Welcome to Mac Power Users. I'm David Sparks and joined as always by my friend and yours, Mr. Steven Hackett. Hey, Steven. Hello, David. How are you? I am good. Although I have a little bit of a cold, so excuse the sound of my voice. I'm going to be hitting that cost button once in a while. But we are very pleased to have a guest back. We haven't had an a long time on the show. Welcome back to the show. Marco Arment, how you doing? Great. Thanks for having me back. It's good to be here. Yeah.
Marco, you've been a busy guy. We have a lot to talk to you about. But before we've got a couple of preliminary announcements. Yeah, absolutely. So I think people may have noticed that Relay, we just celebrated our 10th anniversary. And that's awesome. Thank you all for listening and supporting, etc. But I wanted to point you in direction of a video that a friend of ours made during our live show in London, where he spoke to Mike and I and a bunch of our hosts who were in town.
And it's just this incredible video. Ian really killed it. And so we were trying to get some eyeballs pointed his way and check out his whole channel. Ian does a lot of cool stuff. He's been a friend of ours for a long time. By the time this episode goes out, there will also be on his channel. A long form interview with Mike and I about 10 years of relay and having a podcast network that long. And I think it turned out really nice. And yeah, go check that out.
Also today on more power users, which is the ad free extended version of the show. We're going to talk to Marco about Apple intelligence. Marco is a power user, but also a developer. And I want to pick your brain a bit, Marco, about what you think about what Apple's doing. So let's get started though, with just catching up. Marco, it's been a long time. I know you're a legendary for a guy who just uses the same equipment for decades. So you probably haven't changed anything, right?
No, no, not at all. I mean, I'm still using the same types of things. You know, still still very much a Mac person. You know, my core devices are always my Mac at my iPhone. I've occasionally involved an iPad in my life. I currently don't have an iPad that I use. I attempted like we all did the spring to integrate the vision pro into my life. I have not succeeded at that either. So I'm really just a Mac and iPhone person. I use them both very heavily.
If I could only have two, I would have the Mac and the iPhone. I have the Apple Watch tube. That's kind of an accessory. Last time you were on I think you were on desktop max, but I'm not sure. I think you because you were really into the iMac for a while. The iMac pro I remember. Oh, yeah, well, because for for a long time, the iMac 27 inch was the only way to get a 5K retina screen on your desktop.
And then of course later on we got more options. The iMac pro was amazing. I use that for a very long time. And then ever since the Apple Silicon switch, I've switched to using a powerful laptop connected to a pro display XDR as my desktop. So right now it is a 16 inch Mac pro m3 generation.
And it stays in clamshell mode in a cool little wood vertical stand over off to the side. And so I have just the big XDR in front of me. And then of course external peripherals. And I love this setup because. And also, you know, I also just for around the house and for much travel. I also have a 13 inch MacBook Air, the last years last years version.
What I like about this setup is that when I'm just doing stuff around the house, I can use the MacBook Air. I don't have to disconnect my whole big MacBook pro from my desktop setup. And you know, then I lose on my window positions and everything else like I don't have to go go through all those hoops. But if I'm going on a trip where I expect to get decent amount of work done on things that require a bigger screen like for instance, I'm going to WDC every summer.
And I know I'm going to be recording podcasts doing editing using X code and you know, for those types of trips, I want the biggest screen in the fastest laptop I can get. So when I'm going on a compute heavy trip, I can bring the one I use as a desktop and it's a laptop again. And so, and I have all my files on it, everything is set up all my big apps like, you know, Photoshop and Lightroom and everything is all on that computer.
So I have the big awesome travel powerhouse when I need it. But for the rest of my life when I'm just taking like you know, little David's here and there students up around the house, I have that little MacBook Air as a lighter option. So it's a great setup, honestly. And and and you know, in the past, the process of using a MacBook or MacBook Pro as a desktop, especially in clamshell mode in the past that was fairly buggy.
And then had some weird downsides. There was some heat management issues with certain generations. And ever since Apple Silicon that has been rock solid, it is amazing. You know, the ships run a lot cooler. There's a lot fewer thermal issues. I never hear the fan run and just the entire architecture seem to be much more reliable when using external monitors.
So I have found this to be not only no worse than desktop max. But for my purposes and for what I prioritize actually better than any desktop Apple has sold since the transition. Yeah, and the only downside is I do think you're right. Like all of the connections of it used to be like you connected it and cross your fingers and flipped it work.
But now it's just like rock solid, but there is an input output issue. I mean, how do you deal with the fewer number ports or do you use fewer ports with any way? I don't know what your port situation is. I don't use a ton right now. I'm actually not using a hub except for the built-in port splitter on the XDR. So I'm using I'm using all the XDRs ports on the back of it.
Like that it has its own USB C ports on the back. I'm using all those. And then I use two ports on the laptop. One is going through a ridiculous chain of adapters to use a Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter. And the other one is the cable that goes to the XDR. And then that's it. And then, you know, because of the way I have it vertically in a stand facing me on the front of it is the laptop's right side.
So facing me is HTML, which I don't use one USB C port and the card reader. So I have like front access to the card reader and one port. And that's all I ever really need. So it's fine. But I have like I have one of those Thunderbolt hubs from I think Caldage it. I have it in my cabinet back there like I will occasionally break that out to do something, but I usually don't need to.
Yeah, I had a similar situation for a while. And I switched over to Mac Studio just because I just never took the MacBook Pro out. It was like for like a year. It just never left the dock. And I just said it. I'll just go with what it is.
But, you know, I always wonder if that's the right decision or not. You know, Steven has kind of gone your direction with it. And I don't think there's really a wrong answer here. But it is nice that you have that option now to use a powerful laptop as a desktop Mac. And then also even like battery management's got better. It used to be like if you did that, you killed the battery. But now Apple's got built in logic to kind of hopefully preserve the battery longer.
There's just not a lot of downside to doing what you guys are doing. Yeah, compared to the Mac Studio option. You know, when they first introduced the Mac Studio, that first model I remember I had some fairly high fan noise for it for what it was. Yeah, I know they fix that in the M2 generation. But so at first it was kind of odd that they seem to make a really great desktop in most other ways. And then it had that weird issue. But that's been fixed.
I think one issue that will persist for the foreseeable future, I think is that it seems like Apple waits to update the Mac Studio until they can make the big chip the ultra chip. And because of the way these big ships are made on the expense and the yield issues and things like that. It seems like that is often going to lag behind the MacBook Pro release cycle. And in some cases like what we see currently in the M3 generation.
It seems like they're skipping this generation for the Mac Studio. So the Mac Studio seems like it's going to come in and out of like whether it's a great option. You know, it'll depend on how recently has it been updated. And a lot of times the MacBook Pro will actually be ahead of it in certain ways. So it kind of depends on like when you're buying. Yeah, which I mean, I think I think that makes sense to agree on a recent ATP episode.
And the member section you're breaking down a report about how many Macs are sold in each category like the MacBook Pro laptops in general way out ahead of desktops. And I think when Apple thinks about the Mac it's the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air and the rest of it are, you know, important to small groups of their consumers, you know, with certain use cases.
But I mean, when I think about the Apple Silicon transition is like the Mac the MacBooks or the clear winner, you mentioned the MacBook Air that M2 M3, you know, that new style that new design is so nice. And I don't have a ton of experience with the bigger one, the 15 inch, but we've heard from listeners and I'm sure you have two people who have them really like them. And I set one up for somebody a while back.
And you know, which is using it for a couple of days, kind of getting their stuff transferred over. And even in that short use case like this is, this is nice. Like it's been a long time since Apple has sold a consumer notebook bigger than 13 inches. And I like that they're trying things again in those arenas, you know, separating the error from the pro and some meaningful ways.
Because none of that stuff happened for a long time. And I'm just so pleased like, yeah, I can use a MacBook Pro is my only computer. I do the same thing you do have with a display and a bunch of stuff. And it's rock solid. Like none of the weirdness used to get with the Intel Max has carried into the new the new era. Yeah, which is great because like, you know, I did that for a while, but now I have no patience for unreliability in my tools.
I'm 42. I'm established in my field. I have a budget now. So like if anything is going to be unreliable, it is dead to me. Like I can't, I will not tolerate it. And so I wouldn't be using this setup. If it and I've been using it now for I think three years, four years, I wouldn't be doing this if it was unreliable. And it really is just rock solid. Which bill did you get for your MacBook Pro?
I have the max of I think I spec'd it out in almost every way to the max because this is like, you know, again, this is my workstation. So I have, I don't think I went all the way up on the RAM, but I have everything else pretty maxed out. Yeah. Well, that makes sense. I mean, you're doing development work and you do production work because you've got, you know, all the stuff you're doing with the podcast and your other endeavors.
And the thing too is like in the past, when you would, if you would take like the old 15 inch MacBook Pro and the Intel era, if you would spec it up and get like the top CPU and everything else, it would be a noticeably worse product in certain ways. It would be hot as heck all the time. The battery life would be awful. It would be a much worse product than the low spec versions. And now in the Apple Silicon era, that's not the case. Like the chip, you know, largely is much more controlled.
Thermally, everything else is much more much better managed as well. And so like you just now you can you can spec it up. And it's still like I almost feel like I'm getting away with something. Like it's still this amazing machine for like long term use on battery. If I need to, it's never too hot. It never gets loud. And yet, like it's this the top spec. It's like outperforming many dust tops. And it's it's a pretty great time for the Mac right now.
I mean, there was there was really a heat and battery tax for getting a spec of MacBook Pro in the Intel era. Oh, yeah. Yeah, those GPUs were just murder for a long time. I mean, I think Marker you and I probably talked about on a show at some point in that era, but both of us were like, yeah, the best one is the entry level 15 with the integrated graphics.
Like unless you need the discrete graphics. The integrated like you get incredible battery life. You avoid a lot of the heat noise issues and you're totally right. There's something about these Apple Silicon notebooks in particular that feel like they're breaking the rules. It's like, wait, it's this powerful. I can do this. These many things and this fast, but it's an ever to use completely silent. It doesn't make it doesn't make sense sometimes.
Yeah. I mean, in many ways, you know, the combination of these amazing, you know, Apple Silicon era, plus just as you were mentioning the new. I have the M2 MacBook Air that generation, but the M3 is the same basically.
The greatness of this new MacBook Air is part of the reason why I don't currently use an iPad because the MacBook Air is so good for my purposes. Like for my purposes, it's way better than an iPad because there's a lot of things that that frustrate me about using the iPad for my work or that the iPad literally can't do for my work.
So the so the Mac covers it all for me. I can do whatever I need to on a Mac and the new MacBook Airs are just so good. So many ways that every time I use one of those to get something done like on the go, I'm very happy I have it. Whereas the iPad I'm always wishing I had a Mac. So this so that the MacBook Air has gotten so good that it has removed really any role the iPad would have had in my life.
Yeah, it did really kind of suck up some of the iPad oxygen, you know, all day battery, thin and white, you know, all the Apple Silicon benefits are there except of course the cellular radio, which really we get at some point. I really want that so badly. Yeah. This current MacBook Air that I have is so good. I don't think I would be motivated to replace it anytime soon unless it breaks except if they would add cellular.
I would whenever they do that if they ever if they ever do even if my Mac even with my laptop is like two months old I'll replace it just for just for cellular it would be that big of a difference. It would be huge. I'm still using the 13 but I I've never actually used the 15 outside of just like you know handling it quickly in an Apple store.
Next time I do have to replace it. I'm going to consider it for sure because I do love screen space. But at the same time like this is my thin and light laptop and I'm very glad they have the 13. And then on the iPhone I believe you were a small iPhone guy but is that still the case? I will when they had the mini I did indeed enjoy that they did two years of the mini I use the first one the iPhone 12.
Yeah. But but the 13 got me back on the pro with some of the camera improvements and things like that so I've been on the on the small pro side for most of the time that the pro has existed. So I'm still I'm still in the small pro and I think I will probably stay here for foreseeable future unless you know if the rumors are that this new iPhone slim model might exist at some point soon.
I see what that is that that is interesting to me so maybe I maybe I would try that but I think otherwise I'll be sticking with the small pro. Yeah, I wish they kept making the mini it's not really for me but I know a lot of people that really love that. It was honestly it was great. I think unfortunately I think I might not do it today simply because in the time in the last three years since the iPhone mini since my company usage.
I'm a close up vision has gotten a little bit worse as I've gotten older so now I need like reading glasses for close up things and I think the mini would be just below my threshold of comfort for every day use so I think I'm going to stick with the big one now regardless.
Mentor more. Yeah. Marco, I know over the years the two different size pro phones have had slightly different camera features right this is a cycle that we're currently in where that's true where you get the fancy zoom on the larger one. How do you feel about that trade off is that frustrating to you as somebody I know who like you you value photography in your iPhone or is the size so important to you that you're willing to kind of let let the other stuff go.
I mean obviously I would always prefer if I can get the better camera in the size phone I want but. The size is more important to me if I have to pick like the size that is comfortable for me to hold and for and to be sitting in my pocket all day versus like you know that having the best camera is in the world like I'll take the size if I really have to make that choice.
Unfortunately many years we don't have to make that choice and of course the current rumors are that the iPhone coming out this fall that the 5x lens is allegedly going to come to the smaller pro which I'm looking forward to that that's true.
But for me like the further zoomed in lenses I am not usually a big fan of the picture quality that you get from those because they usually have to have compromised optics and sensors in order to reach those longer lengths with the same physical dimensions you know as the other lenses and so usually the picture quality is noticeably worse on the you know the two X of the three X of the 5X you know whatever that other camera is.
And even the point 5x like the picture quality is almost always significantly compromised and so I find the case with with my current one with the 3x lens I find that the 3x for me is more of a utility lens it's like if I want to like. Remember what the parking sign says you know it's nice to zoom in and see that more easily or whatever.
But it's not I don't use it so much as like an artistic thing and so the difference between 3x and 5x for my purposes is not big the 5x would have more utility in the same way that you know that I use a 3x for utility purposes but in the meantime if I if I can't have the 5x is not the end of the world and so I will.
You know every time I'll pick the phone that is the right size for me if I have the option I would love to talk to someone about that why is it always that the secondary lenses just are of inferior quality I mean is there is there a practical reason for that or is it just cost.
I think it's both I mean I think ultimately though it's it's a matter of physics that if you look at you know what you look at full set camera here and you see like what does it take to have like an f 1.4 lens at a smaller focal distance you know like a 50 millimeter f 1.4 that's one size and then like okay now give me a 200 millimeter f 1.4 you're like whoa hold on.
I first of all don't even know that exists but it's like if it did it would be massive and so I think that's the problem when you're dealing with these different focal lengths like you know the shorter focal lengths are easier to make big wide open lenses and have a big sensor behind it because the light doesn't have very far needs to go for that focal length whereas if you have a bigger one like you know currently the 5x lens on the on the pro max they had to do kind of a prism setup to like bend the optics around a certain way to to make to give it enough space to.
Expand the light out or whatever it has to do in there so there's a lot more trickery involved in getting you know a lot of light into a big lens onto a big sensor when you start having zoomed in focal lengths and I think a lot of times physics physics just getting the way you can't do it.
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So Marco you recently launched a new version of overcast which is your podcast client primarily for iOS but it also on the iPad and the Mac and the vision pro through various compatibility systems which I think we'll talk about in a little while.
First of all congratulations on the launch 10 years is incredible having this rewrite out to land on that date seems like magic to me but I wanted to go back a little bit before we get to the new version you know launching in the summer of 2014 like I remember that very well we were building relay you know we were talking about that behind the scenes and I really remember with overcast initially there was.
But I seem to me like a push to keep podcasting open right and that's something that like comes in cycles where big media players come in and try to change things and you know folks like three of us who want podcasting to remain on our sets feeds that you can upload to any server and download to any client or any app you want we believe that's the way it should be and I think you've been successful in that and I know just.
From relay's own stats overcast has has never been more popular amongst our listeners most of our shows it's the biggest single podcast client in the use which is incredible really cool and I just wonder like you know now 10 years later how do you think about that original kind of pitch an idea and do you think that was successful how do you think that's gone over the last decade.
I mean it's long a job ever had with the exception of ATP so it's it has actually worked out very well but it's you know back then the environment was so different in certain ways and yet podcasting is very resilient to change or to change attempts and so in many ways things work the same way now that they did back then 10 years ago but the environment around them is so different so you know back in 2014.
For me to launch a podcast app actually felt like a pretty big risk because back then this keep in mind this was before serial the you know that the hit podcast serial before that and the podcast market you know we had this American life we had tech shows we had some other like you know public radio types of shows comedians were just starting you know to get a little bit big there but it for the most part it was still considered a fairly.
Nero appeal medium like even back in 2014 you would still have to often explain to people what podcasts were or they might have heard of them but they would never have actually heard one or even know how to hear them so podcast back then were a lot less mainstream than they are today and as a result the market was still pretty small the app market was still much healthier because they were they were not a lot of big players in it and the big players that were in it.
You know partially haven't changed in a sense that it was mostly you know still mostly apple back then it still is mostly apple today yeah with apple podcasts but you know that that was before Spotify had podcast that was in the meantime everyone has added podcast to their apps everybody who makes audio or music services has added podcasts as a thing to their apps even video services have now like YouTube is now like Google podcast is gone they funnel into YouTube podcast like now every big service.
Every big service has podcasts also back then there was hardly any service exclusive content in podcast almost all podcasts back then were free and available for every podcast player.
Today that's also very different there's now every one of those big platforms tries to get exclusives you know whether it's through just creators not knowing any better like people who put up videos and YouTube and call them podcasts and say alright I have a podcast and they don't even know necessarily how to get it into the.
Podcast players or down to you know down to people who are actually signing up exclusive deals to like you know Spotify had a lot of exclusives famously for a while many of them are not exclusive now but you know that still a thing that happens apple podcasts has now also added their their integrated payment thing or you can like pay for premium podcast that only working out a podcast so like the there has been a lot of change in the podcast market since then that it actually now is getting more.
Is getting much further. Siloed I would say you know back then the only real players were apple a bunch of indie apps of which I was joining their ranks and you know a couple of big ones like stitcher and I heart radio but like at the time stitcher was the one that actually scared me the most because like as a podcaster and as a podcast fan because stitcher at the time was having was basically like having people agreed to be there and then
and then just a few of them and then they were like you know that they were just like you know the most and then they were like you know the most and I thought that's not good because if everyone gets on the start acting like you to back which is basically dictating how entire medium is going to work for the end for everyone who wants to enjoy it and I didn't want to happen to podcasts.
And the funny thing is in the intervening time that has actually happened in lots of ways to like that's how Spotify does all of their podcasting I think at least I think it is and it was when they started that is how Google
podcast did work for a time that is absolutely how YouTube podcast works like there's a whole bunch of those kind of things now where everyone wants to create their own wall garden now and the difference now is that they're actually working even apple Apple podcasts for a while you could count an Apple
podcasts to be kind of the sleeping giant in the room like they were they had such big market share that if they weren't on board with some new standard or or spec or even just like trend it wouldn't happen in podcast like if Apple wasn't on board
and it would happen which was great because it kept podcasting simple and open and it kept a lot of add tech out of podcasting which is also great. But the downside is that now Apple has woken up and in part because Spotify started taking away a lot of market share
the few between apple and Spotify the competition between apple and Spotify has only heated up over time in all parts of their services Apple music versus Spotify's music offering but then when Spotify started getting into podcasts very heavily that seemed to wake up Apple podcasts and now Apple is doing things that I would never have guessed five years ago that Apple
podcasts would be doing things like adding that paid tier which by the way overcast can't match because of Apple's 30% so I even if I wanted to do that I would be on way worse footing than apples would be in terms of how much I would have to charge versus how much I'd be able to pay out to people which by the way is also an argument Spotify makes for their music servers but you know apple
so they have their their you know exclusive paid content which I don't love Apple podcasts also has given publishers a check box in their in their like feed management interface that will allow publishers to not have their podcast Rites feeds be published in the Apple podcast directory API now that API is how apps like mine and most other India apps on the iPhone get our listings our search listings so if a podcast is publishing to Apple podcast in the past we could all get it to every other
podcast I want to I was could could have that podcast show up and search results and it would we would get there are access feed URL and we'd be able to play their episodes in our apps to because everybody would submit to Apple because it was the biggest player and we would kind of benefit from that now Apple has given an opt out check box to those feeds being available through their search API
so therefore what people can do now is they can list a podcast for free and Apple podcasts but have it not show up anywhere else I hate this because so far I have and thank God it's off by default but so far I have had I've had numerous issues where a publisher will check that box like thinking it means something else maybe or they won't really understand it and then it will cause support problems for both of us as their listeners
yeah bother both of us to say why can't I find your podcast in my app or whatever so it creates a lot of problems and I wish they wouldn't do it but so anyway so all this is to say that the the environment back then was way smaller of a business and it was it was more open and simpler and today podcasting is a way bigger business it has been attacked multiple times by people trying to lock it down and close it up for themselves and become middlemen
many of those people have actually succeeded in certain areas like for instance Spotify which owns megaphone which is the biggest ad insertion and hosting platform among most of the big podcasts and so like the the ad the podcast ads serving market has actually changed tremendously in the meantime
and it's all been locked up mostly mostly all been locked up by Spotify and so there's a lot of like weird environmental changes that have happened since then Apple podcasts now very much awake and very much doing some substantial updates
and so I think on many levels this is it's way harder to be a podcast app now than it used to be because people expect more and there's all these other competitive forces kind of you know coming up to the gates and trying to try to you know take over the market for themselves but when you look at what has actually happened
there have been so many startups that have tried and so many big companies that have tried to lock it down for themselves and to make like you know big wall gardens to become quote the Netflix of podcasts which is something that we see and you know VC pitches about every two years
and they mostly haven't worked even Spotify which tried to have all this exclusive content paid a lot of money and made a lot of big deals to do it even they couldn't really take it over for themselves they took a lot of market share but they didn't take it over and so I'm actually it is harder than ever now to to stay afloat in this business and it is it has had more challenges than ever and it and you know to its openness and to its the way the way it works on a technical level
but it has still survived it is still the same largely as how it was back then in terms of how podcast are hosted who owns them how distributed how they're served what what kind of technical capabilities do they have how is add tech involved in them how much creepiness is involved in their add tech like to a large degree most of those questions
have the same answers now that did ten years ago and that's actually very comforting and very encouraging to me because the simpler it is and the less people are able to do and the less people are able to mess it up or take it over the more likely it is to stay the open ecosystem that it is and
you know if you wanted to go back to the youtube example if you want to like launch a new video hosting site today to compete with YouTube like you just can't like there is just no way that's going to work at all
if you want to launch a new podcast app today you still can because most of the conditions that allow that to happen are still the case and so there still are new podcast apps launching today you might hear about them that much because it's just it's in general with all apps much harder to get attention and new users today that it used to be usually
to pay for it now you didn't have to pay for it ten years ago as much but for the most part you still can make a new podcast app today and you and anybody can still launch a new podcast today and host it on their own site on their own hosting or however they want to do it they don't have to agree to like
the terms or anything like that you know all of that is kind of optional all they have to do is list themselves in directory things like Apple podcast directory and apps will find them and play them and they can insert their own ads if they want to like they there's all sorts of freedoms and simplicity and open distribution avenues that still exist in this medium that largely don't exist in most other media on the web today
yeah tell people podcasting is taken a few punches but it's still independent and that is the big win for us the reason we can still make a show honestly yeah yeah absolutely I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about overcast itself I know you chronicled a lot of this on under the radar your show with David Smith about independent iOS development over on relay but
you know 10 years is a long time and you had sort of the timing and way and when it came out where swift was so it's been announced right but it was still very new I think whatever cast launched and in the interleaving decade you've had swift make huge advancements you've had that Swift UI things like catalyst and other things have come along to further extend applications and applications are in more places than ever right you've got everything from the watch to car play
vision OS having iPad apps in it what what happened in those 10 years where you kind of came the realization of like a rewrite is what I have to do was it just the march of time was something bigger going on there what was that process like for you.
I mean a lot of it was just time in the sense that like whenever you have a 10 year old code base it's going to have accumulated a lot of technical debt if you've never really gone through and aggressively pay down that technical that's just what happens over time with software development and there are certain things that add to that you know artificially more than time itself would one of those things is a language change as you mentioned like you know swift
came out and really matured a lot during that time so that that's you know a big one right there is like the entire program language changed what we what we are expected to use now apple did this in a way that
Swift works very well with the previous language of the sea you there's a lot of interoperability between them so you don't have to re write your entire app and Swift on day one you can do it piece meal and they can co exist indefinitely but there's a lot of shortcomings to doing that and a lot of a lot of more modern
Swift programming styles are fairly difficult to to mate with objective C code or at least make it a lot more cumbersome or a lot less elegant or more risky or things like that and so there is a lot of inertia behind like once you start using Swift it's a lot easier if all the code that you're interacting with is also swift so there is a lot of pressure there to start rewriting
the jetty code and Swift also during that time the UI framework changed they they introduced Swift UI about five years ago and that changed everything as well so over that 10 years I have all the technical debt of a 10 year old project plus a language change plus a UI framework introduction now at first and to it UI again you can you can blend Swift UI with the old framework you like it but again
there's there are shortcomings there's complexities there are you know losses of benefits and certain things don't quite work great if you do that so again you start you have the same thing over there where like it sure would be nice if you could rewrite most of you why using this new framework and you could enjoy a lot of benefits of it and efficiency and things like that and so over that 10 years I had those two massive bombs drop
plus I just got 10 years better as a programmer so programmers always you know we look back on our old code even stuff I wrote six months ago I'll look at it and I'm like well that's garbage I can do that so much better now you know that's that's a very very programmer ready to look at things and so over that 10 years you know I would I would occasionally rewrite pieces here and there using you know newer techniques new languages new frameworks but it was always
you know very piecemeal and it was always a huge battle trying to integrate the new code and the new way to do something with the old code base and the old languages and frameworks it was always you know just huge amounts of friction trying to do that it was it was possible but just tons of friction and tons of waste meanwhile also in these last 10 years the scope of what people expect from a from a good iOS app has grown tremendously you know you look at what
if a brand new app today launched in the productivity is space you know whether it's you know podcast player or something like you know a notes app or something like think about all the different things that you might want that app to do or that you as a customer especially as power users might expect that app to do so first of all
it's probably not going to just be on iPhone it's going to be it's going to have some kind of sink back end and it's going to be on iPhone and iPad and maybe Mac and maybe vision pro maybe the Apple watch it's going to
probably have widgets and other integrations you know the different platform features going to have to integrate with you know in the near future maybe we'll have some Apple intelligence features you're going to definitely want like some some intense so it can be used with shortcuts like there's all these different the service area of what you have to cover as like an app that's thought of as a decent iOS app citizen it has just grown tremendously in 10 years.
So at the same time that I was building up all this technical debt with just overcast being written in the old language and using the old frameworks and just slowly aging up to 10 years old in addition to all that the demands on me for just keeping up with the platform kept going up because as the platform
which is we keep adding more of these things now we have to have vision pro app or now we have to adopt the new system theme or the new dark mode or whatever those things add up so much over time that at the same time that the demands on my time kept growing and growing. The app itself with the old code base was getting harder and harder to maintain so it was just it would take more time to do things that should be simple.
And meanwhile I knew in the back of my head that somebody who didn't have a giant legacy code base like I had could out compete me because anybody who was starting a new app today yeah they would have a lot more ground to cover in terms of all that huge amount of service area that people would expect their app to have but they would be able to do it using all the new frameworks and all the new languages and all the new techniques and they would eventually then be able to pass me and I'd be stuck in in my old code base and.
Part of it was kind of like perceived competitive vulnerability there but another part of it was just I just felt like I wasn't serving my customers very well. So often like the new OS of the year would come out and there be some new feature like widgets or whatever and I would be behind I wouldn't be there on day one I wouldn't I wouldn't even be there on month one because it was just taking me too long to keep up with everything because my code base was so so high friction to maintain.
So a combination of all those factors let me to conclude okay I need to rewrite this using the new stuff and the way to do it is a total rewrite of most of the components the entire UI and the entire like bottom end of the data layer and so that's why I did I rewrote everything except the audio engine the audio engine is still the nice overcast classic audio engine which is actually mostly written and see I'm not object to see but so there's the huge see audio engine that is still there.
And then there is now a brand new data layer sink layer and UI and it took me a long time took me about 18 months during which I was not really able to add many other features to the old app. But now you know it's I long shoot about a month ago it's it's had a little bit of a bumpy start just because it's a rewrite and so I'm hitting all these little edge cases.
There's a small bug there when you have this configuration and so I got to go fix that but for the most part I'm able to work so much faster in this new code base it has already improved tremendously in the last month since the first release and it is I'm just I'm moving at lightning speed now.
So I am it was a huge amount of work it was a huge undertaking I probably if I had to actually quantify like how many hours I took doing it it probably wouldn't have been worth it in any kind of financial sense but I'm incredibly glad I did it because now I can actually move with the times I can keep up with what I need to keep up with I can serve my customers a lot better I can compete a lot better in the market and the resulting app is just better it's.
Way faster it's way more reliable my crash rate has gone down by more than half it is it is just way way better in so many ways uses way less memory it stays in memory longer as a result on your phone so it launches faster like there's a so many advantages to it so it's been a long time coming but I'm very glad finally be here.
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Anytime you have a big rewrite like that which includes a substantial amount of design work i'm sure people will be upset about a feature that got dropped or something they got changed. How do you handle that i mean i know when you launch an app update like this there's a lot of excitement you know you've been working on it. People have seen it but you're putting it into the world with tons of users for the first time and sometimes some of those people don't don't like it.
How do you manage that feedback how do you decide what's something that you need to address for something that you believe is the right. Change or the right move and you know maybe there'll be some pain temporarily like what is all that decision making like. Um it's definitely an evolving process i don't have all the answers to that you know part of the challenge of of maintaining an ios app over time.
Is that when you're building an ios you're building on quick sand the environment around you is constantly changing constantly evolving you know both on technical levels and also just in trends and styles and ios app that was considered like a good design or like a modern app citizen 10 years ago.
It looks very different than what would be considered a good design and a modern app citizen today so over time you have to keep changing you have to you have to change with the times and with the styles as you maintain an app over time. And of course that's not always popular with certain people so any change you make even if the functionality is the same. Any change you make to a design to a style to interaction is going to rub some people the wrong way.
So it's very difficult over time to try to try to maintain. User satisfaction like try to try to please everybody basically over time because if you don't ever change your design or interactions or whatever. Then your app will look very old and you'll have trouble attracting new users and many of your current users will jump shit because they see newer apps and they're like oh this one looks nicer or whatever and so.
Leaving it the same leaving it like you know old forever is not a good strategy like you your business will slowly rot and die if you do that. But every time you change it you incur a lot of negative feedback so it's very difficult to know. Whether a change you've made is actually a good one or not for a while like sometimes you got you got to kind of sit with it for a while.
I don't always guess correctly sometimes you know I've been lucky I've done a couple of redesigns over the history of overcast and usually they've gone pretty well but. One of the. One of the downsides of my slowing down of the updates over time as as my aforementioned tech that accumulated is that. The rate at which I did redesign slow down over time to. So right now the one I just launched it's been a while since the last one it's been I think at least three years it's been a while.
People had gotten so accustomed to the old design that I feel like the the backlash against the new one was stronger than it would have been if I was still tweaking the design every year or two like I used to. So that's part of it part of it is that I combined this rewrite with a couple of feature removals mostly small one big one which is streaming which I am actually reversing that decision. You guys can break the news if you want streaming will be back in the next update.
That's what I'm working on the last few days because I. I thought I could get away without it and I thought it would make a lot of things simpler and the fact is it would it would make a lot of things simpler if I didn't have to support streaming. That on technical levels on user experience levels on bug levels it is so much better if I cannot have streaming in the app.
The problem is that just way too many people were affected by that removal I had an elitics on it in the old app and it was it seemed like a small percentage of the user base who would actually use streaming by default. What I didn't realize was how many people use streaming sometimes and that's a way bigger number than the ones who use it by default.
I was under counting those people in the analytics and so the total net net damage to the app fraud of people was bigger than I thought by removing streaming.
So that's going to come back in a more limited fashion basically it's going to it's going to work the way it used to if you started from the beginning and it's not going to have the capability to like seek ahead way into the file and restart the download just downloading that last part like it's going to start at the beginning and download the whole thing.
But if you're playing it from beginning it will start playing immediately if the download fails it will stop and kick you out and you'll have to start over. And the reason why is not because I'm trying to punish you it's because dynamic ad insertion breaks that ability. So I've redone it in a way now that is simpler has a few fewer features in terms of the you know how dynamically it can stream things but it should work way better for way more people this way.
And it's done in a way now that is compatible with dynamic ad insertion at the expense of if like you know your connection drops and the download drops halfway through it won't resume it can't. So there's a couple of limitations there but it's overall having used it these last few days and testing overall it's it is way more convenient to have it and to not have it.
So anyway all that is to say streaming is going back in the next version there are you know it wouldn't when I want to look at decisions I've made in this. There are certain things that you just have to kind of get out there and see how people like them that's how my entire development pattern has always gone. I try things on myself for a while before I release them if I like it or if I think it's the right move I ship it.
So I might do a beta in the middle there but for the most part you know betos are usually pretty short for me usually just finding bugs and then I ship it and see what people say. And most of the time I think my hit rate has been pretty good and sometimes when I when I you know when I make the wrong choice like moving streaming that I just I go back and I fix it you know that's that's how I tell you got to be the idea of staying the same forever is untenable and I was mentioned.
So you got it you got to be willing and able to change on a regular basis no matter what. And it's just you have to do with a little bit more I would say care and measurement when you have an existing user base compared to when you're starting from scratch like if I started from scratch I would probably do things pretty differently in a lot of different ways.
But I'm not I have an existing user base that I that I you know care very much about and I want to maintain and then I so you know I take that very seriously so overall like. I the way I the way I make decisions now is a lot more. Data based than it used to be in terms of like I will actually try to look and see you know how many people am I going to disrupt if I change this thing. But I'm also still the other day I'm still me and I'm still going to make the decisions I think are right.
I'll just try to bring people along as best as I can. I can tell you one bit of feedback from me is that once I saw you had switched to Swift UI. I felt like more assurance that this is the app I'll continue to be using the future because that's a big deal I mean that's the future.
You know that all future kind of features like widgets things are going to reward developers like you have made the sacrifice and it is a sacrifice I mean you kind of took a beating in terms to get this thing done on me group went through the same thing. But you know once you guys get to the other side of that them suddenly it's so easy to add new features and as users we know that we're going to get all the shiny bells and whistles in your app so thanks for doing that I know it wasn't easy.
Well, and the great thing is you know Swift UI you do kind of start out slowly like I've compared it to like trying to start a car in fifth gear like you can you can do it. It's going to be a very slow process and it's going to be a while before you build up any speed. But once you do build up speed it's incredible. So once once you have your app architected to use Swift UI well and once you have enough experience using Swift UI as a developer to be able to wield it well.
You can do things with amazing speed and where this benefits users not only can your apps you know do more in terms of like they can develop more and have more screens and more capabilities more easily. But also what I've found amazingly valuable about it is that it speeds up design iteration. So I'm able to try out a design idea on a screen and say hey I wonder what happens if I maybe move this over here and restructure this to be like this I can try that in an afternoon.
And I can try four different versions of that in an afternoon and if one of them ends up being great I can get it out there real fast. If something that I made ends up not being that great I can throw it away because I don't feel bad because I didn't spend that much time on it. So what ends up happening is not only do I save time and development.
But also the designs end up being better that what ends up being in the app has been iterated on more I'm more willing to iterate on them because it is faster and cheaper to do it. And when things don't work I'm less tied to it and so I can say you know what this this design I tried it didn't work for people for whatever reason and so I'll try something else and I'm able to ship way better software way faster as a result of that because I've been able to have that faster iteration process.
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And time I go back you know you do the things sometimes shows up on social media like what are the first 10 apps you downloaded on your iPhone right like your stuff's in there early on which is really cool. iPhone has always been on more or less an annual release cycle they sort of shifted it from the summer to the fall one year but each year we get a new version of iOS and a new version of iPad OS and watch OS and the Mac has even moved to that you know as of like the mountain line era.
Kind of the way things have been for a long time and I'd love to hear your thoughts about that both from the user perspective but in particular the development and developer perspective where each fall there are new features but they're not going to roll out to everybody is not everyone's going to update like how do you approach that like do you think the annual release cycle still makes sense now you know many years into it. It used to be a lot bumbier when they first started doing it.
The iPhone has usually been a pretty reliable platform there have been a couple of bad releases like iOS 13 was rough but for the most part especially recently they've done a pretty good job of making iOS and iOS development fairly stable and as a user too like you know most most of the time.
You can even if you want to which I don't necessarily recommend you can even install the early developer betas for iPhone and usually they're pretty usable pretty reliable pretty stable the iPhone release cycle I think therefore has always been pretty pretty good. With a couple of very small exceptions the problem is when you when you look at the rest of Apple's business you know the iPhone always gets the most attention gets the most resources of course they're biggest business.
But when they started bringing the other platforms into the annual release cycle especially the Mac which for a while was I think not getting enough attention and not getting enough resources. It was a much rougher ride in some other places so I think for a while they had a lot of growing pains moving to that cycle there were a lot of years especially in the Mac where software quality was a big problem it was a little rough for a while there.
But I think they've gotten into a good point now in the last few years the releases have been pretty high quality pretty stable the number of bugs that actually reach users has been pretty low. So overall I think I think they had a rough time getting to this pattern but now that they are now that they've established the pattern they've had a lot of time to work out the kinks I think it's pretty good now as a developer.
It is in some ways it can be a little rough especially if you like on the Mac for instance if you if your apps depend on areas of the Mac that Apple wants to continually lock down further and further things like certain permissions or you know if you're like not in the Mac app story like certain access to read the whole disk or you need to use the camera microphone or more recently we've had this dust up with some of the screen recording permissions.
When when your app lives in one of those areas every release cycle is potentially threatening your entire business and so that's it to have them happen more frequently is much more stressful and much more impactful and risky honestly in over an iOS land though again because iOS releases are tend to be pretty pretty safe pretty stable pretty high quality that kind of like the frequency of the updates for iOS isn't usually a big problem for development.
It's not a big burden for us you know and and because they're on the annual cycle now they're also very predictable we know that you know there's kind of a there's a seasonality to apples year developers know that like.
Chances are in June and September we're going to be pretty busy because that's the WDC and in the launch of you know the new OS is usually in September so we know we're going to be busy then and maybe a little bit into October depending on different hardware tweaks you know if there's like new hardware on on the iPhone of the year and there's a last minute API release maybe we'll have to use that or something but for the most part like September October going to be a little bit busy June to be a little bit busy as we you know dive in the new base stuff.
But then the rest of the year we know how it's going to go like we know the summer is going to be spent probably developing stuff against the betas we know the winter is going to be more feature development the spring can be like paying down tech debt because we're kind of waiting for everybody to see and so we know the spring is kind of like our free exploration time we can we can do a lot of stuff then because there's nothing like pushing on us externally of what we have to do at that moment so it does create this kind of cycle that we can rely on.
That is overall pretty you know pretty noble pretty predictable and and certainly very doable. How do you think apples doing in terms of bringing new features across these platforms I mean especially at the app level things are kind of more intertwined than ever and sometimes you know kind of famously the iPad may be a year behind the iPhone and some feature or capability. Do you think there's there's areas that Apple could improve there or you generally pretty happy with how they've been doing.
I might I guess my opinion on this is evolved over time. I there are certain areas that Apple has always shown maybe shortcomings in or or maybe not enough priority one of those certainly as as you both know very well is you know iPad power user features in general whether it's multi tasking.
Or windowing features or things like the files app you know slowly coming on you know like there's all sorts of ways in which people have tried over time to to push the iPad's boundaries in terms of software capabilities into more pro type uses. And Apple as you know has has moved fairly slowly in that area they do make moves but they they really take their sweet time and it seems like the iPad is is just not as high of a priority for them in terms of power user features has the other platforms.
And so for a while I would say oh they're neglecting this or you know this has a problem or they should be looking more at this I've come to more accepted now and to realize that I should probably not care about a platform or or feature area in Apple's products more than they seem to.
So for instance I've given up on home pods because I as much as I love their sound they have great sound for their size especially but it seems like Apple doesn't really care about the home pod and so I've given up I've moved on to sonos stuff is wherever I can like whenever it comes time to replace a home pod I get a sonos thing instead for it because they so knows cares a lot more about their speakers than Apple does and that has served me well in general like I try to.
Focus on for Apple I put my I invest in what they are investing in so I invest my time and attention in the platforms they care a lot about for the most part it's the iPhone and then maybe a distance second might be the Mac and then kind of everything else is kind of scattered beneath that and I find that it sounds kind of defeatist maybe but I've actually found us to be a very healthy and productive way to live like if I am investing only.
I am investing only in things Apple seems to be investing in I get the good features I get the good benefits I get the stability I get the the you know attention and the work going into the products on platforms I'm actually using and I've learned to accept things like apples never going to care about the home pod so stop waiting for it I accept things like the iPad is never going to fit my needs as a power user so I stop trying you know and so for the most part for the established platforms you know I accept it you know they're not going to be the best.
I accept the Apple watch is always going to be a pretty limited application platform for developers and users and that's fine I like it for the reasons. So what the only places that it seems to you know be kind of in in play are in the newest platform so right now it's the vision pro that's the big that's a big question mark of like are they investing in the vision that remains an open question I think and certainly you know whether I should invest in it is a big question as well.
Currently currently leading towards no for now we'll see where it goes but for the most part I have found a lot of success in generally trying to only invest myself in areas that Apple's investing themselves in. Yeah I had a similar realization around the iPad a few years ago just looking at like the commercials and the advertising how are they using it in the way they sell it and you realize oh yeah I'm trying to do more than they want me to do.
So why am I so many it's that current and and as soon as you like scale back your expectations. Then you're fine you know and the good news is there the MacBook Air is an amazing computer and you can do almost anything on it right and it's about the same weight as an iPad so it's even less heavy than an iPad with a keyboard so you can you can start to scale your expectations but the interesting point to me that you made
was was the vision pro because I feel like that's different I feel like that one is still an experiment for them it's just so unlike Apple to make a public experiment but like when you look at their capacity to make these things it's never going to be a blockbuster product yet because they can't even make enough of them to make it a blockbuster product. I just feel like they just put it out there to see what we do with it so they can start gauging what the future of it is.
I mean maybe I think that's what they had in mind maybe but it seems like like first of all it does not seem like they are supply constrained I mean I know that they have limited their release but the fact is ever since it long you may go into a store and buy one that day right. The rumors were that was not going to be the case right people like oh it's going to take months to get one and I just didn't pan out.
Yeah like we all thought that we've also that on our podcast like we all thought this whole year they'd be back order they'd be hard to get and the fact is they're not I don't think they're reaching the sales targets that Apple might have had or maybe they just had a massive supply built up who knows but it seems unlikely and I also think that Apple seemingly has been.
I think I think Apple is expecting more developers and content makers to just jump on board on day one and that also hasn't happened that that's been a much slower process there too and I think what's what's odd about the vision pro is I don't think we've ever seen modern Apple release a product with seemingly so little follow through.
And so all we're left to speculate on is like is this incredible lack of follow through intentional was it planned this way but no one's no one's questioning whether or not it's been an incredible lack of follow through that's been obvious which is bizarre and I think to me disappointing because I see the vision pro is having a lot of potential like it's it's a really cool technology and there's a lot of tech in there and I mean the amount of.
Engineering and work they had to do to create that platform to even just be like just like you know what I call like the empty desktop like when you just put it on and it's just and you just see pass through just to do that was such work like a ridiculous amount of incredible engineering and so. I don't think this is an experiment that they you know kind of feel lukewarm out I think they put this out there thinking there be a lot more.
Interest in it than there actually has been and what is going to be interesting about this is Apple for a while.
Has not really had to work for their success in certain areas like they've had so much buzz and so much success and so many great product releases in really powerful areas like the smartphone that they really haven't had to like work to attract developers or you know negotiate with big content players and get big companies on board with their stuff they can just rely on the fact that look we either already have sold a billion of these things or we're going to sell a billion.
These things so you're going to get on board and we see that a lot of that in there you know various attitudes towards developers and other companies and with vision pro that didn't work they aren't so many of them there the sales prospects for the foreseeable future are not amazing so the number the sheer numbers aren't going to be there to convince developers and big companies and content producers to jump on board with apple and tolerate you know the apple attitude and so.
The apple attitude in certain ways like the numbers aren't there to do that so for this platform to succeed apples going to have to dramatically change the way it interacts with developers and content owners and I don't know that they have that in them but I certainly think they didn't expect to have to do that so this remains mostly a wait and see for me I think the vision pro can succeed but it's going to take a significant change in strategy and we haven't yet seen any signs.
They're going to have to take the lead on content and I think like you were saying earlier they thought everybody would just jump on board and they're not so apples going to have to dip into those corporate coffers and make that content happen you know the chicken in the egg we need a lot more chicken here.
The exact start showed up right and that that does make it a different thing than apples previous hardware right like thinking about something like the iPod right apple didn't go out and buy a music studio right they they partnered with music studios and you know depending on who you are on what's out of the deal you were you were on that either went well for you or didn't but I'm also struck not only does apple need to get into the content game with this thing.
Is that those major content players aren't there that apples friction with developers and other companies I think is hurting the vision pro when you don't have YouTube or Netflix or some of these other players there and yeah maybe it's because they weren't sure about investing in a new platform but if they were buddy buddy with apple they may have for you know for gone those concerns and done it anyways.
I just kind of help with think that apples current stance on a bunch of different issues with a bunch of different companies is kind of coming home to roost here. Oh totally I mean I think we've seen that apple is not really good at negotiation. The way apple quote negotiates with people is by just having a giant stick like they and if they actually need to give a little or accept something being done and not quite their ideal way. They can't like they just refuse and so.
Apple only can quote negotiate when they have a massive upper hand that makes it so they don't really need to negotiate they don't really need to compromise on anything so what we see over and over again is like when apple has to really you know compromise on something they don't they don't do that or they don't succeed in those areas so that's I think. I think going to be the problem with with getting vision pro adoption is like.
What apple needs to do to make this succeed is to make deals or incentives that will overcome the numbers for for people you know because again like your market if you're going to sell an app or try to sell content on the vision pro. The numbers of that market are going to be so small you need some other reason to do it otherwise it's not worth it.
What game consoles do you know they will make deals with studios they'll make deals with publishers they will publish their own stuff to try to like you know to try to get a game console going off the ground before it has a lot of numbers to to support it for third parties.
You know the vision pros can have the same need you look at what what Facebook's doing with the quest line they do that they go in like you know commission things or they they make deals with publishers to bring their games over to the to the quest line like and that works they then that's what kind of what you have to do. Apple again has shown kind of no no sustained good efforts to do that kind of thing I don't think they can't do it I do think they won't do it.
So I do worry about the vision pro long term I think one of the one of the areas that they could go with it is you know if you're looking at somebody who's going to bring content to it. The kind of people who would ignore the numbers are small developers who are just fans of it developers love developing for stuff that we have and use and love even if there's not a lot of market for it.
You look at things like pico 8 development that there is no market for that people do it because they just love it look at things like the panic play date the play date is a delight to use it is a delightful platform the market for it is pretty small compared to like other game consoles or iPhones but people develop software for why because they have it and they use it and they love it. So if we can get more developers to have use and love vision pros we will get more software made for it.
This isn't going to help so much with like big studio content like this isn't going to help more like large 3d movie productions or ever get made for it but it could help the software side because I think they really need both ideally. And so if you want more software get division pro in the hands of more developers and to me largely comes down to money because most developers especially like indies.
I don't know a lot of indies my own vision pros because they're just too expensive most indies can't afford to drop almost $4,000 on a platform that will make them close to zero dollars and profit. But if you can get vision pros in more hands of those developers through some kind of discount or free purchase or something some kind of like you know developer purchase program get these in the hands of developers at a steep discount.
And many of those developers will find value in the platform will start using it themselves and we start developing for it merely because they have one. And that can start to get some of those chickens growing. One last quick apple platform question for you we talked a lot about the vision pro which is a real treat but I want to circle back.
A second to the iPhone you know you mentioned at the top of the show you're a mac and iPhone person I think most people if they you know we're in some sort of weird situation where they can only have two apple devices. It would be mac and iPhone right I'm certainly that way the the others are secondary best to those those two.
For long time apple took criticism I don't know if it was right or not of being like the iPhone company right there margins their money was coming from the iPhone it is the only thing out of like all their products that never seems to be late or very rarely seems to be late you know there was a word why pandemic we can forgive for that that one year with a weird release cycle.
And we talked in that first section about the small iPhone in this rumored slim iPhone which could could change it up but I can't I can't shake the feeling that apple doesn't quite know what to do with the iPhone and at the 30,000 foot view right right now we have. The regular phone and the pro phone each and two sizes you know the regular one and the big one or if you're you know some people if you're my wife the big one and the huge one right.
They seem unwilling to sort of go after smaller markets for whatever reason and when they do do that was something like the iPhone SE basically the lever they pull is expense right how do we make a cheaper iPhone will use that means using an old design.
And older processor where margins are better so I say all of that sort of set the stage for this question of like when you think about the iPhone long term because a long time ago you said this I think on ATP and I think about it all the time you said don't bet against the smartphone right and in a way the iPad and the vision pro and even the watch.
Are sort of little bets against the smartphone and they end up sort of all falling in line behind it do you think that's going to continue and do you think it's a fair criticism that apple sometimes kind of take swings and misses on what the iPhone actually is year to year do you think that's a problem or do you think this thing is here to rule the world for a long time.
I think they don't take enough risks with the iPhone you know if you look at their other product lines how many iPads are there way more than distinct iPhones how many max are there not only are there way more max but the max also span of ridiculous swing like you have you have four different laptops they're very different from each other.
Plus like that weird thirteenth pro that occasionally exists like then you have the desktop picture wildly different from each other like you have like the iMac and the Mac mini and the Mac pro and Max do these are all like wildly different from each other.
And the reason they do this is because they serve different needs and they don't need every single Mac to be the blockbuster hit you know like whenever there's a new iPhone you know size or whatever you know the mini certainly had this problem the plus currently has this problem where
analysts will say this is the worst selling iPhone well yeah if you're only going to sell like four models one of them is going to be the worst selling one does that actually mean it's a failure no it just means it's less of a success in the other ones but like you know what about like the the 14 inch MacBook pro by most accounts that is not the biggest seller in the MacBook Pro lineup or the MacBook lineup does that mean they should stop selling it probably not it just means the other ones are popular but they're not going to be the same.
But the 14 inch MacBook Pro is a very popular successful product in absolute terms yeah I love the iPhone right people love them like with the iPhone I feel like they haven't taken enough risks and part of that's you know for I'm sure there's lots of reason manufacturing efficiency is scale like I'm sure there's lots of reasons for that the phone market is also a little bit different in that what people say they want or think they want oftentimes is different from what they actually end up buying.
We hear this a lot from people who know more about sales figures and stuff that like you know people will say I want a small phone then they make a small phone and you know most people end up still buying the bigger one so there is certainly that factor to consider but for the most part I think it is totally fine for there to be multiple phones and for some of them to be really weird in different ways like to be very small or very big or to have different compromises like the rumored slim one maybe that'll have worse cameras because it's not really good for the most part.
It's not just cameras because you can't fit as good of a camera in a slim body which in fact we see that like with speaking of weird phones the foldable phone market you know Google just announced the pixel nine something something fold and the nine fold has worse cameras than the nine pro because the fold body has to be thinner so that when you fold it up it's not as chunky as it could be well the thinner the thinness of that body can only fit you know kind of slightly worse cameras than the like the slab phone.
The slab phone can well what if Apple does that with the iPhone slim what if they you know if the iPhone's comes out next year and it's a super slim phone but in order to get that slim they had to make the cameras a little bit worse. Let's try it why not let's see like maybe people want that maybe the slim will be so compelling other ways people will accept that trade off who knows I would love to see more experimentation from Apple in that way.
What if for instance you know when you look at the size and scope of the iPhone business it is just it is so massive that just just for sheer scale reasons there are certain materials or components or manufacturing techniques they can't use because they can't make enough of them or they can't get enough of them so if there's like some really awesome camera sensor maybe maybe there's an amazing camera sensor available but.
If you put it in the iPhone you got to make X million of them and they just there's aren't that many available what if they introduced a higher end model that was really expensive but had that amazing camera sensor that they could only you know maybe they can only make 20 million of them in a year whatever and that would be a small who knows but like.
There are certain things like that or maybe they want to make one maybe they want to make an iPhone out of a different material like ceramic and they just can't make enough ceramic to fill the need for the entire iPhone line but if it's one kind of accessory model off to the side maybe they can make a special one that has a ceramic case or whatever there are lots of opportunities like that for Apple to do interesting fun things with the iPhone that don't need to be or that can't be the mainstream models.
Any in their other product lines you have that you have things like the 12 point I think I had pro or the iPad mini both of which probably sell orders of man to less than the other iPad sizes but they have those for those kind of.
Fringe of the market that people never the less still like and value and will pay for the desktops they have first of all they have desktops at all second of all they have a lot of them it's kind of yes wild right and like you look at like the Mac pro i'm shocked the Mac pro still exists but it does. Even though they can't possibly something that many of them but it exists and people are buying it and then all the way down to the Mac many that also still exists like.
These products sell and they sell to people who like yes if you didn't sell like for instance if if the only Mac desktop was the Mac studio like kind of the middle one like okay people would people would get by we would figure it out some people would buy some people wouldn't.
But you thank god we have the other ones to solve other needs right now the iPhone we don't have a lot of those extremes covered we only have like the middle of the market covered and it seems like if apple tries to step out of that. Everyone calls it a failure if it doesn't.
You know destroy the sales of the other models but I think that's that's just the wrong way to look at it I would love to see more experimentation there and that's part of the reason why the rumors of the iPhone 17 slim whatever whatever we call. That's part of why those rumors excitement a little bit because I want to see apple do more weird bets with the iPhone like try some weird stuff and see what sticks I think they can be really fun.
Yeah I mean I was just looking up quickly it looks like Apple sold 231 million iPhones in 2023. Geez if if a mini or a slim or a super pro was 5% that's 11 million iPhones how many companies. We go nuts to sell 11 million products of anything of anything yeah I just don't I and it is weird to write on other product lines they get it I think that the analogies the iPad.
They haven't I had many they have you know multiple iPads to satisfy different means so many so that sometimes we make fun of them and say it's a confusing product life but. But you know it if you want an iPad no matter how much money you want to spend no matter what size you're looking for you can get one and. The phone for some reason I don't know I maybe I don't know they must just be really obsessed with those margins that's the only thing I can think of.
But but they make such a margins on all of them like it's not like they made less money on the map on the iPhone mini like they made great money on that like all their margins are great and you see this with the Mac like the Mac.
All these you know kind of lesser less popular max that exists on the French of that lineup they still make a huge part of the market so I I wouldn't I think most people's reasoning when we try to analyze why Apple doesn't make more different iPhone models I think most of our reasons do not hold it to scrutiny.
If we we can say well they maybe they don't want to manage the skews they manage hundreds of skews they're fine like we say maybe they don't want they won't make as much money they'll make tons of money trust me like they won't sell as well as others well it's still going to sell better than most phones in the market like it's just they're all these reasons don't really hold it
scrutiny what it comes down to I think is they they have just optimized like they they're hitting the middle of the market there's not a ton of pressure for them to expand out word yet so I think that's fine I will be interesting is like in the rest of the cell phone market we're starting to see some some really interesting new ideas with things like foldables which I think we're going to be bigger than most Apple people think.
I started to see different experiments here and there if any of those start having traction like again I really I think the foldables thing has more traction than most Apple fans are willing to admit if you ever talk to somebody who uses a foldable phone they love it love it because it's a phone that converts into a small tablet they love it so I think there is something there.
And so maybe we'll start to see Apple kind of break out of its comfort zone in certain ways there which I think will be better for the whole market so you know we'll see but I do hope that they start pushing those walls and again that's that's why the 17 slimmer members sound kind of fun to me. I think the other big divider coming up is the mobile phone as your personal assistant like if AI really gets legs and it really can.
You know order a pizza for you and cancel your dentist appointment if Apple is not right there with the rest of the industry it doesn't matter how good the iPhones are people will switch out. Yeah I think that's that's part of the reason why this this new AI boom and phones is I think so potentially interesting because it does have the potential to really shake stuff up if there is big competitive differences.
All right, Lamarco thanks so much for coming back on the show I always love hearing your opinion on stuff you've got you got interesting thoughts as a as a power user as an apple I can I call you an apple fan I think you are you live their stuff and but you're you know you're very attentive to what they're doing and I really value your opinion.
If people want to follow you I guess they should definitely go over and check out the accidental tech podcast your your podcast that you do with Casey and John that's at at a tip you don't have him correct that's right yep. Yeah, all right anywhere else people should go to keep up with what you're doing of course go go down a little over casking it's awesome really love the update by the way I'm 100% in.
Thank you so much I'll give you a little hint I'm also trying to get swipes back on the now playing screen that might take a little bit longer. Okay, we'll see we'll see. Sure. If you are has not made that easy but see that's what I love about it is like you are always making it better and you know some of the big boys don't put as much effort in this you do so that's the opposite one with the apps from the developers that are never happy and that's usually the best apps.
So go check out overcast and that's also that overcast.fm if memory serves that's right yeah ATP and overcast that's where that's where to find the best. Okay, and we are the Mac Power You situation find us over relay.fm slash mp you. Thank you to our sponsors today that's our friends over at one password net suite in Zock dock. If you are a more power user subscriber stick around we're going to talk more about Apple intelligence with Marco.
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