The WAN Show - Fortnite vs Apple - WAN Show Aug 14, 2020

Episode Date: August 17, 2020

Save 15% today with offer code WAN on Displate at https://lmg.gg/displatewan Reserve Vessi's new Weekend Shoe for $5 at https://www.vessifootwear.com/wanshow Sign up for Private Internet Access VPN at https://lmg.gg/piawan Timestamps: (Courtesy of Michael O'Brien) 00:00:00 - Stream Start! 00:00:05 - Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the WAN Show! 00:00:47 - Topic #1: The Answer to the Ultim... Fortnite vs Apple & Google (Jump to 00:02:06) 00:00:59 - Topic #2: Starlink SpeedTest[.net] (Jump to 00:37:30) 00:01:05 - Topic #4: Tiger Lake details (not covered) 00:01:12 - Topic #3: Microsoft Surface Duo (Jump to 00:46:35) 00:01:23 - WAN Show INTRO! 00:02:06 - Topic #1: Morpheus vs Neo? (Fortnite vs The World) 00:03:07 - EPIC's plausible strategy 00:03:44 - Community feedback & Luke's 1st hand opinion 00:06:23 - Recap of the current issue & difference of services 00:09:01 - What has been happening as a result 00:10:17 - EPIC Repurposing Apple's "1984" & current role reversal 00:14:07 - Good for EPIC vs Apple/Google, but nothing small creators can do 00:15:27 - EPIC's tactics/propaganda in-game & monopoly and democracy 00:18:23 - EPIC's store vs App[le] Store vs Google Play Store 00:19:49 - Enterprise ecosystems 00:21:55 - What could Apple do to compromise? 00:24:52 - James' take on possible compromises 00:26:37 - Fornite taken off of Play Store, too 00:28:43 - US vs Microsoft legal precedent (referencing last week too) 00:30:27 - How to carve out your share in the market 00:33:02 - Wrapping up the topic 00:33:43 - Sponsors! 00:33:49 - Displate - lmg.gg/displatewan - 15% off w/ code WAN 00:34:45 - PIA - lmg.gg/piawan 00:36:10 - Vessi - vessi.com/linustechtips 00:37:30 - Topic #2: SpaceX beta test bandwidth testing 00:38:35 - Bandwidth vs area spec & archived claims 00:40:26 - Luke's posisited city-density-reduction effect 00:42:44 - Who's the average user/customer for Starlink? 00:44:35 - James' anecdotal TelCom experience, albeit common 00:45:37 - Except for Luke being treated well by the same TelCom 00:46:38 - Topic #3: Microsoft Surface Duo 00:46:42 - James' considered opinion 00:48:24 - Comparison to the Z Fold 00:50:27 - How costs are saved? 00:51:28 - Power vs Productivity vs Average users 00:54:26 - Luke's considered opinion 00:56:24 - The comparative user base & wrapping up 00:58:39 - Superchats? Luke & James have no Dashboard access 00:59:08 - This is the stream that never ends... 00:59:24 - Intro/Outro/Smoutro 00:59:49 - And attempts were made to end the stream 01:01:37 - Unofficial Topic: ASRock blacklists GN & HU 01:02:54 - Meme opportunity 01:04:01 - BYE! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Your mom hates it when you leave six half-full glasses on your nightstand. It's a good thing mom lives on the other side of the country. And it's an even better thing that you can get six IKEA 365 Plus glasses for just $9.99. So go ahead, you can afford to hoard because IKEA is priced for student life. Shop everything you need for back to school at IKEA today. I have no clue. I'm just going to keep repeating ladies and gentlemen welcome to the wan show welcome to the wan show i do actually think we're live everywhere now so that is fantastic uh is the nah show again myself and james back at it back in action it's been so

long since we had a nah show that i don't even really remember the origin of it i think i guess it's just it's backwards it's just backwards yeah but like i feel like there was some reason why we did that but it's lost to lost to time and space now but anyways yeah hopefully you've had a wonderful friday hopefully you had a wonderful week welcome to the wan show i don't see us on there it is we are live fantastic uh we've got some actually great topics some things that I'm actually really excited to talk about this week I want to talk about Fortnite versus Apple and Google

this is crazy I'm so excited I'm so excited but yeah okay Fortnite versus Apple and Google like he just said we've also got the Starlink beta test and speeds which are like pretty spicy we've got got the starlink beta test and speeds which are like pretty spicy um we've got intel details tiger lake architecture and process improvements and james one more there's

also the microsoft surface duo uh i can't decide if i care i kind of care kind of sweet maybe a little care maybe even a huge care maybe two cares. Anyways, that was a terrible joke. Wham show intro Dude is that from that that Honda commercial the crab? Maybe this display vessi yeah that's a good word and pia gi joe all right yeah so far the stream has not blown up so i'm actually i'm pretty happy with how we're

doing so far and i am also pretty happy about uh morpheus fighting neo or david verse it's not really david verse glad some giant company that doesn't care about me versus some other giant company that doesn't care about me which is fortnite versus apple or epic games versus apple and google now the story has continued they've been kicked off of the uh the play store as well on google stuff that's crazy um so insane so basically what happened was epic epic games they just they had like the strategy in their back pocket they're waiting to deploy and i guess the timing is right with all the like um like the senate is it the senate of congress that like the scrutiny that the tech giants have been under yes whereas last week jeff bezos and satin adala tim cook and and who's the fourth person was it mark oh microsoft microsoft wasn't there. Zuckerberg was there. Tim Cook was there. Amazon was there.

Yeah. And I guess they're just, now that everyone's talking about monopolies and antitrust, it's time for Epic Games to say, you know what? It is a monopoly. These Play stores and the Apple App Store, they are a monopoly.

They're the only way that we can get access to billions of devices and every time these guys are taking 30 of the money we make yeah it's time for this to end especially for for us like um us as in floatplane uh it's it's kind of extremely destructive uh so other other payment so yeah i made a lot of tweets about this and I heard a lot of feedback. One thing that I heard from some people were like, oh, well, I don't want to like trust my payment information to every app that's on the App Store. I'd rather use Apple Payments. And honestly, you preferring to use Apple Payments is not an issue to me,

and I'll talk about that more later on. But we we don't i don't ever want to touch your payment information that is the last thing i want to do trust me i don't want any of that information ever which is why we use payment processors which is like what everybody does that's like for us it's stripe and braintree braintree is effectively just paypal for most people it's stripe and and Braintree. Braintree is effectively just PayPal. For most people, it's Stripe and Braintree or just Braintree or just Stripe or something like that. Those are the main players in the space. There are other players, depending on where you are in the world as well, that might be more prevalent than Stripe or Braintree. But those are really big in North America. Yeah, other players like Apple.

I mean, Apple, Amazon, Alibaba, like a lot of massive companies might have their own payment system. But these little companies like Floatplane, we're not going to have our own payment system. We're just going to... Why would you want to build that? Why would we want to build that? Why would we want the liability? There's there is no way I would ever want to touch your credit card number because I don't want the liability. Well, this is actually part of Apple's defense. As they say, we're actually doing developers a favor,

handling all that for them. So it's good. So I will touch there. Because I personally have no issue having an option to have Apple Pay in the app. And that's actually kind of interesting to this story because Epic Games sort of did that. They had the like pay through us directly option and they had the Apple Pay option. The payment processors will generally take, I believe it's 2.9% plus 30 cents. You may be

surprised that I said I believe. The reason for that is because it changes depending on what like the origin country is, and it changes on where the payment is coming from. There's international charters. There's a bunch of other things going on. I think it goes up to 3.7% on the percentage, but generally stays at $0.30. What that usually is is the percentage is being passed over from the credit card company, say like MasterCard or Visa or whatever else.

And the flat fee, the $0.30, is usually what the payment processor is taking. 30 cents plus 2.9 to 3.7% is a lot lower generally for a lot of things than just a flat 30%, which is what Apple is trying to take. That is massive. And it might not be that massive for actually companies like epic games where what they're delivering you is uh it's it's unlocking a skin in a game that's already there it's already in your game files it doesn't cost them anything

to deliver it to you zero marginal cost yes it did did cost them designer work to implement it. It might have cost them marketing dollars to push it out. There are other costs. To duplicate it, there is nothing. For us, we have to pay creators every single time a payment comes to us. We pay creators. Also, we have to deliver high quality content video. Like it's expensive to deliver all this high detail video to users. So there are heavy costs on our side directly related to every purchase. We can't just give up 30% of the value on every purchase. We don't have that as an option if we want it to be a reasonable business model. So if we wanted to use Apple's payment system which i have no problem doing we'd have

to charge more but that's against their terms you're not allowed to charge more for using apple payments you have to charge the same amount across the board because it can't be worse experience for apple users which i would like to agree with, but it's more expensive. But does that include things like, if you go to our website and subscribe and it's $2, it can't be $3 on the iPhone. Oh my God, that is crazy. Right now we're in a situation where we have tried to remove everything possible.

We have borderline copied some other apps that are on the app store with with which is not our initial intention but it became kind of our intention because we were like okay we need to find a way to actually get on the store uh and we have been denied every time uh it feels almost discriminatory at this point uh at this point they're like you can't reference uh being able to get subscriptions like, you can't reference being able to get subscriptions anywhere else. You can't offboard anywhere else. You can't give someone a support link. You can't give someone an FAQ link. You can't offboard anyone to your main website because that might encourage them to subscribe there instead of through the app. So we took everything

out to the point where you can't even make an account on the app. And if you try to sign in with an account that doesn't have a subscription, it just says, like, you can't do that. And that's it. It doesn't say, like, you have to go to the website. It doesn't give you any good information. It's useless. Nope. It's a terrible app. And there's still, like, no, there's too many references to, like, going outside.

There is none, by the way. There's a blog for everyone's frustration frustration apple trying to get their money and for a company like epic games like they're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars on like every year right oh yeah so so what they did was they updated their app they did this on android and ios now it's a less it's a bit of a less of an issue on android because you can already sideload apks on android and just kind of get whatever app you want anyway but it still has millions of dollars so they did this on ios and android they made an update to the app that included like you said uh the option to use apple pay and another option to buy directly from them and that was cheaper and that is just crazy that they did that, in my opinion,

because what they're saying, they're basically weaponizing the whole fan base. They're like, look, everyone around the world, you are paying more because these guys control access. This is a monopoly, and it's hurting consumers because, look, you could be paying less. So they've just evangelized like legion of fans, turned them all into zealots, got them on their side. And anyway, the immediate response from Apple and Google, of course, was to take Fortnite off of the store.

Yeah. You know what Fortnite did to any response? They had a... Did you ever see the commercial? Yes, of course. That 1984 commercial? It's an old Apple commercial. And it was brilliant at the time.

Yeah, it was really transgressive. And it's supposed to look like, I believe, the movie 1984 from the Orwell novel. And it's basically a bunch of these drone-type people sitting in an audience While Big Brother talks to them from this giant screen and then this one like resistance rebel Like slow-motion runs in with a big sledgehammer and she throws up the giant blue Big Brother and and Big Brother is supposed to represent IBM yeah, and it's like break the mold she smashes the screen and everyone's liberated with their Apple devices and it was so

Cool to be an apple user back then well guess what go forward 30 years and guess who big brother is now so epic games produced this video that has fortnite characters in it and it's fully animated but it looks exactly like and animated in the style of this previous commercial but now there's like this big uh big brother is transformed into like a rotten apple looking character with a worm coming out of his head and uh they smash that screen and they're and they're saying yeah these guys have a monopoly on the app store and we want we want to smash that for the sake of consumers. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like it's I find things like this interesting because this truly was like a big part of Apple's identity. If you if you want to go back, I'm going to tangent here a little bit.

I'm going to tangent here quite a few times, probably. If you want to go back and watch a really cool movie, honestly, probably everyone watching this would enjoy this movie. It's called Pirates of Silicon Valley. Fantastic movie. It's called Pirates of Silicon Valley. Fantastic movie. It's it goes over essentially the origins of like Apple and Microsoft. And it's really, really cool. And the mentality that like Jobs was pushing back then was extremely aggressive towards IBM, like super, super aggressive towards IBM. IBM is absolutely the enemy and this is a war.

Was like the type of like direction he was pushing the company in. Apple, if you want to look into it, I don't think I have great screen capture right now. People saw the Discord minimize. I'm not playing WoW. I'll move it. That's my desktop background. Calm down. That's my desktop background. Calm down. Jeez. I just like Thunder Bluff, okay? But Apple Pirate Flag.

There's like actually official Apple Pirate Flag stuff that they had in the office. There's pictures of Steve Jobs sitting around with his peeps with this pirate flag in the background that has an apple logo over one of the eyes for their something anniversary i don't remember what they flew pirate flags at all of their headquarters like this this like we're against the man kind of mentality it's in their origin oh yeah first product that jobs and was ever made together back when I believe Jobs was still in high school was these little boxes that they used to hack phones so that they could make free long distance phone calls. Yeah. They sold them for like 100 bucks. With Captain Crunch. Yeah.

Like that was this is where Apple came from. And now as many problems as I have with it, and we'll go into that in a moment. As many problems as I have with it, and we'll go into that in a moment, but that Fortnite 1984 commercial positioning Apple on the other side as like kind of more cheesy and less serious. Sorry for the Slack notification. As more cheesy and less serious as it is. Oh, my goodness. Stop messaging me. It's kind of fair yeah well i mean it's a little awkward coming from epic for a bunch of different reasons they're big too yeah they're big too and

then the they're kind of they're 40 chinese owned which i guess kind of flavors it a bit but it's definitely valid it's it is it is very valid criticism of apple regardless of who it's coming from there are some issues with the short uh as far as i know the short being the the fortnight's version of the apple 1984 commercial as far as i know it was played in game which at first i was like oh that's cool i want to go check it out and then later was like uh check it out and then later was like uh while i am very much happy about this legal battle that's going on because floatplane over here is getting screwed over by apple super hard but we're like tiny ants on the road and have no ability to impact really anything um compared to a multi-trillion dollar company that is apple um epic might actually be able to give them a decent fight.

So that's cool. I feel like there's a Goliath on my side fighting the other thing, which is cool. And just because we haven't said it explicitly, Epic is suing Apple and Google now. Yeah, they totally weren't prepared. They just had like a 62-page legal document ready to go immediately after they were kicked off the app store. But it, yeah, they played it in game and they're directing Fortnite

players specifically to like talk about this and tweet out about this. it is kind of pushing propaganda onto kids directly like playing it in the game making an event in the game all that kind of stuff i'm gonna message this guy i kind of like it though because it's weird antitrust and monopoly like law is actually really tightly entangled with with democracy in a really weird way right but do you want small children involved with your democracy well i mean because that's they're trying to they're trying to get kids to like speak up and get angry at apple who probably have no real understanding of like what's actually going on and they're just like oh they took my fortnight from the app store yeah but they also know they

know that it costs more right they they know the price difference and i think that the way that people interface i don't think they're technically allowed to even buy anything well their parents are and that has an effect on them yeah i just i don't know it's pushing propaganda to kids is is it's problematic but what i'm saying is like our interface with power and authority irl is often through economic stuff it's often through our wallet yeah and less so than like politics yeah and so and economics really like when you can garner a lot of economic power, that often turns into political power, whether that's through lobbying or funding research

or staffing government. And so it is the fact that the US has a history of breaking up monopolies. That is a history of supporting democracy, right? So I think it's really cool that they're getting all you know they're they're showing everybody they made a point to open up the app and see how like look this affects you the people yeah and it is kind of propaganda but it's also you know we are all stopping and this is a monopoly i'm okay with the message it becomes

awkward when it seems to be uh not just targeted at fortnite fans but but somewhat specifically targeted at children but then i don't know how you would target fortnite fans without targeting any children so i yeah i guess one kind of follows the other since yeah their fan base so yeah and like obviously there are people that aren't children that play fortnite but there is and like obviously there are people that aren't children that play fortnite but there is a very large amount of people that play fortnite that are children so it just becomes kind of awkward there um that being said there was no real call to action that i could find other than just talking about things while including the free fortnite

hashtag which i think probably helps a little bit. But yeah, there's the other side of it that people have brought up, which is like on Epic's game store, they push really hard for developer exclusivity, but they do seem to take a lower cut. That gets usually countered by the fact that Epic's game store is on open platforms that include other game stores. And that's developers deciding to take that deal instead of it being the only potential option. So things change there. You can't sideload apps, at least easily and by standard, onto iPhones. and bystander onto iPhones, you have to go through that app store

and they have this very anti old school Apple totalitarian grip on that app store. Well, it really depends on how you're thinking of the monopoly and the competition, because Apple would say, buy an Android phone, but it's really, the question is, is that a competing product or am I, I've decided I want an iPhone. I want the iPhone hardware.

And I want to be able to put whatever app on there or use whatever app stores I want. But it's an integrated product. You know, you can't really take apart the hardware from the software. Yeah. So it's really kind of sticky. Yeah. And there's also, I don't know how this plays legally or if it does at all. But there are also quite a few different situations, I would say, surprisingly often on

the Apple side where for your work or for some other reason, you are required to have Apple devices. Things like AirDrop and some other stuff that can simplify things if everyone is using the same type of device. Apple's very well known for making it so that once you're in their ecosystem, it's kind of frustrating and difficult to leave their ecosystem because everything that you have just works with each other and nothing else. Not only that from the individual level, but as you alluded to, there's a network effect with other users. Everyone in my company, we only use iMessage.

Well, it might be a requirement. I have family members that work in the movie industry in my company, we only use iMessage. Well, it might be a requirement. I have family members that work in the movie industry in British Columbia. And there are certain... I'm going to use incorrect terms here. I am so sorry, Brandon and family members. But on different sets for different films, for different movies, for different shows, etc. The... different sets for for different films for different movies for different shows etc the i don't remember the term but the person who like is a producer i don't know the person who like runs the whole thing will often decide like we are using this device like my mom showrunner okay sure yeah my mom had to get an iphone because they were using like some stuff that iphones have and

android phones don't and it was just like okay she also i mean as much as i dislike apple right now it's a better phone for her she naturally picked up iphone a lot faster than she picked up android phones and she probably got to a level of competency that was higher with her iphone in like a few weeks compared to when she had her android phone for probably a couple years that's so weird because i i guess like the curse of knowledge like once you know something you can't imagine what it's like to not know it but from where i'm standing they seem like they're almost exactly the same you know swipe down for notifications there's definitely um they're definitely similar but um

yeah user experience and intuitive design fairly small changes can be pretty impactful um but yeah what do you think what what do you think apple could do like let's say bearing in mind that apple is going to want to preserve their profits bearing in mind that they're going to keep the app store existing in some way and they're not going to allow there to be i don't think they're going to let there be other full-on app stores on the on the iphone what do you think is the compromise that they're going to make like genuinely allowed to have your own like epic games Epic Games can make their own, not App Store, but, like, their one individual app can have its own processing. I'm fairly certain that's what Epic Games wants. Just so everyone knows as well, Epic Games wanted the app taken off the App Store.

I believe we mentioned this. That was super obvious. I do not, I haven't read the 60 whatever pages of legal documentation i do not suspect at all that they're going after apple for the fact that the app was removed for the app store they wanted fortnite removed from the app store for like pr and marketing reasons not for legal reasons or the flame they want it for the flame they want it because we are talking about it now because of that they want it because of like almost every other news outlet talking about it i austin evans launched a this is video about it like immediately like people jumped on this right away because the

app was removed it was it was propaganda pr it was that kind of stuff getting the app removed it was not their legal ground very strategic. Yes But what Apple will do I have no idea I suspect they're gonna fight this tooth and nail in order to do nothing if they have to do something what I think would make a lot of sense is If they want to keep their 30% cut, which is insane But everyone has to use Apple payments, that's fine completely fine with me as long as we can have custom pricing because i need to make it so that it hurts just as much to you oh you mean that you have a different iphone price than you have on the web and that's what i mean or yeah for sure i would even be okay if it was the only payment processor on the App Store, as long as I

was able to make it cost more because it costs more. Or if they let us have them in parallel, I would still be happy having the Apple one there and no messaging telling people not to use it, but clearly displaying that it is a higher price. I would be completely okay with that because I can totally understand the concept of someone being uncomfortable giving their payment information, but being more comfortable using Apple's internal system. If you want to do that, that's cool. I have no issue with that at all. I just don't want it to very significantly hurt our company's bottom line to the point

where we're directly losing money, which is what's happening. So it's completely unreasonable but if they give us some options to actually work with it and actually be able to move forward cool that's all i'm asking for i have no idea i mean on the far end of the spectrum they could straight up allow other app stores on the iphone yeah that exists on android already i don't really think that's gonna happen because and the reason i don't think it's gonna happen is it just seems like way i don't think anyone's really asking for that and also apple does not want that to happen no because if you think about like where the money is in terms of internet companies it's basically a graph that's

a parabola and value is on the y-axis and on the first part of the parabola where it's basically a graph that's a parabola and value is on the Y axis. And on the first part of the parabola, where it's nice and tall, you've got content creators like LMG. That's really valuable. And on the other end of the parabola, you've got aggregators, people where the content is, people who control discovery of content. Right. Because there's so many tweets in the world. You need to go to Twitter to find the best ones.

There's so many web pages. You need to go to Google to find it. Discovery is huge. YouTube is powerful. Facebook is powerful. In the middle of the nadir of the parabola, you have your kind of classical distribution. That's just not worth that much, like cable companies and crap like that. So they're not going to go,

they're not going to give up their position on the top of their parabola to have other competing app stores on the iPhone. They're going to be the only one. And instead, they're going to try to have people land at that bottom where, I mean, like maybe, I don't know, maybe like on a one app basis,

you can have different payment strategies but you can't make a new discovery yeah platform yeah i definitely don't think apple wants that um i think that would be would be not ideal for them um the interesting part here in addition to everything else that has been interesting already, is that a few hours later, Fortnite disappeared off the Google Play Store. This is not just Fortnite versus Apple. It is mostly Fortnite versus Apple, but it's not just Fortnite versus Apple. Like Apple, Google requires that games use the Google Play system for in-app purchases. that games use the Google Play system for in-app purchases.

Developers offering products within a game downloaded on Google Play or providing access to game content must use Google Play in-app billing as the method of payment. Google system also takes a 30% cut. Not as big of a deal because you can at the very least side load. So like, I don't know if this is how this worked, but you could go to Fortnite's website and it could be like, install on your phone and you click a button and it just does it. You could totally do that. Back in 2018, Epic pulled Fortnite from the Play Store protesting the 30% cut.

Epic pulled Fortnite from the Play Store, protesting the 30% cut. 18 months later, it was back on the Play Store because of the warnings of the introduction of Google Play Protect. Interesting. Epic has also filed a suit against Google. This one is kind of surprising due to the ability to sideload,

but maybe due to Google Play Protect, it's a little bit different. Well, they have this other fiasco where there was going to be on LG phones and in particular OnePlus devices. OnePlus phones were going to ship with like Fortnite on the home screen and or at least like a direct download button through like i guess a progressive web app or something like that but then google squashed it i don't know the details of what like leverage they threw around or how they intimidated oneplus but it fell through and they're actually citing that in the in the court documents yeah i mean I don't remember all the details about this, but United States versus Microsoft Corp, which was like around 2000, I believe. It's like 1998, 2002. It was somewhere in that range.

US went against Microsoft super hard and for a ton of different reasons. And that is why, honestly, that is why Windows is kind of as open as it is now. And you see now that there's like the Microsoft Store and all this kind of stuff, but there is also lots of other things. And if I remember correctly, it's been a long time. I should have done more research on this before the show. I didn't actually think I was going to end up talking about it, but it's relevant i should have looked into it um if i remember correctly they were relatively aggressive about like browsers and stuff like that yeah there's a big deal with netscape and having yeah uh internet explorer pre-installed yeah and if i remember correctly it was like the issue was

almost entirely like having internet explorer pre-installed at all. Not only just them like not letting you install Netscape or whatever else. Like it's, this is antitrust and anti-monopoly and all this kind of stuff is a really, really big thing in the US that hasn't really been used very much since the United States versus Microsoft court. And maybe this will bring that back. I would not be surprised at all if this went Supreme court level. Oh yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Like this is going to go huge because this is talking to the max. They're going to appeal as far as they can. What I think is really interesting about it is how it's like a gray area like you're any successful company it seems to be on the road to monopoly have you ever read peter teal's uh zero to one no in the first chapter of that book it's a sweet book it's about how to make a startup he he like taught a stanford class and then they compiled those notes to a book it's a sweet read and in the opening pages it's basically like your goal as a startup is to try

to become a monopoly because that's where the profits are. And you're on that course and you might not get there. And if you do get there, you might not be there for a short time. I remember listening to a talk from Jeff Bezos where he says, like, even when you are the innovator who makes something completely brand new, you only get about two years of reaping the profits before the competition comes and you have to put your prices down and then it's a fully competitive market and it's a commodity, right? In the best case scenario, you only get two years

is what he said. Well, these app stores have had longer than two years. And the thing that's interesting to me is at first, these massive profits of 30% of the labor of all the apps on your platform. That's kind of, that's your reward for making something so awesome as the app store.

And you, you can't fault these people for designing these platforms and these pay structures that benefit them. And in some sense they deserve the reward. However, when they get so successful at some point, like now we think of them as like utilities, you know, now that there's so many billions of devices, it's just not fair anymore. And and they have to like it's a whole paradigm shift where now it's like I don't want to pay for having, I don't know, like the fire department come to my house. It's just we all get it

apparently chat does not like um that guy that you mentioned i yeah it's oh yeah oh he's like like the he's famously like the only libertarian in silicon valley or something i'm not saying he's not a turd but the book is pretty cool. Yeah, I don't know. It's really interesting. There's a lot here that I think is going to be above our heads. I think there's a lot here that's going to be above almost everyone's heads that is at least watching this, because this is going to go very far and very deep.

Hey, on that note, if you want to hear from someone whose head this is not over, there is a really awesome podcast slash blog from a guy named Ben Thompson. His blog is called Stratechery. It's like strategy and tech together. And the podcast is called Exponent.

And they talk about this stuff a lot and it's a really high level discussion. Check it out. Cool. But yeah, it's going to be really, really exciting to follow where this goes, especially from Flowplane side, because right now we are screwed. There's like basically nothing we can do. We're being stiff armed out of the App Store unless we have the only payment option on the App Store be Apple Payments payments we can't make apple payments charge more when we established our company we tried to have uh very competitive rates try to

be thin margin all that kind of stuff we don't have the ability to just take 30 out of everything uh therefore we just can't like we are just so what we do have the ability to do is to read our sponsors we do yes let's jump to that display display is a magnet mounted metal print it's basically like art that you can easily shunk onto your wall and if you get a new one you just pop that one off by the magnet and slap your new one on there they're durable and you don't need any power tools to hang them. With over 800,000 different arts spanning a bunch of different styles and influences,

they're pretty awesome and there's something for everyone. You can browse their store. I think there's some user-generated content on there. And a lot of it is like nerd-themed and fantasy-themed stuff. So very cool. They have some Cyberpunk 2077 ones too. They plant one tree for each display purchased and we only have we even have our own line of displays uh one of them has me in it i'm holding a goddamn duck it's awesome so head to our link below and use code wan w-a-n wan to save 15% on your display today. Yeah.

And then PIA. I love the PIA spots because we can basically say whatever. VPNs. You often want one. You often need one. You're often interested in one. You should check out PIA. We've been working with them for a while.

They have no bandwidth caps. They now feature WireGuard, which is cool. Private Internet Access has access to 3,300 servers in 30 different countries. They have configurable encryption within an internet kill switch. I like the internet kill switch option. Basically, if your connection to PIA gets interrupted, instead of just bypassing and going back to your ISP, it will just kill everything. Therefore nothing will flow through your ISP, which is cool. You can try it risk-free with their 30 day money back guarantee. You can connect up to 10 devices at once

with clients for Windows, Mac OS, Android, iOS and Linux. Check it out. Is that new? Because the copy used to say five devices. I thought it was five. It says 10 in this current copy. Maybe they doubled it. I don't know. But yeah, it used to say five.

It'd be really interesting if you had 10 devices and you just didn't have them in your hands all the time and other people had them. That'd be crazy. Check it out at lmg.com slash P-i-a-w-a-n or p-i-a-w-a-n we're also brought to you by vessi particularly their new weekend shoe it's a pretty nice model actually model of shoe that is uh vessi footwear they're known for making comfortable shoes that are light and most importantly waterproof really good if you live in the pacific northwest like we do you can walk on almost any train while keeping your feet dry they don't look like weird dad shoes they just look

pretty stylish i have a pair myself actually two pairs um this new weekend shoe you could really dress it up or dress it down it's pretty sweet And you can reserve a pair right now for five bucks. And once they're ready to ship, you just pay the balance. And that five bucks actually gets donated to a charity, I believe for mental health awareness. So like awesome. Yeah, they're an awesome company. The shoes themselves are actually a hundred percent vegan. So who wants their shoes to harm animals? That's even if you like eating meat, does your shoe need to? No, it doesn't. So that's great. Check them out at Bessie.com slash Linus Tech Tips.

Okay, awesome. I had some people comment while we were doing that. Like, why don't you just make like the Safari version better? Whatever. Safari is like, I don't remember all the details, super bad at video stuff and has a lot of like compatibility issues with what we're doing. Blah, blah, blah. It sucks. We all the details. Super bad at video stuff. And has a lot of compatibility issues with what we're doing. Blah, blah, blah. It sucks.

We need the app. We need an app. Gotta have an app. Let's talk about Starlink, dude. Yes, let's do it. It's fun. Pissing off astronomers. You like internet, don't you?

It's fun. Everybody likes internet, man. I think this is going to be kind of amazing. But yeah, let's talk about this. Starlink beta tests and speeds. The first speeds for SpaceX's Starlink satellite broadband service have been revealed. Using Ookla speed test app, Starlink beta users found speeds ranged from 36 megabits per second to 60 megabits per second on download and 5 megabits per second to 17.7 megabits per second on upload the latency was as low

as 31 milliseconds don't know how high it went to but it went as low as that so these users by the way are mostly in the northern United States and southern Canada I mean if they're in Canada at all, they're probably in southern Canada. If you look at a population map of Canada, we're all along the U.S. border, almost entirely. Yeah, the 20 gigabyte plus bandwidth of a satellite can support only so much bandwidth in a given 50 kilometer by 50 kilometer cell. can support only so much bandwidth in a given 50 kilometer by 50 kilometer cell that bandwidth is roughly 500 megabits per second for each cell maximum uh pricing for the service is not sorry so that that thing is clutch so there's a tweet here because some of these speeds look a lot

slower than what elon kind of promised so there if you go back and look at the historical record on Twitter, there is a person named AtTestLatino saying, you know, if this was like as good as, or even half as good as Fiverr, that'd be great. I'm getting 900 megabits per second. If I got half of that, I'd be happy. And then Elon says the peak rate of about half of that for version one of the system

would be about that so that he's saying it would be about 450 megabit per second and now we're looking at the recorded speeds from the beta that are like 36 megabit per second up to 60 well that's a long way off of 450 the reason is because each one of these satellites, I guess it services, like you said, a 50K by 50K cell. And the bandwidth is divided among all the users in that cell. So theoretically, Elon wasn't yanking your chain when he said you could get that if you're the only person in that 2,500 square kilometer cell. And he did say it's heavily dependent on users per cell in that tweet. He also said they're aiming for a latency of under 20 milliseconds. This is all, we're not fully set up yet.

They're still launching more satellites that should hopefully kind of divide up those users per cell. Maybe there'll be more than one satellite per cell, not certain. Or more than one satellite per area thing. It's interesting do you think people are going to start moving out oh do i think that more people will live in rural areas and work from home because they have fast internet out there wow i never thought of that that's pretty awesome because honestly right now like what's the benefit i mean during covid right but like that'll that'll pass i guess at some point but right now like a lot of people

are just staying home anyways like you could you could live further out save probably astronomical amounts you can buy a house like you're a boomer yeah and just live that boomer life live way further out there have more land etc maybe you'd be able to go outside because there won't be as many people there um no restaurants got to make your own avocado toast oh no gotta cook uh we'll have robot cooks sooner than later they can make you fantastic meals i don't know i think this is like one of the stepping stones to people spreading back out. We've had a lot of like, for quite a few years, we've had a lot of stuff that has been driving people into cities. And you're getting these like crazy hyper hubs of people.

And I think this is going to be one of the, there's going to be probably going to need to be quite a few things. But this is one of the steps if it steps far enough Like the guy said he needs about half of what his current fiber thing is doing. You should also have better latency, etc, etc Yeah, that guy though I don't think I think a lot of people who right now who are in the target market for this the people who have rural satellite internet right now a lot of them would be happy to have 10 megabit per second or or 25 would be really 20 to 25 would be really nice you could stream an hd movie uh while maybe browsing as well so so netflix 4k requires an internet connection

speed of 25 megabits per second or higher i would probably lean on the or higher i think if you got people to even a hundred the vast majority of users would not really notice a big difference oh most people don't even have a hundred i mean a lot of gamers are like what because they all have gigabit but i think i have fiber 150 150 and i only have that to watch 4k blu-ray remixes most people could are totally fine with if you're watching this show and you are offended by 25 megabit per second internet speed you are probably not an average user um I am rather offended by that that would bother me I like my fast internet but I am not exactly a normal user. Well, you're also just not the customer for this right now in this generation. Exactly. I would love to be.

I would love to move out. I would rather be further out. I would rather have a larger place for less money. Both of those variables at the same time would be fantastic. I have no personal need to live in a big city. I would like the entire world to be blanketed in global Internet that, again, becomes so good. And so I guess it's like the return on investment has been going for so long that it's like paid for and that it's just a utility and all other things just have free Internet everywhere they are. I think that's howon sold the dream of this

way back at the beginning that got my little nerd boner going someone someone uh who's probably from british columbia uh said i had 50 down and seven up with shaw just got telus fiber one gig up and down dot dot dot dot it's the same lol well yeah if you have gigabit you need to use it right you need to have like your partner watching a 4k movie in the living room while you're gaming in the office or or have like large data file transfers often kind of in and out or something like that like there's there's there's other things but it's usually relatively specialized use cases or it's worth it to you to spend like three times as much to get that steam game downloaded half an hour faster or something i don't know you know what actually was interesting and i wish telus our telco here had uh you know called me and and been like hey we can do this for you but

they never did was i had a lesser plan it was it was fiber but it was the cheapest one it was like 25 or something and that had a data cap on it like there was a number of gigabytes per month that if you went over you got an overage fee and we were consistently going over because my wife was on mat leave and she would just listen to music all day she listened to music on youtube so she's streaming video all day right so we keep going over and every day it's like 15 extra or every month is about an extra 15 dollar charge so then i called them and i decided that i want to upgrade to 150 150 the price difference there when you include the fact that i was getting an overage every month i was paying the same i like 5x my internet speed and paid the same because at this new tier of being faster there was no limit it's unlimited

it's like they could have just called me like hey you keep going over how about we just bump you up to this of course why would they do that they actually they did do that for me oh nice tell us tell us has been super nice to me i like i don't know why i think it's like every two years roughly i get a call and they're like hey we're gonna upgrade everything you have and you're gonna pay less or the same amount and i'm like all right thanks thanks. Bye. A lot I picked up today. That's pretty much, yeah, that's about how far it goes. It's not even like an extensive conversation.

It's usually over in like a couple minutes, and my internet speed is just like faster, and things are maybe cheaper. I don't know. It's like, okay, sweet. I understand that this does not seem to be a very common occurrence for most people with ISPs, but my wired internet connection has been fantastic. It also just never goes down.

I don't know. I've been quite lucky in that department, I think. But moving on to other things. You want to talk about this Microsoft Surface Duo? Let's do it. I have such mixed feelings about this Microsoft Surface Duo? Let's do it I have such mixed feelings About this device On the one hand I think it's so

Boring because basically It's like a Samsung Galaxy Note It's a big phone that opens But it's way Less cool than that because it's not One bendable OLED screen It's just it opens like a book And there's just two separate screens So it feels not one bendable oled screen it's just it opens like a book and there's just two separate

screens so it feels not futuristic at all at the same time it's kind of de facto as good as having one big bendable screen because when you have that big screen on on the galaxy note a lot of the time you're just dividing it into two anyway yeah i would always divide it into two personally. I have, I can understand why someone would want that if they're like, yeah, I want to watch like movies on my phone or something like that. I'm not going to do that.

The reason why I would want two screens and I'm very excited for dual screen phones is that I can have like, uh, like Slack or, uh, Gmail open up on one side and be able to message people about something that I'm doing on the other side. That is like always what I'm going to want.

So it doesn't bother me personally. Also, by the way, this is posted by Goodbytes on the forum who now has over 22,000 posts. That's amazing. Yeah, apparently Microsoft worked with uh with uh they worked with android they worked with google to collaborate and make sure that all of the apps like the api was robust enough to make the experience you know not suck um and i think that's going to get more and more common because all these dual screen devices are getting more and more common.

We're on the second generation of Galaxy Fold coming up here. I'm trying to figure out what the price of a Galaxy Fold, Galaxy Z Fold 2 was. It's like $2,400. Yeah, they're over $2,000. They're expensive. okay i can't find it let's be 2000 oh no no it says right here no no this device is going to be 1400 us dollars for 128 gigabyte it's 100 more for the 256 and for reference the samsung galaxy fold the first one was released with a price tag of

1980 so if you if you're thinking it's over two grand the the microsoft surface duo could be like half the price and you're still getting a dual screen phone the fold i believe is triple screen because yeah there's an outer screen yeah so like there's a lot more to it and it has the like the fluid the two screens look like one when you open it like it's super super fancy super nice you're mostly mostly paying for that bendable OLED screen and also it had like seven cameras it's got it's there's that phone is crazy but if you want a dual screen phone and you want the productivity that comes with it you can get kind of most of it for way

less of the price by going this direction 1400 it's still an insane amount of money just to be clear but compare that to like the samsung note 20 it's like the same price yeah i don't know i think this is actually pretty interesting i think personally that people should look at this more seriously. It's really large. Each one of the individual screens is huge. The battery is only 3,577 milliamp hours. I think that puppy is going to die quick with two screens. That is a little disappointing. I didn't look into the battery.

Are they OLED screens? Are they at least like efficient hmm the other thing is they save cost okay they save cost because they only have one camera so if you want to take a selfie versus pointing outward you just flip the phone around which I think is actually so much better I don't like that the galaxy fold has a notch disrupting its giant screen just to take selfies when i like it already has an outer screen on the other side yeah yeah just use the other camera yeah i agree i don't know i'm the battery is a big concern that's not a huge battery

it says dual battery is there two of them well i think um what that means is they've split the battery so that there is one on either half of the device you know but i don't know if that's implying that it's it's 3577 times two i don't think so if it was that'd be cool but i think they would say that well the notes don't say it anyway yeah six gigabytes of ram not a lot no but like again i this doesn't seem like a i think we need another category of users for phones personally because there's like average whatever you just have a phone and you use it for like texting and maybe some games and stuff and then there's like power users which is what people use that term for a long time I think there's like power users and now maybe like productivity users is maybe a different category because like for me to be

completely honest I would have called myself a power user before. I did more heavy things on my phone than I think most people did. Now, probably not. Spend most of my time on my phone in Slack, Gmail, and Twitter. Does this really change the game though? Because I feel like the reason that you don't use your phone, it's not because of screen size. To me, it's because of interface. It's like I try to operate a spreadsheet with like tapping

on the phone it's just too annoying you need a keyboard and mouse it changes the game for me when i don't have the option of something else i love desktops huge fan of desktops i'm like in terms of pc stuff i don't even screw laptops i love desktops I would massively prefer using a desktop over like anything else pretty much all the time. But if I'm out somewhere and something happens, I would love to be able to open something out of my pocket and immediately be more productive than I could have been with my like Pixel 2 by having two screens and being able to do all this other kind of stuff. And with six gigs of RAM, I would be able to accomplish all of the things that personally i would do and i think there are a lot of users in that category um that are gonna power use their phone but not for like games

and if you're not playing like games and stuff six gigs of ram is probably fine you're not going to burn that battery life as fast i'm still disappointed in the battery life because for me like if something is going down i might have to have the phone open both screens on for a very extended period of time and just having the screens on is going to burn that battery really fast even though they are i feel like you don't you want the ram because you're going to be opening multiple apps and you're going to have two of them open at The same time you kind of want to just have this much memory Gmail Twitter slack

That isn't gonna fill that up way too fast Like how much give me one second You know what? This would be really handy for when you're on a website filling out a form and you don't trust that website You know that if you navigate away it's just gonna refresh and it's gonna be empty yeah and you get to you get to a part of that form that you don't have the answer to so you need to switch apps to like go to your contacts to look up a zip code or something like that then you return to it it's gone on this phone you can just leave it open leave it open over here and then do all the

research you need to on the other panel and fill out that form over time without losing your session so my current phone which i don't have memory issues with and i do is that a pixel 2xl pixel 2xl four gigs all right i'm not saying like oh my goodness this is an amazing phone this is going to change the game for everyone this is the best thing that's ever happened to phone not at all but i do think there are definitely users that would benefit from it um i think it hurts a little bit not having the single screen like if you close the phone yeah um for sure because there are quite a few times where i would probably only be able to like one hand the phone and being forced to as far as i can tell probably use the phone with two hands is going to be a big detractor that might be enough to make it so that i wouldn't get this

device it's also or a watch if you combo that with a watch that could be nice true that's interesting because then you know because linus said when he was daily driving the fold that it made him want to take his phone out of his pocket less because it was such a commitment to take it out and open it that he used his phone less but he also uses a watch right so if your watch is going off like oh that's just a casual text clear that don't need to open my phone for that yeah it's kind of a good energy that's potentially more of an investment though if you don't already have a watch and we're already looking at a 1400 device which is to a certain degree a compromise because you're not getting that triple screen more features one fluid display fold that being said that fold is an astronomical price if you did add the watch to it

i'm certain it's still going to be a cheaper overall price i don't know all i'm saying is i i'm fairly certain there is a market for this this watch bro last gen i just picked it up on facebook marketplace 140 canadian dollars i think if you're in the market for a 1500 phone you can just spend some cash and get a basic watch. Do you think that the customer for this phone is the same customer as the Galaxy Fold? No. That's what I'm trying to establish. The Fold customer is actually, it's more about status and having the coolest thing.

I think the Fold is style. I think it's status. It looks nicer. Sorry, Microsoft, but it just does. It looks nicer. It Microsoft, but it just does It it looks nicer it kind of does more the the Microsoft duo you can see more of the Like mechanical nature of the phone. It's the the bezels are bigger. It looks a little chunkier It looks like it might

potentially be a little bit more durable. Uh, but this is a little nerdier. Yeah. This isn't, it's not as flashy. It's not as like sexy. If I want to use that term, it's, I see it as like a small business owners. Yes, exactly. It's more like a successful real estate or car sales. Yeah, exactly. I think there is a different market for it. I think you're going for a different style. I think you're going into it for a different reason.

I think you're both probably power users to a certain degree. You might be different kinds. You might be the same kind. But if you're the same kind of power user, it's probably going to be leaning on the other one for style or the convenience of the single screen. And you can afford the like $800 more probably US. So that's astronomical for that like essentially single screen. Instead of just buying a second phone. Or a watch. Just buy a completely second phone.

Probably be better off. There's my third screen, boom Yeah, I don't know I think they're both very interesting devices I hope the Surface Duo does not get ignored Because I think there's definitely a market for it But Microsoft devices Seem to Kind of be forgotten

In a lot of conversations Not in the laptop category True, true They're awesome, Surface devices have been pretty cool to kind of be forgotten in a lot of conversations. Not in the laptop category. True. They're awesome. Surface devices have been pretty cool. This is not a Windows phone. It's a Microsoft phone. Yes. Well, we're definitely going to cover it

as soon as we can on LTT and Short Circuit probably, so hopefully it fares pretty well. I hope it does too. Yes, but I can't see them. Oh. Well, neither can I. Is

Jake still watching? Can he copy paste some or something? No. I have no access to the YouTube dashboard. Is he not here? Because I think he would have to end the stream. It's 3.30.

Yeah. I can't end the YouTube stream. This is the stream that never ends. Because I can... So I can... We can effectively say the show's over. Here, I'll roll the intro. I can walk over to my desktop.

Oh. Bye, everyone. the intro I can walk over to my desktop oh bye everyone I want to I want to establish that like the main show I want to do the just in case it's like P.I.A. Bessie. Display.

Okay, now we're back. Now we are attempting to end the show, which is going to be the ending of the show. Felt short. It, I think, was maybe slightly short. Yeah, it was a little bit short. But James has got to go. He's got to go.

No super chats? Yeah, I'm sorry. I can't see them. Next time if this happens again, I don't know how long Linus has gone for, we might have to find a way to get me logged in to some of the LTT stuff. But, yeah.

After party? I'm gonna be streaming tonight. I'm gonna be streaming some Horizon Zero Dawn if you wanna come hang out. Did Linus retire again? No, he's just taking a probably well-needed vacation. I can post a ghiasso of a $100 super chat if you want. While James tries to do that, maybe I'll do another topic. AS Rock blacklists Gamers Nexus and Hardware Unboxed. ASRock has blacklisted due to the controversy surrounding Z490 content produced by Gamers Nexus and Hardware Unboxed.

There's a Gamers Nexus post that I believe was under a Hardware Unboxed video where I believe they talk about it. Gamers Nexus said, Fortunately, most of the companies realize it's a bad idea to sue media over objectively backed statements. ASRock Black listed us as well, it seems, also because of our Z490 content. Same boat. We even told them we had good things to say about B550, but they stonewalled us. Some companies are too stuck in the past to realize it's best for everyone to work together. They'll forget about years of good things that have been said after one critical review drops. It's absolutely insane.

I strongly agree. There have been, there's a note here that says LTT is pretty critical of manufacturers when appropriate thoughts. Yeah. Even myself specifically, I have been very critical about certain things. There was a Logitech video that I went pretty all in the paint on. There was a... I think it was Gigabyte. I think it was Gigabyte. There was a video that I went pretty hard on. And the Logitech guys are still super chill.

Gigabyte guys weren't necessarily immediately, but became super chill. You got to understand that like, it's not, I don't like hate your company. Hardware Unboxed doesn't hate your company. Gamers Access doesn't hate your company because you release like one potentially bad product. You have to be able to take that criticism

and roll forward with it. Hello? Hello. Are you still streaming? Maybe Jake says just end the OBS stream Okay, cool I just did another topic while you were gone

YouTube is dead, okay, sweet Alright, that's it for the show guys Goodbye Well, I turned it to private I'll turn it back to public now No, no, no, that's fine Because we're ending the stream now, that's good It's good Well, I turned it to private. I'll turn it back to public now. No, no, no. That's fine. No, no, no. Because we're ending the stream now.

That's good. It's good. Yeah, but I should put it back. Wait. I don't know what happens with YouTube or with the WAN VOD. I think it has to become a VOD and then you set it to public. It won't become a VOD because I haven't stopped streaming yet. All right.

Well, I will put it to public now and just let it do its own thing. Okay. Sounds good. All right. Have a good weekend. Bye. Have a good weekend. Bye.