Marco Arment

This was probably four or five years ago, at least.

The problem is, if you make an app for yourself on your iPhone, even if you have a paid developer account,

um the way that works is you know you open it up in xcode you build and run you deploy to the phone well if you change phones that app is gone yeah and the only way to get it back is to go to a mac download the app figure out register it with provisioning and oh turn on developer mode for and you know make sure like add that certificate to the privacy permissions thing so it trusts that developer account you're you know and so like

a big pain that isn't always possible.

And so when you're making little personal utility apps for yourself for iOS, it's actually easier to just release them to the App Store than it is to try to manage that.

So in many ways, even if no one else ever installs it, as long as it's something Apple will approve, it's actually way easier to just have it in the App Store than to try to manage that developer thing over time for an app that you only occasionally use.

So that's why I actually am going to release this app.

It's not going to become a big part of my business, I don't think, because again, I don't think it's going to fit what most people want.

But it is so far fitting very well what I want.

And I've been very impressed with the AI coding, and I'll get to that another time.

Yeah, we'll see.

I mean, I'm very excited to see whether the low cost MacBook is interesting.

Well, right.

But like, you know, like there's been some rumors of like, you know, what it will cut out.

And I really did enjoy our theoretical thought experiment months ago about like, you know, what how would we, you know, cut down or what would we expect to be cut down to make this, you

Yeah, I believe my big thing was obviously like I was pretty sure they were going to cut Thunderbolt.

I forget.

I forget what else.

I remember one of the things that I was kind of theorizing a lot about was they don't want to cannibalize sales of the MacBook Air, and so they actually might restrict it more than they have to just so that more people don't choose it who would have bought the Air otherwise, but just like the colors or the size better.

So one of my theories was they would make it App Store-only apps or something like that.