639: Crimp the World
01:58:47 Share

Before we start, I have a very, very tiny mini review of my M4 MacBook Pro. Did we know you got one of those? I mentioned it and we never followed up. That was my like emergency pre-tariff purchase. Right.

Righto. And I got it to, I had to send my M2 MacBook Air down the hand-me-down line in the family. And so I got it to replace that a little bit earlier than planned due to the tariff concerns. But it is now my new travel, lightweight, mostly train and ferry computer. So I'm sorry, you went from an M2 MacBook Air to an M4 MacBook Pro. Correct. And remind me why go from Air to Pro?

So I mainly wanted the nanotexture brighter screen. That was the big thing. I secondarily would have liked the extra USB-C port on the other side for charging on either side, which I often run into, or the SD card reader, which I also often miss with the Air. But anyway, so I did it. I've been living with that computer now for, what, about a month almost? Yeah.

And it's awesome. Now, I'm sorry. I keep interrupting you and I apologize. But what is the... You're making this mini review of mid-review. It's my fault. Yeah, you can blame me. The desktop laptop remains an M3 MacBook Pro? Okay. Yeah. Yeah, the big one is the 16-inch M3 Max.

Oh, 16-inch. Okay. Yeah, this is the 14-inch M4, non-pro, non-max, just like the base M4 with some slightly elevated RAM and disk space. And the nanotexture. And the nanotexture. So this is my first nanotexture device.

it's really good like the screen is really good and the rest of the computer is also very good but it's very good in ways that we all knew already you know which is not like i don't mean to gloss over the fact that it's like an incredibly fast incredibly capable laptop that produces no noise and has infinite infinite battery life like those are not small things but now like

Almost everything Apple produces, you can say that about, which is, you know, look, for all we can say about the company and its BS, the hardware is in a really good spot right now. So this is an amazing computer for pretty much anything. And for my upgraded purposes of having the screen be more readable in bright transit vehicles, it is very, very good for that. So it is so good, in fact, that I would say...

I don't think I will be buying any more products that don't have nanotexture screens if that is available as an option because it is that good. Do you think it's the nanotexture or the brightness? Well, it's a little bit of both. It is brighter than the AirScreen. I believe the AirScreen is still a 500-nit max, and this one I believe the base rate before HDR can go higher than that. It is brighter, but it's not so...

so much brighter that it like makes just a world difference it makes a small difference it's a welcome difference but it's not like a massive like earth shattering oh my god that's bright it's not like that but it is nice but what makes it extra nice is the nanotexture that really helps a lot when you're in a vehicle like a train or something like it helps a lot um

And it's a great overall package still. It's not as thin and light as the Air, but it's still pretty darn thin and light. So I'm very happy with it. And again, the battery life is great.

I mean, granted, it's a brand new battery compared to the Air, which was a two-year-old one, but it's a very noticeable increase in battery life over the Air. And that's because I got the low-spec one, but it still has a bigger battery. So anyway, great computer overall. And if you don't need the super pro processing for that computer, I would strongly recommend you look at it. That sounds really nice. I really would love a nanotexture...

on my MacBook Pro. And otherwise, I have no qualms with my current M3 Max BlackBook Pro, as I like to call it,

However, I am really looking forward to, because of things that have been happening, which we'll talk about during the show, I really would love to get a CalDigit TS5, which isn't out yet. And I believe that requires Thunderbolt 5, I think. And that means there may be a computer upgrade in my future. Wait, we're up to 5 already? It isn't Thunderbolt 4?

Marco hasn't been listening to the show either. Yeah, exactly. He did a whole segment on Thunderbolt 5. Wait, do I have it? No.

You believe you do have it on your M4 MacBook Pro. But I don't have the M4 Max. Does it need that? Oh, that's a good question. I don't recall one way or the other. I think it might just limit your ports. Anyway, you can look it up in the specs. But the point is, if you were to buy a high-end Mac now, you would have Thunderbolt 5. Update, real-time follow-up. I don't have it. It does require the M4 Pro or Max. Well, there you go. Good feedback. Thank you.

Thank you, listener Marco, for providing that exceedingly quick feedback. Anyways, suffice to say, I would really like a 10 gigabit connection. And the TS5, if I'm not mistaken, has a 10 gigabit Ethernet port. But again, it requires Thunderbolt 5, which means... What are you connecting through 10 gigabit to? Like your home networking setup is going to be at most 2.5 between devices, right? And your internet connection is one. So where does this 10 become in your life? We'll get there. We'll get there. All right. All right.

Anyways, let's do some follow-up. First of all, I talked, I believe it was last episode, about wanting an SF symbol for Letterboxd or Letterboxd, if you will. And a few people were very kind and reached out with submissions, which was also very brave because I gave...

the briefest of design briefs in what I was looking for. And I wanted to particularly call out Alice D who gave the, or sent me the winning contender, even though it wasn't ever designed to be a contest, but it was very kind of all of you that sent them in. Uh, and, and theirs was the one that I think best fit, uh, what I was doing with it and call sheets. So that's going to be in a forthcoming version of call sheet, which I hope to push the app store in the next week or so. No promises. Uh,

But I also wanted to call attention to the custom symbols app. I haven't tried this myself because honestly, I haven't had a need to thanks to Alison and Ben McCarthy, who has done some stuff for me in the past. But anyways,

was the first of many people to recommend the custom symbol symbols app, which is for the Mac where allegedly you can drag in any reasonable SVG and it will fart out or toot out. If you will see what I did there, uh, to doubt a SF symbol. Um,

Again, I haven't personally tried this, but Underscore gave it two thumbs up, or at least I believe he did. And a few other people have reached out and said the same thing, that it's pretty good. So you might want to check that out if you're in a similar boat as me, and I will be looking into that whenever it is I need another SF symbol.

Kevin Markham writes, summarizing app store reviews using AI would not suffer from the same challenge as filtering spam emails. As long as the threshold for what counts as spam is set incredibly low, then any review that is even a tiny bit spam-like will be ignored by the summarization model. As a result, the only reviews that will get used for summarization are the ones that the model is very confident are ham, which I thought was a typo for a second. Then I played that back in my head and realized, no, no, no, that's deliberate.

Continuing from Kevin, building an email spam filter is a much tougher problem because the end user sees every ham versus spam decision that you make, whereas the App Store summarization model does not need to divulge which reviews were used to generate the summary.

That does make it a little bit easier. But the thing with spam filtering, especially Apple spam filtering, is that it's so bad you can't assume that I'll just crank the threshold up. And so only the really good ones will get through because, first of all, that's going to eliminate a lot of the actual good reviews because you're getting false positives. And second of all, it does not mean that the spam

Spamiest of spam things you've ever seen in your entire life won't get through because we've all seen that happen even Gmail occasionally like they'll be literally all caps word spam in the subject line and somehow it will get through so I don't think there's any threshold that these very bad spam filters can be set to they won't let spam through so now what you've done is you've eliminated almost your entire pool of data but still occasionally a bad one leaks through so now it is like a big fish in a small pond anyway I think it does make the job easier so this is a good point but

I have so little faith in the ability to filter spam consistently from anyone and especially Apple because every time I visit my iCloud email and sort through it, the spam situation there is dire. And yes, I know they're trying not to filter out my spam, but let me tell you, my spam folder is filled with legitimate emails and my inbox is filled with spam. So I don't even know where, speaking of setting the dial, I don't know where to set the dial on Apple's ability to filter spam, but it's not good. Yeah.

Kieran Healy writes with regard to a fine is a price. Kieran writes, there is a debate in the literature about the degree to which this idea is true, but there is a quite famous paper literally titled A Fine is a Price. And we'll put a link in the show notes. Thanks to Kieran. The Journal of Legal Studies, Volume 29, Number 1 from January 2000 by Uri Gnese and Aldo Rusticini.

And I guess the summary is the deterrence hypothesis predicts that the introduction of a penalty that leaves everything else unchanged will reduce the occurrence of the behavior subject to the fine. We present the result of a field study in a group of daycare centers that contradicts this prediction. Parents used to arrive late to collect their children, forcing a teacher to stay after closing time. We introduced a monetary fine for late coming parents. As a result, the number of late coming parents increased significantly. Whoopsie doopsies.

Yeah. And now, you know, what famous that I'm sure wherever Marco heard it from was someone who heard it from this paper because this was going down the sort of like pop culture news at the time. I think the debate is probably around any any kind of like famous paper or famous saying that like becomes known in the popular media. There's always kind of a backlash against it to say, well, how representative was that? How many people have reproduced it? And people are motivated to try to do studies to disprove it or whatever. But anyway, this is.

That's where the phrase comes from, and it is still a good thought technology, as they say, to keep in mind when considering fines and deterrence and how they work.

Apple is going to be teaming up with Anthropic, apparently, for a new AI-powered vibe coding platform. This is reading from Bloomberg. Apple is teaming up with the startup Anthropic on a new vibe coding software platform that will use artificial intelligence to write, edit, and test code on behalf of programmers. The system is a new version of Xcode that will integrate Anthropic's Clawed Sonnet model. Apple will roll out the software internally and hasn't yet decided whether to launch it publicly. Last year, Apple announced its own AI-powered coding tool for Xcode called Swift Assist.

The company had intended to roll it out in 2024, but never actually shipped it to developers. Internally, engineers have complained that the company's own system could hallucinate and even slow down app development. So I don't quite understand this story. This is another Gurman thing. It's like, all right, so there is this just like an internal thing to Apple? They're not sure if they're going to ship it. What about Swift Assist? They didn't ship that. Are they not planning on shipping it? It's very it's a very confusing other than like the potential partnership is like, well, maybe Apple is having trouble shipping.

is creating its own LLM-powered code assistant thing integrated with Xcode. So they're just going to field test a bunch of different partnerships inside the company until one is good enough to escape. But anyway, I mean, I would throw this in the pile of,

Policy decisions that Apple has made after the whole Apple intelligence debacle last year are basically saying we will work with third parties much more openly than we used to. We will consider using third party LLMs. We're trying to partner with Google for Gemini. Maybe they'll announce that at WWDC. We're going to partner with Anthropic to try to make Xcode better. So I endorse these efforts, but I would like to see something come of them eventually.

We are brought to you this episode by BetterHelp. Mental health awareness is growing, but there's still progress to be made. 26% of Americans who participated in a recent survey say they have avoided seeking mental health support due to fear of judgment. And this is honestly a shame. Mental health support is so important. And it's, you know, there's nothing more to be ashamed about mental health support as there is to be about physical health support. Like, you know, would you go to a dentist if you had a tooth problem? Of course.

Would you go to your doctor if you had a physical problem, like, you know, if your arm was hurting? Of course, right? When people hesitate to get mental health help, it doesn't just affect them. It impacts families, work, and entire communities. This Mental Health Awareness Month, let's encourage everyone to take care of their well-being and break the stigma. The world is better when people are healthy and happy.

Happy. BetterHelp has over 10 years of experience matching people with the right therapist from their diverse network of more than 30,000 licensed therapists with a wide range of specialties. And it's fully online, so therapy is affordable and convenient, serving over 5 million people around the world.

If your therapist isn't working out for you, you can easily switch therapists anytime at no extra cost. So check out BetterHelp today. We're all better with help. Visit betterhelp.com slash a tech pod to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash a tech pod. Thanks to BetterHelp for sponsoring our show.

All right. So we have been talking about last week the App Store rule changes that Apple was compelled to make by a very cranky and justifiably judge. And hey, guess what? Reading from The Verge, Apple asked a judge to halt an order forcing it to give up control over App Store payments while it appeals the decision. In a filing on Wednesday, Apple says the order contains, quote, extraordinary intrusions, quote,

that could result in grave irreparable harm to the company. Quote, deriving Apple, depriving, excuse me, Apple of control over core features of the App Store is standing alone sufficient to warrant a stay, Apple says in its motion to halt the order. The new rules profoundly undercut the integrated iOS ecosystem that this court sustains is lawful and that is the foundation of user trust and confidence in the App Store.

Yeah, there's a lot of wringing of hands over the weather. The angry judge's decision about what Apple has to do is going to stay on appeal. And Apple, of course, is pursuing every possible avenue, including saying, hey, while we're waiting for the appeal, can we just like undo that? Because we've been doing it for like a week now and we hate it.

Yeah, I just, oh, I hate every bit of this. But you know what? Like, look, what do they expect to happen when you pretty blatantly and maliciously avoid complying with a federal judge's order?

Stuff happens. This kind of stuff. Usually bad. Their case is kind of like, okay, so we defied the judge's order, but the thing they made us do after that is way beyond the original order, and we think that's mean. You can read their appeal about it. They have many complaints about everything. They're like, oh, the judge never said anything about not charging money. Anyway, well, this will all be hashed out in the legal system. It's

It's, you know, part of the process of all these cases and everything is like, when do we decide to even check in with them? Usually we only check in when something significant happens. But the the very aggressive follow up from Apple on not just appealing, but also saying, well, while we're appealing, we don't want this to apply to us is noteworthy. And with that in mind, yeah.

We have some news from Riley to friend to the show. Riley tested and Delta Riley's emulator app. Riley writes Delta's latest update with our revised Patreon signup flow has been approved. We can now freely mention our Patreon without giving Apple 27% of donations. Of course, Apple still requires we offer in-app purchases. So we shoved them away at the bottom of Delta settings under alternative payment methods. Truggy.

Love it. Love it. Very good. Literally an item says alternate payment methods and it's like a sub menu in the support section of settings. So good. Um, and then, uh, Riley continued, I think it was like a day or two later, maybe it was later that same day, adding a new screen to Delta to inform users about the differences when using an app purchase instead of donating directly to our Patreon. What do y'all think? This is so good. I'm going to, it's a lot of words, but it's worth it. So this is a full screen sheet, uh,

And it says in a very large font, you're about to use Apple's in-app purchase system. Patreon is not responsible for the privacy or security purchases made with in-app purchase. And then in a body sized font, any accounts or purchases made outside of Patreon will be managed by the company, quote, Apple Inc. Quote, your Patreon account stored payment method and related features such as subscription management refund requests will not be available. Patreon can't verify any pricing or promotions offered by the company. Learn more, continue or cancel.

So I'm pretty sure that's word for word, the Apple scare sheet, but with the words, you know, substituted. But right down to putting Apple Inc. in quote, like we mentioned last time about the Apple employees being excited. Ooh, put the company name there because that'll be scarier. Well, Apple's a well-known company name, so it's not that scary. But putting it in scare quotes just adds a little bit of extra scare. And again, these are all truthful statements. Patreon will not be responsible for the privacy and security of the purchase made through an app purchase, but it makes it sound so scary. Yeah.

Who will be responsible? Who knows? This is so petty and I love it. Yeah, this is flawless. It is exactly matching the design of Apple's scare sheet.

Oh, I love this so much. It's so incredibly petty and I am so incredibly here for it. Just so good. Well, and I think it also like it highlights just how over the top Apple's design and language were. Like, of course, they were going to, you know, be slapped down by anybody who can read like the judgment or the regulation. Like,

Of course, this was Apple, you know, putting a finger in everyone's eye, which they are increasingly doing. And speaking of being exceedingly aggressive with scare tactics, in the App Store, I think in the EU only, there was a MJ Sci blog post, and we'll link to that. And there was a screenshot, is a screenshot of

of Instacar, which is apparently some app that you can get in the EU, and above what you would normally expect to see in an App Store listing, you know, the icon, the name of the app, and so on, and the Get button. Above that, there's a big red warning triangle. This app does not support the App Store's private and secure payment system. It uses external purchases. Learn more. So bad. So ridiculous. This really shows, like,

You know, Apple, first of all, they're not over it. No, they are not. That's very clear. They're not over it and they haven't stopped fighting. And they have a lot more fighting they can do. So what's interesting, so this app, Instacar, as far as I can tell, it seems to be exclusive to the App Store in Hungary. So most of us can't view it without some workarounds. But I did verify with some people before the show, like, yes, it is indeed real. It's super...

it's so outrageous. Like this, this thing they're doing, it's so outrageous that I thought for sure, like that's gotta be, that's gotta be fake. Right? Like, so we, but no, it's real. Uh, and it links to, uh, the learn more links to this giant wall of texts. That's all, you know, scares about, you know, basically, basically the scare sheet type of language. And it just shows like if Apple, like they're not going to go down quietly on this, uh,

They have a lot more pettiness and hostility and just sheer cruelty they can do to apps. And they will keep going. So this is...

A huge block that pushes down the app on its own product page on the App Store. It's the very top thing on the page besides like the navigation where you can go back, like right underneath the navigation where the content begins. Giant warning. This is Apple showing, demonstrating like,

If you don't play ball with us, we will penalize you in the app store in substantial ways. Or they'll try to because like their sort of blindness on this is like, look, if they do this and they keep doing these banners, it's not going to be too long before people figure out when you see that thing on the top, the prices are cheaper.

Like, because that's because people don't need to care about the words or whatever. And yes, it will initially scare them. But word will get around. Someone will make a tick tock and say, hey, you may have seen this little thing and you might be scared by it. But like, don't worry, because these are the apps that charge you 30 percent less or 15 percent less. That will that word will get around very quickly. And now Apple supposed we're going to scare you away with big dialogue. They've just put like a little flag on top of the apps where the prices are cheaper.

I think that's very optimistic that your take on that. I don't think that's going to happen. I just need one good tick tock and it'll happen. I mean, to maybe to some people, but I think this is again, this is showing like Apple has a lot more tricks they can pull out of their hat.

And they are not going to go gracefully. They are going to go kicking and screaming. And we haven't seen anything yet on what they are capable of, because this is a company that is extremely petty and thin skinned and vindictive around this point. So we are going to see a lot more stuff like this. They will not go down quietly. And it just goes to show how incredibly desperate they are to protect this revenue stream.

Yeah, it's intense. My other favorite thing is the scare sheet that the learn more, the aforementioned learn more link goes to. It's got, you know, a giant graphic at the top and from the app store about alternative payment options in the app store and dot, dot, dot. He clearly did not spend an overabundance of time on this. To be fair, I grabbed that screenshot from a video somebody posted, so I might have grabbed it before the layout had completed or something. Fair. Okay.

Either way, I do find it mildly amusing. And just think, we're going to be talking more about Apple in a little bit, but wouldn't it be nicer if we could be talking about Apple products in these news cycles? Of all the wars they're fighting, this one...

It's not worth it. The cost to them of fighting this battle is so much opportunity cost. It's so much reputational damage. It's so much damage around the whole ecosystem. I don't understand the strategy they are following unless it is truly being done by incredibly short-sighted people who don't understand software, which maybe it is.

All right, let's enter home networking corner. First of all, Peter Binks writes, Ubiquity's other line, Amplify, A-M-P-L-I-F-I, is probably a better fit for people that just want to replace their Google, TP-Link, et cetera, mesh network. It's more in the prosumer consumer space. And because of that, it doesn't have all the fancy networking software. The one caveat is that it seems like Ubiquity is much less invested in it.

So we'll put a link in the show notes. I mean, I've heard about Amplify, but like in the context of what we discussed with Casey and his plans and Marco and his stuff, like,

If your goal is to go to ubiquity so you can play with all the fancy software that Casey's raving about and this doesn't have that, then this is kind of like, okay, well, but then now it's just competing with like Eero and Google without all the Amplify fanciness. All the unified fanciness. It doesn't have all the fancy software. It doesn't like every device you put in gets added to this big thing. Like it's not, you know, I don't have any experience with this thing, but it looks like it is. It definitely is more of a consumer oriented one, but I don't,

I feel like ubiquities sort of, uh, brand advantage is, you know, we make, uh, expensive feeling, expensive looking, and probably actually also expensive, uh,

stuff that will be reliable and that has lots and lots of features and configurability. And to the extent that we can make that easy to set up, that's great. But if you're going to say, well, we take away most of the expensive feeling and looking this and some of the expense and also take away most of the cool features. It's like, well, you know, like it's not it's not their bread and butter. Like that's now you're into like Eero's bread and butter. So, you know, I don't know about the Amplify brand. I looked at their products, too. They didn't seem good.

particularly compelling to me because I'm not in the market for ubiquity stuff, but I am in the market for, you know, easy to set up home stuff. And so far Eero has been doing it for me, although not that I'm looking to replace my networking stuff anytime soon, but one of the main criteria that I look at when I look at products other than like brand reputation and feature set and everything is what size and shape are the access points? Because from even within a brand, there's not a lot of consistency and people keep changing the size and shape of them. And it makes a difference because, um,

sometimes it's easier or harder to fit these things into your decor and into your home depending on is it a tall skinny thing a low flat thing where are the plugs how does it connect to something does it have to be hung on a wall or a ceiling maybe case it will get to that if it is on a piece of furniture is it ugly do I want to hide it or is it okay to be seen and on that front Amplify isn't doing much better than its competitors yeah and I would say too like I've said in the past you know when talking about like you know HomePods versus Sonos for instance like

I generally have found better luck, better experiences, and higher happiness with

when I'm using a product that is the company's main focus who makes it. And, you know, I love Ubiquiti stuff. I can't talk enough about how much I love Ubiquiti stuff. But the reality is Ubiquiti is an enterprise networking gear company and their Amplify home line is not a very high priority for them, it seems. So it's great that they have it for people who want it.

But it does like I would generally recommend like when you're when possible, get things from a company that does a really good job of that thing. And ideally, that that is their main focus within that within the company.

Colin Robertson writes, I'm a photographer that often shoots real estate where I regularly provide a floor plan as one of my services. The app Cubicasa, C-U-B-I-C-A-S-A, lets you walk around your house with your phone recording a video. It uses LiDAR if you have it and then upload to the company. And in about 24 hours, they send you an accurate enough floor plan one can use for furniture planning. It works surprisingly well.

And I looked into this. I've not tried this, but I looked into it a smidge. The bare bones 2d floor plan is allegedly free. If I understand it right, check my math. But it's a $15 for what most people would probably consider like the, the, I shouldn't say floor, but like the,

most basic version. At a glance, it looked good to me, but again, I can't stress enough, just like the SF Symbols app from before, I haven't personally tried it, so your mileage may vary, but you might want to just check that out if you're interested in making a floor plan and didn't want to try the magic plan or whatever it was I talked about last week.

Yeah, I've tried apps like that, but no, maybe not the specific one that use like LIDAR on the camera to try to do like 3D models of your house. Not so much tame for a floor plan, but again, just like to have a rough idea for like positioning furniture and stuff. And they make it look like you live in kind of like a place with melting walls. And if you have lots of furniture or lots of clutter, it has a hard time finding your walls and windows. But, you know, the tech will only get better. So it's good to have these options available. Certainly easier than taking out the tape measure and trying to measure all this yourself.

All right. Thunder God Sid, which is a funny username, has decided to do the world service and has created what unifies stuff should I buy dot com, which I briefly, briefly looked at. And I can't say one way or the other. If these recommendations are good at a glance, it seemed fine to me, but I'm mostly ignorant myself. So.

Um, but if you wanted at least a starting point with which to, you know, try to figure out what you need to buy, uh, at least that gives you a pretty easy flow by which you can figure this out. So, uh, I thought that was a community service, uh, for all of us. So you can check that out.

All right. So let me give you my status updates. How many, how much time do we have? Um, so, uh, after I talked about the ubiquity stuff last week, a lot of people, a surprising amount of people were kind enough to reach out and offer either to sell me their leftovers. And I don't mean that in a bad way, uh, stuff that they had, you know, recently upgraded away from or whatever the case may be. Um,

They they'd offer to sell me them very, very cheap or in some cases just straight up send me stuff oftentimes because they weren't using it anymore and just wanted it out of the house, which I totally hear. So I think it was over the weekend. I received two U6 long range access points. I wasn't going in seeking long range access points, but they were offered at a very steep discount and I couldn't say no. So I got two of those.

Uh, if you recall the Eero setup that I had, and I know you aren't looking at my house and, or a floor plan or anything like that, but if you just imagine a standard, you know, two story rectangle, basically, um, in one corner of the house in the front, uh, right corner, if you're inside the house in the front, right corner of the house on the second story and the top story is the office. And that's where the main Eero was. And that's now where the cloud gateway fiber is. Um,

Below that and behind it is the living room on the back right corner of the house, if you will. That's where one Eero was. And then back upstairs, literally in the opposite corner of the house from the office, is the primary bedroom where I had another wireless access point.

So what I've done is I put one of the U6 long ranges in the bedroom. And so it's in the bottom left corner there, I guess I should say top left corner of the house, if you will. And then one of them in the downstairs living room, which is kind of the bottom right corner of the house. And that seems fine, although installing it was a little bit of an adventure because none of my networking equipment at this point is Ubiquiti except the Cloud Gateway Fiber. And so because of that,

I needed to figure out a way to power the U6 long range because, Marco, how do pretty much all of Ubiquiti's stuff get powered? Power of Ethernet, PoE. Yes, it does. PoE. With various numbers of plus signs after it, which indicate power level. Right. Exactly. So I didn't have any PoE anything in the house except the Cloud Gateway Fiber, which is all the way up in the office.

So I had to buy two, well, at this point anyway, I had to buy two exceedingly ugly and surprisingly large, but only $18, Power of Wreath Net injectors. So you plug this into the wall, you plug data in, and then coming out is a combination of data and power. And I did that, and they worked great. They're hideous to look at, but they worked great. And so I was able to get them installed.

It was a little bit fraught because they seem to periodically decide to not realize that there is a wired backhaul to the cloud gateway fiber. Like at first it seemed to work and then one of them fell off and then the other one fell off and I had to like do a bunch of rebooting, but eventually they, they both got convinced that, okay, no, no, no, we're good to go. There's a wired backhaul. That was a little bit tough. Um,

The other question I have, which John alluded to earlier, what's the deal with ceiling mounting? Like, I'm aware that that's the default method, but do people really ceiling mount this in their homes? Like,

I don't know if I can get away with that. So that's to be determined. But like, Marco, do you have your, you know, you don't because you have it like just mounted on screws on the wall, right? So I, depending on, you know, where I've put them, I've done every kind of mounting option, including not mounting them and just kind of resting them against things. But,

I think the antennas in this line are designed for it to be mounted in some form of horizontally. So whether it's like, you know, sitting on a table facing up or more likely from a ceiling facing down, that is probably better for antenna performance and to maximize the range and performance and everything like that. That being said, so I have them installed on the ceiling in the restaurant. In my house, I...

I have nothing like that in my house. None of them are visible because I, you know, that doesn't really pass the aesthetic requirements that we, that we go for. So they're like in closets or like, you know, in like at the beach, I have a couple that are like in wall areas. Like one's like,

in the roof of the porch. Like it's kind of like, it's like they're all kind of hidden in or around or under things or in closets. In my experience, you can kind of have them oriented however you want as long as you're willing to tolerate like, this is my home, not like a competitive gaming, like, you know, high bandwidth. Everything has to be like the top of the line throughput. Like, you know, if you can, if you can just have it work as a house, I have found it really doesn't matter how you mount them.

Good deal. All right. So with that said, once I got those installed, my beloved topology was looking way better. If you recall, you can go into the Unify management interface and actually see what is connected to what and where. And for me, with the Eero, it was basically one gigantic flat device.

list. You know, it was just everything connected to the cloud gateway fiber because as far as it was concerned, that was true. It didn't see any of the switches or access points or anything in between because they weren't ubiquity. At this point, it was everything wired, you know, was peer to the two wireless access points and then they had stuff hanging off it. So improvements are being made. But

I'm wondering if, I'm mostly very happy, but I'm wondering if maybe this was a mistake because now I have a lot more data about the state of my world and it's telling me that my AP deployment density might need improvement. And now I'm stressing about things that I never used to stress about. So as happy as I am broadly, I'm wondering if maybe this was too much data for someone as neurotic as me. You know, this is why I don't have my battery level or my battery amount indicator. Yeah.

in the status bar because I don't need a percentage. I just need to know vaguely. But anyway, for the most part, so far so good. I actually have a non-long range, I believe it's a U6 Pro incoming from another very kind listener. And I'm probably going to put that in the office and hopefully that will get me sorted. I mean, not to say that anything isn't working now, but I can tell that there's a little bit less coverage than I want. And I use their Wi-Fi Man app, which you can, I think it requires

requires at least one ubiquity access point but i'm not sure about that but you can go around and scan and it'll show you exactly you know how robust your your wi-fi signal is and it was sufficient for me but i i could get a little bit better out of it so hopefully a third access point getting back to the place i was with uh euro hopefully it'll clear me up

And then, uh, John was alluding earlier. Well, why do you, why do you need a 10 gig connection for your laptop? What are you connecting to? Well, my Synology now has a 10 gig ethernet, a 10 gigabit ethernet daughter cardboard thing in it. And so, uh, I am getting a solid 250 megabytes, megabytes, bytes, megabytes per second between my MacBook pro and the Synology because the MacBook pro are you connecting those two things?

The Cloud Gateway Fiber, baby. So the Cloud Gateway Fiber has a 10 gig... has one 10 gig port, but then the rest are 2.5s, right? Right. So the Synology is on the one and only 10 gig port. And then because the TS4 that I have is two and a half gig, that's connected to the... I believe it's only one two and a half gig port. And...

At some point, I will need to get a couple of SFP connectors so I can connect the MacBook and the Synology simultaneously, but I can't at 10 gigs right now. Or perhaps I'll just get a switch that has a 10 gig capable switch. I'm still not sure how I'm going to handle the office and it depends.

It depends on whether I relocate everything somewhere else. You know, I've been considering, I don't think I've talked about this on the show, but I've been considering moving kind of the, the Synology and main switch and cloud gateway fiber and all that. I've been considering moving that into either the garage, which I think is probably temperature not going to work, but,

Or potentially the laundry room, which is, I think, a pretty decent place to put all of it. But that's to be determined. You love bringing things near water. No, it would be above the water, not below it. So it's fine. You can put it outside and combine both of our forces. Yeah, put it in the roof of Marco's porch. Right, right. There you go.

So then, breaking news, moments before we started recording, another kind listener had sent me two Light 8 PoE switches, which is, I think, four PoE ports, four non-PoE ports, and a Flex Mini, which is a USB-C or PoE-powered little baby hub, or switch, I should say. I installed...

One of them downstairs, the Light 8 downstairs, I installed the Flex Mini on my desk. And mostly I'm happy with all this. However, I had heard horror stories about getting Sonos to work with Ubiquiti. And let me tell you, my brief experience in the span of 20 minutes before I'd run upstairs and record was that most of those horror stories were mostly accurate because as soon as I replaced dumb, unmanaged switches with Ubiquiti switches...

everything was upset. Now, I think the, it appears to be that the going advice is to go wireless and wireless only on your Sonos devices. And it was the case that my two Arrow 100s on my desk in my office were connected to a little baby switch on my desk. Yeah,

Uh, the Sonos arc, which is the main soundbar was connected to a switch to the switch in the living room. And, uh, the Sonos port, which is what powers the, um, the porch and as well as takes input from the turntable that was also connected via ethernet. And I knew that I was probably in for a little bit of an adventure. And it appears the moment I switched from unmanaged to the ubiquity managed switches, uh,

Everything took a turn for the worse. Now, I reset up the main living room situation and that seems to be fine. I haven't reset up the port yet. I in the office just fell right back onto Wi-Fi. I think I had explicitly disabled it on the on the arc way back when.

So far, so good, he says with not a ton of confidence. But if I recall correctly, part of the reason, a lot of the reason why it started wiring all this stuff was because getting it to play Spotify or Apple Music or what have you off of Wi-Fi back when I had the Eros was very, very finicky and spotty. And then with the desktop ones, the two Air 100s on my desk,

One of them would like fall out from time to time. Now, given that my office is now about as far away from an access point as I can get as I sit here right now, we'll see how tomorrow goes. But I'm sitting here now. I think I've gotten through it, but it was definitely like the Sonos app was pissed.

The Ubiquiti app was pissed. Like everything was up. Sorry, British people. But anyways, everything was upset. And so we'll see what happens. And if I can get all this squared away, then the next mission is I really, really want to start getting some cameras in and around, mostly around the house. I don't think I need them in the house unless I want to stalk Penny when we're out.

But I want to get some cameras around the house. So I got to figure out, you know, what my plan is for that. How am I going to get data to them? How am I going to get power to them? Because of course, any of the places I want data and power, neither of those things exist at the moment. And yes, I'm aware of PoE. That's what makes PoE great. But I still got to get that Ethernet. That's the E.

I got to get that Ethernet to where these phantom cameras would be. So I got to think on that and work that out. But if people have recommendations for cameras, ubiquity cameras that they really like, and or doorbells or what have you, do let me know. I can tell you, we have all ubiquity cameras at the restaurant. Well, what should I get as a person and not as a business, though? We have a large number of G5 turrets, which have just since been replaced by the G6 turret.

It looks like they still might sell it as G5 turret ultra for $109. Yeah. So we have a large number of the G5 turret ultras, which are pretty much universal. They're kind of like the everything cameras. You can put them in many different locations, many different mounting situations. Most of them we have directly mounted to the wall. You can route the cable through the wall behind them, or you can route it out the side.

The only weird thing about them is that they have this little like blob that converts the cable. It's like a breakout cable. It converts the cable from their little proprietary thin thing that goes into the camera to Ethernet. And you can, you can like, you know, wrap these things around it to seal it up and everything. But that means that like six inches away from the camera, you have like what looks like a large like ferrite core thing. But it's, that's like converting your cable type.

If you get one of their mounting boxes, you can shove all that into the mounting box, but then it makes the whole thing a lot bigger and uglier. So it depends on where you're putting them, how you're writing the cables and everything, but it gives you a lot of flexibility. The image quality of their turret line is – well, of all their cameras, is very good. The G6 turret goes up to 4K, so it's like a step up in resolution and image quality. But –

For most cases, for a standard home camera, you won't really need that kind of resolution. And the only other ones, we don't have any of the domes or anything. We do have a couple of the 360 cameras for covering big areas. I will say a 360 camera is not amazing enough.

If you actually want to like, you know, look and see in detail what's going on. It's more of like the 360 camera is like a just in case camera. Like if you want to cover a very large area, just in case like, you know, there's some kind of incident that you want to look up footage for later that you don't care that much about the precision of it.

It's not great for detail, especially around its edges, and it's really hard to view the feed very large because the feed is a circle. When you put it up in a window or on a monitor, it takes up a huge amount of space to display relatively little objects.

of the useful information. So the AI360s, again, we have a couple of those for big areas of the restaurant. I kind of regret those, but all of the turrets, the G5 turrets, and I got a couple of G6s when they came out. Those have all been great. They're rock solid. I have no regrets. At the Beach House...

I, when I did those, the turrets didn't exist yet, I don't think. So at the beach house, I mostly have the bullet style of camera. Now, when you look at the specs and everything, for the most part, they're all basically the same, the same guts or the same small number of guts. It's just a question of like, what, like what physical form do you want the camera to take? You can get fancy with like the super zoom ones and you know, like, but I don't,

I don't think it's necessary for almost anybody. So again, it depends on what you're doing. So at the beach, I have mostly the bullets. I think I have all the bullets actually. Most of them are the cheap little G5 bullets. I do have a couple of G5 pros where I needed like more resolution and lighting, but for the most part, that's,

pretty like stick with like the the turret and the bullet and you're fine um i i have also tried in a couple of contexts the little compact instant ones i believe they're g4 instance or g6 instance i forget no they're g4s the the instance are really inexpensive really basic and

Not very good. You kind of get what you pay for. They're good if that's all you can fit in a spot, but usually if you can fit the turret kind, it's better. So there you go. We are brought to you this episode by Mack Weldon, my favorite and most worn brand of clothing. So the weather this time of year can turn on a dime. One minute you're sweating through your shirt. Next minute you're wishing you had a jacket. And this...

And I have done this myself almost every day. I'm dressed wrong. But when I'm dressed in the direction of accidentally sweating in my shirt, it doesn't stink because I'm wearing a Mack Weldon silver t-shirt almost every day. If you had to pick like what is my uniform, it is a Mack Weldon v-neck silver t-shirt that I have.

wear constantly. Whenever they release new colors, I buy them because that expands my wardrobe to whatever definition that is. Because Mack Weldon stuff is so good. Mack Weldon is 100% of my underwear supplier right now, which I know you all wanted to know. But their underwear is really good. Also has that silver fiber, so also doesn't stink. Mack Weldon has everything you need to stay cool, comfortable, and stylish, regardless of whatever the temperature is doing to you outside. They also have a new

tech linen line this combines the easy charm of classic linen with their cool max tech to help you look and feel your best all season long they have polos sweaters hoodies and more every time a year go to mac weldon and see what you find and their stuff is super high quality it lasts like it fits really well it's comfortable it's nice you know kind of broad appeal you know it doesn't like

It doesn't clash with anything. Like you can wear it with pretty much anything you want. You can dress it up, you can dress it down. And all of that is with incredible quality. It lasts forever. I've been wearing Mack Weldon clothes for many, many years now, and I've never had to replace anything because it wore out like ever.

So see for yourself all of their wonderful products at MackWeldon.com. Give your closet a breath of fresh air for spring. Go to MackWeldon.com and get 25% off your first order of $125 or more with promo code ATP. That's M-A-C-K-W-E-L-D-O-N.com. Promo code ATP. Thanks to Mack Weldon for sponsoring our show. ♪

It turns out that one John Syracuse has written a blog post, and let me tell you, it started with an upside-down flag, and that is setting the tone, as they say. So, John, what's going on, man? I've done like four this year, haven't I? I don't know. Let's see. It's been a lot for you, for sure. Yeah, I've blogged in three totally different months so far this year. It is a miracle. I've done a total of four posts, so yeah, I'm doing pretty well this year.

Yeah, so what I posted, this is something I've been thinking about probably since we started talking about the DMA stuff ages ago. I don't even know how long ago, like last year sometime. And I just figured I need to just get it out and write it. That's usually how things go on my blog. It starts its life as a blog idea and my blog idea note, and it sits there for...

months, usually sometimes years. But if I feel like it's kind of like burning a hole in my pocket that I just need to just don't worry about how you're going to write it or what you're going to say, just get something out. And I kind of reached that point with this topic about a week ago. And if you listen to the show, there's not really anything in the blog post that's going to be surprising. But the kind of the role I see of posts on my blog is like,

a succinct summary of the stuff I ramble for hours about on a podcast. And also it's more accessible, like it'll be crawled by search engines. It takes two seconds to read instead of having to listen to hours and hours of podcasts and find the part where we talk about this or whatever. So that's that's kind of the role I feel like for for blogs in my life or, you know, and see our recent episode about our websites, but why it's important for me to have a website and a domain and a place where I can put this stuff. So there you have it.

And so what is the topic? It's about sort of the place where Apple finds itself these days. And in particular, it was spawned by when I was thinking about discussing the DMA stuff, I always thought about, as I always am, what kind of things should Apple do differently, right? Apple should do X. Apple should do Y. Apple should do Z. Like it's...

You know, a large part of my career has basically been that, thinking about Apple should do differently. And the thing that changed for me is so many things that I would think about that Apple should do differently, I would end up running into this dead end and saying, well, but they're not going to do that thing until different people are running the company.

And the more and more I ran into that, the more I thought like, this is, it seems different than all the past times when I was saying Apple should do X, Y, or Z. I gave a couple of examples in this post here, but like, I mean, which example did he use? I think I talked about the bad keyboards, right? They made computers with bad keyboards, right? But even just like,

way back in the day they need to have a new file system they need a new memory safe language uh they need a new operating system even farther back than that that has memory protection and preemptive multitasking has always been these things like apple needs to do this because they are not doing as well as they should and if they do these things they'll be doing better and they need to do this and usually eventually apple does they need to make a way to share photos between multiple people in the same family and a decade later they do it um

And in all those cases, it was like I always had in mind this is the thing that Apple should be doing. But I never thought to myself, but of course, Apple is not going to do that unless different people are in charge. That thought never entered my mind. I was frustrated that it would take them a long time to do it. Even even back in the day when we were complaining about, oh, Johnny, I've made these laptops that don't have any ports on them. I didn't think like the only way they can fix this is to fire everybody who made these laptops and make different ones.

Or certainly I didn't think the CEO of Apple needs to go and be replaced to fix the laptops. They make mistakes all the time. And they're slow to fix them, but eventually they do. But there's this one class of problems that they've been running into in the past decade or so that every time I think about it, I'm like, I don't think that's ever going to change until new people are in charge. And the more I would think about it, I would say, well, what do you mean by new people? Like if Phil Schiller retires, does that fix it? Well, no, probably not.

Well, like that – if those lieutenants you see in the leadership page who have been there for decades, if they leave and new people come in, will that fix it? Well, maybe, but I'm not sure. It's always been a – how much does Tim Cook delegate or whatever?

But in the past several months or six months or a year, it's become increasingly clear that even if you change the ranks of everybody in the C-suite at Apple but still left the CEO there, you'd still have the same problem because so many of the worst decisions, when you run them up the flagpole, you find out, no, Tim Cook, as you would imagine as CEO, the buck really did stop with him. And when it came time to choose between competing theories about which things to do,

Tim Cook would be the ultimate arbiter of what goes. And with the laptops and the keyboards and stuff, like, you know, there's people under like Johnny Ives says this is our new laptop. Tim Cook says, yeah, sure. Fine. You're the product guy. I'm sure it's great. When the keyboards are breaking and they're having customer complaints, he'd say, what's the deal with the keyboards? And if engineering says, no, we can fix it, we're going to put a membrane on it.

Tim Cook goes, all right, we'll fix it. And then they put the memory down. It doesn't fix anything. Tim Cook says, what's the deal? You told me you were going to fix it. No, we're going to fix it. Like that dynamic makes sense. At no time during any of those things, like they need to make a new Mac Pro successor, you know, the file system, the operating system, the ports on laptops, all these big crises that can make people say, that's it, I'm fed up with Apple. They're not doing what I want. At no point did I feel this helplessness that somehow you needed like leadership change at the very top to fix this.

Because I always assume that, you know, well, Tim Cook's going to make mistakes. He's going to, you know, people are going to tell him what he wants to hear sometimes, you know, going to go off and do the car project, whatever. Like in the end, you make mistakes, but you move on. But this class of things that Tim Cook in particular seems extremely married to, and so do many people under him, just really seems like it's not going to change unless leadership changes. And so here's the post saying like, look,

I'm not mad that they're making decisions I don't like. I'm not mad that they're making products I don't like. I'm not mad that they haven't updated the Mac Pro. Well, I am kind of, but like, that's not, I'm not saying you didn't make a good Mac Pro, therefore you need to, Tim Cook needs to leave the company.

I'm saying that there are things that Apple has been getting into lately that just seem entirely hopeless, that like this is never going to change as long as Tim Cook is still there because he has proven that no matter what the people beneath him say and debate and offer or whatever, in the end, he's going to make, as the judge said, he's going to choose poorly. He's going to make the wrong choice. And as I said in the post here,

People can change their minds. Steve Jobs did all the time. You make a terrible mistake, you change your mind. And that's kind of what I've been hoping for for years. It's like, okay, well, it seems like this is never going to change unless leadership changes at Apple. But, you know, maybe just something sufficiently dramatic has to happen. And that's where this came from the DMA thing. I kind of thought when the DMA thing comes to a head, like, finally, they've been pushing this as far as they can go. They think they can avoid this regulation. And here come the regulations, and we see what they are, and then they fight it. And it's just like,

this is going to be it this is going to be the crisis that finally drives them to say all right we we we fought this as long and as hard as we could but in the end we we need to change direction and no they didn't change direction they they saw the dma and they just dug their heels in harder and harder and harder it's like wow that was that was kind of the crisis point that i always expect them to turn on like they stripped those stupid butterfly keyboards for so long they pressed it as far as they could but they get to the crisis point and eventually they changed their mind they they

voice those laptops on us with no ports on them for so long, for so many years, the touch bar, the whole thing. But they come to a crisis point and they turn. And I feel like the DMA was the crisis point for all of the app store stuff and the rent seeking and services and all that stuff. And they didn't turn.

And so I'm like, well, that's it. That's the ballgame now, you know, and just reinforced by the more recent US things or whatever. But it's like, there is no crisis that's going to happen that's going to change the minds at the top of this company about what they should be doing. I thought what they were doing is wrong for a long time, but eventually I essentially lost faith that anything could happen that will change their minds. And they just continue to be wrong. And, you know, we touched on it in the follow-up section. Like, they're just digging in their heels. So

They're welcome to prove me wrong. Better late than never. If they finally, you know...

think about what they want to change. And I mentioned last week about potentially doing a member special or something on this, because I think it would be fun to say if you could change stuff at Apple without regard for like, if you could change leadership and get someone in there as like a turnaround artist, which just sounds dumb when you're saying you're going to turn around the most successful company in the world. You know what I mean? Like if you could fix the things, the longstanding problems that Apple had get in there and fix them, what would you fix? What would you do? How would you change it? But it is kind of like that scenario where you need new people to come in, uh,

and say okay whatever the old administration slash regime did forget about that a new day has dawned kind of like you know Satya Nadella at Microsoft it's not like Microsoft was bad before but he had a new plan for the company and he executed on it and you kind of need a new person to do that what does that plan look like for Apple

So maybe we will talk about that. Maybe it won't be a member special. Maybe it'll just be on the show. But anyway, that's my thought with this post. I tried to really just boil it down and be as precise as possible.

And just hit the specific points, not get too bogged down into argument, reasoning and examples and all the stuff that I just got bogged down in when discussing the post. You know, it's it's pretty tight. Every paragraph, every line is there for a purpose that makes a point and makes I'm trying to make the specific point that I'm actually making with the words that I chose, not that.

tangential points that would use different words which is always the challenge with uh things like this and i you know i and i knew i would be able to expound on it in the the podcast or whatever um and i think this is capturing a popular sentiment uh you know sometimes people complain about when we talk about you know complain about apple on the show which i still argue is one of the main purposes of the show but like oh you know isn't there anything nice to say about apple um

And as we said, over the many years we've gone through this cycle multiple times, when things are going great for Apple, it's all fun and roses on this show. When things are going poorly, it doesn't sound as great. We can't impose a reality on Apple. The things they do influence the discussion of them. And I made this post, which is probably the most...

pessimistic and damning post I've ever written about Apple and got basically zero pushback. I'm not going to say basically. I got zero pushback. No one read this and say, you're off your rocker. Apple's great. Everything's fine. What are you talking about? Nobody. Zero people. And that usually doesn't happen because usually there's just someone out there who says, you know, who's just really committed to the cause. But obviously the circles I travel in are most inclined to, and the people who would even know my site exists, let alone read it, are most inclined to agree with me because there are lots of developers and stuff. But

Yeah, it just seems like Apple is not getting the message on the whole, you know, anti-competitive rent seeking app store stuff. And I linked again for the billionth time for the last time I took a run at this topic, which was the art of the possible post, which was like, look, Apple seems to think if they just hold the line on this, that the world will bend around them. And I don't think that's going to happen. And they need to change. I forget how long ago that was a year or two ago.

But yeah, as it's all come to a head, like they've Apple continues to believe we're just going to fight as hard as we can. And in the end, it will be fine. And no evidence supports that. It's not, you know, the, on the outside, the people who oppose them are not having their minds changed, nor are they being strong armed into compliance. Instead, governments are stepping in and strong army Apple into compliance and still Apple is fighting them. So yeah,

Yeah, you know, like, I don't want to steal Marco Stunder for being like fire Tim Cook or whatever. And like, in the end, he's going to retire in a few years anyway. So this is a problem that will solve itself. But it's just, I really feel like we've reached that point where there are so many things, so many important things that Apple should do differently that I now feel they will not do differently until there is new leadership.

I think for me, and I'd like to hear Marco's take, but for me, the thing that was most surprising, even having been a part of, much less listened to this show, although as we all know, do I really listen to the show? But anyways, it was surprising for me to hear you or see you plainly say,

it's time for Cook to go. Because to my recollection, you've come up and towed the line on that on ATP, but I don't recall you ever saying, no, really, he's got to go. Last show, Casey. All right, fine. But no, in case it defends, this is a very recent thing. But it's not, though. It's the thing. It's

The problem with posts like this is they very often read like, that's it. Apple has gone too far. They removed the SD card slot from the MacBook Air. That's it. I'm off. I'm no longer an Apple customer. That's what all these things read like. Like, it just seems like it's just a series of things, a whole bunch of little annoyances, and just one annoyance too many. And that brings me over the limit. And just in a rage, I'm now anti-Apple. And what I tried so hard to say on this is that's not what this is.

All of those things are a different class of things where you say, like, they should change this and they're not doing it, but probably eventually they'll figure it out and change it. This is just like a class of things where it's like, no, they've lost sight of...

I called it their North Star, like what makes Apple Apple? And they didn't lose sight of it just once or for a year or with the Mac Pro or on a particular topic or even just with the App Store. They've lost sight of it like big picture wise. And that's why it's not like I don't want to. That's why I didn't say like Tim Cook needs to be fired. It's not a punitive thing. What I'm saying is I'm now convinced that this will not change until leadership changes because they've proven it to me.

over so much time that there's no crisis that will motivate them to change and and i can go a real long time like how long like i still believe that they could fix the laptops how many years how many years were their laptops messed up right i how long did it take them to get a new operating system that was any good i i still believe i'm like you're you know i had complaints about it i wrote all those reviews for years and years like you need a new operating system but you're not doing it right they eventually got there but with this one i've just i've

I've just lost faith. And so that's why it's not a angry, punitive, Tim Cook needs to be punished thing. It's more of a recognition that I no longer believe things will change without new people. First of all, I think you're right. And it's also like when I saw this blog post yesterday,

I was like, oh my God, John flipped. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Keep in mind, in the last few weeks, we've seen some pretty important Apple fans and Apple defenders and people who have really smart views and measured views. I heard on dithering, John Gruber and Ben Thompson are both now wondering aloud, maybe it's time for new leadership at Apple. That's huge.

Huge for the types of people who are now either saying aloud like maybe it's time or who are actually saying no, it's time now. That is a big shift. And that's like a big threshold that has been crossed in only very recent weeks. And that's really something.

Yeah, because it's like in all those cases, it's it's not the sort of knee jerk reaction to particular events, because how many events can we all name that are just so objectionable to get people so angry? But those are just if you've been in this game for a couple of decades, you're like, those things happen. They come and go. You get angry about them. Things change. You move on or whatever. It's like, but what does it take for you to, like, stop believing that?

These things are gonna get better like that. It's not just a matter of time It's not just a matter of making your case in public It's not just a matter of there being a crisis and I think that's where people are getting in Honestly, all the discovery in the court cases has really accelerated this I think for everybody because you no longer we always say well who knows what's going on inside Apple Well, we don't know what's going on inside Apple But we have actual like literal evidence of some of the things that are going on actual words from actual people and

And those things did not help make people get more optimistic about the company. Quite the opposite. So anything you were able to believe before, and it's like, well, here's the people saying the stuff. So does this help or hurt your faith? And really, I think I honestly, you know, not that...

setting aside whether the, the wisdom of the court cases and how they're going to turn out. If you've lived through the Microsoft antitrust trial, you know, these things don't necessarily go the way you think they will, even if you're heavily in favor of them. But just the discovery process has revealed stuff that we didn't know before. And all of it has been in support of the idea of like, these people are not going to change. No. And, and,

You know, you can look at the, there's a number of, you know, counter arguments to this. People say like, well, Tim Cook is making the company a lot of money and has made the company a lot of money. He has grown the company tremendously from when, you know, when Jobs died and, and, and Cook really took over like fully. The company has grown tremendously. The whole market has grown. Apple has, you know, has expanded its dominance in so many ways and has expanded its scale in so many ways. That's all true.

I've made the comparison before, so I won't dwell too much on it, but so did Steve Ballmer for Microsoft. Tim Gokit has done so much better than Steve Ballmer, just in terms on as measured by Steve Ballmer metrics. He's like, I

I don't know, 100 times better. So you're right in this. Like, if you're just looking at those specs, they're of a similar type, if that's what you care about. But the scale is so much bigger. Like, he's been tremendously good in that Steve Ballmer way. Exactly. He has been a better Steve Ballmer than Steve Ballmer was, but he's still a Steve Ballmer. I wouldn't call him a Steve Ballmer, but I would say along those metrics of, like, financial metrics and expansion of the company, he's done amazingly well.

He also, in all fairness to Steve Vollmer, Tim Cook also inherited a much better ship, I think. I don't want to do a post-mortem on him. Maybe we'll end while he eventually leaves. But I think if you look at the size of things, like Ben Thompson was talking about this and dithering a little bit this week too, the company he inherited had so much going for it, but it had not as many of the things that we currently attribute to Apple. The company that he inherited...

was not in a position to make as many iPhones as they make now, let alone sell them, right? And it wasn't in so many businesses that they managed to enter. So there was a lot of work that needed to be done to get where we are. Like, I don't have a lot of objections to most of the things that Tim Cook has done with Apple. It is particular stances and policies. And, you know, as I said in the post here,

losing sight of the fact that what has made Apple successful is doing what nobody else wants to do, which is just concentrate on making great products and have faith that money will come from that. That's what brought them to where they are today, and losing sight of that is a terrible mistake. Right, and I think you can look at Tim Cook's entire time as CEO. There are some things he's done well, the scale, you know. Although, I will also point out, you know, people...

People often say that the scale of Apple today is all because of Tim Cook, like the scale of manufacturing in China, which I'll get back to in a minute. But they ascribe all that to Tim Cook because before he was a CEO, Tim Cook was the COO, and he was famous for all that scaling stuff. When people say that, they're usually saying in the context of,

Well, we need Tim Cook now more than ever because he's the operations person. And with all the possible tariff stuff or instability with China, that Tim Cook is the one we need right now, the leader we need right now to get us out of this mess. And I would point out like the CEO has a lot more on their plate as a role than all the operational details.

We have Jeff Williams doing that role. And Jeff Williams is probably the one who is most responsible for that kind of operational stuff these days. So I would say we don't necessarily need Tim Cook for that reason alone. But getting back, you know, so Tim Cook's tenure has been great for operations. It has been great for profits. It has been great for growth of those profits. It's been great for expansion into new profitable areas, right?

It has been a mixed bag for products. Right at the beginning, Tim Cook had said in interviews and people said like, he's not a product person. Okay, well, the outgoing CEO, Steve Jobs, was like one of the world's greatest product people who left in his wake one of the world's greatest product companies. When he passed away, that left a huge vacuum.

Tim Cook was the worst person to try to fill that part of the role. So what did he do? Well, he, for a while, it seemed like Johnny Ive was kind of the head of products, maybe a little bit marketing, Phil Schiller maybe was, but like right now, who is the head of products at Apple? I don't know. Like who is the big product thinker? Who is the product lead?

I don't know if you need one person for that. Like he's always been delegating into his various product leads, which is part of why we've got into trouble with like the, the bad laptops and the not enough ports and the, and the, the, uh, the Mac round table. I get various times, uh,

He's allowed the company to go in bad directions on product because he can't make the can't and didn't make those calls himself and he delegated them and the people he delegated them to made bad calls and it took a while for like the the you know the the right compiled debug loop to solve that problem. That's why you had these big like we're going to revise laptops and we're going to have the Mac roundtable and say we care about the Mac and we're going to do a real Mac Pro like.

They came to crises, but they were able to resolve them. And obviously, if you have someone at the very top with better product sense, you don't let that go to a crisis as much. But I don't know that you need one person who's in charge of it. You just need...

somebody with who's either more a little bit more engaged or has a little bit more faith in their own taste in that regard to not essentially delegate it and delegated as much as he had to delegate it like i to his credit he delegated and also to his credit he was able to write the ship several times after running at a ground after after the people he delegated to ran at a ground you know what i mean like that's why i don't get so mad about those things because those go in cycles but like

Now he's the one running it to ground on the whole stubbornness about all the anti-competitive stuff. Well, and...

I mean, look, I can point to a lot of things in the Tim Cook era that show that he made poor decisions. At the end of the day, he is a bean counter. He's a really good bean counter, but he's a bean counter nonetheless. He does not understand the products that he makes from a product standpoint. He understands them from a profit standpoint. He understands them from a business and operational standpoint. He does not understand them from a product standpoint. Over time, we've seen various ways this has manifested, you know.

Simply, number one was putting Johnny Ive in charge of software design showed a pretty large lack of understanding of software design. Having Johnny go a little bit too nuts with some of the product decisions of making things too thin at the cost of reliability, that was, again, poor product sensibility or poor product delegation by Tim Cook. We heard many times that...

Tim had basically abandoned the Mac in favor of thinking the iPad was the future of computing for a few years there. And the hardware reflected that. Because, again, he didn't really understand the Mac, which is a pretty big part of Apple's product line. He also, you know, when the butterfly keyboard thing happened...

What we heard from a few different people over the span of that, which lasted, again, way too long, what we heard is basically like that they were too cheap to change the manufacturing line too soon. They wanted to get their value out of the manufacturing line they had built. And that's, again, that's Tim Cook. That was, what we heard from multiple sources was that went right to the top. I don't know. What I heard about the butterfly keyboard is mostly that people kept telling Tim Cook that we're going to fix it this time and he believed them like three too many times. Yeah.

That's less than like we wanted to get our money's worth out of the line because I feel like he was saying, what do we need to do to fix this? And if they told him we need to make a new keyboard, he would have done it. But if someone told him, actually, we don't need to make a new one. We can fix this. He just kept believing them. And maybe he's motivated to believe them because he wants to recoup costs on the manufacturing line for the keyboards. It's a mix of them combined. So there's enough blame to go around. But in the end, it's on him, the fact that it lasted so long. Right. And let's look at some bigger picture things.

Bigger picture, iPhone sales have been great, you know, but it's not like, you know, growing anymore. So what have they done? Well, they tried to make a car. They spent a long time, tons of talent, billions of dollars trying to make a car, which seemed like a bad idea right from the start. It seemed like an organizational nightmare. It seemed like it was all over the place with its goals and all sorts of problems that reflected a lack of

I think, reality on Tim Cook's side. They also spent a huge amount of resources, time, and money making the Vision Pro. They actually shipped that, but I kind of think they shouldn't. They shouldn't have. There's a lot of problems with that product as well. You can point to a lot of big and small releases or decisions Apple has made over time that shows that, on a big scale, Tim Cook was really weird at product decision-making, and at a small scale...

they seem to very frequently under his leadership profoundly misread the room or fail to read the room. For a large corporation that's making a bunch of money, it's easy to overlook all those flubs because you can say, well, they're making a bunch of money. And the scale at which the money matters is quite large. When you look at

how much of the world economy is invested in Apple. Like if Apple shares take a hit, that affects like people's retirement funds all across the world. Like the amount of money involved in Apple and the effect they have on the global market is not insignificant. So to grow it into that financial state is, you know, a remarkable thing. But as Tim Cook grew into that financial state,

He did it with two massive strategic risks. Number one was an incredible over-reliance on China.

And no one for the last 20 years has said we should definitely pour more reliance into China. Like that's not a great idea. And it's always been a risk. They knew it from the start and they decided for various reasons. Maybe it was necessity for a while, but it probably hasn't been necessity for a long time. If they actually made the right investments earlier, maybe they had to for to some degree, but they didn't have to to this degree.

That's a huge risk that he took that he has built up over all this time. And now Apple is very vulnerable in key areas because Tim Cook took way too much of a risk with over-reliance on China. I've said that years and years ago. We were talking about that. I said, you know, America has a China problem and Apple has a China problem. I think I phrased it all those years ago. But on that front, this is a case where I would say, yeah,

Uh, it's kind of like the butterfly keyboard, but even more so because I feel like, uh, yeah, he's done that. He, he went to China because it was at the time the only option and he invested heavily in it and led to Apple's success that it has today. But if I had to pick a single person, uh,

to both recognize when Apple needs to start diversifying away from China and to execute that, I'd pick Tim Cook. He's the best position person to fix his own mistake because this is what he's the best at. And, you know, we have some items that may be in future shows, but Apple is trying to fix it in various ways, like trying to say that every new iPhone they sell next year is going to be not made in China. Every new iPhone they sell in the U.S. is going to be not made in China to avoid tariffs and stuff like that. But anyway...

I agree with you that it was a risk and they went too far and they took too long. Sound familiar? It took too long to notice that they needed to change. But

But I would pick him as the person to fix this problem because I think this is the kind of problem that he does see and does recognize and is not digging in his heels and saying, no, we're never going to manufacture any place except for China. In fact, we're getting even closer with China. No, that's not what they're doing like that. So that's why as much as that concerns me and bothers me and is a huge problem as it is for Apple, Tim Cook is the best equipped person to fix it.

I don't know that I agree because I think we see that Tim Cook is not great at evaluating long-term risks. He tends to prioritize the short-term profits over the long-term risks. That's why he's in that situation in the first place. Like I said, I think he prioritizes the long-term profits. Yeah.

Because that China investment is decades long and it gave so many profits. It was so huge and important strategically. And they are turning it around now just a little bit too late. And it's going to be a long time and it's going to be hard to do. Yeah. And how much are they turning around? Is it going to be enough to matter? Is this another butterfly keyboard gasket? We don't know. You know, speaking of long term risk.

Look at Apple's financial performance. There was a great segment on Upgrade this week. Thanks, Jason. Jason went through and ran the numbers of basically what percentage of Apple's profit, not revenue, what percentage of Apple's profit is likely to be tied to the Google search default deal and App Store revenue.

And it's a pretty high percentage. I believe the ballpark he came up with is possibly like a third or a quarter of their profit. Like it's a large chunk of their profit. What that means is that Tim Cook has over the last 10 years, whatever it's been, by pushing the services narrative, which as I mentioned last episode, I think is a misnomer. And I think it is

misleading the shareholders in an interesting way you know they want to tell you that all this money is from ted lasso but a huge chunk of this money is from fees and commissions they collect based on their market position and so i think it should be called fees or maybe like you know commissions and services would be a better you know a more accurate title for this category of revenue and when you look at you know fees and commissions like well those can be a little precarious and

Because why are they getting this big Google default search deal? Well, the Department of Justice has some things to say about that, and that might have to go away. Why are they getting all this App Store money? Is it because they're making amazing products for their customers? No. That's a side effect. They're making amazing products for their customers, and...

and developers tolerate this giant tax that they put that kind of strangles the market and constrains what we can build and constrains the type of business that can even exist in the modern computing world. Those are all the hallmarks of if you look throughout time, you can say like, yeah, they built their own platform, but the railroads built their own tracks and the power companies built their own power lines. Many utilities and critical infrastructure companies are,

are either regulated or literally taken over by governments. Because once they get so large, they start to serve such an important role to all of commerce that the private companies who own them would abuse them in a regular unregulated system. That's why you have things like the AT&T breakup. All the phone lines that were everywhere, AT&T ran those phone lines. And so they could say, well, we demand whatever terms we want on the phone lines across all of America.

The government said otherwise because it became too important. You look at any large infrastructure or platform in history before the era of the personal computer and that's how things worked. Like monopolies would occasionally develop and governments would step in to regulate them because they became so big and society became so dependent on them in such a large scale that regulation was necessary to prevent the owners from being abusive and putting too large of a tax on society.

Apple clearly has reached that point with the App Store. The Apple and Google duopoly has really put this in a position of like, yes, this is obviously something that needs to be regulated by the government for all of those reasons that all those things in history were always regulated. It's an obvious parallel to all of those. So what Tim Cook has done, he's led his company into a huge risky position with China.

and a huge risky position of having a having a huge chunk of his profit and much of their growth as a company as a stock is now relying on these incredibly precarious revenue sources that both are likely to be regulated down or out of existence and also have nothing to do with making the product better for the users so this gets back to what you were saying john like

The problem is Apple's incentives now, and this has been this way for a while under Cook, the incentives are shifting away from making the right decision to make great products. And it's more towards capturing more, harvesting more from the ecosystem around us. What can we take by force?

And I love the comparisons that we've been hearing with the App Store ruling and the in-app purchase stuff. The comparisons we've been hearing have been saying things like, well, if Apple loses all of this money from the App Store, and almost with the presumption that, of course, they're going to lose. Of course, once people can link out to the web to make purchases, of course, they're going to lose 100% of their App Store revenue. The reason people say that is because the idea that Apple might just compete

is so remote and laughable to us now. What does that say? They've put themselves in a position where they're super dependent on risky conditions that Tim Cook himself built and the company now relies on. And all of that is not with aligned incentives towards making the products better for the customers. Because you know what, where else they can get growth?

Making better products. That's a different source. That's a different path they could have taken. But Tim Cook chose not to. And I think it's because he's not capable of it. He did exactly what he knew how to do. He's a bean counter. He squeezed everything as much as he could. He made the profitable decision every single time. He did exactly what he was an expert at doing. Steve Jobs picked the wrong guy. It wasn't the first time.

Trying to steal my thunder with the wrong guy thing? You'll be hearing from my lawyers on that one. Right? I think between the two of you, I come down closer to John than Marco. I think knowing what Cook knew when he took over Apple, I think he did exactly what he should have done. I think the problem is that

Either he didn't realize the error in his ways, particularly with regard to China, or he didn't realize quickly enough. So that now, with this madman at the helm of the United States again, now Cook needs to figure out how to work around that. And I would have hoped that he would have already had...

one to two to 10 backup plans ready to rock, you know, such that a switch just needs to be flipped. I know it's not actually that simple, but it sure seems like I have only heard in the last couple of years that, Oh, we're talking about Indonesia and we're talking about India and all these other places where we can assemble iPhones. And yeah, they're not as good as China, but they're, they're, they're sufficient. And I feel like cook firing on all cylinders would have perhaps been

fired up these alternative approaches years before when the oh crap moment happens. Well, we'll see if he follows through on the supposed rumor that there are, I don't know if it was rumor or just flat out stated, which is like, hey, the next iPhone that we sell, like in September, we're

every one of the ones that we sell in the United States will not be built in China. That was a plan that is floating around out there. And if he does pull that off, that shows that there was lots of forethought and planning because that's not the type of thing you do. That's not a trivial amount of iPhones. I know the rest of the world is big, but U.S. is a really big market for Apple. So if they can actually pull off, oh, we got a new administration somewhat surprisingly, and suddenly selling things made in China and the United States is undesirable, then

So for our next phone, we're just going to make them all in Brazil and India and Vietnam and Malaysia or whatever, like no phone sold in the US will say made in China on it. That would be amazing and shows that there is actually a plan A, B and C. And now I agree that it's gone on too long and he is not hesitant to bet it's enough, but.

Like that is a difficult problem in that, like there's no obvious alternative and building up alternatives is expensive and time consuming and is probably going to take just as long as the buildup in China did. So I'm willing to give him some leeway there. But yeah, like it's it's not like he didn't think about it or didn't have backup plans. And it's not like it's you know, we all agree that like this is a fairly unprecedented, dramatic turn of events situation.

policy-wise in this country because as you noted of the new administration being ridiculous um and still still he's finding a way to navigate that like this is what i think tim cook is actually the best at even if he goes a little bit too long and too hard and too heavily into china and that is his big mistake i think he is the best person to get out of it but that's not why i'm saying he needs to go it's all the other stuff that like it was like what marco was saying like making making decisions

uh that aren't trying to make the product better like putting the cart before the horse or whatever the phrase is like i put this quote from the ambrosia software page it's the sort of the centerpiece of my post i don't even know if it's a real quote because who knows it would probably be in a different language but anyway but uh virtue does not come from money but rather from virtue comes money and all other good things to man um the idea is you if you chase money if you try to do the thing that's going to make you money

you'll fail. You need to try to do the thing that makes good products, that makes your customers happy, that makes people want to buy your stuff. If you try to do that, the money will come. You can't like, I know you, I know you want the money. You want to be successful. Like that's what you're supposed to be like. I want to, I want it. We want to be a successful company, but you can't try to be a successful company. You have to try to be a company that makes things people want and have confidence that if you just do that and to Tim Cook's credit, he has followed through on that philosophy from Steve Jobs, uh,

For just years and decades, like even like stuff like the car program, do the thing that you think is going to make a great product that people really want. Don't worry about how much it's going to cost. Put all the money into the big spaceship thing, you know, building. Do $10 billion in the car because if you, I mean, it could turn out you're wrong, you know, that wasn't a thing that was successful. But if you're chasing that, you'll eventually get where you want to go. The second you start saying, but over here, actually, we're not going to chase that.

Actually, what we're going to chase here is we're going to chase the money. And every one of those decisions is peeling things off the course. And is investing in China chasing the money? In some ways, yes. But in other ways, it's a recognition of this is where we can make the best products. It's not just that they cost the least money. Like literally, they make them better than everybody else still. So that's maybe a half and half thing. But yeah, I give him a lot of leeway to pursue...

attempts to, you know, to pursue virtue where he thinks it can be found, even if he's wrong a lot. But I don't give him as much leeway to pursue money. And we can name like it's not hard to name the places where Apple, as led by him, is clearly pursuing money at the expense of the virtue from the Socrates quote. It's just so many instances. And

The more information we get about them, the worse it looks. And that's the place where I feel resigned. And I think it is not a small thing that the industry has just over the last few years exploded with disruption and promise and development and excitement in this huge new area of AI. And Apple is nowhere in it.

He missed it. He blew it. All of these companies are doing such cool stuff, and Apple is struggling to ship such basics online.

way later than everybody else is. I can't help but think, in large part, they would have been better off doing what I believe Ben Thompson suggested a few months back of just be a better platform for these other companies. Have all these things run on the iPhone through extension points or through official APIs to replace Siri if you want to, the same way you can replace a web browser. That would actually have been a better path than the path they took. But all those specifics aside, the fact is,

Microsoft missed mobile and that really hurt them and that changed that really limited their future directions as a company. Apple has missed AI like they are going to try to catch up. I don't see any evidence that they are able to do it in any reasonable reasonably competitive level. And that's again, that's on Cook like he all this time. They spent investing in cars and VR helmets and

They could have been building this up, and they didn't. I don't connect those two things at all. Like, they're separate. Yeah, but they spent a whole bunch of time and money on LARCs that really didn't have much of a chance. Those people wouldn't have been doing the AI stuff. Yeah, that's a different group. I agree that they're behind in AI, they're late in AI, but I don't blame the VR helmet or the car for that at all. No, it's more like Apple was, they were willing, like he was willing to invest in huge R&D projects.

But because he has such terrible product sensibilities, they just picked the wrong ones. They picked R&D projects that seemed really cool to, I guess,

Johnny Ive and maybe Mike Rockwell. I don't know who, I don't know how. It seemed like Tim had a profoundly bad product sense. They took big swings. They just took the wrong big swings. And meanwhile, here's this huge new world of tons of opportunity and development and potential disruption to their core products. And they're just not competitive at all in that world because they didn't take it seriously early enough and still seem to not be investing enough in it.

Yeah, they didn't take it seriously enough for sure. But I do think the strategy as articulated at last WWC, I think the strategy actually is a good one. They just have utterly failed to execute that strategy, which is kind of an important part of the strategy is the execution of it. So like, but like the idea, like, so setting aside, like, oh, do you just want to be a platform where other people's OMS versus doing it yourself? The idea of, you know, to recap the Apple intelligence strategy is like, look, Apple has all this information about your phone and it has local processing power and

and we have ways to talk to all the apps, if we can leverage all of that as the platform owner, we can do a more private, more secure version of LLM-powered stuff

And I've heard people say like, oh, they're trying to do it all on device. I don't think that's a strategy at all. The whole private cloud compute thing is the idea. And also, we don't have to do it all on the device. We can transparently do it securely in the cloud. And this is a more privacy focused thing where we're not scraping up all your information and chucking it over a third party company and yada yada. But that's just what they announced. They haven't shipped that. So they have a good idea and a good strategy and they were late with it and they haven't executed on it at all. So it's a bad situation. But yeah,

on the AF front, like, I feel like the AF front is kind of like all the other things that I said of like, they're in trouble and, you know, aren't doing well, but not too many things related to AI actually run afoul of the

the core rot at the center of Apple that I'm saying is not going to change the leadership changes with the one exception of the thing that you mentioned about like, well, why don't you just become a better platform for AI and let other people plug in? That's where you start touching the third rail of Apple leadership, which is like, when we integrate with third parties, you know, we got to get our money.

It's like, no, no, stop. Just step away. Step away from the money machine and say, you should be doing this because it makes your product better for your customer. Nope, nope. Integration with third parties, money. What percentage should we get? Is this going to replace our Google revenue? It's like, stop. Stop chasing the money. Not that that has been Apple's strategy at all so far. Maybe this year they'll say. And our new strategy is we're the best hosts for other people's AI stuff because ours sucks.

But as of now, that's not their strategy. But if it was their strategy, everyone would be looking at it and saying, oh, well, who's going to plug their LLM into your phones if they have to give you X percent of their money or whatever to do it? And ultimately, I think AI is going to be important enough. I mean, look, it already is. But I think this is going to prove long-term to be important enough and that Apple has such an inability to do it well themselves that

that I think long term what's going to happen is Apple's going to acquire one of these larger AI companies at just an extraordinary cost. It's one thing they've got is money. It is, but they're going to end up, I think, having to spend a lot of it to acquire or merge with a good AI company because I don't see any sign that they can do this themselves. Whatever that costs them, you should deduct that from what you think of Tim Cook's expertise because that's 100% on him. But they'd be paying for it with Tim Cook dollars.

That's true. That's true. I wanted to call attention to another similar post. This is Apple's Diet of Worms by Joan Westenberg, who is a writer that I was not previously familiar with. It's a pretty short piece, but I wanted to read two paragraphs to you. It's not the mistakes that matter. Apple's made them before. The Newton, Mobile Me, the Butterfly Keyboard. What matters is the posture. A company once defined by joyful provocation, by thinking different,

is now defined by its defensiveness. Its leadership acts not like investors, excuse me, its leadership acts not like inventors, there we go, but like stewards of a status quo. They protect margins like relics. They fear dilution. They optimize at the expense of surprise.

Apple's fate isn't sealed. It has the resources to adapt, the talent to reinvent, the reach to still shape the culture. But none of that matters if it won't change its mind. Empires don't fall because they run out of gold. They fall because they mistake orthodoxy for durability, because they think the pageantry of power is the same as the legitimacy of it.

Very well written. If you don't like my matter-of-fact writing style, then you want a more flowery approach to Apple's Diet of Worms is for you. Although I can't believe that you put the Newton in there. So many people were cranky about that. How dare you? The Newton was such a pile of garbage.

It was not. It was amazing. It was just a little bit ahead of its time, but like such great ideas, such great people who went on to do great things that eventually it kind of circled back around when Apple did the iPhone. I feel like that's kind of like the return and triumph of the Newton Project is essentially the iPhone. It's like finally we have the technology to do what we tried to do way too early because the Pepsi guy told us to.

All right. Before we go, I wanted to turn this round upside down. There's a couple of fun pieces of Apple-related, Apple-adjacent media that I wanted to call people's attention to. A lot of people have been talking about these over the last week because, hey, guess what? They're really good. First of all, the Search Engine podcast, which I don't currently make a habit of listening to, but on the occasions I listen to it, I always really enjoy it. They did a...

episode on the Dave and Buster's anomaly, where it was discovered that if you do a voice message, like an iMessage, where you're just recording your voice, you're not doing transcription, mind you, you're just recording your voice and sending a wave, so to speak, or wav over your iMessage, then if you say the words Dave and Buster's, the recipient would never receive that audio file, which is bananas. And they go through and talk about

How, how, what, what was going on and eventually figured it out or had a pretty good theory about it. And then friend of the show, Guy Rambeau was listening to this, apparently stopped listening to it and did some spelunking in order to figure out what he thought the, uh, the situation was. And that is a much more technical, uh, write-up, but also excellent. So I wanted to call that, uh,

to people's attention. And then additionally, I think Gruber wrote about this. I'm pretty sure this is where I got it from, but there's a conversation between Patrick Collison and Johnny Ive. I guess it's some Stripe thing recently, and I'm only about halfway through it so far, but hey, guess what? It's really freaking good. And for all of the things that I blame on Johnny Ive, of which there are many, including but not limited to the butterfly keyboard, I

he's really smart and really good at what he does on the broad scheme of things. So yeah, both of these I think are worth your time, but he's a slow talker. Oh my God. Yeah. He really needs an editor and smart speed. Yeah. You do. I don't know. Like Johnny, I've obviously his, his resume is, you know, basically, you know, it will never be equal probably in terms of how important, like he's amazing work. Right.

but every time I see him talk, I'm like, yeah, this is why I wouldn't let an unencumbered Johnny Ive anywhere near a product that I wanted to make. He's got amazing talent and he's got great ideas and he's got good instincts, but he's also got some really bad instincts and ideas. I feel like I don't know if that has changed about him as he's aged or there was always like that and he was always constrained, but he is a powerful force. Let's put it that way. And a

You got to be careful when you're employing a powerful voice to do anything. But yeah, it's a good interview, and I'm glad he's not at Apple anymore. All right. Maybe I should have saved that for after this next segment, but I don't have too much to say about it. We should try to at least plow through it real quick because I promised we would last week.

Backblaze drama. So a couple of weeks ago, there was a post by Morpheus Research. Backblaze, a loss-making data storage business mired in lawsuits, sham accounting, and brazen, brazen, brazen, how do I pronounce that? Brazen? Brazen. There we go. Insider dumping.

reading from this post from Morpheus Research, which we'll talk about who they are in a second. Since it's November 2021 IPO, oh, I'm sorry, I should interrupt myself. Backblaze is a former sponsor. I think all three of us are paying customers to Backblaze. I did look and they are not currently slated to sponsor again, or at least I didn't see them in the docket. But just for what it's worth, they did sponsor many, many times in the past.

Anyways, since its November 2021 IPO, Backblaze has reported losses every quarter. Its outstanding share count has grown by 80% and its share price has declined by 71%. In October 2024, two former senior employees filed a suit against Backblaze alleging accounting fraud, inflated projections, and whistleblower retaliation. One lawsuit was filed by Backblaze's former vice president of investor relations, James Kisner, while the other was filed by former senior director of financial planning and analysis, or FP&A, Huey Hall.

To keep its stock price afloat, Backblaze pressured employees to certify inaccurate financial statements, according to former director of FP&A Hall.

Throughout our investigation, we found Backblaze's track record reveals a management team lacking transparency and willing to take aggressive and possibly illegal steps to create an illusion of financial performance to support their own exit liquidity. After extensive research, we believe the evidence justifies a short position in shares of Backblaze. Morpheus Research holds short positions in Backblaze. Ding, ding, ding. And Morpheus Research may profit from short positions held by others. Ding, ding, ding. This report represents our opinion, and we encourage all readers to do their own due diligence. Please see our full disclaimer at the bottom of the report.

I am way outside my depth, to be completely honest with you. So take everything I'm about to say with copious amounts of salt, but this smelled kind of fishy to me in the sense that people who want, people who wish for backblaze to perceive badly say, hey, backblaze should be perceived badly. Like,

uh, I don't know this, this didn't smell good to me. How short selling works is essentially you are betting that a stock price will go down and it's, there's always the two sides of this. It's like, okay, well if you're, if you are betting that a stock price will go down and by the way, short positions have like an unlimited downside practically. So you better hope it doesn't go up. You really need it to go down. Uh,

You obviously want it to go down, but also when you pick which company to short, you're looking for companies that you think will go down. So it's not like, oh, you just pick a company out of a hat and say, I'm going to get a short position on them and then I just trash talk them, right? No, you look for the company that you think is going to go down and then you explain to people, we got a short position on company X because we think it's going to go down and here's why.

And so which one of those, again, cart and horse, which one of those is driving? You know, there is always if you're running a company, you're always like these short sellers. They just latch on to us and then they say terrible things about us because they just want the stock price to go down and everything they're saying is wrong and it's not true. Tesla always does that or whatever. Oh, it's all anyone has complaints about the company is just short sellers trying to make the stock price go down.

But on the flip side, it's like, well, what do you think short sellers are doing? They're out there trying to find a company that they think the price is going to go down. And they do research on them. They say, look at this company. They have lots of problems. And I think their stock price is going to go down. So...

Again, I'm no financial expert, but be aware that both of those forces are in play whenever there is a short position. And the things you just read are very clearly from a company that probably honestly thinks that the stock price is going to go down, but also really, really needs the stock price to go down. Yeah. So it's probably like it is a huge grain of salt, even bigger than Casey said. Yes, not only do they need the stock to go down,

The more the stock goes down, the more money they'll make. So they directly financially benefit from if everyone else makes the stock go down too. So it is a pretty biased position to try to take their advice. However...

It does indicate like, yeah, there's some shenanigans going on in this company. There's some problems. Yeah, I 100% believe almost everything that they say there. These are problems with the company because these are problems that lots of companies have. It's not unprecedented that, oh, it's being mismanaged. The people at the top just wanted to get their money and cash out and people –

fibbing about how well the company's doing and trying to hide how it's doing badly. Like every company does that. And, you know, what you have to look at is like, OK, is this company in trouble? Do they not have a sustainable business? Have they been hiding some deep, dark secret that's going to come crashing down? And these people are the first people to see it. Like you just have to make those, you know, judgments for yourself.

So Backblaze initially responded to Ars Technica and Patrick Thomas, Backblaze's VP of marketing, said the report is inaccurate and misleading based largely on litigation of the same nature and a clear attempt by short sellers to manipulate our stock price for financial gain. Which is what companies always say.

Which is 100% what companies always say. I did not get a chance to read this before recording, so I apologize. I totally missed this in the show notes. But there is an actual full-on formal blog post from Backblaze. John, I presume you put this in here. So did you read this? Is there a TLDR you can offer? Yeah, I mean, you can just look at it. They bolded things. They basically say, yeah, there were some bad things going on. But, you know, we hired third-party people to check out our accounting. And we've been cleared of all wrongdoing. And we're doing great. And I know there's problems. It's just, you know, like neither one of these things is the whole truth.

The short seller's description is not the whole truth. And Backblaze's everything is going great is also not the whole truth. The whole truth is a combination of those two. But anyway, I just, you know, if you wanted to see the company's response, they have one. We'll see how it goes.

Then MJ Tsai has a roundup of different things with regard to this, as he always does. One of the quotes that MJ quoted was, however, linked financial results do confirm that the company lost about $50 million in 2024 and about $60 million in 2023. It also says that the number of computer backup customers has decreased. B2, which is, isn't that like? It's their S3. It's S3, yeah. Thank you. It's S3, but way cheaper.

Okay, there you go. B2 is now more than half the business and the APRU for B2 customers is $645 versus $159 for the computer backup customers.

Additionally, Corn Chip writes, Backblaze doesn't break out profitability by product division anymore, but when they did, computer backups were profitable. B2 wasn't. The cost of revenue largely comes from the B2 side because S3 compatible object storage intensely competes on price per gigabyte, whereas computer backup competes on perceived trust, UI, etc. They consolidate fixed operating costs for now, but the R&D is largely for B2 as well.

So those are the two halves of their business. One is the one we're always talking about, which is like get backblazed, put it on your Mac and have your Mac be backed up over the cloud for an unlimited amount for each Mac for a very low price. And the other thing is B2, which is like S3, which is like, do you have some data you want to put in the cloud? We'll charge you per gigabyte. And those are two different businesses. And as as Corn Chip notes, the B2 S3 thing is like it's just a commodity. It's like

What who has the cheapest price per gigabyte that gives you the performance and durability that I need? S3 Amazon has a thousand flavors of S3 storage. You can probably find one that is suitable for your needs. But if not, B2 is out there saying we offer this very simple solution. We undercut S3 on price. You know, if our durability and latency and throughput things meet your needs, maybe you should go with that. And that's a very different business than here's some software that you put on your Mac to back it up to the cloud.

So the reason this is in here at all, it's not because we care about Backblaze. Like I said, they're not even a sponsor anymore, although they should be because I still think they're good. Spoiler. Yeah, I'm still a Backblaze customer. Yeah. People are asking us, okay, given all this Backblaze drama, what do you think? Should we not be using Backblaze anymore? And my answer is you should still be using Backblaze. It's the best product at what it does. And by the way, CrashPlan, one of the competitors to Backblaze, is apparently back. It like left the consumer business and it's back. Still with the Java client. But anyway, so...

The thing about backup services, if Backblaze goes up in a ball of flames and the company goes under and the CEO loots the company and just falls to ashes or whatever, oh, well, I'll pick a different backup service. Like, I know you say like, oh, but you're giving them your data. And, you know, even though it's sealed with an encryption key, technically that encryption key you're sending that could be sent. It's not staying client side. It's going into the server. Like,

There is the thing of like, look, if you really think this company is like bad news and has been infiltrated by hackers or the CEO is trying to steal all your data and sell it, then yeah, you should stop. But I don't see that here. What I see, even if I take the short seller's word 100%, like everything they say is 100% true, it's just a company with a bunch of people who are trying to make money and not doing well at it and want to get out with their golden parachutes and are lying about how well they're doing. Right. And none of that makes me feel like, oh, they really want to get my data.

They really want to crack open all my files and look at it because that's their path to riches. That's not their path to riches. My files are not going to give them any path to riches. There's not even rumors that they're trying to train AI on all my files and stuff, and my tax returns are going to come up and chat GBT, something like...

If that was the rumor, I would say maybe pull your stuff out of Backblaze. But even if you take 100% of the worst things people can say about Backblaze, from what we know now, I would say keep using them until they go out of business because they are the best at what they do in terms of price and performance. I ran CrashPlan for years and years, and that Java app was a nightmare. Backblaze, I barely even know it's running on my computer. It just does its job. So I personally am still using Backblaze.

I think they should sponsor the program again because I highly recommend them because honestly, if they go away and die, I don't know what I'll do. I know people are going to say you should use arc and you have lots of other, there are alternatives. A backblaze is just so low cost fire and forget low effort on your computer and they update it. And the people who wrote their software know what they're doing on macOS. So I still recommend it. You can read all these links and make your own decision. I'm still going to keep being a backblaze customer because I,

I mean, look, the company's finances, like, honestly, you know, I know this might sound a little bit callous, but, like, the company's finances are not my problem. Yeah. And so if they've worked this out, if they are still in business...

fine it's i i don't need to know their finances it's not my problem and if it becomes your problem because they go out of business you'll just you'll you know try arc or another server so you try crash point like you'll go to a competitor because it's not like a type it's not like like i've invested all my what system am i using for my family photos i've invested all this in apple photos what if they go down oh no i have a big problem if a backup service goes away

delete all your data off it hopefully delete it all and you start backing up to a new service like it's the type of thing where you can jump to a competitor without too much fuss yeah exactly and we have fast upload connections that that matters

All right. Thank you to our sponsors this week, BetterHelp and Mack Weldon. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership besides all of our awesome specials. Did we forget to plug the special? Oh, shoot. We did forget to plug the special. Oh, no. Oh, no. Is ATP overtime our weekly bonus topic?

This week on Overtime, the bonus topic for members will be about SSD longevity and long-term data storage and how we do that and some interesting new developments on SSDs and they're kind of bad at long-term data storage. We'll talk about that in ATB Overtime. Join us at atb.fm slash join. Thanks, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week.

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. Marco 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 Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A. It's accidental. They did.

So long.

I was hoping to revisit some restaurant tech MVPs. Oh, yes, please. This is a topic I began a few weeks ago, and we basically just got through Ubiquity and stopped because it was so long. So Ubiquity remains awesome. I had an interesting failure on that, but what failed was I had connected an SFP third-party module to get 10 gigs out of one of the switches over Ethernet.

to a different switch. And that third-party SFP module flaked out and failed. Everything Ubiquiti made was fine and has worked continuously. And the one part of my network that they didn't make flaked out and failed already. Anyway, what connects all of these network things together is a whole bunch of network cable, of course. And this... I actually finally evolved my skills in this area. So...

I have long-term listeners might know that I have tried in the past to crimp my own ends onto network cables and have failed every single time.

I thought that got a lot better since I did it in my high school home, you know, in the late 90s. I thought there was some pretty easy ways to do it these days. But are there not? I mean, there were then, too. So for whatever it's worth. This is just your one-week spot. Yeah, this is my one-week spot. And so what I did was basically...

I took a bunch of measurements of how long does this cable need to be? How long does this cable need to be? And I ran a whole bunch of pre-made Cable Matters cables. And I got Cat6A for the important runs, Cat6 for the kind of sub runs, and I just ran a whole bunch of very long Cable Matters cables. And so one of my restaurant tech MVPs is Cable Matters. This is a company that makes a whole bunch of cables.

And they matter. I don't know what else to say. They're good cables. So that's... However...

At one point, so there is an ATM in the restaurant because, you know, you're on an island, there's no banks. So most of the handful of restaurants have their own ATMs. At some point, the ATM stopped working. And I realized it was because one of the wires that I thought was no longer in use and had cut. Oh, no. Was in fact, it was in fact the ATM's cat five wire.

So I'm like, all right, how do I fix this? I have a dangling Cat5 cable. I still had some slack in it. It would have been a very big pain in the butt to rerun that wire. So I'm like, I really should try to use the one I have here.

So I got one of these kind of generic brand cable crimpers to crimp on Cat5 or Cat6 ends onto Ethernet cables. And it's an Amazon kit for like $35. And it has like the crimper and a tester and a whole bunch of boots and cable ends. There's a thousand no-name brands that make this kind of stuff than they have for a long time. And because I had to get it to work, I got it to work. Yeah.

It took me like three tries to get the first one, but I did eventually successfully crimp on a new end.

to an ethernet cable i thought that was going to be your story that you were so bad at crimping but then when you had to do the restaurant you had to do it so many times that eventually you got good at it but no you bought pre-made cables which boggles my mind uh but i'm glad you were forced by your uh pasty cutting of the atm to practice it a whole three times before you did it successfully and so and look it's still now i should say like so i i

I fixed the ATM. And then I'm like, well...

Now I have a tool at my disposal. Now I'm mad with power. Now you're ready to crimp the world. So this was at this time I had not yet decided that I was going to replace the cameras like this year. It was still going to be like a maybe next year product or project. But then like as I was tearing stuff out, I'm like, you know what? It would be a lot easier if I did the cameras now as I'm working with all these wires and as I'm tearing all this stuff out and then I can get rid of those wires and all this other stuff. So I decided like kind of halfway through the spring, I'm going to also replace the cameras.

There were a number of camera mounting points where I had to run wires through holes that went like from the inside of the building to the outside of the building or through thick walls in the building where the hole was drilled by, you know, some previous technician years ago to only be the diameter of a wire. So an end of a cable would not fit through those holes. Yeah.

No. Now, a couple of those holes, I just made wider with a drill. I just shoved an end through them. Your fear of crimping is so much that you're like, no, let's make the hole bigger. Right. But some of them, that would have been so incredibly destructive or impractical or impossible. I was like, you know what? I really, if I'm going to use this cable...

I'm going to have to like, you know, either, either use a cable. It's already there, which is, they were all these like ancient cat five or cat five e cables or the, you know, they're super thin. And I'm like, eh, some of them are flaky. I'm like, I don't, I'd rather run new cable, like run brand new, nice cat six or cat, you know, six, a cable. Um,

But, you know, so I was like, I could run it through these holes or they were more commonly, they were coax wires in the hole. So I'd like replace a coax wire with a cat six wire. So I would do things like, you know, tape that, you know, cut off the coax, tape the wire to it and like kind of pull it through, you know, but I was, I still only had the width of the hole to deal with. So I had to crimp ends on a few. And so,

I just started doing it more. And I learned a couple of things. Number one, I learned with practice and not even that much practice, I actually was able to start doing them more consistently and more reliably to the point where now most of the ones I do, I get right on the first try. Not always, but most of the ones I do.

I have definitely wired some backwards, but I had to fix those. But for the most part, I get it right the first time and it works. And the best thing I learned, though, is all this time using my trusty Cable Matters cable, it matters a lot when you're using a high quality cable.

it makes it a lot easier to crimp the ends on because the wires in it are themselves higher quality. Like they're a little bit, you know, thicker or more rigid. You can, they, they go through the connector more easily. They, they don't, you know, accidentally get cut when you're cutting the cable. Like there's all sorts of like, you know, if you bend one, it doesn't snap off. Like there's all sorts of little, little upgrades. So actually,

I still am using Cable Matters cables when I'm making custom ends. I still use them because most of the time I can still keep one of the stock ends on. So I would just cut off one end of the cable, run it through wherever I had to run it, and then put my own custom end on the other end.

And I did all of that with this stupid cable kit from Amazon from no name. And it worked like I and I stand by this as a strategy like because I wasn't I mean, look, the end of the day, it was not that much cable. It's not like I'm wiring up a whole office building where where like the cost would be a significant difference.

I was just wiring up a few cameras and a few network switches. And so it actually ended up being fairly easy to still use stock cables for almost everything and just cut off one end of some of them to get them into funny places.

Did you verify that? Remember, John, do you remember when we talked years ago about how there's like two different internal wiring mechanisms? Yeah, I did a prototype T-shirt design based on that. Did you tell us that? I don't remember that part. I design a lot of T-shirts that never see the light of day. It's just, believe me, if you don't see them, there's a reason. Well, fair. Anyways, Marco, I bring this up to say, are you...

team one or team the other i don't even remember what they are anymore they're they're t568 a and b and in looking at the diagram so i i am team whatever the big picture in the instruction manual of this thing is whatever the piece of paper that came with the crimper said it's supposed to be from memory i'm looking at the pinouts now i think i am i think it's

A. No, maybe it's... Maybe I'm B. I think I'm B. You're probably on the newer one. I think I'm B. I think the green... Because I remember finishing with orange. So yeah, I think I'm B. When we last covered this, it was like one of them was meant to be backward compatible with regular phone lines and the other one cared less about that. Yeah.

Well, you can go find that episode of ATP because we linked to the Wikipedia page and the explanation and we talked about it, I think. But it was so long ago, I don't remember which was which. Yeah. And basically what it came down to was like, it doesn't matter that much. Just make sure they're all the same. And so I think I'm pretty sure I am looking at this diagram. I'm pretty sure I was B. But it's like I was just matching whatever was on the other end of the connector. Yeah.

Yeah, in the end, that's all that matters. If you get them mixed up, you're in for a bad time. But you got to have the stripey ones, the solid color ones, which color goes where or whatever. Like there's no like performance difference or anything between them. It's just standards. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, making your own cables sort of or making half of your own cables turns out occasionally useful.