622: Duplicate Garbage Generation Process
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So it turns out I am tired and it is entirely my fault this time. What'd you do? I decided this would be a good day to get like all of my medical to-do items done. And so not only does that include a trip to the dentist, which is never fun, but I also now have four new holes poked in me, I think. Oh, lovely. Three different vaccines and a blood test. Yeah.

I'm in line for my shingles vaccine now that I'm 50. Ooh, congratulations. So exciting. More vaccines open up to me. I think I have to get that one twice. Yeah, do you have a party for that? That's fun. If you haven't had chicken pox, what you get instead is the chicken pox vaccine that prevents you from ever getting chicken pox. But too late for old people. Didn't exist when we were kids. The problems of being born in the 1900s. Mm-hmm.

All right. We have a bunch of follow-up to go through. We have a lot of AirPod-related follow-up. This is so funny to me in a good way. I almost didn't talk about this because I thought maybe I'm an idiot. Maybe I'm the only one who doesn't understand these noises and so on and so forth. And this actually got quite a bit of traction, both in terms of feedback and some other stuff, which we'll talk about in a minute. But

We have, thanks to the magic of friend of the show, Guy Rambeau, and you might know Guy because of AirBuddy, which does a lot of really fancy and fun Bluetooth stuff with your Mac and other devices. Also, what was the name of the keyboard silencer thing that we've been talking about on and off for the last few weeks, which I'm drawing up now? Is it Keyboard Buddy? Is everything Buddy? I think that's right. I think it is Keyboard Buddy or something like that. It's a very friendly category of software. It is very friendly, and so is Guy. Yeah.

Anyway, thanks to Guy, we have actually some sample audio that we can play for you. And thanks to Marco, it should play not only for John and I, but more importantly, for those of you listening, even those of you listening live. So we're going to go through a bunch of feedback. And the funny thing about this feedback is...

I am pretty darn confident that we have discovered the genesis of one of the, or actually two of the noises, one of which I was talking about, one of which I wasn't. But there's yet another noise that I'm still not sure what the genesis, what the purpose is for this noise. Let me get to the feedback. Zach says...

I have the same model of AirPods Pro as Casey, and I feel like there was a firmware update in the last few months that introduced a new noise because I never heard it before, which tracks what I was experiencing as well. It sounds a lot like what Casey described. Turns out that noise is to let you know that the case has 40% or less battery left.

You can turn off case charging sounds, but then you don't get the chime when it starts charging. I think, I am not saying this with confidence, but I believe that this is what Marco will play for you now, which is so that like trailing off noise is, I think the case saying that

hey, I need to be charged now, please. And there's actually a little bit of knowledge-based articles that we can talk or that we'll talk about in a moment that indicates that there is a noise that does this, but doesn't indicate which noise does this. I'll tell you, I've heard this noise for years now, occasionally. I never assumed that's what it meant. It might be what it means, but I have just, oh, I've put my AirPods in the case.

I guess. Actually, before you go on, let me just address something that Zach pointed out that a lot of other people point out as well, that you can turn off case charging sounds, right? This annoys me so much about AirPods. And I think I complained about it before and I will do it again. Whenever I read anything like this, like, oh, there's some setting in AirPods. I should go change that because I was like, you know what? I don't, I don't really benefit from the case charging noises. I should probably just turn them off. But guess what? You can't. Unless,

Unless the AirPods are connected to your phone. And that drives me insane. It's like Apple, just give me the UI. And then the next time they connect, set the settings in. So I have to go get the AirPods, put them in my ear, open up the phone. Oh, there's my AirPods. And now I can turn off case charging. So anyway, if you don't feel like you benefit from hearing noises from your case, which I don't think I do because I'm pretty good about keeping things charged,

You can turn it off, but you do have to connect your AirPods and then the AirPods show up at the top of all of your settings and you dig into them and you can find this. That is very true. And there actually will be a link in the show notes about where you can do this, if I'm not mistaken. But Marco, if you wouldn't mind playing that same one one more time, please. So that's one of them, which we believe to be the case is mostly discharge sound. But there's another one. And this one, I'm still not entirely clear what this is. Marco, if you please.

I think that might mean that like there's some sort of I'm not charging situation going on. One of the earbuds has poor contact or something. Yeah, that sounds like an error. We all agree. And I think that's what it is. But I've heard and read no specific confirmation that that's the case. That's just a theory.

But that being said, Tom French writes, Hey Casey, I think the sad sound your case makes is telling you that the case charges below some level and needs to be charged. I find this helpful to not end up with uncharged AirPods because I forgot to charge the case. It may be the same sad sound the AirPods make when their batteries are low, but I'm not sure. It's not. It's not. The orange light when nothing is in the case tells you it is not fully charged. Green indicates fully charged.

Orange with AirPods in the case tells you the AirPods are still charging. Green tells you the AirPods are fully charged. I was aware of the orange and green for when the AirPods were in the case. I didn't realize that if you do the same motion, if you open the case while the AirPods are in your ears or just out of the case, I suppose, that the light now serves double duty as the case status, which was a bit of news to me.

Continuing on, Ian Williamson writes,

It was driving me mad for a while as I kept hearing the sound, but I couldn't figure out where it was coming from. So I'm going to have Marco play this in just a moment. I will tell you that by no fault of Marco's, this is a little bit shrill. So if you have the ability to turn your volume down just for a moment, I might recommend it. So Marco, why don't you play it like twice, please, if you don't mind.

This is apparently a sound that's played only when the case is closed, only when the AirPods are in the case. And this is quoting from a knowledge-based article that we'll put in the show notes.

I have heard this from time to time, had not a damned idea what the hell it was. And so I am very thankful for Ian Williamson and others who have written in with this. This was not one of the noises I was talking about last week, but I am genuinely happy to know what exactly this is. So again, we'll put a link to Ian's little video recording on Mastodon in the show notes, as well as the knowledge-based article that mentions this.

Then, as John had mentioned earlier, you can turn off the charging sounds, and there's also some information about the light. This is a different knowledge base article, which we also put in the show notes. Quoting from that, when your AirPods aren't in your case, the light shows the status of your case. Green means fully charged, which is what we thought earlier, and amber, or what I called orange, means less than one full charge remains, which I did not know until I read this. That was very useful.

This ended up getting picked up by MacRumors, and so we actually inspired an entire article on MacRumors. And it's so wild for me personally, because again, this was a thing I was barely even going to bother talking about. And then Julie Clover made an article out of it on MacRumors. And so among other things, Julie writes, information on the mysterious chime was highlighted on Mastodon after Apple's unclear AirPod sounds were discussed on what's now last week's ATP podcast.

Then finally, somebody who listens to the show who goes by Patch said, after listening to your most recent episode, I put together airpodnoises.net, a super simple site that has the various AirPod noises you can go through and play to work out what they are. The only one I believe I'm missing at the moment is the new shake head and nod head sounds from AirPods Pro 2 and AirPods 4, but I will hopefully add those soon. And actually, Patch, at the time, or last I looked, said,

It doesn't have a couple of these noises that we talked about earlier today, but I don't know, maybe patch will, you know, slice and dice them out of the recorded version of this episode. I don't know, but yeah,

For the day-to-day noises, this is what I was hoping to see on Apple's website, and I didn't. So, Patch, thanks for rescuing Apple. Apple hasn't figured out how to play audio on the web yet, but they'll get to it. They've reinvented scrolling in many different ways, but never audio. Yes. Right? But anyway, thank you to everyone. Thank you to Guy. Thank you to Marco for being DJ for me. And thank you to everyone for writing in. This had a lot more traction, like I said, than I realized, which makes me feel good that I'm not the only dope in the world. So, go team.

All right, John, more TV at CES news slash followup. What's going on? This one snuck in after we recorded. I saw this news. So I think we just missed it at recording time. Uh, I don't know why these guys don't get all their announcements done all at once, but they don't, they tend to trickle out over the course of CES. So I think this is probably the last one. Uh, this is from high sense, uh, Chinese television manufacturer, usually known for making not so expensive displays with a very impressive specs. They're kind of an upstart. Um,

Anyway, they have a television which I believe is called the 116 UX. That was the name that stuck on the plate underneath it on its display. But a lot of the videos that we will link in the show notes don't actually say the name of the TV. But anyway, it's as the name might imply, a 116 inch television. It is very large. It's innovation.

is what they are calling, what they are branding, a trichroma LED backlight, which is, as the name sounds, a backlight that uses three different colors. Now, with a regular mini LED TV or mini LED screen in your MacBook Pro or whatever, what

What they mean is that the backlight, instead of being just one big giant light, is a bunch of smaller lights. And usually the more the better because you want those backlight regions to be small because the way it works is it turns on the backlight regions behind the areas of the screen that are lit up and turns them off or turns them down below the areas that are darker. The screen has millions of tiny little pixels on it. The backlight...

Maybe there's hundreds, thousands, ten thousands, but, you know, the screen has millions, right? So the backlights are maybe, you know, one inch by one inch or one centimeter by one centimeter on a large television, a few inches by a few inches, right? And obviously the pixels are very, very tiny.

This is one of the disadvantages of minimal LED screens because you can't just light up an individual pixel. If you want one white pixel on a field of black, you've got to light up the entire giant backlight behind that one pixel and then it bleeds through and yada yada, right? Well, the innovation on this screen is instead of the backlights being white or blue LEDs, which is the two things they predominantly use, they use white because it's convenient and they use blue because...

They can turn the blue into the other colors in a quantum dot front layer, and they let the blue straight through for the blue subpixel, and then they turn it into red and green with quantum dots. Anyway, instead of the backlight being all one color,

Every backlight region, every square in the dynamic backlight has an RG and a B, RGB LED lights that combine. If you turn them all on, they make a white backlight, but you can also obviously make it a colored backlight. So one thing that television manufacturers have been doing in demos is

either for real or faking it is they will I think Sony did this for real with last sometime during 2024 where they basically show you a television screen where one half of the screen is the whole screen has the the liquid crystal display layer

And then the backlight behind that and, you know, the whole stack, right? But the other part of the screen does not have the LCD. So there is no liquid crystal display over it. It is just the backlight regions, right? And whatever like filters and polarizers and stuff they have to show off how good their backlight is, right? What they want to show you is like, okay, well, here's what the screen looks like.

But, you know, even just looking at the backlight, you can kind of make out what the picture is because our backlight regions are so small and there are so many of them. And we do such a good job of blending them so they don't look like little lit up squares or whatever. See, isn't that impressive? Well, Hisense did the same thing. I don't know if it was for real, like they peeled away the physical layers of their screen or if they faked it by just showing video. But either way, you can follow the links that will be in the show notes and see it.

You can see on the left the actual color image of the screen and on the right what is supposedly just the backlight. And what just the backlight looks like is a really blurry color version of the screen because the backlight itself has colors in it. And that obviously makes the backlight look closer to what is on the screen and also helps the color purity of the individual pixels.

what they claim for this is that it covers 97% of the BT220 color space, which is a very large color space that no television has come close to covering all of. Closest any television has ever gotten was QD OLED, which is around 75, 80% of BT220. And this is 97%. So this has the best color volume of, I was going to say before I finished filling in these show notes, the best color volume of any consumer television. And this television goes up to 10,000 nits. So they don't say what size, what the window size is for that, like how much of the screen is lit up.

So this is very impressive, right? OLEDs still have the advantage in terms of they can light up every individual pixel. They don't need to deal with this backlight stuff. But the color purity they're achieving here has surpassed OLED, which is very impressive. Then I got to the video, which came out, I think, just earlier today. The first one to say a price for the television.

and it's thirty thousand dollars oh so cool my excitement has been severely tempered uh but because i thought like look it's a mini led television it's 116 inch 16 inches there have been 115 100 inch 98 inch like it's not it's not unreasonable size and the tech that it was using it's like oh it's mini led but they have rgb backlights uh but yes thirty thousand dollars so so that's not

great but still impressive showing um samsung and tcl also have similar tech in the work uh in the works i also remember back before i bought my first flat screen television like i was going from my uh i had bought a used uh 34 inch sony vegas crt that weighed a hojillion pounds and i was going to buy my first flat panel tv and i was looking at like what's on the market for flat panel tvs

And at one point I was really enamored with Sony's, uh, led backlit LCD televisions of the day. And I believe they also used RGB backlights, like incredibly primitive. Like, I think they look like actual big, like, you know, Christmas tree light, you know, RG and a B right. Um,

I ended up getting a Panasonic Plasma as my first flat screen television. But I remember this tech being existing back then as well. And like I said, Samsung and TCL are also investigating it. I don't know why it's so expensive. It seems like if it has a similar number of backlight regions as a regular mini LED TV, making them RGB shouldn't increase the cost that much, but whatever. Anyway, as an aside, as part of watching the videos that we will link about this

One of the videos mentioned that this new television, this Hisense 116UX,

comes with a mediatek pentonic 800 chipset which finally supports four full bandwidth hdmi 2.1 ports just in time for hdmi 2.2 to be announced they've done it mediatek now sells a part that can handle four full bandwidth hdmi 2.1 ports so in theory companies other than lg and samsung could have televisions with four full bandwidth hdmi 2.1 ports in 2025 i

Now, I'm sorry, to fill in a little background here, I'm going to go with what my understanding is and just interrupt me whenever you're ready. So there is a parts manufacturer that does kind of the IO for many, many, many different TV manufacturers. And their like most common version of this IO board only supports like one or two HDMI ports at 2.1. Is that right? And then like every other HDMI port is neutered by comparison. Is that fair? It's not just the most common, their best one.

that you couldn't buy one from them that supported for years. You get two of the good ports and then, you know, two not so great ports. And then, you know, like I said, LG does their own chips and I think Samsung does as well. And they've supported for HDMI 2.1 ports for years. And every other company that just buys this MediaTek chip

There wasn't anything for them to buy to support it, but this year there is. Now, will TV makers buy the new MediaTek chip or will they keep using the old ones? We'll see. I'm hoping the flagship TVs use them, in particular the Sony TVs, which have not yet been announced for 2025. I hope they use the new QD OLED screen. I hope they use the new MediaTek chip, and that will be great. But anyway...

Good job for Hisense for pushing the envelope. Bad job for it being $30,000. I mean, if you're going to look at $30,000 TVs, like I said, there were micro LED televisions where every little subpixel is a tiny individual LED, like that amazing screen technology that is the best technology you can get. But those have always cost like more than a car, right? Well, if I'm going to spend $30,000, I'm going to start looking at those. I'm not going to be looking at like a

mini LED backlit thing. So, and supposedly they had ones of those that were, there wasn't one company showing them or being less expensive because those tend to be modular. Like, like literally the, one of the demos they have is you can take a piece of the screen and pull it off. Like a television we made of like six or 12 of these panels. And you can literally like remove one while the television is running and then snap it back into place, which made me think it should make everybody think,

won't you see the seams between the panels? And the answer is, yeah, you kind of do see the seams, but...

If you pay enough money, they can essentially precisely manufacture the parts so that the rectangles really touch each other so that you can't see the seams because they're so precision engineered and the light overglow hides the seams. So even in that technology, you can kind of understand why they're expensive because A, it has to be precisely manufactured and B, placing however many millions of tiny R, G, and B LEDs...

is very expensive. So if you do have $30,000 burning a hole in your pocket, maybe look at micro LED before looking at this iSense thing. Noted. For when I inevitably have $30,000 with no other purpose than an absurdly expensive TV.

All right. Tell me about DLSS, if you please. This was the, what does this acronym stand for? I forget now. Deep Learning Super Sampling, I believe, from memory. DLSS 4 was announced at CES. We talked about it last episode. A few people had some feedback about it. Hampus Jensen says, frame generation was added as part of DLSS 3. That's what I was trying to remember last time. I'm like, this is not the first version of DLSS to do frame generation, but the big innovation with DLSS 4 is it can add like three manufactured frames instead of just one. So anyway, continuing.

DLSS3 actually included this originally with just one frame. And while the comparison... this is going back to Hampus... and while the comparison to motion smoothing on TV is apt, it's not just a dumb average routine two frames that uses motion and depth information from the game engine. And then Flunked Flank's explanation of this is that DLSS frame generation introduced in DLSS3 is not just extrapolating the next frame based on previous frames, but rather interpolating between rendered frames.

But wait, how is it possible to add a frame before the one being shown? Did they invent a time machine? Well, no. About half a frame of latency is added to the display pipeline. After a frame has completed rendering, the display pipeline delays it a half a cycle until the next frame is about halfway through rendering.

Another half cycle later, the next frame is done. DLSS runs the relatively quick interpolation step and then immediately displays the generated frame. Another half cycle later, the frame that was previously finished can now be displayed rinse and repeat. So like what it's doing is basically like it wants to interpolate between two frames. So it's got one frame ready.

And then it waits a little bit until the other frame is almost ready. And then it does an interpolation between the frame that's ready and the frame that's half baked to make the in-between frame. And if you just repeat that pipeline, you get ahead of the game and you end up increasing the frame rate. There's a Digital Foundry explanation video that tries to show this in action in like the Spider-Man game if you want to see what this looks like.

And then something I meant to add last time is this whole DLSS, XDSS, I can't remember all the things. There's a bunch of different alphabet soups from every company. This family of technologies was originally focused on letting people run games at lower resolution because obviously if you render fewer pixels, you can have a higher frame rate. Render the game at lower resolution and then upscale it to fill like a 4K screen. So you run it at 1080p, upscale it to 4K.

That's what most of these technologies were originally aimed at because upscaling is obviously fast and easy to do. The upscaling has gotten better and better. I believe they added machine learning upscaling many years ago and now it would be called AI upscaling. Like, can we upscale with a little bit more smarts than just like Photoshop? You know, you just expand. Well, Photoshop probably does AI upscaling too, but instead of just like bicubic interpolation or whatever. Anyway, all these technologies, DLSS included, are

started kind of doing that and still do that still can do that but now dlss you know starting with version 3 was getting to the frame generation game so yeah there's lots of ways for you to uh uh make get better frame rates in your games without relying on what was it traditionally rendered frames or brute force rendered frames they use those same terms in the video so these really are terms of art in the industry of uh

rendered frames having all these adjectives stuck on them to make them seem old fashioned. Yeah.

Oh, yeah, yeah. All right. And then with regard to Mac monitors, Henry Chen wrote in, have you all spent any time looking into the monitor options from lesser known Chinese manufacturers? Reminds me of about 10 years ago when you could get Korean branded 27 inch monitors for a fraction of the price of the American ones. That said, the Korean one I had died a few years ago, and I'm still using my 27 inch Dell Ultra Sharp purchased around the same time.

I found a thread on MacRumors covering a lot of these, and we'll link to that. And then Henry says, here's the one I would likely get, the Kuycon, K-U-Y-C-O-N, G27X. And this is aesthetically a clone of the...

but it's 27 inches in 5K instead of 32 in 6K. But, I mean, just looking at it, it looks good. I mean, visually, I'm not offended by it at all. So please load the webpage. I didn't put the images in the notes, so please load this webpage now and take a look at this monitor. I'm guessing that you're going to make me feel dumb because I'm not seeing what you see. No, like, you're right. Like, they're trying to, the whole idea is, presumably it's using the same panels, a 27-inch 5K panel, 600 nits, you know. Like, it's,

probably the same panel that's like in 5k imax right like that that much i believe and they're trying to style it to look like the xdr but how do they do that and offer this panel in an xdr looking case for a thousand dollars because that's the price thousand dollars which is you know incredibly inexpensive compared to like the studio display well let's look close a little bit closer at this case which is hard because their webp image is going to try to open the image in a new tab it will download it because of some misconfiguration of their website but anyway

Take a look at the back of the monitor with like the XDR Mac Pro looking holes in it. Yeah, that pattern is wrong. It's like two layers sandwiched together that are offset. So it isn't... Exactly. What's actually on the front of the Mac Pro is like if you machined out these partial spheres...

this is just two sheets of metal with holes in them that are offset from each other. Yeah. So it's like a, like a 2d shadow puppet version of the much, much more expensive machining that is completely unnecessarily done on the back of the monitor that I never see because it's facing a wall.

I got it.

It's really cool. It does look really awesome. It's on the front of my Mac Pro. I look at it all the time. It's a beautiful work of art. Entirely unnecessary just for aesthetics. But it's also incredibly expensive because you have to have this thick piece of aluminum that you machine out into this incredibly complicated shapes like...

It's just so expensive. So this is trying to look like that, but it's literally two flat pieces of metal with holes punched in it that are just slid past each other. So clever there. Second thing, take a look at the side view at the bottom there, because this comes with a stand, right? Looks a lot like the XDR stand, but look a little closer.

I think it's just like there's no articulation like that thing coming out of it is just a flat piece of metal. There's no hinges anywhere on the thing. It is not height adjustable. It's not tilt adjustable. It is like this is the position does not move. I'm given an option for a height. So it comes with no stand because they copied Apple that closely and then regular stand 50 bucks a little bit less expensive than apples, right? And the height adjustable stand is 100 bucks.

Right, but like the one you're looking at, the regular stand, like it looks like the XDR stand, but it does not move. Yeah, that's got to be... It's a solid piece of metal. Yeah. So kudos to these people for... And it's a VESA mount on the back of it, so it's a standardized thing or whatever. But like I...

My faith in the quality of the casing around this is probably low, but this is always the gamble with those things. Like the panels are only made by a small number of companies. If you know this is actually the panel that you want and you think the surrounding case is aesthetically to your liking and you think it will be reliable and you think like,

you know things that are people tend not to think about until they go wrong casey like the connection of the usbc ports in the back of the monitor to the uh the printed circuit board that's inside and how when that starts getting flaky the whole monitor becomes no good um it's hard to judge stuff like that right but anyway yeah there's there are many sort of lesser known brands for monitors that use the same panels uh it's just a question of finding one of those that

is going to work out for you in the end because there's so much more to monitor than just the panel all that other stuff around it including the case and the stand but also the power supply and the way it's designed and how the connectors connect to the circuit board that all adds up to the sum total that is the monitor experience so you got to be a little bit careful

Additionally, Tim Wenna writes with regard to the Asus. Asus? I'd never get it right. I always say Asus, but I have no idea if I'm right. All I know is that my version of Asus is definitely wrong. Definitely. That's definitely incorrect.

The Asus PA32QCV, which is a 32-inch, same resolution as the XDR6K monitor. And again, at a glance, this looks pretty good. $1,200. It's not many LED, so it's just got one big backlight. No dynamic backlight, so the black levels aren't going to be great. It's 98% P3. It's HDR600. I finally found a webpage that explains what these display HDR600 specs, like what it means, are.

Like you just glance at it and say, look, it's not going to get brighter than 600 nits, which is fine, whatever. But we'll link to the performance criteria thing on display HDR dot org so you can see what it really means. But this thing has HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 1.4, two Thunderbolt 4 ports. It's a USB-C hub. It has a headphone jack, an ambient light sensor, built in KVM, 96 watts power delivery, $1,200. Yeah.

I'm assuming this uses the same LCD panel as the XDR because it's 32-inch and it's the exact same resolution. Yeah. It does not use the same backlight, obviously, so it's not HDR. It's not 1600 nit. It's not going to have good black levels or whatever, but it's the XDR panel with tons of IO on it in...

a plasticky looking case, but it's $1,200. It's less than the studio display with no stand. And it's basically, it's a 6K monitor. And remember the studio display also doesn't have HDR, also doesn't have a mini LED backlight, also doesn't do 120 Hertz, right? So, and Asus is not a fly-by-night brand. So this looks like the best deal I have seen for someone who just wants 6K pixels, doesn't care about HDR and wants it from a brand that they've heard of.

Yeah. This looks amazing. Because this is literally like you could buy five of these for the cost of an XDR with its stand. Like, it's...

This entire monitor, which comes with the stand, is only a little bit more than the stand for the Pro Display XDR. Yeah, it's not going to be as good in some of the edge case specs that a lot of buyers won't care about. And it doesn't do HDR at all, so if you want HDR, this is not the monitor for you. Right, and look...

These days, every third-party monitor is going to have a little bit of friction with macOS. Like, there's not going to be as great integration in certain ways. You know, you're not... Like, there's going to be downsides to using non-Apple monitors, as there always are. And I feel like these days, those downsides are a little bit higher. But...

$1,200 for the same size panel as the $6,000 XDR. Like the same size and same resolution. Let me tell you, I haven't moved to one of these panels a few years back.

It's amazing. And when I use a 27-inch now, it feels like I'm looking through a porthole. When you have this much space, screen space matters a lot to power users, and especially in certain use cases. But almost everybody who's a power user can benefit from more screen space up to a certain limit of how big is your field of view physically from your eyes. And I think 32 inches...

It maxes it out. I feel like I can use this monitor fully without turning my head, and this is about as big of a monitor as I can use without turning my head. But to have this option, if this is good, I mean, look, we don't know yet. We don't have it. We don't know what the experience is like using it with a Mac. But if the experience of this monitor is good...

for 1200 this will be an incredible buy yeah 100 if i was in the market today given how um frugal i am i mean this is probably what i would get um it's it's it's incredible value for money assuming it isn't a pile of trash but who knows i mean i hope not but we'll see but as uh the character's name i can't remember says in planet of the apes he's just so damn ugly

It's a shame. It's not ugly. The Dell 6K is ugly. This is just, it looks like a PC monitor. Whatever.

Okay. So Dan Engler writes in HP episode 500, you wondered what the industry at large would call the dynamic Island. Here's what the phone maker one plus calls it. And this is from NKBHD review of the one plus 13. Uh, somebody, maybe John, maybe it was Dan put together a YouTube clip, which I very much appreciate. And apparently they call it live alert capsules. Okay.

I mean, Dynamic Island's not great. I think that's why we were talking about it. It's like, Dynamic Island. What an Apple kind of poetic name for making lemonade out of the lemons that is the giant punch-out needed for the Face ID sensor.

I'm going to say Dynamic Island is better than Live Alert Capsules. Oh, yeah. It's pretty rough, yeah. Especially since this is like so clearly just a complete copy of Apple's feature. You know, Apple did this thing with their cutout. We're doing the same thing, but we call it Live Alert Capsules. So there you go. That's what they would call it. Oh, yeah, yeah. All right. Let's talk topics and...

I don't know. I don't know what to make of this. And I'm not sure I really want to talk about it, but we need to. So Tim Cook apparently donated a million dollars to the Trump inauguration.

Uh, reading from Axios, Apple CEO, Tim Cook will personally donate $1 million to the president elect Trump's inaugural committee sources, which with knowledge of the donation, tell Axios, uh, the verge rights, Cook's donation follows similar commitments from open AI CEO, Sam Altman, Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos through Amazon and meta as big tech companies and executives work to curry favor with the incoming administration. Unnamed sources tell Axios that quote, Cook, a proud Alabama native, uh,

believes the inauguration is a great American tradition and is donating to the inauguration in the spirit of unity. Sorry. I'm good. I'm good. Unity with who? Right. The spirit of unity. We're going to anger everybody. Continuing, Apple is, quote, not expected, quote, to donate to the inauguration. And then later on, we'll link to The Verge also, where Google and Microsoft apparently are also doing the same thing. How much is everybody donating, Casey? Oh,

Well, I thought everyone was donating exactly a million bucks, but maybe I'm... Yeah, I guess that's just the price that's stamped on it. Like, you know, do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Donate $1 million. Everyone's just... Interestingly, they all decided they're going to donate exactly $1 million to the inauguration committee. And you may be wondering...

What is donating to the inauguration, which is like the event where the person becomes president? Why would giving money to that event be helpful or useful in any possible way? And I think before we talk about the people doing it, it's worth considering why that's the case. It's basically because it's a way to get money while looking like you're helping to pay for a party. And really what's happening is it's a sort of

not money laundering, but might as well be like, like many government things. Uh, this, some amount of money is going towards this thing. Uh, and this thing is somehow going to find a way to spend all of that money by hiring all the companies that are, uh, friends with the, uh, incoming administration and they will get all this money. And it just look at what happened to all the money that was given to the 2016 Trump inauguration committee. Uh, it's just a way to, uh,

uh, enrich, uh, people, uh, associated with the, uh, incoming administration. And so that's why donating money to the, uh, inauguration committee is seen as a thing that is desirable. This is like, well, you're not actually paying for a party. What you're doing is paying for how, whatever obscene price that, uh, my, my, uh, brother-in-law's DJ company is going to charge us for whatever it is that they're supposedly doing for the inauguration or whatever. Yeah. I'll just say it's a bribe that,

That's a lot faster way to say what John just said. It's just a bribe. It's just basic. I mean, like a lot of government stuff is like this where it's just basic government corruption, which the Trump administration is a corruption machine. Like just everything is corruption. But every administration has some form of like patronage where, you know,

you give money and I hire them. And like there's, there's whole sections of the government that are meant to try to stop this to say, well, we won't just let you pick your brother-in-law's company. In fact, we'll have a whole process for figuring out who wins the bid for this contract and so on and so forth. And then the companies all involved find out how to subvert that process and make sure their brother-in-law's company still gets the money. And,

The cycle goes on. But Trump, the Trump administration in 2016 and again in 2020 is like we don't dispense with the notion to even pretend we're doing anything legitimate. It's just straight up corruption. Give us the money and it will go to all the people we want to give it to. And we're not even going to pretend we're actually spending on anything for real. So, yeah, it's a it's a payoff. It's here's some money in exchange for something.

Yeah, and let me just also put another exclamation point on what John just said here, because I'll say it even more directly. To say that this is just the nature of the game is to do a disservice to most of the players in this game and to the people listening, because that kind of equivocates it with, like, oh, this is just all politicians are this corrupt. And what we saw during the first Trump administration, and there's absolutely no end in sight with now the second one,

is that they take corruption to another level. It is a difference in degree so great that it is not comparable to what

almost any other u.s president has ever done like it it is a very different level of corruption it is first of all right out for everyone to see like there is no it's shameless they have no they have no shame there's no they don't try to hide anything about they hire their idiot son-in-law to be like an important government position for thing has no experiences and it's like i'm not even going to pretend there's a reason for this it's straight up corruption

What are you going to do about it? I mean, look, he was elected by this time a pretty good margin despite being a convicted felon, a rapist, a traitor to our country. I mean, there's – the list of crimes is pretty severe here and yet people like him. So obviously –

he knows he can do whatever he wants. He did last time, nothing happened. And so he's going through the same thing again. And so now we have, getting back to the topic at hand here, now we have all of the, well, most of the big tech people basically just right out in the open giving him protection money. Like just go

going right in and saying, you know what, we're just going to give him a huge amount of money here just so we can curry favor with him. And what we see, you know, look, I've seen a lot of people, you know, say online, oh, well, this is just shrewd business from Tim Cook. So, you know, because Trump's going to put tariffs on things from China. So Tim Cook has to

protect the troops and make sure that all these thousands of people whose jobs he's responsible for, surely they can't be hit by terrorists and things from China. And my reaction to this is, first of all,

The fact that Tim Cook put everything in China, despite the political environment of the last couple of decades, that is his fault, largely. Like, yes, there are certain volumes and certain entries, but Apple could have moved slowly out of China. They could have done that sooner and more than they have been doing that. So they're stuck there.

And that's on them. That's the Tim Cook era right there. Like, that's on them. So that's number one, huge strategic problem that they have, and that's right on Tim Cook. Now, number two, does he have to play ball here and literally bribe the incoming president? First of all, will that even matter?

Trump turns around and fires his gun at whoever he wants to all the time, including people close to him. It's a waste of a million bucks, in my opinion, because it's not. If Trump wants to get that money from Apple's products, he will. Like if he wants to put the tariffs on, this won't matter. Number three, suppose these tariffs actually do go into effect, which that's I mean, that's a big if let's be honest, it's kind of a severe thing, but you never know with Trump. So suppose these tariffs actually happen.

Shouldn't Apple's products be hit with them? Like, if you're going to have a tariff from products made in China, isn't that what most Apple products are? I don't see any moral high ground for Apple to not be tariffed the same way everybody else would be. To me, that is also morally indefensible. So...

No part of this move by Tim Cook strikes me as either good for business or at all justifiable. Tim Cook is a bullshit artist. He's always been a bullshit artist. He's a big corporation CEO. Most of them are. That's kind of how it goes.

He puts on this great show, but how much he cares about certain things and, you know, he's not a terrible person. He does care about certain important things. You know, his environmental – the company's environmental efforts under his reign have been very good and that continues in certain ways. But –

When it comes down to the bottom line, he's a business CEO like every other business CEO. So when something threatens to attack his bottom line, he's going to do what it takes. And he does not have the courage to stand up to this in any other way. This is a complete lack of courage. This is a complete lack of good business. This is the result of kissing ass and bribing a new president to cover up for strategic errors he made in the past and to protect his bottom line. Screw everyone else.

So I have a slightly different take than Marco. But first, I want to explain why I think Marco is so angry about it, because it's worth saying explicitly in case people don't get it from the vibe. Why are people mad about Tim Cook donating a million dollars to the president's inauguration committee? The reason is that people who dislike everything that Trump stands for don't want to see him

him get support from anybody for anything so if you if someone if like the ceo of a company you like does literally anything to try to help or uh support or it seemed to endorse in any possible way anything having to do with anything that trump wants that's why people are mad because it's like

you can't, we don't want you to smile at him. We don't want you to shake his hand. We don't want you to like just nothing. Cause it's like everything he stands for is the opposite of everything Tim Cook says he stands for. And so,

You'd be like, oh, it's not a lot of money. Who cares? Whatever, blah, blah, blah. The whole thing is like, it is the symbolism of the gesture. We don't think that this million dollars is going to make a big difference in anything in the grand scheme of things. It is Apple, a company that we all care about, a company that stands for, claims to stand for, and I think does stand for essentially the opposite of everything Donald Trump stands for in terms of issues that people care about, is giving this money. So that's why people are mad, right? Yeah.

Now,

I'm mad about it too because I also hate everything that Trump stands for and think it is the opposite of everything that Apple and Tim Cook stands for, right? But they have done this and so have tons of other tech companies. Now – Well, now slow down. Strictly speaking, Apple hasn't done this. Tim has done this. That is a distinction that I think does not matter at all. This is just a shield. Like this is Apple. I think there is something to that a little bit. But come on. It's Tim Cook. It's Apple. We know. Like there's no getting around the fact that this is Apple, you know, Apple.

you can just say Apple, it's Tim Cook, but it's Apple. For all these companies that are doing this,

Tim Cook in particular, I think, has a reason to believe that it will be good for Apple's business because he did the same stuff last time Trump was president. It wasn't a million dollars, but it was that whole like, oh, come and stand in front of me and I'll stand next to you and smile and listen to you say the wrong things about the Mac Pro factory and like whatever, that whole PR thing where he was with Trump about the company that made the Mac Pros and stuff.

That, you know, basically kissing up Trump and trying to make him look good by standing next to him and allowing all that to happen was supporting an administration that lots of people didn't like and made people angry. And it got Apple, in theory, not provably, a carve out in a bunch of regulations and rules, I forget what they were, that would have hurt Apple a lot financially. But for whatever reason, Apple was excluded from those. Interesting. Interesting.

So will, you know, kissing up to Trump get you a business advantage?

history has shown that it is possible perhaps even likely right that's the nature of corruption he is a corrupt politician bribing corrupt politicians gets you something that's why they're corrupt like that's the whole point bribing an honest politician doesn't get you anything lots of companies give money to the you know inaugurations and funds of lots of you know that's the thing that tech companies always do it's like we just give money to all politicians people angry about that like you can't give it to all politicians when half the politicians are doing terrible things but like anyway

Um, we just do that because it's just a thing that we do. But like, in theory, if a politician thinks they at least have to pretend to be honest, they're not just going to be like, oh, take your money and then write into the law. Everybody gets this law except for Apple. Don't ask me why. Nah, right? That's, that's corruption, right?

So I think Tim Cook has some reason to believe that giving this money will get Apple an advantage because it did last time. It's, you know, it's terrible. It is an indictment of the Trump administration, but I think there is reason to believe that this will be a smart business move for Apple. Now,

A smart business of Apple. Marco thinks that they should, you know, take their lumps along with everybody else. If Trump does something stupid that makes Apple, the price of Apple products go up because they're made in China, they should take that because guess what? They are made in China, right? And that should, they should just take that the way it is.

That's one possible position. The other position, which Marco said in a funny voice before, but I think is a position that has some merit, is sort of the position that, I'll put a link in the show notes to, because I actually looked at this quote because I couldn't remember exactly, that has some historical connotations that are not positive. This was a Wikipedia article about Charles Irwin Wilson, who was up for the nomination for Secretary of Defense many decades ago.

Um, and this was, this was back when people really actually needed to pretend to be somewhat honest. And during his confirmation hearings, they were like, well, wait a second. Cause he was, he was previously the CEO of general motors. Like you're going to be secretary of defense, but you were running general motors. Isn't that unfair? Aren't you going to have a conflict of interest? Like between like, well, you want, you know, you want things that are good for general motors, but now you're supposed to be making decisions for the whole country, but you're not going to, you're surely not going to, you're not going to do anything that hurts general motors. Um,

Can you imagine being afraid of a conflict like that, given the insane conflicts that everybody has in government, including everybody? Anyway, it was a different time. And his answer in the confirmation hearings, his oft misquoted answer was essentially, to paraphrase, that he thinks that what's good for General Motors is also good for the United States and vice versa. So he's like, well, you know...

Like, I'm not going to do things just to benefit General Motors, but General Motors is so big and so important that what's good for General Motors is also good for the whole country. So I'll just do what's good for the country, and it will also be good for General Motors or vice versa. And that was widely condemned as saying, like, oh, you think...

you know, the country and General Motors are equal and just as important to each other. And so you don't even draw a distinction. You're like, I'm just going to do what's good for General Motors because as we all know, whatever is good for GM is good for everybody. And the rest of the country is like, no, not that's not the way it works. Right. But that angle on Apple is perhaps a lot more apt than it was for GM. Apple is huge, not just in terms of the people they employ and the money they make, but also in terms of

given the current financial situation, how much of every private person's retirement who has any kind of retirement account is unknowingly wrapped up in Apple and three other tech companies, right? Because we all like people who have 401ks, right?

have mutual funds and they're invested in the stock market. And what are the big players in the stock market? Like what percentage of people's portfolios are unknowingly made up of the big tech companies? Like they don't know that because it's a mutual fund. It's not like they're buying individual Apple or Google or Microsoft stock. But like the fact is tech giants are tech giants for a reason. Financially speaking, the footprint of Apple across the financial fortunes of the entire country is huge. Kind of like GM was back in the day.

What's good for Apple is good for the country. What's bad for Apple is bad for the country because we're so freaking big. And you may not even think you have any interest in Apple whatsoever. But guess what you kind of do? Because if we get screwed over and we get destroyed by these tariffs, your 401k is going to go down and you're not going to understand why. And it's because tech dominates our industry, right? That angle does exist. Now, it is interesting.

It's extremely charitable to ascribe to Tim Cook the motivation that he wants to essentially protect the fortunes of all the people who are financially dependent on Apple. It may be true. It may not be true. I don't know what's in Tim Cook's heart. But practically speaking, it is a fact that if Apple gets massively hurt financially, obviously Apple employees get hurt by that because a lot of their retirement and compensation is wrapped up in Apple stock.

Tim Cook himself, who cares? He's a billionaire. He's not worried about that and no one else is. So he's not in it for his own personal wealth or whatever. But tons of people rely financially on Apple maintaining at least its current level of health. And trying to protect the people who depend on Apple, employees, investors, everyone who's got stuff on their 401k, there's something to that. Now, you could say that's not worth the price you're paying.

you're enabling the evil Trump administration or whatever, but the most charitable and noble interpretation of what he's doing is personally sacrificing his own reputation and perhaps historically his, his own view in history. Cause if Trump turns even worse during this term, everybody do anything to support him is going to, they're, they're, they're, you know, they're going to go down in history as like the person who, uh, you know, helped out this even more terrible person. Right. Um,

personally sacrificing himself because he knows people are going to hate him for this and they do. Right. And he donated it himself rather than donating it through Apple. And that doesn't deflect the blame from Apple. Cause again, it's obviously an Apple donation done for the purposes of protecting Apple. Like it's clear what it's for, but by doing it himself, he is putting his personal reputation down.

in the trash can, right, for doing this in exchange for protecting the company. And I honestly believe, again, I don't know what's his heart, but I honestly believe he's not doing it to protect his riches. He doesn't care about the money for himself. He knows he's got enough money. He's going to give all his money away anyway. He seems like a nice person. He is not someone like some of the billionaires we know who can never feel like they have enough power and money.

And now he has to have more. I don't think that's Tim Cook's MO. So I think he's doing it to protect Apple. It could be argued that...

his tunnel vision about protecting Apple is causing him to miss the wider picture, which will say there's protecting Apple, but now you're enabling this terrible administration. And on the other side of that, you can say, is this amount of money going to materially affect how much evil the Trump administration does? Or is it just going to enrich the brother-in-law DJ? Because in the grand scheme of things, it's just the inauguration fund, which is going to be skimmed off of by a whole fleet of grifters that, yeah, those people probably go off and do bad things, but honestly, they'll probably just blow it on jet skis or whatever. So...

I hate this. I think everybody who is against the Trump administration hates seeing Apple support the administration in any way. But I also feel like I've been here before. I hated seeing Tim Cook standing next to Tim Apple in the Mac Pro factory. I hated the Mac Pro's good name being sullied by that whole thing. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Cheesy, peasy. But he did get a carve out for Apple. Is it fair that Apple has a carve out? No, it's not. It's corruption.

Should is it a more defensible, more moral stance to not give in to that corruption and not pay the bribe? Maybe. But morality is not just a one dimensional thing of like, do you participate in a corrupt system by paying off the corrupt politician or do you not? That's an easy decision. That decision doesn't happen in the vacuum because there's also corruption.

No.

See, to me, that is a really dangerous argument. Because once you start saying that we have to let Apple keep making as much money as possible, because if you don't let them keep making as much money as possible through basically whatever means they deem necessary, then we're going to harm all these people's retirement funds. So then... It doesn't mean you need to grow without bound. It just means if something terrible is going to happen, like these China tariffs that, again, might not ever happen.

But anyway, if these terrible things that were threatened didn't come to pass, it was not just a matter of growing without bound or even just maintaining. It's a matter of like massively hurting. There's, oh God, there's so much wrong with this. But like, you know, I think number one is like if Apple does, so suppose again, if these tariffs do happen and Apple gets a carve out under the argument that this is good for people's retirement funds and the employees and everything. I mean, it totally would be. Well, okay. But like, first of all,

Does Apple need any more unfair advantages? They're a monopolist in so many areas already. So for instance, should the iPad cost less than a high-end Amazon Kindle? Those are made in China. I know. That's the nature of corruption. Yeah. The people with money bribe. Right. What about Sonos? Most of their products are made in China. How about the Remarkable tablet? That's made in China. Should the Remarkable tablet cost less?

$1,500 when the iPad is $700 because they weren't big enough to give a million dollars to Trump. To say that the solution to corruption is more corruption... It's not a solution to corruption, but it's harm reduction. How can I make the least amount of harm come out of this terrible situation we're all in? No, what should happen is if these tariffs end up ever being real...

Every single American who voted or who chose not to in this past election should feel the pain of what they voted for. Honestly. Yeah, we know how well voters are able to connect the consequences of their vote to things that they don't like. They just reelected Trump. If they vote for a guy who says, let's raise the prices of everything in China, everything from China. Fine. Do it. I dare you.

See what happens. Yeah, well, we'll see how or anyway, I don't I don't support this. If I were Tim Cook, I wouldn't have done it. But I'm not Tim Cook. I don't understand the the what's it? First of all, I don't understand what's in his heart. And second of all, I don't understand the responsibilities he feels.

What's in his heart is completely irrelevant. You judge him by his actions. Look at what he's doing. Right, but his actions, net-net, his actions may be reducing the total amount of harm that happens during the Trump administration when you count the number of people times amount of harm. You know what I mean? Like, he's doing the most harm to himself

And in exchange, he's protecting a whole lot of other people from consequences. He's a cheap-ass coward is what he is. Hurting, competitive. But, like, no, that's the difficulty of ethical and moral decisions is deciding, you know, this we may discuss this in a future episode, the good of the one versus the good of the many. And how do you balance that? Right? It's not so cut and dry. Like, you know, we all hate it. We all don't like it.

I don't I'm not going to come out and say it is a noble move by Tim Cook because I don't know that it's a noble move by Tim Cook. But like that, I'm not ready to say that the consequences of it are it won't actually be better overall when you multiply the amount of harm times the number of people it affects. And no, it's not fair. It's corrupt and terrible. Like, I'm not saying this like, oh, you fixed the problem. It's not fair to Sonos. It's not fair to any. It's not fair to the people who vote. It's not fair to anything. None of this is fair. Nothing good is happening here.

It's just trying to figure out how can we minimize the harm. And on that front, I think one of the things that you can argue is like with the slippery slope thing, which I think is true, is like, okay, well, the inauguration, a million dollars, personal donation, like in the end, is that going to enable any harm that wasn't going to happen already anyway? Probably not.

But there are things that you can do later by, okay, well now I need another few million, another few billion. I need you to do to support this nominee for this or whatever. And you can't just say like, well, no matter whatever bribe I give, it's fine because I'm reducing harm. Maybe you're not, maybe you shouldn't support the nomination of the devil incarnate to some government position in exchange for Apple avoiding the tariffs because the devil incarnate is going to, you know, do devil things, right? Like it's just like,

you can't just say, oh, no matter what you do, it's fine because there's some good that comes of it, right? I think this is very close to the threshold because you are giving money, but it's not a lot of money and it's just mostly going to be sucked up by ancillary grifters, right? And it's not, nothing bad that is going to happen wasn't already going to happen anyway with or without this million dollars and yada yada, right? But,

It is actually a slippery slope, and that's one of the things that people hate about this. It's like, okay, well, once you've decided you're ready to bribe corrupt politicians, when does that stop? Do you just bribe them all the time now? You know the bribes work. This is how corrupt governments happen. It's like, oh, well, everyone knows you have to bribe to get anything done. We don't want that to be the system.

unfortunately a corrupt politician has been elected and a bunch of the largest tech companies in the world are all saying we are going to now pay the bribe in hope of avoiding the things that he's been threatening us with probably in exchange for getting bribes that's not a good precedent and then the result of that will be every single smaller company who can't afford to bribe the politician is going to have their product squeezed even further out of the market yeah i mean and that's and by the way that's not just like forget about corrupt politicians or that's true of

everything having to do with anything, no matter who's in the administration. The big companies always get advantages. The whole regulatory capture and open AI being in favor of constraints on AI, like regulations regarding AI, because they know they're big enough and rich enough to navigate them and nobody else is. They're squeezing out their competitors by trying to get regulations on the books that only they can navigate. Microsoft has done the same thing. Setting aside Trump, this is just something that big businesses always do. They get advantages over small businesses

by donating money to politicians. It isn't, you know, Citizens United has made sure that that is a thing that can continue to happen in this country. One of the many things that is broken about our system and every big company does it. And it is unfair to small companies. This is worse than that because the person they're bribing wants to do a lot more than tweak regulations to favor big tech companies, right?

But it is not unprecedented. And it has always been happening. And it has always been terrible. And it's one of the many, many things wrong with our country.

Yeah, it's just, I think the problem, this is something that I've been struggling with a fair bit, both in a personal level and a professional level. We, well, I shouldn't say we, I fancy Apple as a company that tries to do good in a company that's trying to do right by people. And Tim Cook is a good man who cares about things that I care about.

And everyone's good. They're all good. And rank and file Apple, by and large, are good people. Tim, as you both have said, predominantly John, is probably, I think he's mostly a good person. But as Apple gets bigger and as their monopolies get stronger and as they operate as a bigger and bigger company with all the bad that comes of that,

It's real hard to be really enthusiastic about Apple. And I think this comes in fits and spurts. I think if you were to plot the vibes of ATP over the last 10 years, there have been times it's been hard to be a fan of Apple and there's been times it's been easy. And

And it's funny because right now, in terms of products, by and large, I think it is a pretty good and easy time to be a fan of Apple. And yeah, you can start saying, well, what about this? What about that? But I mean, look at how great Macs are these days, iPhones are, iPads. I mean, these are all great products. And in that sense, it's easy to be a fan. But it's hard for me to come to terms with

I don't really want to support a company that is a clear, to me anyway, a clear monopolist and doesn't give a shit that that's the case. Like, they just don't care. It's like, yeah, we're owed this money. We are owed 30% of everything. You know, we're owed. We put in a lot of hard work. We're owed it until the end of time.

And that's hard to be enthusiastic about. And it's hard to find a way to be enthusiastic about a man who, even though on the whole, I think is a good person who donates to this just charity.

frigging monster. Like, I'm sorry if you're enthusiastic about Trump. Maybe you're cackling and excited about what we're saying, but I am not. I am not, and we are not. And to shoulder up to slash kind of snuggle with him is just fucking

frigging gross. It's just gross. And I can squint and I can think of a thousand different reasons why it's by some definitions, the right thing to do. And this is what John was talking about, but it's also just gross. And so it's hard to be enthusiastic about this company that I have enjoyed for a long time, not as long as John, but I've enjoyed for a long time. And to

to some degree, I've hung, like I've hitched my horse professionally, or hitched my cart rather, professionally to this horse in many different ways. Not only this very program, but, you know, the apps that I write.

They were only on Apple platforms. And yes, I could switch. And yes, I could do a bunch of things. But I don't want to do those things. So it's making me kind of feel like, I mean, I'm being a bit dramatic now, but it's making me kind of have that, oh, wait, are we the baddies moment? And I think Apple are.

And I think Tim, at least in this action, is a baddie. And again, I can justify it. I can make a passionate argument why this was 100% the right thing for him to do, but it would be a hollow argument because I don't think he should have done it. And...

I just, I'm, I, I, it just makes me feel disgusting. It makes me feel super gross and I hate every bit of it. And I don't. That's part of like the sacrifice is that if we imagine ourself in that position, we would never want to do it because it would feel so terrible. Like it would be so soul destroying and denial. Like, especially if we're, you know, us in our position where we know how we feel internally, we were like,

How could you ever bring yourself to do that? Because it would feel so bad. Even if you were convinced, which you may or may not be, that it actually is the thing that produces the least long-term harm, you still have to eat that

beep sandwich see i do it myself i don't know you still have to eat that beep sandwich yourself like why do you have to do that all right all right so now i gave you like the noble tim cook self-sacrifice version of it here is the less noble less charitable version which you can decide if it's more or less likely uh one area where i think it is possible that tim cook actually does agree with some of the things that the trump administration stands for is when it comes to regulating big business

Tim Cook probably wants what's best for all the people in the world, but he thinks, he may possibly think, it is very feasible, you know, plausible to imagine him thinking that the person or entity best positioned to decide what is good for all the people of the world is Apple and not the U.S. government. Therefore,

Tim Cook may agree that less regulation on big tech companies is better than more. Tim Cook's recent experience with the EU and the DMA

some evidence that Tim Cook thinks maybe governments don't know what's best when it comes to making decisions that affect large numbers of consumers. And so even though Tim Cook may be opposed to pretty much everything that the Trump administration stands for, he may in his billionaire heart of hearts believe that this kind of regulation of tech companies is harmful and those kind of decisions are best left to

benevolent, wise, smart people like Tim Cook who run the companies. And it's very difficult, I think, to become a billionaire captain of industry and

and not start to believe that the people or entities that know best are the captains of industry, the private companies that have all this money and power. Especially if you are, as I think Tim Cook is, a benevolent captain of industry who does want what's best for people and isn't in it to enrich himself past all reason for, you know, like,

There's no actual reason any billionaire needs more money, but some people just can't stop trying to amass money and power as if it's some kind of game and they'd have some kind of terrible sickness. I don't think that's his position, but I think he does believe governments should not be telling Apple what to do.

And Trump also seems to believe mostly to enrich, mostly because of a hangover from his own life as a quote unquote business person that like, yeah, rich people should be able to do whatever they want and the government should not tell them what to do. So I should be able to discriminate. And hence, you know, it,

do terrible things and cheat on my taxes and there should be no regulations on me and I should be able to put lead in the Cheerios that I feed to the kids and like that's the world Trump wants. And Tim Cook doesn't want any of those bad things, but he absolutely does not want the government telling Apple what to do. So he is actually aligned with the Trump administration's supposed possible, you know, as much as they have any kind of coherent anything, he is aligned with that. And so I think as much as he hates Trump,

Trump and what he stands for, if there is an opportunity to do something that produces less government interference with Apple, he would do that no matter what, no matter who was in the administration or out, he would be lobbying for, I don't think you should make more rules that govern Apple. Don't do what the EU did. It's bad what they're doing. Don't do that here in the US. Don't regulate us. We know what's best. We're Apple.

don't we don't need any more regulations on us at all regulate our competitors fine but not us so any rule that's going to affect us we don't want and you can see that in every kind of shareholder meeting in apple where there's sort of like you know shareholder proposals we think apple should do x we think apple should do y and the default answer is always apple recommends you as a shareholder vote against this because we don't want anyone telling us what to do that's well let's let's reframe this a little bit though

The Department of Justice currently has an open lawsuit against Apple. For now. Right. So why else might Apple and might Tim Cook support Trump? Huh. Maybe the million dollars and all the support, maybe this is not just about tariffs. Maybe it's also because Apple wants the regulatory pressure and the lawsuits from the Department of Justice to go away. Now under pressure,

pretty much any other non or less corrupt president that would be unheard of under this president that will become commonplace so we are saying the two of you maybe are saying things from the point of view of Tim Cook really doesn't support Trump but he's grinning and bearing it for the good of whatever

What if Tim Cook does support Trump? Like, I think Tim Cook actually literally does support Trump. He absolutely does not. He does not support Trump. How do you know? He's a gay man. He's not going to support a president who hates gay people. You think he's the only gay man who would have voted for Trump? Like, no.

of course not. But I'm saying he absolutely does not. He loves the environment. Trump thinks climate change isn't real. He does not. Tim Cook, every fiber of Tim Cook's being is counter to everything that Trump stands for except for the part where the government doesn't interfere with what Apple does. See, to me, people...

People are bending over backwards trying to justify why Tim might be doing this despite hating Trump. It sure looks like Tim Cook supports Trump, period. Like, that's it. What else do you call this? He doesn't. But he didn't lobby for him to get elected. He didn't give millions of dollars to help get him elected like Musk did. It's clear that he does not support Trump. When every other big business person gives Trump some kind of financial support, we all say they're a Trump supporter. Why don't we say that about Tim Cook?

No, he only is giving this after he's been elected when he has the power to do something that affects Apple. Tim Cook is a Trump supporter. What do you call it? If he had been giving stump speeches for Trump, then maybe I would believe you. But even that would take a lot of speeches to think it wasn't some weird strategy because personally, from everything we know of Tim Cook, he is not...

I mean, he was out there trying to get Hillary Clinton elected in the first time Trump was elected. It's not a Tim Cook thing. It's a long time ago. Things change. A lot of people support Trump now who didn't then. As you noted, it doesn't really matter what's in Tim Cook's heart. It only matters what he does. But I would bet...

such a huge amount of money that Tim Cook hates Trump and everything he stands for, except for the part where he doesn't regulate Apple. I think Tim Cook likes making a lot of money from Apple. And I think if you compare... You think he's motivated by his personal fortune? No, not... Well, no, I think he's motivated by his company's fortune, which is related very heavily to his personal fortune. But listen, if you compare the behavior of Tim Cook in all the various app store regulation lawsuit kind of stuff, right? Compare that...

Do you think Tim Cook really would like to be a little friendlier and less horrible with the App Store in-app purchase policies, but he's, for the good of his company, he's making the difficult decision to be a greedy a**hole? No, he's doing that because he thinks Apple knows best. Yeah, and he thinks Apple shouldn't be sued by the Department of Justice probably too, and Apple shouldn't have tariffs too. I don't see why these are different things. That's just Tim Cook.

That's him. Like, and I think he should be more aware of how many LGBTQ people he has in his own company who have a big problem with this and are literally have their lives threatened by this administration. Like talk about supporting the troops. He doesn't support them at all. It's all about Apple and money. Well,

That's what I was saying. How much additional harm is happening from donating a million to the inauguration versus how much additional harm for doing something more substantial? Like there is a line, right? And Tim Cook is walking right up to that line. You maybe think he's already over that line, right? Tim Cook flew over that line in his private jet. But now listen, now going back for a minute, I do want to, what Casey said a few minutes ago, I think is worth discussing. You know, it is hard at this time.

When you are as fired up as I am or as Casey is, and maybe John's down there. I don't know where. John's on a different planet right now, a planet of compassion and understanding. Casey and I are like, I'm in the sun. I'm mad about it, too. I'm just able to see more sides of it. I mean, as I think I said in other conversations about this, the way Tim Cook has dealt with China is also enraging in similar ways.

Yes. Right. Like like he's like the way and he has and Tim Cook has actually articulated like whether it's the truth of his motivation or not, he has articulated. He said, this is why I'm doing this with China, because he thinks it is better to engage with them and do the best we can then to do what Facebook did, which is like, say, no, we're not dealing with them at all. And you can argue about that. Is it better to deal with them and engage with them and let them?

trying to enter your data centers and do all the stuff that you would never do, sacrificing Apple's customers. I think that it's easier to argue against that because Apple's moves in China open up millions of Apple customer to invasive stuff that Apple supposedly doesn't want and stands against. But Tim Cook says, no, it's better to engage with China. And that gets back to Marco's thing of like, well, maybe it's better to engage with China because they manufacture all your stuff. And if they didn't, you'd be screwed. Isn't that convenient? Yeah. No, so...

I think it's important to kind of bring this down a little bit, back down to John's planet of compassion. But, you know, cases on Earth, John, I don't know what part of this whole system you're in. But anyway, to bring this back a little bit, you know, what cases did a minute ago is like, how do we process this as Apple customers and Apple fans? And I think that's a worthy discussion to have because it's hard. Like, it is not an easy thing to do. And I...

You know, I brought this up a couple times in the past. I think it's a great analogy. A while ago, our friend CGP Gray said somewhere on a podcast, you know, whenever he complained about Apple stuff, people would suggest, why don't you move to Android? And he compared changing your major computing platform to be like moving to a different country and

in terms of like disruption to your day-to-day life. Which also comes up having to do with Trump. Yes, well, exactly. And so that's, I think it's a very apt analogy of like, you know, what do we do if we disagree with the political moves of the person at the top of Apple? What do we do about that? Do we stop buying Apple products? Do we get rid of the ones we have? Do we move to different platforms? And I think you can, it's a very, it's a direct parallel to like,

If your country gets...

Bad leadership. If you have a bad election, you get bad leadership. Do you move to a different country? And I think, obviously, there are certain aspects of moving to a different country that people are like, well, that's a ridiculous analogy to changing operating systems. It's much easier to change operating systems. But in some ways, it's easier. In some ways, it's harder. As Casey was saying, our entire businesses are related to Apple and, in many ways, inextricably tied to Apple.

Like it would be difficult for us to continue doing this show and continue making our apps if we all stop buying Apple products and try to move off of all of them. Like that would be difficult. It would – we could maybe make apps for other platforms and you can, again, look at the country analogy of like, well, are the other platforms like much better in these regards? Yeah.

Do the other platforms have much better leadership? Because if they only have sometimes better leadership or slightly better leadership, that move's not going to be worth it. Do they have much better leadership? Or worse. We just listed Google donated, Microsoft donated. Where are you going to go? Is there some big tech company that's not playing this game? That's the problem. I think Microsoft didn't, or did they? Yeah, they did. Google and Microsoft as well. Yeah, and that's the problem. When you look at what other platforms... There's the whole we can move through the woods and use Linux thing, but...

Even that's probably, you don't know who's running all the companies that maintain Linux. That's probably... I don't use Linux because that murderer made a file system. Right. There's so many gotchas. If you try to look around for a country that has no bad political problems...

or an operating system or a major tech platform that has no bad people funding or running it, you're not going to find one. It's like when you get mad at an airline, like, I'm never going to fly, you know, United again or whatever. And then like, Hey, that's me. Yeah. I mean, United is terrible. But like,

You say that, but then like, well, there's only like four airlines that fly into your airport. So you're going to probably fly them again. Because these are systemic problems. They're not problems due to like one bad person or the CEOs are all evil. And it's just the system. The system is bad. And it gets to the question of do you fight to fix the system or do you flee to Canada where nothing is wrong? And their system is great and they would never elect somebody who's from the right wing. Right. And that's the thing. Like, you know, when I think that's – it's useful to think of it that way of like –

Are we going to move to a different country because we don't like Trump? No. But that's not to say that we never would. That's not to say that our tolerance for that is infinite. But things have to be pretty bad for that. And the alternatives have to be substantially better. And I think in this case, we don't have that dynamic. Things at Apple land aren't that bad. And

And the alternatives aren't better meaningfully. And they're mostly worse. Right, exactly. In every aspect, every aspect we're talking about in terms of like, you know, donating. Tim Cook donated personally. The other companies donated directly from the company. If you care about the environment, if you care about diversity and inclusion, like show me the companies that are all better than Apple on all these fronts. Like it's either a wash or Apple is still ahead. Yeah.

Right, and that's why I think the same reason when people complained to us, like, if you don't like X, Y, Z, whatever thing we're complaining about that month, if you don't like this thing Apple's doing, why don't you leave? And it's like, why don't we move to a different country? Because that's ridiculous, and the options aren't better, and that would destroy our lives in so many ways. And by the way, on talking about what we do, maybe this is just from my background, but I feel like my non-programming, like my regular jobby job career, fine, I was a

full-stack web developer for 25 years and worked for a bunch of different companies, did a bunch of different things. But my other career, my Apple-related career, I mostly view as being an Apple critic. Like, I wrote reviews of Mac OS X, which were not universally flattering for 15 years, right? Like, I feel like being critical of Apple...

does not impair my career. And in fact, mostly is my career. And I think that applies to both of you as well, with the exception of developing apps for the platform, which is slightly different, right? Which is not as big a part of my business, my income as it is both of yours. So that is that. But like on the podcast, like,

criticizing Apple, just like a political podcast. Political podcasts don't go away when the party that they support wins or loses an election. Criticism is just as valid commentary as praise, and I feel like we could still make a good podcast when we praise what is praiseworthy and criticize what is worthy of criticism. Yeah, and I think the right way to address this as an Apple fan is

is to be vocal about it. You don't need to move to Jupiter. Like you can, you can just, you know, obviously maybe, maybe support Apple less. Write a letter to Tim Cook. Yeah. Like make, make your position known that this is not okay. And this, and why this is not okay. Like what you think of this and, and, and, you know, in ways that supporting Apple is optional, maybe don't.

Like, you know, if I was like, you know, about to develop a Vision Pro app for some reason, like maybe this would stop me. Who knows? Lots of other reasons why I don't. We know how motivated you are to make Vision Pro apps. Yeah, I know. But like, that's probably a bad example. But like, no, actually, it's a good one because that's like, it's not the Tim Cook donation thing that's stopping people from Vision Pro. But there's tons of other things that people don't like about Apple that may be influencing people's decisions to perhaps not develop for the Vision Pro, as we've discussed in the past. And like this, this kind of.

Just like all the app store in-app purchase BS, this kind of sentiment accumulates and can kind of affect mood. And that overall mood can cause problems for the company when they try to do something like Vision Pro and no one wants to support their new platform. There are lots of...

knock-on effects that are hard to evaluate like the the numbers behind them it's hard to put a cost on alienating a whole bunch of your own employees and your customers to support a corrupt dictator wannabe like there it's hard to put a number on that so maybe tim cook can understand it but it absolutely has massive value destruction

But but the right the right answer here is fight it from the inside, like because you can't really like I'm not going to go buy a PC to fight this. Like that's not going to do anything except ruin parts of my life. So instead, I'm going to try to fight it from the inside because that's all I have in the same way that I'm I'm fighting this terrible corrupt government that we're about to get from the inside of my own country.

I think part of the understanding of the damage that is done by Tim Cook doing this is reflected in Tim Cook doing it personally, because what that means is when he retires, some of the badness goes with him because you can put the blame, some of the blame on him personally. Oh, Apple did this bad thing when Tim Cook was in charge. Remember when he donated to the Trump thing? But now he's gone. Like,

That I think he does recognize that. And I think that's one of the positive effects of him personally donating instead of making Apple do it, is that it transfers a tiny bit more of the badness to him. And so when he's gone, that tiny bit goes with him as opposed to like trying to reshape Apple as a company that supports Trump, which he's not attempting to do. Someone in the chat room asked if NVIDIA had donated. I believe they have not. But there's a story in The Verge that we will link in the show notes.

about NVIDIA flattering the Trump administration to what? To get fewer regulations on selling AI chips that NVIDIA makes. So lest you think that NVIDIA is the one morally upstanding company that would never engage in this kind of corruption when it comes time to stop Trump from making, or stop the Biden administration for that matter, making rules that say NVIDIA can't sell as many chips as it wants to whoever it wants. NVIDIA says, Trump, you're not going to do that, right? You're our pal, right?

It's all just so gross. And we're not going to forget. When Tim Cook retires, this sticks with Apple because this is entirely on them. This stain he put there and this will stick there and we will not forget.

I don't even forget the Mac Pro factory thing. People forgetting about that, not me. But this is even worse. This is just straight up corruption. I think it's about the same. It's a lot worse. I mean, it's worse because it's a second administration. But honestly, by the time he did that, we all knew better. It was bad then. This is literally giving him a million dollars. It's not giving him. It's giving his brother-in-law, DJ, a million dollars. This is giving him a million dollars.

It's hard to be worse, except giving him even more, which I'm sure will happen over time. But his personal wealth has very little effect on anything, and he's not getting this money directly. It's going to his cronies and gives him a tiny bit more power. But anyway, I think it goes to him. Well, he's not a good businessman. What do you where do you think his money comes from?

It comes from grift. It comes from grift and corruption. That's what all of it is. He's going to be dead in a few years anyway from old age. Like, him accumulating more money is so pointless now. He's just one of those, like, just blind. He's got the blinders on where he just thinks, like, this is what you do. You amass money. And it's just like, for what? To what end? Like, there's no, you know, there's no helping him there. We just need to contain the badness that he can cause for four years or until he dies of old age.

All right, John, what's the latest update with the app that shall not be named? Good transition. Boy, we'll just come off of that totally light, fluffy topic. You got to follow that. I'm sorry. Anyway, as you may have heard, I'm developing an app for an Apple platform.

But it's the good Apple platform that like lets you do stuff except I'm putting it on the Mac App Store. Anyway. Do you have a launch party fund? Yeah, right. Oh, jeez. Please donate $1 to my launch party fund. Brother-in-law needs that money. All right. So...

As I said last episode, I am indeed going to make the test flight for my new app available to ATP members. So it's not there now. So people in the chat room don't run off to ATP.fm and look at your member page. But yeah.

After we finish recording this episode, I will press a bunch of buttons and I will get the link up on the member page. That means you go to ATP.FM, you log in and on your member page, if you click on membership in the nav bar or whatever, you will see near the top a thing that says, hey, do you want to go on the test flight for this thing? Here you go. And it will give you a link.

You will need to install the TestFlight app on your Mac if you don't have it already. I link to that as well. And you'll be able to install the TestFlight and try it out and totally destroy your disk and then not blame me. Yeah. So, obviously, if you are interested in the TestFlight and you do install it, you will know the name of my app. So I have to reveal the name of the app on the show now because I've just been holding off and now everyone needs to know. So...

We talked about possible names for many episodes ago. I read many of them. I didn't want to say whether I said at that time that had already chosen a name, but I didn't want to say whether I had chosen a name that was recommended by somebody or whether I had to come up with something on my own. And yeah,

I have to say, and I said it in a later episode, that I think people aren't going to like the name that I chose. Based on all the people who were sending feedback about that huge list, they're like, I like this one, I like that one. People eventually voted with giving their opinions on the many names that we listed, and nobody was interested in any name that was anywhere close to the name that I chose. So it is what it is. As I think I described before, I wanted the name to...

have some chance in being discernible as an app that finds duplicate files and replaces them with clones. Like I didn't want it to just be like Lavender or like just some fanciful name that is not connected in any way. I didn't exactly hold that rule as well as I had hoped, but it's because one name grabbed my attention and I initially didn't think it was that great, but it just hung on and eventually ate away and it was like, all right, fine, fine, you're the name.

This name was suggested by a listener. Oh. It was suggested by Jared Hofferth on December 13th, 2024 in a Mastodon toot. And that name is Hyperspace. That is good. I do like that. You can see how it ate away at me. Okay, so let's start here. Hyper, my website, my old podcast, Hypercritical, right? Anything with hyper, there's a connection there. Space.

Disk space. Storage space. It's not great. It's kind of something about getting space back. It's got space in the name. Yeah.

And the one that kills it, Star Wars. Star Wars, Hypercritical, Storage Space. The three of them together ganged up on me and made me pick this name. Now, am I going to be sued by Lucasfilm? Maybe. And I'll have to change the name of the app. But for now, shh, don't tell them that I'm using Hyperspace as the name of my app. And then they won't notice me because I'm too small. And it'll be fine. But yeah, that's what the app is called. It's called Hyperspace.

I dig it. I was going to intercap it, switch classes intercapped intentionally because I love intercapping. That is the tradition from the classic Mac OS days where Macintosh application names had a beginning capital letter and then in the middle of the word another capital letter like MacWrite, capital M, capital W, MacPaint, capital M, capital P. It wasn't always just with Mac something, but there was a lot of that. MacWrite, MacPaint, MacDraw, all that stuff, right? SuperPaint, capital S, capital P, I think. Anyway, intercapping was big back in the day.

uh switch glass is capital s capital g and i almost did hyperspace capital h capital s but star wars doesn't do that so i didn't anyway hyperspace capital h no other capital letters that is the name of the app uh if you want to try it you can for the test flight people i have some instructions this is difficult because i didn't want to junk up my app with a giant dialogue that pops up in your face that tells you about the test flight but i almost did

There are instructions linked with three siren emoji on either side of it in honor of Casey on the member page that tell you, please read this first. And it tells you things about the test flight that you might need to know, including the one thing I put in the test flight release notes in all caps, which says this build will not actually reclaim disk space. It will not actually do the thing that my app is going to do. It will do everything but test

that final last little thing. So it's important that you pretend that it's working. It will tell you that it works. It'll be like, I reclaimed, you know, five megabytes of disk space. It didn't, but it did everything up to that point. So please use the app as if it will do that thing, but know that it will not.

Why am I doing this? I know this for multiple reasons. First of all, I don't want to destroy our disks in the first beta. So this one will not actually modify any of your precious files. It will just do stuff off to the side, but it will do all the work except for that final part where it just swaps it in for your file. Right. So please do test that. The second thing is if you use this app and get rid of all your duplicate files, you can kind of only do that once. And then all your duplicate files are gone until you generate more somehow.

And so I want to kind of save that to the end because it's not useful if everyone uses the very first beta, rids their entire drives of duplicates, and then says, okay, well, how am I supposed to test the next beta? There's no work left for me to do. Should I artificially make some duplicate files? So keep in mind that this beta and many of the betas, many of the TestFlight builds that come will not actually reclaim disk space. Even though it will say it's doing it, it's totally not, which lets you repeat the process over and over again, which is good for my testing.

Second thing to know if you haven't been on a test flight before, test flight builds will not actually charge you money. The purchase stuff is in the test flight build. You can do scanning for free, but as soon as you try to reclaim space, it'll be like, oh, you got to pay.

So feel free to click those buttons. They will not actually charge you money. I believe the UI will tell you, oh, by the way, this is not going to really charge you. It does, but it's easy to miss. Yeah, but it will not. Like just I'll link to in the documentation that you're all going to read, link from the member page. I link to the Apple page that says, I swear it will not charge you money. Like it looks like it does, but it doesn't. Only the test flight build, the real builds that you get from the App Store will charge you money. But this one will not.

but please do test the purchase part this is probably the part of the app that i have my least the least confidence in because i've never done it before and it's not easy to test please test the purchase part like buy it pick like there's a bunch of things and prices in there we may or may not talk about but like they just ignore the prices don't like obviously it's not charging you real money prices may change the ways you can buy it may change lots of things may change but like please do test that right um

About subscriptions, because some of the options are subscriptions in test light subscriptions renew at an accelerated pace. Again, I'll link to the Apple page that talks about this. They say that they renew renewed daily up to six times within a one week period, regardless of the duration. So even if you get a one year subscription, it's going to renew every single day. And I think they expire after like seven days. Like it's not real time. That's what I'm saying.

So don't be freaked out of like, hey, I bought this supposed free fake subscription. And then the next day, the app said I needed to charge money again. Is that a bug? That may. I'm not entirely sure, but it may be the nature of the accelerated renewal thing. Again, I haven't done this before. Finally, feedback.

You can send feedback on the beta through the TestFlight app itself, through the app on your Mac called TestFlight. Not in hyperspace, but there's an app called TestFlight that you'll use to install the TestFlight beta. It's like a blue icon with a propeller thingy blueprint on or whatever. You can send feedback in that app. If you launch the TestFlight app on macOS, find hyperspace in the sidebar and then click on the send feedback button. You can use that to send feedback, attach screenshots, so on and so forth. You could also just email me

There'll be an email address in the documentation that you're all going to read. Links from your member page that says you can send email to hyperspace at hypercritical.co. That's fine. The icon is a placeholder. It does not have feet, but it's... All right, all right. It is not the final icon. Don't worry about that. Now, as for what I want you to send feedback about, literally anything.

I can't figure out the app. I don't understand this. I didn't know what this button did. I didn't find any duplicate files. It did find a bunch of duplicate files. Like just I don't know how people are going to perceive this out. Obviously, ATV members are not the general public, but they are perhaps the type of people who might buy an app like this. So please just any feedback. You don't have to give any feedback. You can just look at it and throw in the garbage. You don't have to join it. But if you decide to give feedback, don't feel like, oh, he probably doesn't want to hear this.

It doesn't have to be a bug report. It doesn't have to be a feature request. It could be just your opinion, your experience, what you thought, where you were confused, things you didn't understand. Depending on how much feedback is, I might not be able to respond to you individually, but it's good to hear.

people's experience using it, if they can make heads or tails of it. When you work on an app for a long time, it starts to become like obvious to you where everything is and how it works. And it's not that complicated of an app. But if you don't have that background knowledge and you're just faced with this UI, it may not make sense to you. So I'm open to any and all feedback about every aspect that you see before you, including the pricing, which again, we may get to in a moment here. But like the pricing is not final or real in the app and everything is free. So it doesn't matter. But like if you have opinions about that,

throw your feedback over the wall i am glad to hear it i i do value atp listener feedback uh a lot because you all if you have been listening for a long time know a lot about me and a lot about uh app development stuff from listening to us so please give your opinions show the app to someone else uh who doesn't listen to the show to get a more outsider opinion if you want and tell me what they thought like whatever so anyway there it is hyperspace uh beta for atp members uh

coming as soon as you listen to this episode a couple of quick addendums i'm speaking for you so tell me i'm wrong if i'm wrong but um once the app is released on the proper app store the test flight will go away the same way it did with call sheet is that fair to say uh that is true although i don't think you can make it go away immediately doesn't like 90 days or something correct so like i said before when we talked about this this is you know you're on the test flight

But this is a specific test flight for ATP members. This test flight will end when the app is ready to be released.

Actually, you might be able to expire all the builds, but if you have more than a handful of builds, that'll take a freaking year to go through and expire them all. I didn't even know how to do that in App Store Connect. Oh, yeah, one final thing. This is a fun note on how little I know about testing in-app purchase stuff or whatever. I installed the TestFlight version of my app on my own computer, and I was testing the purchase flow in the TestFlight build of my app, and I subscribed to my own app with one of the subscription options to see how it worked.

I was like, great, you subscribed, you know, it didn't charge me money. Okay, fine. And then I was like, all right, well, I want to, I wanted to look like, I wanted to take like screenshots of what the sunscreen looks like when you haven't paid for the app, but I've already paid for it. So I'm like, I just got to find a way to cancel that subscription that I just made. And I do have a managed subscription button in my app that uses the Apple approved API to bring up the managed subscription interface. But my subscription to my own test flight build of my app was not in my subscription list.

And so I couldn't unsubscribe to it. I Googled for it and I asked people who knew they're like, well, it should be in your subscription list. You know, like I swear to you, it's not there. Like I just don't see it. Is it an app store? Connect somewhere. I didn't use a sandbox Apple ID, which I do have a separate account with a sandbox Apple ID. I know how to deal with that one, but that's not this. I use my real Apple ID.

that is on the test flight to purchase from the test flight version of my app. And I just could not for the life of me figure out how to cancel that subscription. And yeah, it's renewing like once every day or whatever. And some people said they thought it would expire after seven days, but it hasn't been seven days since I did that. Could not figure it out. You know how I eventually solved this problem, Casey? Please tell me, because I haven't solved this problem myself with testing subscriptions. Casey has. Have I? You have. You know how I solved this problem? I solved it with CallSheet.

Now I'm deeply confused. So thanks to Craig Hockenberry who pointed me in this direction, right? So on macOS, there's, you know, you can make a button that says like go to manage subscription. And what it does is it launches the App Store app on macOS and it shows you your list of subscriptions. But test flight things are not there. Well, there is the same API in iOS. And guess what?

on ios it does show your test flight subscriptions oh fun call sheet the test flight version of call sheet has a thing in settings where you can go to manage subscription and it calls that api that brings up a sheet that shows you all your test flight subscriptions and lo and behold hyperspace test flight subscription was right there inside casey's app and i just canceled it from there

You are welcome. I will take 5% of your proceeds now. Why does that not exist on macOS? Because Apple doesn't care about macOS. Like, I guess what you can do is make a stub application, like a stub iOS application, run it in the simulator, pull up that, like, subscription management sheet, and lo and behold, in iOS, it has that little square bracket sandbox section that shows, you know, call sheet and all your other betas.

Ridiculous. I cannot believe, thank you to Craig Hockenberry for pointing that out to me. I would never have guessed that either making a stub iOS application or launching CallSheet would be the solution for me to unsubscribe to my own app.

I'm glad I could be there for you, John. That's the solution, Marco, if you want to figure out how to do it. Maybe you don't know about the API, but yeah, I'll see if I can find a link to that to put in the show notes. But Casey just had the link because he literally has the code for it in his app. Well, I was just talking to Craig about this a couple of weeks ago, so I should be able to dig it up from when we were talking because he had asked me, how do you get the managed subscriptions thing? Yeah, here it is. Managed subscriptions sheet is presented. I will put a link in the show notes and in the chat room and so on and so forth, but this is how you do it.

Oh, I see. Margo is putting in our Slack all the people who own hyperspace stuff. Yeah, there's just so much hyperspace stuff. Speaking of, one of my old competitors, Epic Healthcare, I worked for a competitor to them back when I had my jobby job. They have a thing called hyperspace something or other, like chart or whatever. Yeah, if someone comes and sues me, I'll have to change the name of the app. So we'll be back to the naming thing. But for now, I'm going with this.

Yeah, I think from a cursory look through things, I think you are reasonably safe. Because, you know, trademarks are on certain types of goods and services. Like, you have to narrow it and say, well, this is what I'm claiming. And if you look through, like, there's one that's a little close,

but it looks like it's a dead app actually. So everything else looks pretty far away. I think you're okay. But the actual truth is if literally anybody comes after me for any legal reason, I'm just going to fold immediately. What am I going to do? I'm going to fight them in court over like, no. You'd never get there.

is the law of like people with money win like i'm not i'm not going to invest any money in battling this type of thing so just you know just don't tell anybody and we'll just have this little hyperspace app off in our corner and uh lucasfilm will never come knocking on my door yeah the best defense for uh like disputes like this is obscurity yeah and if not i'll just change the name of the app like like uh steve jobs would say just change the name no big deal not that not that big of a deal i believe it was

Speaking of pricing, how should I price my app? I will give only one constraint to my co-hosts, after which I will hear their advice. And my constraint is this app is going to be free to download. And the idea is it's free to download and it's free to scan to find duplicates. Because the whole idea is, hey, if you don't find any duplicates, don't buy the app. It's not going to do anything for you. I don't want to take people's money when it's not going to save them any space, right? But on the flip side of that, if they scan some folder and it's like, oh, you could save 8GB.

Now suddenly they have a concrete motivation to give some amount of money to get that 8 gigabytes back. And so that's the constraint. Free to download, free to scan, free to do everything except that final step that gets you that space back. So I'm open to any and all pricing structures. And in fact, for the people who have the test flight, you will see that I have implemented every possible pricing structure. It does not mean that they will all be there in the release version. I was just trying to make sure that I knew how to code all of them. And so they were all in there.

Well, the obvious pricing structure is 100% consumables. And so you get $0.10 per gig saved, and that's how you do it. This is not iOS, Casey. I mean, first of all, that's not that crazy of an idea. But one thing I think that you need to know is how much space people stand to save on average.

And I have no idea right now. Do you have any kind of analytics for the test flight that will report that back to you? No, that's why I ask people to give me reports. Like, so my, I have zero analytics, zero, my privacy policy is this app collects no data. Like I collect nothing. I probably will never. I have no telemetry. I have no data. I have nothing. I only, I only know what people will tell me. I know what I see on my discs and like, this is my family, but I have no telemetry. And I understand from a business perspective, that's stupid. You should have some.

But at this point, I just don't want to deal with the privacy implications of collecting literally any data from anybody. And so I'm not. I mean, honestly, that's fair. I mean, I make forecasts. And the only data I have from that is if the app checks the Sparkle RSS feed for auto updates. But I don't even look at that. Yeah, I have crash reports from Apple. That's the extent of my... And I don't even know if you can opt out of those. Yeah.

I don't think you can. But yeah, so I think it's hard to know what the value will be of it without knowing how much space people stand to save on average. So I think if you look at other disk space saving apps in the Mac App Store, prices are kind of all over the place, but it generally ranges from like...

10 to 20 bucks for this kind of thing. There are free ones. That one I talked about that does basically the same thing as my app but not as fancy is like six bucks up front one time pay. Yeah. On the other hand, you are John freaking Syracuse-o.

So you can charge a premium based solely on not only your fame here, but also the reputation that you have of being a good developer, especially regarding knowledge of the file system and how it works. So this is like people trust you, rightfully so, to know how to do this safely. Well, they should not trust me. People have said this. My enthusiasm for the file system does not translate into an app that has fewer bugs. What I will say is that I think my app is more full-featured and...

nicer and more careful than a lot of the other apps simply because i've spent a lot of time but i mean you can judge for yourself like i'm not gonna like i know what my source code looks like i know what their feature set looks like i think i have put a lot of work into this and i've worked hard to make it safe that may be why like why can you charge more money so we talk about this like mac apps can charge more money for like phone than phone apps because they're bigger on the screen like there's something to that the idea that like physically it is larger therefore it is worth more money like

the things that that translate into people being willing to pay more money are wild so anyway i think seeing the feature set maybe or the interface or i don't know the perform like does it look like it was more carefully constructed than this other app doesn't mean that it was but does it look like it was does it look like a more like a native mac app does it look you know anyway

That is influencing my thinking about pricing. I'm not going to undercut my competitors. I'm going to probably end up charging more than they do. Yeah, so I think if you were doing like a more full-featured like cleanup unnecessary files, like that kind of app, there's lots of those, then I think you could be up around $20. But those are a little janky if you've ever used those. That's true. Those look shady sometimes. Oh, those look shady most of the time.

But the fact is those are going to recover more space and have more utility than most apps will. But those are going to remove files and mine will not. Well, right. But that's a distinction that many people will not draw. This is a space-saving app regardless of how that happens. I mean my app is trying very hard to draw that distinction and my marketing will try to draw that distinction. But like really my app will only appeal to the people who understand that distinction. Otherwise, why would they get it?

I mean, fair. But anyway, so I think you should free up front to find out how much you have and then to delete the files, I think $10. Doesn't delete any files, Marco. To recover your space, hyperly, $10. Without removing files. Traveling without moving, Marco. Another movie you haven't seen. Yeah, you're right. All right. Yeah, so I think I would, and I think $10 is the premium price for what you're doing. $10 for what? For the deletion.

Or, excuse me, for the traveling with that. Yeah. For the non-deletion. Yeah. Well, you pay that once and then it's like a one-time purchase and unlock forever? I think so. Because...

You're not offering people a lot of reasons to run this frequently. It's the kind of thing that you're going to run once, you're going to recover a hunk of space, and then maybe you'll forget about it for a year or more. And then you run it again, and you'll recover a smaller hunk of space. But most of the value that you're going to deliver to most people is going to be up front on that first run.

So because that's when the most space will be saved in all likelihood over the lifetime of them using the app. So that's why I think you should have it be a one-time purchase, $10. You can delete as much as you want after that. Actually, non-delete as much as you want after that. Reclaim, I call it. You're reclaiming space. There you go. Casey?

Um, I think Marco's answer, although I think you could charge more than 10, I think you might be able to swing 20 bucks, but I think broadly Marco's answer is probably the right answer. Um, this doesn't necessarily strike me as a subscription app. Um, I think you could do it, but I think it would be a tough sell. Um,

I think, well, first of all, I love the way you're doing the paywall. I think that's brilliant. I mean, it's somewhat obvious, but it's still brilliant that you're getting right up to the point of reclaiming, not deleting, Mark, oh gosh, but reclaiming space. And you have to delete files. Right? I could delete all your files for free. But anyways, getting right up to the point where this is what you would have saved. And I think, by the way, as a quick tangent,

You should make it very clear, particularly at that step, that this is not... Like, reiterate at that very last step. This isn't a deletion. It's a reclamation. And, you know, you're not losing anything. You're getting this effectively for free. Somebody in the chat, and I lost who it was, and I apologize, but somebody in the chat, oh, Philco, said, you should refer to the Apple SSD upgrade pricing. We just saved you $5,000 worth of files, which is 8 gigs or whatever, which I think is very funny. But I think...

So the rightest answer is probably to do a one-time unlock everything in-app purchase at that point, like you and Marco have both said. Or, well, Marco definitely said, and you've kind of hinted at. But I think something that could be fun to play with...

is doing and i said it jokingly at first but the more i think about it the more i think there may be something to it is to do some sort of consumable so as an example you can run this one time or use it for a day or whatever but i'll probably run it for one one time and that's 10 bucks

You can get a three pack for 20 bucks or you can get a lifetime unlock, run it as often as you want. And maybe if you wanted to, you could even have it like install a cron job or something like that. And that's like 80 bucks or something like that.

I don't know if I'm standing by this crackpot theory, but it's an interesting theory. And this is one of the very few apps I can think of where that might actually make sense because you are like one of you just said, you are only going to run this once a year, maybe for most people. And then other people go bananas and run it once an hour. But generally speaking, you're going to run it like once a year. You could do consumables, assuming they're supported on Mac OS. You could do consumables here. And I actually think it might even make sense.

The problem is that when you first run it, you're going to recover way more space than subsequent runs for most people's usage patterns. That is a very good point. You also create an incentive then where you're like, well, if I'm only going to save...

A gig I'm going to save up my ticket to use until later like I'll come back to this in a year and then you make zero on that person or whatever like I think you I think it's a one it's an unlock one time and that's it because the utility will vary so much per person but it will almost certainly be mostly up front.

Yeah, so consumables do exist. And I said before that I implemented every possible thing, but I didn't implement consumables. That's how much I hate them. So I'm never doing that. All right, fair enough. It's just too... Like, I understand the logic behind it, but it just feels so gross to me and it doesn't feel like Mac-like for whatever that's worth. Yeah, the ones I did implement, like, setting aside the pricing, which is who knows if I got anything close to that. Like, I have all these options in here and...

At this point, mostly because I think all the options make sense in a certain scenario, and I haven't priced the options against each other to try to motivate one over the other. There's no price advantage to choosing any of the options that I have available. In terms of running the app multiple times, here's the thing to factor in here. So first of all, this is discussed a little bit in the documentation fact thing that I'll link to, but like,

the especially the tesla version but probably the 1.0 version of this app are extremely conservative i'm trying not to break anything so there are whole swaths of people's discs that i will just not touch i will just ignore 100 including large areas that people want me to look at for duplicates i would just will not do it in

until I can have some confidence that I can do it safely. Example is iCloud Drive or anything that is like any file that is owned by like backed by one of those things that makes the file magically appear when you click on it, like the ones with the use the file provider API, like OneDrive or the new version of Dropbox or obviously iCloud Drive. I will not touch those files at all because I have no freaking idea how

what will happen if I try to do my magic to them? So it's just like, I'm going to reclaim duplicates in my cloud drive. My file will complete. My program will complete instantly and say, nope, can't save you anything because it will refuse to touch them. I will not touch anything in your library directory, even though my library directory has 12 gigs of stuff that I could reclaim. Why? Because I'm terrified of touching anything there. It's too much stuff that's that can be screwed with. Nope. Won't touch it. I won't touch anything in your photo library. Yeah.

I did it to my photo library with the Perl script. I'm not ready to do it to yours. So if you think you're going to recover space from your photo library, you're not. My thing will totally ignore it.

I have so many limitations in this thing. Maybe too many. Maybe people will do a test flight and say it found nothing. And maybe I have to dial them back. And I can dial them back. And I almost added a UI for dialing them back. But like, you know what? 1.0, let me just see. Which means that subsequent versions of this app will surely have some of the guardrails either removed or optional. Which means that over time, as I develop this app, if you purchase it,

You will be able to find more space to recover, not because you've created more duplicates, but because my app is becoming more brave or you are becoming more brave with your settings in my app of what you're willing to examine for space. So there's that. Second thing is an app like this. There is an ongoing development burden of making sure that it continues not to host your drive, especially with little picky file system stuff like this. Right.

So if I wanted that to continue to work and continue to be on the market, I will have to continue to develop it, which makes me not want to do a one time purchase. My other two apps, you know, someone paid five dollars for my app five years ago. I'm never getting any money from them again. And they run it 24 hours a day. Like I run switch class 24 hours a day. I'm never giving myself any more money for it. Right. But it's fine if you think the app like switch class is going to be like feature complete. You never really have to do anything to it again.

But this app, I feel like, is going to have an ongoing burden, and I feel like I'm, over time, going to make the app braver and braver. So I was looking for some way to potentially fund what I see as the multi-year development lifecycle of this app, up to and including things like...

A privileged helper tool that can do stuff outside the sandbox that you could secretly install like I did with Switch Class, right? They can do stuff across accounts or things that run in the background, scanning for duplicates. There are many sort of more ambitious goals that will never be achieved unless there's some form of funding that is more than just someone paid for this once, one time, five years ago, and you're never going to get any more money from them.

So I did want to add some kind of option for ways to get money on an ongoing basis. But I do recognize that most people will either run it once and then just never run it again or run it once and then run it five years from now. So the options that you'll see in the test flight are there is a buy it all up front thing for so much money that no one will ever pay it. Right. But it's there. But like we always talk about, like, what's the right amount? Should I ever have an unlock forever option? What's the right amount I should put there? I feel like I gave myself like a five year runway. Right.

with the buy it all at once option. For people who want it, it's there. It will unlock everything forever and ever and ever. Marco did this much with Overcast and is still supporting it and people regret it. But like, how should that be priced? Whatever. It's basically a deterrent. Like, don't buy this. The other things you can buy are

time spanned one-time purchases because people hate subscriptions so i've divided up my purchases into subscriptions and one-time purchases and yeah there's the unlock for every one-time person but there's also the unlock for one month one-time purchase and then there's the unlock for one year one-time purchase non-renewing do people know that can i communicate that successfully in the ui who knows we'll see what people think but like

If you want it for a month, a month is enough time to like make sure, yeah, I found all the stuff that I care about that one point I was going to find. And that's it. It never recurs. It doesn't rebuild you or whatever. Don't touch the app for three years. Come back to it in three years. Scan up. It found some more stuff. Should I buy another month? Sure. It's kind of like the consumables, but not really, because during that month, you can run it as many times as you want. Right. During that year, you can run it as many times as you want. And then the subscriptions are exactly the same price. They just renew.

for people who want something that's renewing. I don't know why anybody would, but there's no price advantage to not doing it. I'm not competing. I'm not saying, oh, the subscriptions are cheaper, so you should do them so you forget about it and auto-renews. No, there's no advantage. If you don't want something that renews, you have multiple options. One month, one year. I didn't do one week or one day. It seemed like too short or whatever. Or forever. And then subscriptions, which are exactly the same price as their one-time thing. That's probably too many options. I should probably get rid of some of these.

That's part of what the test flight's going to do. I'll let people tell me, oh, I think your prices are insane. I would never pick this option. I would pick that one. It didn't find any files. It found 20 gigs of files. Like, I'm hoping I get some actionable information on this. But in the end, what it might come down to is, I don't freaking know. I'll release something, and if no one buys it,

I'll change it, right? Like Marco has changed the business model and pricing and his apps many, many times. That's just seems to me to be part of the process. And I'm willing to like, maybe there's only the only way for me to learn that is to like learn it myself. Despite all these people giving me advice from based on their experience, there's all sorts of things I can tell myself like, well, their experiences on iOS or their apps, not like mine, or I want to do it this way. But it may be one of those things that I just have to learn the hard lessons myself. And part of that could be launching a 1.0 that no one wants to buy.

And then I change it and launch a 1.1 and change it. And, you know, like I'm as frustrating as that sounds, I actually kind of relish that process of learning because for me, for an app like this, it's like low stakes. It's not a big deal. This app is not going to be a big app or whatever. But in the same way that I kind of perversely enjoyed fighting with the in-app purchase system, like doing a part of my app that had nothing to do with my app and had everything to do with dealing with the app store.

One of the reasons I wanted to do this app was to play with that code to hope that I got it right and also playing with pricing strategies. That's another thing that I actually kind of look forward to. Granted, it will be based on no information because I'm not collecting any information, but that's all part of the game for me. So I don't know. We'll see. I haven't finalized anything. But in the meantime, I want Tesla people to try all the options and give me your opinions on them. If you say if this was a real app.

uh i would pick x option i would pick y option if it was half the price i wish there was a z option let me know what you think because honestly like the main customer base for this app right now are people who listen to the podcast because they're the only ones who know it exists and they're the only ones who might even think about seeking it out in the app store because the ain't the name isn't really something oh by the way the name is not just that it's you know what what's the name of your app casey my app call sheet no that's not what it's called what is it called

Oh, Face Splash? Or no, that was the other one. FlickUp. FlickUp, right. Sorry. No, CallSheet. What is it actually called, though, on the App Store? Oh, I don't remember. Like, LookUpCast and Crew or something like that. CallSheet colon LookUpCast and Crew. What is your app called, Marco? I believe it's Overcast colon Podcast Player, I think. Yeah. And my app is Hyperspace colon Reclaim Disk Space. Yeah, there you go. And part of this is because that's how the App Store game is played, even though Casey refers to his app as CallSheet.

in the app store is called call sheet colon lookup cast or whatever like uh that's part of how it's played and the other reason is hyperspace i think was already taken by the epic app so i had to put colon something i probably would have anyway uh but yeah that's the only chance anyone finds me in the app store is they search for like disk space or something and mine comes up because of the subtitle and my keywords or whatever but you have to put storeqs as a keyboard you know yeah i don't think i think they would have worse seo than hyperspace if that's possible no so i mean

For your subscription ongoing stuff, I think that can work when you add more ways to recover space. But I think it's going to be a challenge when you're, quote, only doing this particular method of recovering space.

I think you're going to be compared in people's minds to all the other disk saving tools that like delete temp files and stuff. Yeah. The ones that delete files though, I don't feel like are my competition. Maybe they are. Maybe that's what people really want. Like they already have had people say, Oh, I don't want to actually recover space. I just want to find files that are duplicates and delete them. I mean, I can always add that feature is obviously I know where all the duplicate files are and it's really easy to delete stuff, but yeah, we'll see. Maybe that's a thing that I'll learn is that, uh, my, the, the function of my app performance is not desired. Yeah.

It's desired by me. That's why I made the app, but we'll see. Well, it's desired, but I think it's a, if you want it to be an ongoing revenue app, I

I think that needs to be one function of multiple functions that are all responsible for keeping your disk space minimal or recovering more disk space than what that can do. Yeah, I will say like, I mean, it's not like it's not like ongoing. It's more like punctuated, like use it once, wait two years, use it a second time. But when I use it the second time, I want you to pay again.

All right. You know what I mean? Unless you've unlocked it forever. But like, that's what, like if I get the pricing right, you'll be like, I, you know, a one month unlock is plenty. I'm not going to use this thing for a whole month. I'm going to be done with this in two days. So you pay what you, hopefully you think is a low price. You use it for a month. Forget about it for two years. Two years later you come, Oh, I should do more space. And you download the app and you do the exact same thing. Like it's, it's kind of like a consumable in the form of like, I don't use this app that often, but it does make the second use potentially easier.

you know, a transaction, right? Obviously, if it was 99 cents to do it, everyone would do it. They'd be like, oh, I'll just pay 99 cents and do it for a month or whatever. It's like the question is how high can you make that month thing? And really that depends on, to your point, Margo, that first big number when you find all the duplicates the first time. But like what I was saying earlier is that it could be that your second run actually finds more space than your first

Because two years pass and now my app is brave enough to delve into darker recesses of your Mac where the real space can be recovered. Like I said, my library directory has been the largest source of duplication that I've found, but I'm just not ready to go there yet.

I think subscription is going to be a tough sell. I really do. I get what you're saying. It makes sense. I don't see why anyone would do it either, but if it's the same price and if that's what people want, eh. You've got to reach for more disk space. I think, again, you've got to go for the library. You've got to go for the photo. If you want, because the thing is, obviously, the more space you can save, the more value you will have to people. So I think you have to go for those.

Yeah, it would also be nice if I knew at what rate duplication is generated, because that's one of the questions people had. They were like, why would there be any duplicates? I'm not sure I know the answer. All I know is that there are duplicates. Like, I don't think I was creating duplicates, but I've got just so many of them. How did they get there? Like, I can explain some of them, but not all of them. Like, they're finding duplicates. I'm like, how in the world do I have two of those that are not clones of each other? But somehow I do. So I don't know at what rate does new garbage get generated. Yeah.

If new garbage gets generated real slowly, then yeah, no one's ever going to want to run this app again. But if there's some part of some process, especially in the directory that I'm not looking in now, like...

library or photo libraries or something if there's some like duplicate garbage generation process that is just constantly eating people's discs then maybe running this once a year is not a ridiculous thing to do or even continuously monitoring or something so there's just so many unknowns here and you know if i'm not willing to add any telemetry i'm not sure how those unknowns are going to become knowns but presumably slowly through feedback we'll see

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Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Margo and Casey wouldn't let him. Because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.

And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's K-C-L-I-S-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T. Marco Arman, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A. It's accidental. They did.

John, it's wintertime and you have a new car in the house. How's that going? Yeah, I think we've got a little bit of after show car stuff to match up well with the overtime car stuff. This is the first winter for my wife's new 2024 Civic.

Uh, and I didn't really think about winter car performance until the snow started coming. And I was like, I've got a new car in the snow and I'm not talking about how the car drives in the snow. Cause you know, it's front wheel drive Honda with all season tires. It's pretty much a known quantity. I don't think there's anything remarkable about this car. I'm talking about the other stuff, uh, have about having a car in the snow, which is basically when you wake up in the morning and it's time to get in the car and go to work. Uh,

What does that process look like? Now, if you have a place where all your cars fit in your garage, maybe it's not a big part of your life. But all our cars do not fit in our tiny garage made for horse-drawn carriages. Cars, with the exception of one, are all on the driveway. That means they're getting snowed on. That means in the morning you've got to go out there and defrost your car and scrape it all off. And depending on the weather you had, you could be brushing away snow. You could be scraping off ice.

Uh, this is just part of life, uh, in a place with winter, uh, with a car. And I guess I hadn't thought too much about it for so many years because so many of our cars have been the same. We have two of the same generation of Honda Accord. We had a bunch of Honda Accords and Honda Civics before that, but this 2024 Civic throws in a few new wrinkles, uh,

And I don't know if it's just like, you know, because my car is 10 years old. My wife's car is like seven years old. My wife's other car. And her new one is the shiny new car. And along with the first car having carplay, there are other firsts in this car as well. I'm not sure all of them are good, but some of them are just a fact of life. So this is our first hatchback.

Uh, and a hatchback has a rear wiper, has a big hatch. And yeah, there's a wiper on the hatchback. What the hell is that doing there? Uh, that is a thing that I have to be aware of and avoid, uh,

when removing snow from the back of the car, lest I scrape the wiper off of my car and onto my driveway. Now, hold on. Are you not doing the time-honored tradition of moving your windshield wipers to the upright position when it's snow is pending? Well, I'll get to that. So first of all, the wiper on the hatch does not do that.

At all, as far as I can tell. Well, that's a shitty design. Yeah, I agree. But there's that, right? And yeah, when the snow is on it, you may not be aware of exactly where it is. But the second thing is, the hatchback also has a little sprayer thingy.

for spritzing water for the wiper to wipe away that is in the middle of the glass that is another thing you do not want to hit with your giant ice scraper as you're scraping the ice off the windshield with big long powerful strokes yeah that's another thing you don't want to do just for the purpose of argument here have you not considered just like turning the car on and turning the rear defroster on and just coming back in five minutes

five minutes hey i'm not sure where you live five minutes is like kind of like a dent when you have like freezing rain that has put a centimeter thick sheet of ice over your car that rear defroster is not going to like make that stuff magically vaporized and no but it'll at least make it loose then you can it'll it kind of just like falls off right you do what you can you give it 15 20 minutes but sometimes you're running late sometimes you don't have time to let the car sit in your driveway and defrost you don't want to just be sitting there just

spewing fumes into the atmosphere with your internal combustion engine for all this time. Like, yeah, obviously you put on a defroster. Obviously you turn the car on. Obviously you want it to warm up. Obviously you turn the heat on inside. You do all that stuff. And yet still you want to get going. You want to get out of the driveway. You're late to where you want to go. You've got the ice scraper out there. You're scraping. So I have to be aware of where that little nubbin is. So you got the wiper on the back and you got the nubbin on the back. And that's setting aside the other thing that you have, which my wife does not care about, but I absolutely do.

which is all the ceiling around all the glass. And you have to be aware of what that is so you don't take your scraper and jam it into the ceiling around, you know, that's fragile, right? It's made of soft plastic or rubber. Your ice scraper can damage it. I have the opinion that you should not hit that with your scraper.

Other people in my household are not of that opinion. So I'm trying to preserve this car. And obviously you've got the side windows, which have their own seals around them. Right. But you also don't want to hit that. You're also trying to scrape off that. You're also trying to point the vents too. So they help to rust it. But now let's move around to the front where some real issues are happening.

So first of all, this is the thing that I've gathered a lot of modern, more modern cars do that I don't like, which is they want to get the wipers out of the airstream. So the wipers are like nestled more under the hood. Yes. Right. Both of our cars do this. Which means you can't just take them and pry them upwards. Hmm.

because they won't go they'll hit the top of the hood what you have to do is go into the car and depending on whatever your car is do whatever incantation that tells the car can you please put the wipers in service position and they move and they blah blah all right now you can move them out and of course you can't put them back until you you know so that dance is stupid on the car because you have to like start the engine and then turn it off or turn actually turn on the accessories and turn them off

which is harder when you don't have a key because the key you just turn halfway but you've got a push button anyway that's annoying I don't like I understand why they do it but I don't like it and the second thing is and I don't know if this is just a Honda thing or this is a new modern car thing but I'm I have two minds about this

All my previous cars that I've ever owned had the squirty things where they squirt windshield wiper fluid onto your windshield. Just like I have one in the back, a little squirty nozzle sprays out. And usually there's like two of them. One sprays the driver's side, one sprays the passenger's side.

Not the 2024 Civic. Are they in the wipers? Yeah. Oh, that's what the Volvo is. It's something. And I understand why they do this. What it has is the wiper squirty things. They're not in the blades. I mean, they take regular wiper blades. You can just replace them with any wiper blades. The wiper blades are dumb. Like, there's nothing smart in them. But the little arm that holds the wiper blade has the squirty thing in it. So the stuff squirts out basically just in front of the wiper blade.

Right, like right there with the wiper blade. So as you swipe the wiper blade, it is squirting stuff in front of the wiper blade as it goes. Now, I would imagine that our motivation is this. First of all, with the old one, when you pull the little stock or whatever and it goes squirt, squirt, squirt.

There are situations where you could effectively be blinding the driver in a quickly moving car because that spray sprays onto the windshield and instantly freezes into ice or smears some mud or dust that was on there or whatever. And now you're waiting like, oh my God, I can't see anything. You're hoping those wiper blades come off.

and sweep away the mess you just made. And if you're lucky, they do. And if you're unlucky, it like flash froze onto your thing because your windshield washer fluid was the wrong concentration. And now you can't see and you're going 60 miles an hour on the highway. You don't want to be in a situation where you spray a bunch of gunk on your windshield and then rely on the correct functioning of the blades to swipe it away. With this technique, where they're on the blades, you're

The only place you're putting it is right in front of where the blade is about to move into. And you're not spraying the entire window all at once. You're just spraying the region in front of the blade. So maybe there's a safety issue there. Maybe it is a little bit better. Maybe it's a more efficient use of liquid, so you're not spraying most of it into the air. So it's just blowing over the car. How much of it actually contacts the windshield? How much of it stays on the windshield? Here, you're squirting it directly on the windshield. But now...

You've got this problem where the little arms have little hoses on them and little squirty things. And it's just one more fragile thing to go wrong and not mess with when you're there fumbling in the ice and snow. Maybe people don't know, don't live around snow. Think that snow is like, I don't know, invisible or easy to deal with, but like, you know, wet, icy snow that's frozen onto your car and everything like,

It's not as simple as... It's not just like this fluffy white powder that just moves out of the way. It can encase your car in hard stuff that you want to chip it out of, but you don't want to chip... It's like chipping out a baby from a giant stone thing. You want to get the stone off, but you don't want to use a jackhammer because you'll kill the baby. My car is the baby in this scenario. Right? So...

I- there's ice coating everything. I can't even get the blades up into service position because everything is frozen in place, but I don't want to crack them out of- there's little tubes going into the arms to go up to do the squirter thingies, and in the old way at least I could like know where the squirters were and like try to clean them off the- clean off the nozzle to have a clear shot, but now the squirters are facing down and they're inside the ice-encrusted blades.

It is a much more delicate operation than it was before. And I guess this is the march of technology. Although my wife thinks that the wiper arm squirters are not as good as the old ones, just flat out in performance wise. But again, I kind of see why they do it. But like it is making the process of chiseling my car out of its icy prison or my wife's car out of its icy prison a lot more complicated than it used to be. And I'm not entirely sure that the tradeoffs are worthwhile.

fun what do you think of your wiper blade squirty things casey

John, I am a civilized human who parks in the garage and we get, we very rarely get snow. We did just get snow twice actually. So it does happen, but despite what you think. It just melted away instantly instead of, instead of the snow, instead of snow that falls being, having to be there until March. Well, that's your own fault for living in the wrong section of the country, but nevertheless, no, I think in general, like in, in decent conditions, I like having them in the wiper blade. That being said, I went to replace the,

the wiper blades in her last Volvo once, and I had gotten whatever, you know, reasonably not crappy ones I could find on Amazon. And then they arrived and I went to install them in the car and whatever the mounting situation was for the wipers I got was in direct physical conflict with the sprayer for the wiper fluid. So I quickly ended up saying, I'm not going to bother with this and trying to research what third party thing will work. And so I just,

you know pulled a marco and threw money at the problem and just went to volvo and got some new wiper blades from them but oh yeah and on that front oh yeah wiper blades aren't usually really any more expensive than good third-party ones unlike so much like you know the oem things where it costs a bazillion dollars to get the official one from your car manufacturer wiper blade's not the case now maybe they're not as good as the third-party ones you would get for the same price but if you're worried about like any wiper blades that exactly fit my car the oem ones are not that expensive you just go to your dealer and buy them like 20 bucks each or whatever

They're a lot more expensive, I think, than crappy things you can get from Amazon, but they're at least not crappy. Anyway. But they're about the same price as the really good third-party ones that you

That's probably true. But one way or another, I like having them leaving the replacement issue aside. I like having them in the blade. Um, my car, both of our cars do the hideaway, the, the, the blades thing when, when the car is, you know, in, in a steady state, if you will. Um, but I, I, I don't really mind that generally speaking. And, uh, again, I don't have to deal with snow on a regular basis. Do you, do you know, do you even know the process of getting yours out? Uh,

Uh, I certainly did on her old car. I think I do on mine. I don't, I don't, I'm sure I could figure it out fairly quickly, but I don't remember off the top of my head. Um, but yeah, I mean, it's not terribly difficult. It's just stuff in the center. You think it's on a touchscreen somewhere? Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's what it is, what it is. That's,

Modern cars for you, baby. And speaking of modern... Oh, well, actually, before we move on, how is the on-road performance of the Civic? Like, does it go reasonably well in the snow? I drove my wife's car for the first time like a week ago. Oh, okay. So what did you think of it? We were on the streak of me just not driving. First, I was not driving in it because I didn't want to be the first one to scrape the wheels, but then she scraped the wheels. But still...

I didn't drive it. It was just, you didn't want to break the streak, but she was away for a while and I had to move cars. So I did actually drive her car to move it out of the driveway. I drove it around the block to see what it was like. It's fine. It's nice. Um, I like it's, I bought this car because we talked about before, like, like I can barely fit in it because it's got a sunroof. So I would not choose this car for myself, but she likes it. Oh, fair enough. Uh, for me, I have a little bit of car followup. Um, I am mad with power gentlemen. Um,

Because I have installed Home Assistant, which I think we briefly have touched on a handful of times. Are you putting Yolink things in your car? No, although, man, if I could find a way, I would do it. See if your sunroof is leaking. Oh, funny. Well, you have a sunroof now too, big guy. Not me, my wife's car. Oh, yeah. You have nothing to do with your wife's car. Not a thing. I just drove it for the first time. We've had it for like six months.

Anyway, there is... Maybe this has been here for a while and I just didn't realize it, but there is a integration between Home Assistant, like a community integration between Home Assistant and Volvo's APIs for controlling the car. And, oh baby, I don't even know what I'm going to do with myself because...

I installed this integration, which was challenging for uninteresting reasons, but I installed the integration like three hours ago and within an hour of it being installed, I've already written an automation such that if it's a weekday and the car is plugged in,

at about 10 minutes before she leaves in the morning to drop the kids off at school. It will precondition the car. This is stuff that Tesla owners have probably been doing for 10 years, but now I can do it. And the other thing is, I bet you I could do this in the Volvo app, but I don't care. I can do it through Home Assistant now. I've got a hammer. Everything's a nail, baby.

And so this is very exciting for me. I can get like a readout in Home Assistant of the battery level of, you know, whether it's charging or not. And I think I can even tell roughly when it'll be done charging. Can you put it in your menu bar? So you can put it in your menu bar and see what your wife's car's battery is like. Yep. Don't know why I would, but I could. Now I feel like you've nerd sniped me. I just kind of want to see if I can. But anyways, this is way too much fun. And

I feel like, again, everything is a nail because now I've got the world's biggest hammer. And that's my quick bit of car-related follow-up for today.

Marco, how's your car in the snow and everything else? And how was it on the long trip? So far, it's been great. I mean, I haven't had it in many demanding, snowy environments. So I don't know how it compares to actual off-roaders I've had before because the iX is not an off-roader. It has...

It has all-wheel drive the same way most modern BMWs have all-wheel drive, and it has the benefits of electric drive of very high torque and everything, but it is not in any way a good off-road choice compared to any other regular SUV. Can you lift your wiper blades up with your hands without doing anything else?

I don't know. I'll have to check. But they do have the squirters in the blades, which I also had in the Land Rover. I guess it's everywhere now. So I actually prefer the squirters in the blades because not only does it, as you mentioned, John, you have kind of less blinded time as the winch is sprayed, but also it uses way less fluid to get a full sweep because you don't have to hold it

Hold it down for a second and then like, you know, the wiper blade goes across and scoots it over and then you like squirt a little bit more to get under the blade. Like, you don't have to do that dance. You can just squirt a little bit of it and it coats the whole windshield way better with less fluid. So... Less of it is spraying off into the air and doing nothing.

thing. You know the people who have their squirters are not aimed correctly and you're driving behind them and they just send off this spout like a whale and it just splatters onto your windshield? Yeah, exactly. So I find it's nicer in every way and I have not yet found a downside. So other than those, the car's been pretty great. I've had a couple of minor software things where sometimes the iPhone won't unlock it very quickly and

I think, honestly, that's probably the iPhone's fault because I usually run beta iOS's and they change the Bluetooth details all the time in iOS betas for some reason. So that's probably the phone's fault, not the car's fault. Other than that, it's been pretty great.

I love CarPlay. In fact, there was a story that breezed through the news today real quick that apparently BMW's next-gen iDrive system, everyone's saying, like, it's barely going to support CarPlay. And what they mean by that is it's not going to support dual-screen CarPlay. It's going to keep having CarPlay just, like, in the main screen and not in the secondary, like, driver cluster. But as far as I can tell, I don't think my car supports the driver cluster second screen anyway.

And the iX is supposed to have one of their most cutting-edge iDrive systems and one of their most cutting-edge CarPlay integrations. I mean, it's a few years old now. The model's a few years old now, so maybe it's not as new as the newest ones, but I already don't have the second screen, and I don't think I would want the second screen. This is probably a bigger discussion for a different day, but

I think CarPlay, the way it is implemented in most cars, which is just like the window on the main screen, I think that is CarPlay's best self. They should never have tried to branch out any more than that because that was never going to work and there's other downsides to it. And I think having it be in that screen...

both keeps the automakers happier about keeping it there, achieves a nice balanced functionality with the users and everybody. It gives the car enough room on its UI to show what the car needs to show. Things like when you have an assisted driving feature, it will usually have some option to show in the middle, like, here's your car, and...

here's a map of ahead of it. Here's the car that we think is there. And, you know, kind of show like a visualization of like the cars around you as the car sees them or your following distance or your cruise control settings or whatever that all goes in the main cluster. So I like having car play in a little, or in the case of the IX in its giant rectangle on the main screen, I don't think it needs to go anywhere else. I think having it try, having it try to take over everything was probably the wrong strategy for Apple. And also, uh,

Apple doesn't put a lot of effort into CarPlay, so I think having it be in its rectangle on the main screen matches the amount of effort Apple puts into it. I don't think Apple makes CarPlay good enough, bug-free enough, or reliable enough, or full-featured enough to have it take over the whole dash. So I think CarPlay in the rectangle is exactly where it needs to be. And by the way, remember CarPlay 2.0?

The next-gen CarPlay, remember that? Oh, yeah, yeah, wherever the hell that is. That's gone. Coming in 2024. Yeah, that's, I mean, look, they're walking away whistling. That's gone. We all know that's gone. It's up in Apple heaven with air power. I think Apple is still insisting that this is still coming from some car manufacturers, but they keep revising. I think they announced it in 2022. Nowhere to be seen. An Apple story for all of 2024 is totally, it's coming in 2024 from one of these manufacturers. That did not happen.

No, it's not going to happen. Like, that's fine. Anyway, so I love having CarPlay in what is a good version of regular CarPlay. It's still the one rectangular screen in the middle of the car. It's a good version of that on a nice, big, good screen. So I like that a lot. And yeah, otherwise, I'm very happy with the car.

I disagree slightly with regard to the multi-screen, uh, car play thing. It is nice to have like in Aaron's car, it'll do multi-screen and it is nice to have a map right there in the instrument cluster rather than, um,

only in the center screen. I think perhaps you've been tainted by having many cars where the screen was, you know, this giant thing in the center and there's little to nothing in the instrument cluster. But one way or another, I do like having it there. It's not critical, but I like it. And I think...

a lot of the brouhaha with regard to BMW from what little I read is that it is a regression insofar as they were supporting that previously in most of their cars, perhaps not the electric ones, and they soon will not be anymore. And people were pretty grumbly about that. But yeah,

All in all, I mean, I do quite like having CarPlay. I still will not buy a car without it. You know, people keep saying to me, especially with regard to our conversations a few weeks ago, oh, you should buy the Rivian R3 when it comes out because it'll surely be cheap enough. Sure. But...

I I'm not going to buy a car without CarPlay. I just won't. And you might think me a moron for that and that's fine. I don't care. Like I will not buy a car without CarPlay cause I just don't want to do it. I don't want to rely on a automobile manufacturers software in order to have the infotainment that I want on my, in my car. You know, I don't want to have to use overcast via Bluetooth. I want the damn CarPlay app. And, and,

I just, I will not buy a car without it, at least. And so I'm hopeful that CarPlay is not dead in its entirety, even though it does appear that next-gen CarPlay was never born, much less has died or anything like that. But, oh well.