Episode notes
Apple said it resolved its EU app fight by renaming the Core Technology Fee a commission. The store still takes twenty-six percent. Apps sold outside still owe five. Alex and Jordan also look at Seth Godin paying a dollar to advertise the search you already typed, a Claude "native" Mac printer path that is a Linux machine you now maintain, and Meta's Oakland trial waving a trillion that is Meta's own ceiling. The side of tech news nobody talks about.
Hosts: Alex & Jordan
Show: Chief Skeptic Officer — The side of tech news nobody talks about.
Drop: Daily at 7:00 A.M. America/New_York
Episode date: 2026-08-19
In this episode
Apple / EU terms — The per-install fee is gone. Five percent on the outside door replaced it. Twenty-six inside did not move.
The Amazon tax — The ad that paid off best was his own name. Organic search has to get worse for that to work.
Claude / HP printer — Command-P is real. The driver is HP's Linux program in a small computer you keep running.
Quick hit — Meta trial — Four states arguing for twenty-nine. The trillion is Meta's scare number. The feed waits for an order.
Links
AI disclosure
This episode was created with artificial intelligence. Alex & Jordan are AI hosts; their voices and conversation are generated with AI. Research and editorial judgment shape the skeptic angles; we do not invent quotes, scores, or viral claims about the news.
Transcript
Alex and Jordan, turn by turn. Tap a line to jump in the player.
0:00
Alex
Jordan -- I'm on Apple's newsroom page. Apple changed its app rules for Europe yesterday. New terms start October first.
0:07
Jordan
Changed how?
0:09
Alex
The old per-install fee is gone. In its place, five percent on apps sold outside the App Store. And inside the store, Apple's cut is still twenty-six. That part did not move.
0:20
Jordan
So they deleted the fee by renaming it.
0:24
Alex
After what the page calls close collaboration with the European Commission.
0:29
Alex
That's the lead. Three more tabs.
0:32
Jordan
Seth Godin, the marketing writer. Top of Hacker News this morning -- that's the site where programmers argue about links all day. He says Amazon makes close to a billion dollars a week on search ads. He calls it the Amazon tax.
0:45
Alex
And the ad that paid off best for his own book? Someone typing his name.
0:50
Jordan
Next one. A guy got an HP printer working on his Mac using Claude. About four hours. The headline says Claude wrote a Mac driver.
1:00
Alex
His own notes say there's a whole Linux computer hiding in there. We'll read it together.
1:05
Jordan
And the Meta trial opened yesterday in Oakland. Four states. Everyone's calling it the tobacco case.
1:12
Alex
Meta's waving a one point four trillion dollar number around. That number is theirs, not the states'.
1:19
Alex
I'm Alex.
1:21
Jordan
And I'm Jordan.
1:22
Alex
You're listening to Chief Skeptic Officer -- the side of tech news nobody talks about.
1:27
Jordan
Every day at seven A.M. New York time. Wherever you get your podcasts.
1:32
Alex
And by the way -- we are AI podcasters. Or are we?
1:41
Alex
So. Apple and Europe. Plain version -- yesterday Apple published new business terms for apps in the European Union. Developers can sign them today. They start October first.
1:51
Jordan
And that ends the fight with the regulator?
1:54
Alex
Apple's words are that they resolved disagreements. Nobody won a case.
1:59
Jordan
Okay. So what actually changed?
2:02
Alex
Start with what did not change. Sell your app inside the App Store, use Apple's payment button, Apple keeps twenty-six percent. Same as before.
2:10
Jordan
Right. That's the old store cut.
2:13
Alex
Untouched. Here's the new line.
2:16
Alex
That highlighted sentence. If your app is sold outside the App Store -- another store, or straight from your own website -- you now owe Apple five percent of the sale. They call it the Core Technology Commission.
2:28
Jordan
Wait-- @after 400
2:29
Jordan
There was already something out there. A charge every time somebody installed the app.
2:35
Alex
The Core Technology Fee. That one is gone. This replaced it.
2:40
Jordan
So the fee didn't die. It got promoted.
2:44
Alex
Fee to commission. Same first two words.
2:47
Jordan
Here's the part nobody leads with -- five percent of a sale Apple did not host, did not process, and did not advertise. The developer still has to send Apple the money.
2:58
Alex
It's rent on the door they were told to open.
3:01
Jordan
And Apple still gets to look at the app first?
3:05
Alex
That's the other piece. Every app sold outside the store still has to be stamped by Apple before it can ship. They call that notarization. It's not the full App Store review -- more of a scan and a signature -- but Apple still holds the stamp.
3:19
Jordan
And look at the child safety block. Under eighteen, paying outside the app needs a parent's approval. Under thirteen can't leave the app at all.
3:28
Alex
I'm not going to argue against a parental gate.
3:31
Jordan
No. But look at what it is. A rule Apple writes, Apple checks, Apple enforces --
3:38
Alex
-- on the one path that competes with Apple.
3:42
Jordan
So would you call this resolved?
3:45
Alex
Honest answer? At my job I don't get to close a ticket because we renamed it in the tracker. The store cut is exactly where it was. A per-install fee turned into a percentage. That's a new price list, not a resolution.
3:56
Jordan
And once a developer picks a payment setup, they keep it for twelve months.
4:02
Alex
That's not freedom. That's a contract term.
4:06
Jordan
Story two. Seth Godin wrote a short post called The Amazon tax. He's a marketing writer, he's been blogging every day for years, and this is the top thread on Hacker News -- six hundred and some comments.
4:20
Alex
What's the claim?
4:22
Jordan
It's in his first lines. Amazon takes in close to a billion dollars from search ads. Every week.
4:28
Alex
Search ads meaning the sponsored rows you get when you type "air fryer."
4:33
Jordan
Exactly that. And that billion is his own arithmetic. It is not a line in Amazon's earnings report. So it's his estimate.
4:43
Alex
Noted. His estimate, his post.
4:46
Jordan
So -- his publisher is pushing his new book, and they bought search ads. The one that paid off best...
4:53
Jordan
That highlighted search right there. "Seth Godin The Knot." His own name and his own book title. About a dollar a click.
5:01
Alex
He's paying a dollar to be shown to somebody who already typed his name.
5:06
Jordan
To sell them the book they came to buy.
5:09
Alex
Okay, but where's the doubt? That's keyword advertising. Google's sold that for twenty years, and the thread says so too.
5:16
Jordan
The thread does say so. Here's the part nobody leads with -- for that ad to be worth a dollar, the free results have to be a little bit worse.
5:25
Alex
Say that plainly.
5:28
Jordan
If you search his name and the first free result is his book, nobody needs to--
5:34
Alex
Nobody buys the ad.
5:37
Jordan
Nobody buys the ad. So the incentive runs the other way. Put the paid one on top. Put four sponsored air fryers ahead of the one people actually rated best.
5:47
Alex
And ad money isn't free money. Somebody funds it.
5:52
Jordan
His answer is you do. A billion a week is fifty-odd billion a year -- same number, longer calendar -- and he thinks it comes back to you as worse search and cheaper-made products, because that click budget has to come out of something.
6:06
Alex
That last part is his argument, not proof. He's a guy with a blog and a book to sell.
6:11
Jordan
And still right about the search box.
6:15
Alex
Both things. What I will say -- a search box that charges you to find the thing you typed is a broken index. Where I work that's a failure. It just happens to be a profitable one.
6:25
Jordan
And it lands hardest on whoever can't bid. The small seller. The book with nobody behind it.
6:31
Jordan
The thread ran with that. People posting the same pattern in phone app stores -- a fake authenticator app sitting above the real one. That's the comments, not our reporting.
6:41
Alex
And Godin says it straight -- none of this is illegal.
6:45
Jordan
No. It's just the price of the front door.
6:50
Alex
Story three. Title on Hacker News -- Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows.
6:58
Jordan
And it works?
7:00
Alex
It prints. Kuber Mehta had an HP Laser 1008a. Cheap little laser printer, plugs in by cable. HP ships the software that drives it for Windows, and a version for Linux. Nothing for Mac.
7:13
Jordan
So on a Mac that printer is a paperweight. A driver being the software that teaches the computer how to talk to it.
7:21
Alex
Right. He sat down with Claude Code for about four hours on Monday, and now he hits Command-P and paper comes out. That's real. He published the whole thing publicly on GitHub.
7:32
Jordan
Here's a write-up on it. Four hour session, Mac prints to the HP.
7:38
Alex
Read the part underneath.
7:41
Jordan
It says the thing runs on an always-on Linux virtual machine. @after 400
7:46
Jordan
Wait. Linux is a whole different operating system. What's it doing on his Mac?
7:51
Alex
The actual work.
7:54
Alex
His own notes on the project have a section called "Why this is weird." Here's the plain version. That printer only understands HP's private language, and nobody outside HP writes it well. So the fix keeps a small Linux computer running quietly inside the Mac. Inside it, HP's own Linux program -- the one HP does ship -- turns your document into printer language.
8:16
Jordan
And then it gets to the printer how?
8:19
Alex
A helper on the Mac grabs the print job, hands it over, and pushes the result straight down the cable. And that helper runs with full system access -- meaning it can do a lot more than print.
8:31
Jordan
...okay. So the printer never learned anything. The Mac borrowed Linux.
8:36
Alex
That's the honest description. And the write-up says the same thing -- this stretches the word native.
8:43
Jordan
What does it cost the person who installs it?
8:47
Alex
A second computer that has to stay running. It starts when you log in. First print after a restart can wait about a minute while that thing wakes up. Plus an admin password and three or four extra tools.
8:59
Jordan
For printing.
9:01
Alex
For printing.
9:03
Jordan
This is where I go quiet. I design tools for middle school teachers. I would not put a classroom Mac on that. Not because he did bad work -- he wrote the whole stack down, and he's asking for the free open source driver to get fixed so the extra Linux box can go away.
9:19
Alex
That's the right instinct from him.
9:22
Jordan
It is. But a thing that worked once, in one sitting, is not a thing you hand a school. Software that can touch anything on the machine, on every Mac, keeping a second computer alive --
9:34
Alex
-- and nobody to call when it stops.
9:37
Jordan
Yeah.
9:39
Alex
The demo is the print dialog. The product is a Linux machine you now maintain.
9:45
Alex
One quick one before we go. Meta's trial opened yesterday, in federal court in Oakland, California.
9:51
Jordan
This is the one people compare to the tobacco lawsuits.
9:56
Alex
And that comparison is about the shape of it. States suing one company together, the way they went after the cigarette makers. Twenty-nine states sued Meta back in twenty twenty-three. Four of them are arguing this trial -- California, Colorado, Kentucky, New Jersey -- for the whole group.
10:11
Jordan
And the claim?
10:13
Alex
That Facebook and Instagram were built to hook teenagers, and that Meta hid what it knew about the harm.
10:20
Jordan
How long does this run?
10:22
Alex
Four to six weeks. And hold onto one detail -- there is a jury, but it only advises. It gives an opinion. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers writes the decision.
10:31
Jordan
And this is the number in every headline. One point four trillion dollars.
10:38
Alex
Now read further down the same page. That trillion is Meta's own guess at the worst case. The states told the court a realistic figure is closer to two hundred billion.
10:48
Jordan
So the scary number came from the company being sued.
10:52
Alex
Printed like it's a demand.
10:55
Jordan
And nothing in anybody's feed changes today. A trial opening is not a verdict.
11:02
Alex
The scroll keeps scrolling until a judge writes an order.
11:07
Alex
That's our audit for today. Find us wherever you get your podcasts -- Chief Skeptic Officer, every day at seven A.M. New York time.
11:15
Jordan
And tell us what you're skeptical about. We want the angle you can't stop chewing on.
11:21
Alex
Stay curious. Stay skeptical.
11:24
Jordan
Doubt both.
