though we invested billions of dollars in it we think that's kind of expensive and we think we can do it a different
cheaper way and they were wrong they could not so they blew a multi-year lead on the entire industry while the rest of the world made the right bet or tsmc made the right bet and now the intel has got chips that uh they sell for like servers and pcs apple doesn't buy from them anymore their fab technology stagnated for years because they made the wrong bet right so they didn't have the best fab in the world anymore uh they didn't even have the best x86 chips in the world i think one of the worst
One of the biggest signs that Intel was in trouble, one of the sort of leading indicators that Intel was in trouble, if you were paying attention, was way back when they were all powerful, they couldn't even successfully transition from 32-bit to 64-bit. They tried with Itanium and it was another bad bet. Their competitor, their sort of like little tiny little brother copying off them, AMD, came up with x86-64.
And Intel didn't come up with that. Intel wanted to do Itanium and didn't work out. And guess what we're all using? When we say Apple went to Intel chips, with the exception of, I think, some of the early ones, they went to x86 underscore 64. And Intel didn't make that instruction set. AMD did, right? So...
They just lost, Intel has lost everything. They're not the best at making chips. They don't have the best chips. They're not selling the most chips. They're not selling into any of the big growth markets, mobile, GPUs, crypto, AI training. They're nowhere to be found. So into this, Pat Gelsinger comes back to the company. He was also the lead architect on the 486. He worked on Larrabee. He spent 30 years at the company. He left. He came back after being at VMware.
save the company pat and pat says here's how i'm going to save it i'm going to fix everything i'm going to make our fab best in the world again i'm going to start i'm going to have our fab take uh
We're going to make chips for other people. We didn't used to do that. We only made them for ourselves because we were the best, but now we're going to make them for other people too. And then the other part of the company, we're going to make the best chips in the world. And if our fab can't fab them, we're going to fab parts of them at TSMC because they're the best in the world now, right?
So we're just, you know, no more of this like, oh, we have to be tied to our fab. We're just going to do everything. We're going to make great chips. We're going to fab them, whoever's the best. And our fab people are going to try to make the best fab. And he was on the way to trying to do this plan and it wasn't working.
great uh and they just the board of directors got tired of it and said you've spent too much money it doesn't look like it's going well you're out arguably they didn't give it a chance to see it through to the end but also arguably the end could have been the company going under right
Because they spent so much money, especially on the process stuff. Their new processes that are supposed to be competing with TSMC are not as good as TSMCs, are behind schedule, and they apparently have no customers.
So if you're going to be like TSMC and you're going to be in the business of making chips for other people and you want to make the best fab in the world, A, you better have the best fab in the world. And B, you got to have someone who's going to pay you money to make chips for them.
that's an important part of the business if that's what you're doing uh and then the other side of it intel trying to make its own chips it's been messing up by making chips with a bunch of problems that you may have read about in the news uh and it's been using tsmc to help fab them but tsmc is like
If you want to fab your chips with us, we would prefer it if you weren't also trying to be a fab yourself. And so if you're going to have your own fab over there where you're trying to get our compete for our customers, we're going to charge you more. If you give up on that whole fab thing, TSMC might say, it will give you a better price. Just be like Apple.
Like, they don't have a fab. They just pass money and we make their chips. They're not competing with us. And so, you know, Pat was trying to make Intel do everything all at once and it wasn't going that great and they kicked him out. And this is a really, really sad... Another very sad chapter in the downfall of Intel. Not that I cared that much because...
I'm not too invested in Intel and AMD is doing great and NVIDIA is doing great and Apple's doing great and TSMC is doing great. But that whole part that we read at the end there with the whole sort of geopolitical thing, that's that's a real thing. It's not just like Rara USA. So much of the world's economy essentially depends on TSMC now. All of the top end chips, the best manufacturing, that's in Taiwan. Taiwan is in a politically precarious situation.
It would be great for the U.S. government or any government to say, do we have a hedge against that? If things go really badly over there, can we make chips? And the current answer is no, not really. I know we've got TSMC with a plant in Arizona, but again, it's the same company. And also they're not making the top end chips. They're making like two years behind type chips. Intel got $8 billion from the U S government to help with manufacturing.
But now the CEO that was trying to make that plan happen is out. And now like the rumor is that maybe the board wants to really split it off and say, OK, we're just going to be fabulous. We're not going to make any chips. We're just going to design them and then farm them out to somebody else. And the U.S. government's like, wait, no.
don't do that the whole point is we need someone in this country who can make chips a u.s company that can make the best chips in the world we used to have that intel that used to be you but it's not anymore and we need to get that back strategically and so maybe intel has got these eight billion dollar handcuffs here which isn't that much because i think intel like lost 16 billion dollars in like the last quarter or something so the numbers here are big but um
If the U.S. government wants some U.S. company to compete with TSMC, I think it's going to take more money and I'm not sure it's going to be Intel. But I just look at this whole story and I feel bad for Pat Gelsinger because I think he maybe he bit off too much. Maybe.
There's no way that his plan was going to work anyway, but at least he was trying. And his heart was in the right place. And the things he was trying to do were... technically possible if he was given enough runway it's almost kind of like if steve jobs when he came back to apple in like 1998 and then he started working on his plan and if there was some board of directors that said
It doesn't look like he's going well, Steve. He gave you a couple years, but you're out. And that would have been the wrong move. Like, I'm not saying that he would have turned it around like Steve did, but I...
really feel like he didn't have enough chance like if the board's going to support him and support this plan as they did see it through to the end don't get cult feet halfway through because you can quote unquote tell that it's going downhill because from everything that i've read the intel board of directors
doesn't really know or care anything about technology it's kind of the reason they're in this situation it's like we know how to make money and we want to make more money and don't tell me the mobile is going to be big and don't tell me the gpus are going to be big and i don't want to hear about ai training and
Nothing will ever change because we're Intel. And those are the people who got them in the situation. And so they hired Pat Gelsinger and then they just fired him. And I think it's sad and I'm sad about it. I feel bad for Pat and I feel bad for Intel. But I am glad Apple is isolated from it, but I still just worry about the entire world depending so heavily on one small island in a politically precarious situation.
Growing up, especially as a PC person, Intel was amazing. I was never upset about anything Intel ever did growing up. Now, granted, they obviously made a lot of wrong choices. The Pentium 4, you weren't upset about that?
Eh, that was... A little upsetting. I mean, maybe some, but... It has netburst architecture. It'll make the internet burst faster. But see, the thing is, Intel... For the young people, they made a chip that wasn't that great. But then what did they do? They made a better chip after. Like, they fixed it.
Right? They were good. For a while, they were good at what they did. And again, it really helped that they had the best fab. Well, in either way, they were firing on all cylinders for most of my childhood, or at least that's the way I reflect upon it. I feel like that's the way I knew about it then. And even when like, even when I was really into windows.
there would still be a lot of stuff that would annoy me about Microsoft. And the only thing that annoyed me about Intel was that they kept coming out with better stuff that I didn't have, you know, like it was, it was the march of progress and Moore's law was reliable as hell at the time. And I don't know.
it was such a like, maybe the American in me is coming out maybe I'm getting a little rah-rah USA and I don't realize it but it was such a great story of like you know let all of these people came together and made this just unbelievable company kind of sort of out of nothing I know it was from a shell of, what was it? Something semiconductor? Fairchild? Fairchild, yeah.
But for the purposes of this conversation, it came from almost nothing and became this juggernaut, this international juggernaut. And it was so cool. I mean, it was so important. Intel wasn't what generated Silicon Valley. was early on in silicon valley and you know there was such a great american story a great corporate story i mean i know i have very different feelings about uh capitalism than i did as a little while ago but still it was such a great story it was something to be proud of
as a nerd, as an American. And it really, from the outside, seems like they were sniffing their own farts way too much. And they just thought they could do nothing wrong. And then they...
continually did things wrong and didn't seem to care because other parts of the business were, you know, booing them. They were, they were, they were money. They found, they wanted to make money. They did what they thought were smart decisions to make money. And those people who made the decisions are rich and retired now. And so they're like,
yeah it worked out but they were none of them were technologists like to be to to be in the tech industry long term you do have to have some your decision making needs to be influenced in some way based on technical understanding what's what's the next big thing is it important to be in mobile uh is power consumption important on cpus are gpus going to be more or less important in the future like things like that or like you'd you'd come to that to like a bunch of business
people and they'd say okay yeah sure maybe but like let me show you the numbers we're making money selling x86 in the server right now because the internet is booming and we're better than amd and we're better than everybody in the world and we just got apple so We don't have to worry about like the iPhone. Who's going to buy an Apple phone? That's so stupid. Like you need someone with some tech industry instincts.
to influence your decisions that if you don't do that and you just do what's going to make you the most money right now you will miss everything and intel missed everything yeah it's really it's such a sad story and Again, from the outside, it seems like such a cautionary tale about hubris that it really seems like they thought they could do no wrong and didn't really understand or believe when they did do wrong.
It's really just crummy. It's, it bums me out. But I, and as much as I feel for them, like if you've been shooting yourself in the foot slash torso slash face enough times, like. I'm running out of sympathy. And while from a geopolitical standpoint, yes, I think it's important that we are not completely and utterly reliant on Taiwan. But it certainly doesn't seem like Intel is going to fix that problem for us, no matter how much money the U.S. government is pumping.
handcuffed now because the way they would fix it is like we should just be giving money to a company then the only thing they're going to do is figure out how to fab chips well and being tied to intel which wants to sell chips that it designs some of which are fed to tsmc just complicates things. Like if you're a fab, you just make chips. Anybody who wants to make you, they give you money, you make their chip.
That's your whole business. You don't make any chips. You don't sell any chips. You build chips that other people tell you to build and they give you money for it. That's what TSMC does. It's a business that makes sense. And the other side are all the other chip makers. Apple, AMD, like they don't make their own chips. They design them and then they pay somebody else to make them. They call it fabulous chip designers, right? And Intel, Pat's plan for Intel was like, we're going to be.
have a fabulous chip design part of the company and we're going to have a fab part and they're going to be the same company technically but like we're going to build a wall between them and the people who are designing the chips
they're they don't have to go to intel to build them they should go to whoever has the best and then the intel fab just you should just try to be the best and it was just it was never going to work out again because when intel is trying to fab it ships with tsmc tsmc is gonna be like So you want to fab your chips with us while you try to work on a business that competes with us. Here's your price. It's a different price than Apple gets. Right. And it's just.
And now Apple's, you know, the U.S. government's giving them $8 billion. And Intel, I think the board of directors would want to say, we just need to split this. We're just two companies. We need to not be just two companies, the fab and not the fab.
But where does the $8 billion go? And the US government's like, you can't do that because we gave Intel $8 billion. And so you cannot split. Otherwise, we're going to have something to say about that. So I don't know how this is going to work out. I don't see how firing Pat does anything except for like, let's.
them stop spending so much money because they were spending a lot of money trying to implement his plan and now he's gone and now the plan is gone and now what do they do next they don't even have a ceo they just have interim ceos not great not great intel We are sponsored this episode by 1Password Extended Access Management. Quick question. Do your end users always...
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All right, let's do some Ask ATP. We probably only have time for one of them. And John CG writes, after Jason Snell's The Mac is the Model Piece, which, and aside from me, if you haven't read that, I recommend it. It's really good. Anyways, after Jason Snell's The Mac is the Model Piece, what are some features you'd like?
love to add to your apps but deliberately don't ship because you don't think apple would approve this is a really good question and i was thinking about this earlier today and off the top of my head i I can't really think of anything. Teacher's bad. No, no, no. I'm sure there are some things. The only thing I could come up with, which is I think I could work around it today, but...
I don't have any particular interest in running a server for CallSheet. And we'll talk about this in the future. I think I'm going to end up doing so a little bit in the near future. But if I can avoid it, I'd like to. And one of the most... frequently requested features that I haven't even begun to think about is let me know when a movie is available. Perfectly reasonable. Perfectly reasonable thing to do. And
The easiest way to do that is to have some sort of like background daemon that will every great once in a while look and see. All right. Of all the things you have like pinned or favorited or what have you. Are any of them available yet? And if so, send a notification. And there are ways that you can work around this within the context of what Apple allows today. But the easiest way one could argue for me to handle this is just to have some process that's running the background always.
once every hour, once every day, whatever the case may be, it wakes up and does a little research and processing and then goes back to sleep. And that's not allowed. And honestly, I think it's for the best, but that's the only thing that I can think of off the top of my head that I would potentially ship.
But again, that's kind of a weak answer because I can work around that in other ways. In fact, Marco, you and I talked about this. I can't remember if it was privately or on the show. Marco was telling you to make a server. That's what he's going to tell you. No, you and I had talked about this, I think, privately. And there were ways to handle this outside of it.
running a server or you're having a daemon or what have you and i'm not interested in exploring that right now we will surely explore that many you know sometime eventually in the future but that's the only answer i have john let's go to you next because i have a feeling your answer will also be pretty simple and then marco I think you're going to have a little bit more to say.
Well, I mean, there's things that I don't ship, not because I think Apple want to prove them. I know they want to prove them. Some of them I've tried to submit just to see that they want to prove them. On the Mac, the things my app does are not that complicated, but I would like to do some. other things that just aren't APIs for. To give just one example, my switch class thing is like little pallets on the side of the screen.
and of course the doc exists too and you can't get rid of it because there's things only the doc can do so i guess that's one category of like things that only the doc can do like get notification badges and stuff there at various times in history have been ways to sneakily get at those private apis and use them but of course
if you figure out how to do that uh you will not get into the app store so if i want to be in the app store i can't do any of that but let's talk about something much more basic uh my little switch glass palette thing can be on any edge of the screen right
uh but i also want to know when the dock is on the same edge so i can implement things of like hiding when the dock like if you're on the same edge as the dock and you make the dock appear i want my thing to hide itself so they don't conflict with each other you know that type of thing right
I've got a preference that says like hide on doc conflict in my settings screen or whatever. But to implement that well, what I have to know is something that I'm sure everybody who thinks about this for two seconds thinks surely is an API for this. Which edge of the screen is the dock on? Simple question. You can only have it in three places, bottom, left, and right. That's it. I just want to know, where's the dock? Not only is there no API for that,
But in some situations, there's no way for you to figure it out. The way you can figure it out sometimes is by comparing the available height of the screen versus the full height of the screen because there's an api that will tell you here's the pixels you're able to draw in and it subtracts like the menu bar in the dock and you can figure out you can basically i know the menu bar is roughly this height
And if the height, if the remaining height is not what I think it should be, it probably because the dock is down there taking up some part of it. So you can figure out where the dock is based on those APIs, which is a real roundabout way to do it that makes you have to try to figure out how you're going to estimate the menu.
our height which is not also a really good api for and it's like look i just want an answer with three possible you know an api where doc where is the doc tell me left right bottom just tell me that's all i need to know but no you're doing a bunch of math but if they have the doc set to hide then you can't even do that.
Because then it says available pixels, all of them. You're like, yeah, but the dock is hiding down there. I have no way to know it's hiding down there because now the math doesn't work anymore because it's taking up zero space unless it's visible. So at any given point, if you try to do that math, you don't.
know where the dock is but guess what there is an api for this it's just private and you can get at it and i figured out how to get at it and it's an api that says where's the dock and it tells you whether it's left right or side exactly what i wanted uh but no apple rejected my app because i used that api
uh and you know obviously i filed feedbacks i said please give me an api that lets me know where the doc is and they're never going to do it uh simple stuff like that is maddening because back in the pre-app store days uh You could just do it. If you could figure out how to do it, just ship it.
And if they break that private API, well, you'll have to fix it in your app and test it on betas and so on and so forth. Tons of apps do that. I was thinking about the Christmas lights app. What is the name of that one that has been going around lately? Oh, I know exactly what you're thinking of. I can't think of the name. Festivus or festival or something like that? I think it's like Festivus. Stivius. Yeah.
Yeah. One of the things it does, it puts Christmas lights on your dock. And when you're like mousing over the dock, if you have magnification enabled, the Christmas lights move up along with the magnification. I looked at that and I said, how are they figuring out what level of magnification it's set to? I know you. can find a way to get that on the Mac, but is that an API that would be acceptable in the Mac App Store?
I don't know for a fact that they're using private APIs to implement that, but I think that app is not available in the Mac App Store, which makes me think, hey, they're doing something. It's a Christmas lights app. Who cares? But Apple would be like, no, you can't have it on the Mac App Store. You've figured out how to tell what the Mac App Store is.
magnification is set to on the dock because you can set the magnification at different levels still right so you don't know like you can track where the cursor is but you have to know a that magnification is enabled and b how high is the magnification enabled so they know how high to move the christmas lights up as the cursor moves around
and it's just a fun little app like that things like that can exist that the fact that things like that can exist in the mac app store is criminal like i understand why they like you know we don't want you to use private api or whatever but it's either like allow people to do that
or make APIs for that stuff, right? It's frustrating. Anyway, and yes, of course, you say, well, why are you distributing a thing on the Mac App Store at all? Why don't you just do what the Christmas Light app did and just sell it on a website? For me, with my apps, They're worth more than zero dollars, but not much more. They're not worth enough for me to run my own store. They don't make that kind of money. Right. You know, it's like so.
I'm kind of, for me, the Mac App Store is a boon because I can sell apps for a pittance and not make too much money and not have to worry about it or whatever. But it is frustrating to me and very often I've thought about...
having a version that's outside the mac app store that has more features and the final thing that i've talked about in the past is uh my app is like the dock and i wanted to be able to right click and quit quit apps and i couldn't do that see a past episode where i talked about this i had to ship a non-sandboxed app that you can download for my website that communicates with my mac app start app to allow you to quit apps it's basically like
The functionality that I couldn't ship to the Mac App Store, I shipped in a separate app that I have to sneakily lead you to download if you know where my website is. And once you have that app installed, my app will find it and launch it in the background so it can talk to you.
it to do the thing that i want it to do that's insanity and it's entirely because apple will reject my app if it does what i want it to do which is be able to right click something it's like quit like you can on the dock it's really quite sad All right, Marco. I actually have much less to say here than John. Oh, I'm surprised. Well, I sold you short. Because they actually add APIs to iOS, I think, but not so much to Mac OS. Yeah, that's true.
So basically, there's a couple of reasons why you might want to do something that Apple would reject. One of them, a big one, is something about money. Another big one is a category of app they won't even allow the entire category. Think stuff like porn or emulators previously, that kind of stuff. Or another one is John's thing of like, I want to either use a private API.
or I want to use an API that is public, but use it in a way that Apple would reject because I'm using it like, you know, quote, wrong, like in an unintended way, like hijacking the volume button for the camera shutter, like, you know, that kind of stuff. And so... When I look at what I have thought about doing with Overcast over the years, in the context of types of apps or types of features they won't allow,
I've never really run into that kind of problem. I don't want to make an emulator or a gambling app or anything like that. That's not really been a problem for me. What you also don't want to do, which is also totally forbidden in iOS, is make... I guess what you would call like a system enhancement app.
Things like Quicksilver or Switchglass or like a thing like when people used to jailbreak phones that like change notifications or the multitasking switcher, like things that work at the system level. They're not an individual app. You just want to change how the whole system works, like multiple clip. Exactly. Exactly. I haven't run into that, and so I don't have an answer to anything like that. Now, if you look into the...
you know, the private API side or the unintended API side, I have occasionally had ideas for features or implementation details that I have backed away from. I forget.
what this idea was but a long time ago i had some idea that was like you could you know because i'm always like playing podcasts while you know walking my dog in all kinds of weather you know including rain and snow and cold and everything I've had all sorts of different ideas for like how to remotely control the app when the phone is in your pocket.
And I've tried things like using the accelerometer to detect certain tap patterns if you, like, just whack the back of the phone. That was even before they added the triple tap accessibility gesture you can now do that with. You know, stuff like that. And one idea I had was what if you... what if like if you pause the podcast while it's paused
If you use the volume up and down buttons, maybe you can navigate through a spoken menu. It's like the iPod without the buttons on it. Yeah. I've had ideas like that over time where I've thought about the idea. I'm like, well, but then...
they would probably reject that because i'm misusing the volume buttons or whatever like or in the modern day like the airpods thing where you can shake yes or no yeah right apparently i bounce my head too much because every time a notification comes in i start hearing those little ticks like for people to know when you get a message
And it says, like, do you want me to reply? You can shake your head left and right to say no or up and down to say yes. And when you shake it, what you hear in the AirPods is a little doop doop. that sounds like little like beads knocking around to let you know that it's sensing you're shaking but whenever it comes on and notifies me
I'm not shaking my head. I'm not trying to say yes or no, but already while it's reading me the message that says, do you want me to reply? It's going tick, tick, tick, because I just move my head around too much. It doesn't trigger yes or no, but it is weird that I feel like these little...
rattly things are loose but anyway you could use that for like head shake gestures to control overcast but oh there's no apis for that sorry yeah or you know you know there's been other stuff like you know last uh last year's OS's, watchOS 9, or...
Yeah, whatever last year's OS is, when they released the Series 9 watch that had the double tap gesture introduced. Then you know it's not watchOS 9 because it was Series 9 and the numbers never match. Right. Anyway, yeah, you're right. So, you know, for the first... First year of the double tap gesture, the OS did not let third parties do anything good with it. All it would do would be...
Hit the first button on any notifications that would show up on our app. Thanks a lot. You know, so there were all these customer requests saying, hey, can you please make double tap, play or pause? And I couldn't do it because there was no API.
I bet there was some kind of private notification name somewhere that was being posted that I could have responded to, but Apple would definitely reject that. So there's been occasional things like that, but nothing really big. And then finally, the other big area...
of stuff Apple would probably reject that I would stay away from, as mentioned earlier, is money stuff. So what could I do with money or business model stuff that Apple would most likely reject? And the only time I've ever really thought of something good here... and it wasn't actually good in the end, was, and I've mentioned this before, I briefly...
I started asking around different podcasters I knew if they'd be interested in participating in what I would call the readability of podcasts. This is like a throwback back to my newspaper days. There was a competing app called Readability that I was briefly involved with. They had a scheme where... you'd like you'd pay them i think it was like 20 bucks a month or something it would keep track of what articles you you saved to it and
If you saved articles from sites that participated with them and that agreed to their program, they would divvy up your 19 bucks a month or whatever. And it's like, all right, well, you read five articles from The New York Times and five articles from USA Today. then we'd give $10 to New York Times and $10 to USA Today, that kind of thing. That never really took off with readability.
in large part because the publishers didn't really want to form agreements with them. And I had the bright idea, why don't I do this for podcasts? And briefly forgot about that side of it. My idea was, what if Overcast collects? whatever it is, 10, 20, 30 bucks a month from people and divvies it up to pay whatever podcast they listen to, you know, make an alternative revenue stream for podcasts. Apple's 30% at the time cut.
would really eat into how that would look to people. Because the idea is like, all right, well, if Apple's taking, if you're paying, you know, 10 bucks a month, Apple's taking three of them, Overcast would probably take one. to be able to pay for the admin cost of the program and have any kind of revenue for me, then you're down to 40% down from your price. You're paying $10 a month and what's going to get divvied up to podcasters is only six of it?
That's a crap selling proposition. So that's mainly what kept me from moving forward with it. And then, of course, the second problem with it is that no podcasters wanted to do it. But that's the second problem. It turns out...
People don't like you getting in the way between them and their customers and their money. Nobody likes that. They don't want another middle party taking a cut. Right. And I can't blame them. Because you know what? If that was us, we wouldn't do it either. I can't blame them. And that's the biggest reason.
and I didn't do it. But anyway, so I've had over the years a few bad ideas for things that probably would have not worked. The only time I came close was... A few years back, Overcast briefly had, for maybe a year, I forget how long I did it, I had a feature where... You could add a certain rel tag if you did like a rel equals payment in either your feed somewhere or in the show notes for an individual episode. I would highlight that link in green.
to indicate money, of course. Green is the color of money. So I would highlight the link in green, or in the interface of Overcast, if you have one of those links, I would replace one of the buttons in the bottom of the now playing screen with a dollar sign button. And if you tap that dollar sign, it would just open whatever the URL was to that link. So the idea was give people away.
in their podcasts or show notes to link to something that gives them money, whether it was a Patreon or their own membership program or whatever. And I ran this for about a year, and I kept analytics on how many podcasts showed it. And how many times did people actually click on it? It was used very, very little.
And then this was right around the time when Apple started getting up everybody's butts trying to scrounge up more services revenue. And this is when they started giving 37 signals a hard time. Well, no. But this was when they really ratcheted.
up they started like looking around the couch cushions so that this is you know the 37 signals with the hey app i believe that was the big controversy of the time like they were starting to get really aggressive with people having any kind of way to link out to anything that gave anybody
else except them any money and so even though overcast was not making any money from those at all it was just literally just like the publisher specify a link and i direct people to it with a dollar sign but because of all that stuff going on it spooked me And I didn't want to become the next story. Overcast wasn't making any money, but neither was Apple. Right. And so I knew that was a risk. And then I looked at the numbers, and it didn't get that much traction.
I just quietly turned it off one time, like in some update, and no one said anything because nobody was really using it. But it sounds like what I'm saying is... I don't need more freedom and we should leave things the way they are because all the ideas I had...
to do things that Apple wouldn't like were actually bad ideas also. And that is somewhat true. But I think the spirit of what Jason is saying in the Mac is the Model piece, which is very good, is basically that there's a lot of software out there that never even sees the light of day because people know that, well, this is close to the edge of the rules or this is kind of maybe over the rules.
you know, over the line. And so Apple will probably reject this. So I won't even bother making it. An example from your business models thing is the thing you didn't even mention because we've all just been so institutionalized to reference the Shawshank Redemption upgrade pricing.
We just don't even talk or think about that. It's not because we don't want to do it because we just know, well, we just know that's against the rules. We're so accepting of the walls that we're in. What you're talking about is things that are like, oh, they might be around the edge or they're interesting ideas. Part of the reason what you're coming up with is like, oh, it's just a bunch of bad.
ideas that I didn't want to do is because a bunch of proven ideas like upgrade pricing are just flat out forbidden and there's no way to do them sensibly.
And we just don't discuss them and don't talk about them and don't don't like say, oh, it's a thing I wish I could ship, but I can't because it's like, well, everybody knows you can't do upgrade pricing. That would be madness. Upgrade pricing doesn't even work. It's not sustainable. Unlike the App Store model, which is totally sustainable. So now we all have.
Even beyond that, there are so many features that, yeah, I did have some pretty bad ideas for how to use the volume buttons. And I did have a pretty bad idea of how I could let podcasters get a little bit more money somehow. But I knew so soon into thinking of them, I knew Apple wouldn't permit them probably or they would cause problems for me, that I dropped them before I even tried to develop them into something that could have been better. And that I think... The real loss here...
Yeah, you have problems where Apple starts shaking down somebody to get more money because what's very clear to all of us is that Apple really needs more money. They're having some hard times over there, and they really need our help to get through these hard times. So there's always going to be stories like that where Apple is being a jerk to somebody because they need all their money, of course. That's just today's Apple. That's the kind of people they are.
And that's the kind of people that Tim Cook, this is what his Apple is. They've decided that is the kind of people that they are and that they want to be. So you know what? Good for you, Tim. We're really happy for you. But the real harm that's done is... In all those ideas out there that people talk themselves out of even trying. Because yes, some of them are bad, but not all of them. Some of them have promise and some of them could actually be good.
if they were allowed to develop and evolve. So there's this overall chilling effect on the ecosystem when we know that there's all this potential that could be really great, but we kind of think like, well... Apple probably wouldn't like that or probably wouldn't allow that, so we don't even try. We as the developers who would make that kind of thing are not the only people losing value here. So are Apple's customers, and so is Apple. I hope someday...
when they get new leadership, that maybe they reconsider this stance. Because it isn't just about the dimes and dollars that they're going to make on commissions or possibly miss out on on commissions. It's about... The ecosystem and the usefulness of their devices and the software that can run their devices and the way people can use their devices, having more software and more types of software and more business models for software.
has huge benefits to the entire ecosystem of that platform, which they make tons of money from in lots of other ways, chiefly the sales of the hardware and their super expensive storage devices. They have lots of reasons to have a healthy software ecosystem that has less of their own filtering keeping things from being made.
And it isn't just about trying to make sure you get your 30% of every dime that somebody spends in Candy Crush. It's so much more complicated than that. Previous Apple leadership that liked computers would understand that a little bit better. But that's not... It's going to happen with current Apple leadership, and it's a shame because it does overall limit the software that can run on their products and therefore limit the usefulness of their products.
I can even blame some of my woes on the iOS side of the fence because, I mean, you may be thinking like, well, what's the problem on the Mac? You don't have to be in the Mac App Store. That's why you got the Christmas lights app. So you're complaining about, oh, you can't put your apps. You can't put these APIs in your apps because they're in the Mac App Store. Oh, what? Just not be in the Mac App Store.
app store as i mentioned like they're running your own payment processing and everything is a little bit of a pain and you need some minimum amount of money that your apps are going to make to make that worthwhile it doesn't really make sense for my apps or whatever but setting that aside um if uh apple allowed actually allowed and not just like fought tooth and nail not to allow despite government asking them to um more competitive uh ways to distribute software on their big platform ios
that would make it more possible for there to be competition for the Mac App Store. Now, there is competition for the Mac App Store. There are companies like Paddle and there was Kagi back in the day and stuff like that. But the problem is that the Mac is not...
where the show is now it's it's tiny compared to the phone so in order for a third-party company to compete with the mac app store it basically needs to be a company that can sell phone apps ipad apps oh yeah and maybe also mac apps right
If it's just a company that just basically does what the Mac App Store does, but not by Apple, that's a tough business to be in, which is why the choices for me as a very small-time developer with some dinky apps is like, yeah, the Mac App Store is basically the best fit for me. And so my apps are worse because my options for selling them at the volumes that I'm able to sell my dinky apps make.
The Mac App Store, the best choice, and it has the worst rules for distributing stuff. If Apple allowed competition on its phone platform. The companies that would grow up around that, actual good big companies that are not constantly being beat down by Apple, and we'll talk about that in future shows. It's just... If there was actual real open competition for stores that could distribute things to the iPhone, surely those companies would also sell iPad apps and probably eventually Mac apps.
Because they build all this infrastructure to be a developer and distribute to their store and blah, blah, blah. And their rules would be more open than Apple's and they would take a smaller cut than Apple's because of the magic of competition. And then maybe I would have an option that is. As easy for me as the Mac App Store, but allows me to do things like find out what side of your screen the dock is on.
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We have a lot of, you know, kind of follow-up and new directions on some photography topics we've talked about in the past, some of them in overtime. And so we're going to do... some more photography talk this time in overtime. You can join us to listen at atp.fm slash join one more time. Thank you everybody for listening and we'll talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
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I'm on the precipice and I'm scared. Are you about to mail me a TV antenna or something? Like what's going on? No, no, no, no, no. Well, we'll see how Sunday goes, right? But no, what's going on is... So I've been working, well, I started by kicking this can down the road repeatedly over summertime and early fall.
And I'm almost at the point of delivering on something I've been working on for CallSheet for quite a while. So my biggest, or maybe not the, but certainly one of the top three biggest requests I get is to...
be able to have multiple lists of pins. So CallSheet has the ability to pin movies, TV shows, or even people. So basically a way of favoriting or saving, you know, or hearting, if you will, you know, just marking things as your favorite. That gives you... other things, quick access on the main Discover screen and affords a couple other things as well.
A lot of people have been saying, and justifiably, you know, this is great and all, but I want one list for perhaps things I would like to watch and one list for things I have watched or maybe another list for just my favorites or whatever the case may be. This was taking what you could think of as a single database table and blowing it into two database tables. And for what it's worth, the actual database in question is not SQLite. It's CloudKit, which...
I've actually had pretty good experiences with. It's not core data in the cloud or whatever the current flavor of that. I forget what the actual name of it is. But it's just regular raw cloud kit. And it's been, generally speaking, pretty reliable.
written what I'm actually pretty proud of as like a front end to cloud kit. It's pretty simple. It's pretty simple for me to use where I need to use it, which I really like. And it takes, it kind of abstracts away a lot of the complexity, which is obvious. great. But I really feared doing this because... now I'm changing the wings of the airplane while I'm in the air, right? Because I've already deployed the CloudKit schema, the way the database looks.
to iCloud. And in order to do this, I need to change the schema. And this is something that Apple affords you to do. But this oh no that you just said is exactly why I said, I'm going to do that this summer. And then I had a busy summer with like life things. Everything's fine, but everything's great, in fact. But I had a busy summer with life things. I said, okay, I'm going to do it early this fall.
And then I had, you know, the return to school and all of that is in, you know, the kids return to school and busy life. And so hopefully before the end of the year, I'm happy to report that once I finally like. forced myself, no, really, you need to stop kicking this can and just freaking do it. Once I sat down to really just do it, I didn't need a graycation, although I was wondering if I was getting to that point. I didn't need a graycation, and it took...
A couple of weeks to do the heavy lifting and a while after that to kind of clear everything up. As it always is, the last 20% takes at least as long as the first 80%. It is in test flight right now. And at the moment, I'm not really looking for new test flight users. So please, I appreciate your offer, but no, thank you. But... I'm at the point where really I should probably just ship it. And I am...
So freaking scared. And I probably shouldn't be because one of the things I had to do and one of the only things that kind of bums me out about CloudKit is that in order to push it to test flight, I needed to actually push the schema change to production. So this schema is live in production right now. The good news is it was all additive. So my CloudKit facade...
just ignored or didn't even look at anything or the shipped version of the app doesn't look at any of this new data. It's completely ignored. It's never requested. It's just sitting there out in the ether. And I don't think anyway, it's not hurting anything. But that, first of all, was super freaking scary. I really wish I could have said to TestFlight, I could have told TestFlight, use the development iCloud schema for TestFlight users. And so I don't have to actually push it to production yet.
But I've already pushed the scheme into production, and I've had at least a handful of people trying it on test flight, and it seems like that's going okay, which is really impressive because one of the things I had to do as part of this was...
If you think about the way the database was laid out with the currently shipping version of CallSheet, it expected a database that is just one table. That's, you know, the name of the pin and what the unique identifier is of that pin and whether it's a movie or show.
or a person and whatnot, and maybe a couple other superfluous things, but not much else. Whereas now, what I needed to do was add a column to that, which is what list is this pin a part of, and then a whole new table that is what are all the lists.
And that means that what do you need to do when you upgrade or when the new version of CallSheet gets installed that can talk multiple lists? One of the things you need to do is a database migration, or not really a database migration, but you need to do a data migration.
So you need to add a entry to the table that represents all the lists that is pinned items, as I think what I called it by default. And then you need to... edit or modify, update, I guess, strictly speaking, to use the right term for it, you need to update all of the rows in the existing pin column and say, oh, they're a part of that list, the pinned item list.
And so far, the handful of beta testers I have, it seems like it's working. I'm knocking furiously on my desk as I say that, but it seems fine. But I have watched... Marco in particular, many friends as well, do this enough to know that especially because I haven't had like a catastrophic failure for my test batch yet, my test group yet, shortly I'm missing something and I'm so scared.
to actually push this out, even though, again, the scheme is there. It's just, you know, submitting the app to app review and then, you know, presumably it'll get through and then hitting go. Even knowing that I can do the incremental rollout, which I do every time just for safety's sake.
I'm so scared, y'all. I'm so freaking scared. Sounds like you shouldn't be on the photos team at Apple because I think if someone had a data loss event and they lost their pinned items and call sheet, they'd be annoyed. Maybe you get some complaints. But in the grand scheme of things, losing access to their photos or their health data, it could be so much worse. I mean, imagine changing the file system.
live, in flight, on the phone. The file system team is like, I can lose all your data at once. I'm not restricted to just losing your photos. I can lose it all. But you know what I'm saying? I guess I'm half looking for you two to say, it'll be okay, just do it. And I'm half just saying... letting people look at what I slash we go through as developers is, this is so scary. And I agree with you wholeheartedly, John, that...
Ultimately, if people lose their list of pins, yeah, it kind of stinks. But is that going to hurt anyone? No. It's an additive change to a low volume, low stakes data collection. It's pretty much the best case scenario for the first attempt at doing a migration. The only thing you have against you is that you're forced.
to use apple's apis right because they do mysterious things that you don't control you don't have the source code for it or whatever which is part of why marco does everything himself is at least he knows then if he screws up it's what something that he did I think the challenge that you face with CloudKit is that you are in very little control of that infrastructure.
So if you are running your own server, which you should not do, please, for the love of God, don't do that. I would love – take my servers, please. It's like I would love to get rid of my servers. Anyway. So if you are running your own servers, though, you control every part of that. So like if you're just adding a column to a table in MySQL, you just, you know, alter table, pins, add column, you know. Pin book.
big int default null or default zero. Everyone has a pin list zero and you're set and you're done. That's almost something else you have to do. and just build up the stuff on the client side that talks to it. Doing it on CloudKit, theoretically, that should be fine. But first of all, it's difficult to test. And then it's difficult to like try things out. And then it's difficult to know what to do if it goes wrong because it's not in your control.
That is the trade-off you make when you use someone else's server-side infrastructure. When you're not running your own servers and you're using some kind of managed, hosted service of some kind, that's what... That's the trade-off that you're making. Now, the advantage is if sometime in the middle of next year, a year after you've written this code and it's just running out there in the wild, if CloudKit has some data center break,
You're going to have some email, but it's not really your thing to fix. Fixing it is not on you. It becomes your problem to your customers. Depending on how bad of a problem it is, you could regret that down the road. It isn't your job to get up in the middle of the night and fix that server when it breaks. It's Apple's job, and they have people to do it for you thanks to all of our 30%. Because they really need your 30% to keep those people.
Those starving server admins, they need to keep them fed. But the thing is, what you're doing here is a relatively ancillary function of the app. And what you're doing here is... adding a column for which the previous version of the app, as long as they can continue reading and writing to the schema. So I assume there's some kind of concept of like a default value for the column or whatever.
As long as that's not breaking, this seems like a pretty low stakes migration. You're not like moving, like rearranging the whole arrangement of the data of the table. You're not like you're not. changing it to a whole different table for storing all of people's pins. Like this seems like a pretty safe one to do. So I think you'll be okay. And intellectually, I know you're right. Both of you are right. But.
It's so scary. I'm so scared to actually do it. If something goes wrong, you can put out a bug fix update really quickly. Right. I don't have to wait for anyone to approve it or anything like that.
No, I mean, all kidding aside, the good news is that I can do the incremental rollout or whatever Apple calls it, where I think it's something like they do 1% on the first day and 5 more percent on the next day. And then like, I forget where it goes after that. But basically, over the course of a week is when they start offering.
the update to people and i think we've covered this on the show before but if you know an update is available and it hasn't been offered to you generally speaking if you do an actual search for that app so if you search for call sheet on the app store for example and then you have to
go all the way into the details. It's not enough to see it on the search results. You have to drill into the details for call sheet or whatever the app may be. And then usually what you'll see happen is the open button will magically turn into an... upgrade or update or whatever button if you want to kind of jump the queue a little bit. But in any case...
I can do this rollout to 1%, 5%, 10% or whatever the numbers are over time. And I think I would find out reasonably quickly, like, oh, your junk is all broken, my guy. You need to stop the rollout and do something to fix it. Again, intellectually, I think it will be fine and it shouldn't be an issue, but...
It's just scary. And I've used CloudKit a touch in the past, but not a ton. And this is the first time I've done any sort of migration or schema change or anything like that. And so I'm scared of it. And I need to just do it. I'm going to give it, I think, a few more days in test flight to see. if I get any feedback that's, you know, worth investigating or changing or whatnot. But hope
Hopefully sometime next week, and certainly before Christmas, unless something weird happens, I hope to have this out and done. And then after that, we'll see what I get into next. I have some thoughts, one of which includes running a very small server, which we'll talk about in the future. Don't. Just don't. Well, we can talk about it another time, but I think you would agree with this.
one use case because it's very very very simple but we'll bicker about it another time unless it's if it's any push notifications then definitely on a server because that is something like it it is really i find it kind of sad how many services, businesses there have been launched over the years that try to sell to developers the ability to send push notifications because it's so easy to send them. And it's like...
It's so incredibly low resource usage. It's so easy and costs nothing to send push notifications. and they're oh god it pains me when i see people like you know paying some absurd price to do it that's what i was saying for the thing that notifies you when a movie comes out and he's like oh i gotta run a job in the background just run a server it just has to watch the list of movies is finite and there's it could be millions of people who are interested in one
movie but your server just needs to know when that one movie comes out and they can send push notifications to everyone who's interested. It makes sense. See, what you're saying is in the middle of that you said, just run a server. That's a pretty big just.
I know, but like you said, for push notifications, it gets you out of the business of worrying about how you're going to run on the back, like running in the background on everyone's phone to check. And they're all checking when some popular new movies coming out versus one server that you're running checking one time. It's so. much more efficient in terms of resources and usage it's just like it just it makes so much more sense
Yeah. I don't know. I have alternate plans for that specifically, which Marco and I discussed in the past, which again, I don't want to get into that now. We're already running a little bit long, but we can talk about it in the future for sure. Yeah, right. But... In any case, I have a use case for a server that I think you both will approve of. And maybe we'll talk about that next week. Don't run it as a server. Just run it as a Lambda and AWS.
Well, actually, what I'm talking about doing, that is potentially possible. But the big problem with that is I know in principle what Lambda on AWS means. I have zero experience with it and don't truly understand it. It'd be fine. Maybe that'll be next week's After Show, as we can talk about that. But one way or another, wish me luck. Godspeed.