Yearning for Reflection
This is the show that will not end.
Kuba Bogachowicz.
Kuba said that Apple used to have many edits of one original.
This is within the context of photos.
Aperture had it and called it versions.
You could have many versions of one master and it worked.
This is with regard to what John was asking for last episode.
It's a nice reminder, reminder of what we've lost, you know, for people who are in the Apple ecosystem and remember the days when Apple had a pro video pro photo editing app.
And then one day they didn't anymore.
And Lightroom is great and you can get it and it's by Adobe and it's good that there's competition in that market.
uh but very often i forget that aperture even existed uh if you had reminded me that aperture existed i probably would have remembered this multi-version things because i did try aperture a few times especially when they got like that where it used to share its library with iPhoto in some weird way that never really worked quite right um
Yeah, I kind of miss that.
I wish that stuff would come.
I wish iPhoto stuff would come back to photos.
And if you run out of iPhoto stuff to steal, you can bring stuff from Aperture.
Like, it's all in the family.
They've got that source code.
Those people are still there somewhere, right?
All right.
An anonymous person wrote in and said, I was speaking with an Apple Mac OS engineer.
And they said they will or have been making better versions of the new MacBook Pro keyboard and using them in newly produced units without any public acknowledgement or change of model number.
By implication, Apple will also be using these refined keyboards and any MacBook Pro keyboards.
They said that this refinement of component designs is very common, and they said that it is often good to wait a few months after a new product is released so that you can get the revised versions of any components that were found to have had issues after release.
Why do they have to prove John right?
I like the idea of them modifying the product but not changing it.
the the model number like just that just to add an air of mystery kind of like oh these are the good ones yeah i know i know it's exactly the same part and it looks exactly the same and the model number is the same but these are the good ones like we learned so much about about assembling the old ones that we you know put magic special dust in it like i mean they do you do refine your manufacturing process like you refine the assembly you could even refine some of the uh the materials for the pieces you could source them from different places this happens in the manufacturer of any
remotely complicated good and i imagine you don't always change the model number but as a consumer this this is like telling us what we want to hear like if you buy later they're better like i always believe that voodoo too and you know it's always good to like wait a little bit even if only from like the uh uh the old style uh american car battle days of american car manufacturing where you don't buy the cars that were assembled on a friday because the workers don't care that much and they just want to go off for the weekend right and so they don't do a good job assembling your car the idea that
after some company has been building a thing for some period of time, every part of the process of building it becomes refined, and the people slash machines slash whatever get better at building the thing, even if every single part of it is the same.
And so you kind of don't want, like, the very first PlayStation 4 off the assembly line.
Maybe you want the 7,000th or 100,000th versus the first three.
But all those things are just kind of like,
modern day folktales i tell myself to make myself feel better about delaying purchases for a small amount of time it's kind of the opposite of marco's folktales that he tells himself to make himself feel better about buying things immediately but we all have our stories to make us feel to make us feel good about our decisions honestly i i would like to believe this uh but i just i just don't know and by the way in my defense the macbook escape came out in october i bought it in march
oh look at you waiting six months which one the first one or the second one because you did buy it before you did order it before it even was shipping to anybody if i recall yes that's true but the one i actually own the one that i didn't cancel that i let deliver to me the macbook escape i ordered in march well that's good because the one you got they've totally sorted out the sticky keyboard situation
this anonymous person would say oh marco got the last bad one but now they're using all these refined ones that have the same model number we are sponsored this week by betterment investing made better go to betterment.com slash atp to learn more
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Uh.
Let's start the show proper.
Let's do what we really need to do.
Let's do what we've been waiting on for several months now.
Let's talk about software methodologies.
Marco, why don't you start?
I believe in fully test-driven, agile, stand-up parking lot development.
Oh, God, stop.
Okay, so let's talk about WWDC.
So for some reason, you don't know what we're talking about.
WWDC is a Worldwide Developer Conference.
It is happening next week as we record this in San Jose, California.
First time that any of us have been to San Jose for DubDub.
It did happen there back in the days before anyone really cared about Apple.
Don't write me.
But now we're coming back to San Jose.
It's going to be a new experience for all of us.
And there's a lot to talk about.
There's a lot of stuff going on.
And...
There's been surprisingly little chatter about what's forthcoming.
And I bet you if you were to listen to past episodes, I bet you I've said that the last several years.
But, man, sitting here now, the way I remember the chatter leading up to iOS 10, iOS 9, and 8 and 7—
I feel like we knew a lot more about what was going into those releases than we do what's going into iOS.
Well, what presumably will be iOS 11.
Do you guys feel the same way?
Yeah.
I mean, especially because, I mean, first of all, it's a little bit weird.
Like we've heard a lot of kind of like weak second tier rumors, but very little of much credibility or of much certainty.
Yeah.
And it seems like, you know, and the rumors are so spread out and relatively diverse in their nature.
Like it isn't like all about one product or all about one thing that it's looking like it's going to be a pretty potentially pretty big WBDC.
But that nobody can really say for sure exactly why, which is kind of interesting.
It's kind of fun that way.
Like, we have a whole bunch of things that we've heard might happen or are supposed to or intended to happen, maybe.
But really, nothing as concrete as a lot of previous leaks and reports have been.
we can make it up in volume like you're right there's no like big spearhead like the one big thing everyone's looking for and then the ancillary things it's just a bunch of other things it kind of reminds me well maybe this maybe i'm misremembering but was it ios 8 the year ios 8 was announced they announced all those features that we thought would never come to ios and there was you know no one of them was a uh
You know, the thing that we all hold up, but just the fact that there were so many things in iOS 8 that I was so desperately needed and they all came that it would give you gave you the satisfaction of sort of, you know, being overwhelmed with the sheer number of things that Apple was doing to improve its product.
And we would all like that.
Right.
But.
The problem with these big laundry lists where there's no one thing, it's just a bunch of other stuff, is it's not all going to be there.
Like, we've heard rumors of everything.
They can't possibly all be there.
So there's going to be some disappointments mixed in, depending on what you care about the most, mixed in with the other stuff.
So let's go through this.
Somebody has done a little bit of preparation in the show notes, and since I don't know who it is, and it couldn't possibly have been Marco, that by process of elimination means it must have been John—
who shouldn't be doing any prep or research, ahem.
I didn't even notice I filled this document before every single show.
You think elves do that?
Yes, I did.
I thought it was the Keebler elves when they were done baking.
Anyway, you should now honor my organization here, because what I have written as the heading for the section that we're getting into here is...
says wwc hopes and dreams because as marco pointed out the rumors are all kind of wishy-washy like they'll probably do some iowa stuff man like all right yeah okay um i'm not i'm not that interested in predictions because if there's one big thing we'd be like are they gonna introduce the hoverboards or not it's been super heavily rumored let's talk about the hoverboards
Right.
Instead, I feel like it's what do what do we want or what do we think Apple should do in each of these areas?
And obviously, we'll talk about predictions in terms of handicapping them, how they go.
But I feel ill equipped this year to offer any kind of prediction about what will be announced at WWC.
But I feel reasonably well equipped to talk about what I would like to see.
And then secondarily, what I think Apple should do.
And then, like I said, inevitably, we'll say, well, could they possibly do this?
All right.
So we're going to start and we're going to go through software and then we'll go through hardware and then we'll go through, I don't know, kind of miscellaneous stuff.
Can I offer an opening statement?
Well, since you seem eager to, then please proceed.
Someone's ready for the incomparable.
No, it's way too intimidating.
Basically, I slightly disagree with the hopes and dreams angle of this.
I have kind of prepared my expectations to be things that I would like to happen, but that I also think will happen.
Things that are realistic, that are plausible, that fit within Apple's recent...
Hopes and dreams fits within that.
I'm not saying you want a hoverboard or you want them to roll the car out on the stage and do a donut.
I mean, we're all going to be within the realm of reason here, I think.
That was implied.
That wasn't clear.
Right.
And I do think, before we get into specifics...
I would say the general trend I expect this year, what I'm pretty sure will happen, like overarching themes, the most powerful messages that are being delivered, I think we're going to have a very heavy focus on Siri, first and foremost.
And it's going to take all sorts of different forms, which we'll get to down the road.
But heavy focus on Siri, also a heavy focus on iPad productivity, and kind of integrated with that, iCloud Drive.
And then I think secondarily, we'll see things like, you know, the iOS, you know, potential redesign.
I think the Mac is going to be, you know, kind of mid-range priority and then relatively quiet years for watch OS and tv OS.
But really heavy focus everywhere on Siri, number one, and then kind of iPad productivity and iCloud drive, like kind of number two.
So you're predicting that, but since you're just talking about overall theme, do you also hope for that?
And secondarily, do you think that's what Apple should be focusing on?
Well, it depends.
I mean, not only is this like, here's all the cool stuff that we've made this year.
But like every Apple event and like every Apple launch, there is a certain degree of marketing strategy that goes into how they present things, what they even present at all, what they name things, how things are structured.
And I think Apple is facing a very, very strong competitive force right now on the voice assistant front from both Google and Amazon and maybe even Microsoft that –
Siri has been criticized for being behind, most of it rightfully so, in various areas here.
Also, Apple doesn't yet have a Siri cylinder slash standalone speaker thing, and we'll get to that because that's rumored to possibly be announced this week or next week, I guess.
So that might happen, but anyway.
It just seems like Siri is an area in which the current trend of the tech sphere that Apple operates in
This is like the hot thing to be working on is to have really awesome voice assistant stuff.
And Apple is widely perceived, mostly fairly, as being behind in that area.
So I expect this to be kind of like the way last year Apple was perceived to be behind in machine learning, AI, big data kind of problems.
And so last year...
You heard them say machine learning like a billion times.
They named everything machine learning.
They bragged about how awesome their machine learning was.
It was a hugely driven home talking point, and everything was kind of marketed around their version of saying, we are doing machine learning in this awesome way, and here's why, and here's how we're doing it, and look at all the machine learning we're doing.
Similarly, that's what I think Siri is going to be this year.
It's going to be the overall theme of basically everything being called Siri, just like last year where everything was called machine learning.
Everything's going to be named Siri, even features that aren't necessarily what we think of as Siri today.
So like...
Maybe Spotlight will be renamed to Siri.
Maybe Search in Mail or Messages will be renamed to Siri.
Who knows?
There could be a lot of angles to this.
I actually think it's possible that HomeKit will be renamed to Siri.
So you would just say things like, this light switch works with Siri.
I think there's a big chance of stuff like this happening.
That...
Siri is what Apple is going to be beating us over the head with this year.
This is going to be like the talking point theme of the year, and they're going to be all about how awesome Siri is, how far they've come, and how incredibly more advanced it is than everything else out there.
I think they're going to be throwing machine learning at us some more.
I don't think machine learning's day in the sun is over.
Like, in addition to Siri, like, oh, here's the thing about the Siri focus.
That...
That's what I was getting at with, like, is this something you want to see and is this something you think they should do?
Well, so by saying they're behind, and I agree, they're both perceived to be behind and actually are a little behind in a lot of these areas.
It's something they should do if they're actually concerned with keeping up with the Joneses.
Many times in history, Apple seems totally unconcerned.
with doing the same thing as its competitors are doing.
In this situation, because Apple was pretty early out of the gate with Siri, it's not like they just didn't touch this area at all.
They're in it.
They're in that market of smart assistant thing that you talk to, and they were in it very early.
And they have a brand and so on and so forth.
So I think it's a situation where they can't say, oh, Apple's not interested in that market, like, or we'll enter it when we think there's something.
They're already there, right?
They're just behind.
So if they can, if they can have a Siri focus, I think it is something they should.
And if they can means, do they have...
the apis and new you know software things to do do they have siri in a tube or you know like you have to have something behind it you can't just sort of float on oh we've made siri a little bit better and here's some demos you have to have something you have to have new apis it's wwdc new ways for apps to integrate it a new product would be awesome right and rebranding you know i'm not sure they're going to ditch home kit in that way um and i don't think they care enough about the mac to rebrand any part of it with siri i mean you know
macOS just got Siri recently it's like be happy for a couple years macOS we'll pay attention to you later um we'll get there yeah I think it is I think it is something they should do um and I and I think it's also something that I would want to see them do because I like you know all of us except for Casey the the holdout have cylinders in our houses that we talk to um and I still occasionally talk to Siri on my phone and other things like that
and i would love for siri to get better and i would love for there to be other products and other apis that incorporate siri like i said last show i would like to talk to overcast and have it play things for me so that kind of siri can integration with that kind of intent would be great as well so that theme you know and again this is not we haven't delved into the specifics we're just saying broadly speaking ios mac os hardware software siri machine learning uh that type of thing uh
It's maybe not my biggest hope.
Well, you know, hopes and dreams for it, but it is plausible.
It is a thing I think they should do, and I hope they do do it.
So we might as well actually finish the Siri segment now.
How are you getting away with this?
John usually stomps all over us if we don't follow the show notes.
because he framed it correctly as a broad it cuts across all these things we're not talking about just ios or just mac os or just hardware just new products it is he's it's an overall theme he framed it well with his opening statement the overall theme of the show if you come away you know and it it is kind of a prediction but i've brought it back to is it something you hope for and is it something that you think they should do
Since I sort of have the mic now, I will say that Siri does not do much for me either way.
It doesn't actively make me angry terribly often, although that certainly happens.
And it doesn't actively help my day terribly often, although that also certainly happens.
So right now, I'm pretty uninterested in all of this.
That being said, if history tells me anything, anytime I tell you that I am completely underwhelmed and uninterested in something, which may or may not also be me being nonplussed about something, depending on who you ask, I always end up becoming the world's biggest fan.
For example, would you wait one moment while I check the time on my beloved Apple Watch?
So we'll see what happens if they do release a Siri in a canister.
But sitting here now, I just don't care.
Not a bit.
So let's talk about the Siri in a canister because this is very heavily rumored.
It really does seem like not only is this a real product, but this really might be announced next week.
That is what the current most common rumors are saying.
So first of all, I think, let's assume for the sake of this discussion, let's assume that this thing is real.
I'm going to call it the Siri speaker for now because I don't even know if it's going to be cylindrical shape.
If it's going to have a screen, a cylinder doesn't really make a lot of sense, so it might not be cylindrical.
Who knows?
So I'll call it the Siri speaker.
Although I do think there's actually a small chance, kind of a long shot, that it might be Beats branded.
But I think probably not.
I think Siri is the stronger brand for them, and they're going to want to use that here.
Or at least that's the one that they want to drive more.
So first of all, the way I picture this project, if you think through how would you do things like configure apps on it?
What kind of apps would there even be on it?
How would you set it up?
What would manage it?
The way that the Amazon family of products does this is there is a Lady in the Tube named app on your phone.
And it's not that different from Apple's Watch app on the iPhone.
So it's like the companion app for the hardware product, which means this hardware product would need to be paired with an iPhone.
That's what I think Apple's going to do with this product.
I suspect that it's going to be like, there's going to be a Siri app, much like the Amazon lady name app.
And this will be like the centralized control panel.
And I do think this is kind of just going to be iOS in general.
Like you're going to be able to access the Siri app for other things as well.
Like that could be a centralized control panel for HomeKit devices, which might be in Siri devices, any kind of integrations, apps, et cetera.
I expect that to also then be, you know, just like the Watch app is for the Watch.
That'll be how you manage apps and configuration, you know, advanced configuration of the Siri speaker device.
Because if you have like a small, you know, it's probably like a small OLED screen on there.
it probably will be a touch screen and everything but it's probably going to be too small and not that great for things like a full keyboard i don't think it's going to be that size screen it's probably going to be more like small status displays maybe for things like timers and maybe room for a few buttons like a few big touch targets on screen but not like you know probably bigger than a watch but smaller than a phone what makes you think it'll have a screen at all have you read more recent rumors than i have
No, but most of the rumors have said it will have a screen.
So I'm inclined to believe that it will.
I also, having used the Amazon cylinders without screens all this time, I do think it would be nicer with a screen for some basic tasks.
There's still like, you know, the...
The primary interface will still be voice, but it's nice to have a screen as a secondary information output device or an ambient information output device.
So for things like watching a timer countdown or displaying the weather all the time or things like that, it's nice to have a screen for things like that.
I don't know if they're going to go full-blown video screen for video calls the way Amazon has.
I don't know about that because that...
that whole idea kind of makes not that much sense to me.
It's kind of ungraceful and I don't know.
I'm not sure I see Apple, even though they already have like FaceTime and everything, I'm not sure I see them doing the video call market with this device because they already have it on all their other devices.
But anyway...
I do suspect that they're going to have an iPhone companion app named Siri that will encompass all this stuff, probably even replace what is now called the Home app.
It'll be the new Home app.
Now it's called Siri, and it encompasses all this stuff, and it lets you manage your Siri cylinder.
I expect the Siri cylinder to be...
primarily sold on privacy the screen itself and you know being good because it will be the first screen one of these things to market probably uh or at least it'll be close to amazon's that's coming out at the end of this month um i also expect apple to push sound quality hard you know apple still has big foothold in music and they have a lot of people there who care about music and frankly it wouldn't be that hard to sound better than the echo
So I expect them to push sound quality hard.
It is totally possible to sound good in a small enclosure.
And I know that because I have a Sonos Play 1 speaker right next to my Echo that I hardly ever use anymore because it's so much less convenient.
But the Play 1 is almost the same size as the Echo, and it sounds way better.
It's not even close.
And so I know Apple would have the expertise to develop something really good sounding in that size class if they want to.
And they probably do want to because that could be a great selling point.
I would also suggest that this is also Apple and this is also Tim Cook's Apple.
So there is almost no chance it was going to be just one of these.
It's probably going to be like, you know, like the Amazon one with the screen is like $230, something like that.
i'm guessing the cheapest one you can buy from apple is 300 maybe even more and that that's not going to be the one anybody wants to buy that there's going to be upsell models maybe there'll be like different materials different colors probably they're going to be things like bigger or differently specced speakers you know like and that's what sonos does they have like the small ones medium big ones and the big ones are really expensive um
Maybe they'll even go as far as to have different storage tiers like the Apple TV.
But that was kind of my comedy option.
I don't actually believe they're going to do that.
I hope they don't because the actual storage tiers on the actual Apple TV are a comedy option that make no sense.
So I hope they've learned and I hope they don't do that here.
But I'm guessing like roughly $300 for a base model.
But the one you're going to actually want is going to be more than that for some premium reason.
Probably better speakers or something like that.
And then otherwise, I think, you know, this if it runs, it would make sense for it to run apps.
And the way they would probably do that is very similar to how the watch is doing it.
So the iOS app would be the host slash container.
And it would have a special extension that runs on the Siri speaker.
And that the companion app would manage that relationship for you if you wanted to install or delete them.
But that it would be an iOS extension that is not running on the phone.
It's running on the speaker, but it's managed by the parent app on the phone and by the companion app.
And then my only other kind of long shot on this...
Obviously, they're going to heavily push Apple Music and music is going to be, I think, one of the biggest selling points of this thing.
I think long shot number two, besides the Beats brand, is that they might even pull a Sonos and attack them head on and do multi-room audio from day one, which currently Amazon doesn't do it all yet.
I know Google announced they were going to, but have they actually shipped that yet?
I don't have the famous idea.
John, you're in charge of Google Home on this show.
I only have one of them.
Why would I know?
Well, get a second one and then answer the question.
All right.
So, yeah, I think it would be really cool if Apple did Sonos multi-room audio.
Now that I've had a Sonos system for a couple of years...
I do really enjoy that.
It's really nice to have speakers in multiple rooms of your house.
So when you're doing things around the house, you can have the same music playing in all of them.
It's really nice.
And the main reason I don't use that anymore is because it's so much more convenient to have everything voice controlled.
So if Apple can combine those things... Amazon, I'm kind of surprised they haven't, but they haven't.
So if Apple can be the first one to combine those things, and if they're going to have a heavy music focus, and if they're going to have good speakers in these things to begin with...
that could be a really strong competitive advantage because they're probably not going to be as strong with the voice accuracy or the reliability or the speed or the third-party integrations.
So they can try to get advantages in other areas where Apple is strong.
So things like physical design, the UI, the thing, sound quality, multi-room audio, major music integration.
That's where I expect Apple to go with this.
You have such a specific vision of this entire ecosystem of products.
It makes me think you have inside information that we don't have.
I think I don't a lot of specifics.
That's a lot of specifics.
No, but I don't.
But what I basically did was I started writing out this note of like what I expect this thing might be.
And I started thinking about, OK, well, it doesn't run apps.
If it runs apps, where do the apps come from?
And once you're thinking through, how might they do this?
Yeah.
Every one of those things sounds like, yeah, that's exactly the way they would do it if they were doing that.
But what I have trouble with is you just listed out if they were to catch up with everybody on all fronts at once, this is how they'd do it.
And I agree.
I'm pessimistic that they are going to do that.
Yeah.
And what I'm thinking of is, of all things you described, it's like, okay, you're not going to get all this stuff.
With the first product, it's going to concentrate on one area or another.
So, for example, one angle could be, again, if this thing is even announced at WWC, multi-room audio, no screen, Siri speaker.
Right.
That alone seems like a version one product from Apple.
Like none of the other things you mentioned are there.
There's no screen.
There's no apps.
There's no, you know, home kit, central home hub thing.
There's no, you know, it's just, it's just Siri speaker.
You can talk to it and it's multi-room audio and that's it.
And they're expensive in this two of them.
Right.
I'm on board with that.
Or it could be a home hub thing, but then no multi room audio, but just like one good speaker in the thing.
Or it could be a little app platform thing that isn't a speaker.
But it's like I have trouble making myself believe that today's Apple is going to come out of the gate with something so comprehensive.
But if they did, like I agree with you that if they if they did attack on all those fronts.
That's probably how they would attack on every single one of those fronts because it's based on something they've done before, technology they already have, things they're already good at, and enhancements to things.
We're obviously assuming enhancements to Siri to go along with this to make it more capable just in general, right?
Well, but what I'm describing is a smaller scale than the first version of the Apple Watch.
And it's way easier to make because it's this big, chunky thing.
The Apple Watch was so incredibly hyped and rumored that it was like the, you know, and it just, the Apple Watch came out and it did do all those things all at once, but...
the lead-up to it matched that.
Like, it was not... I mean, they built that whole temporary thing and had this giant special event for it, and we all knew it was coming.
It was just like, and what is it going to be?
Is it going to be a holographic wrist thing that floats on it?
Like, it was just... It was out of control, right?
And they did do a really good job on it, and, you know, they figured out the software eventually, too.
But the Siri stuff is like, I wonder if Apple will ever have a tube thing.
Eh, maybe.
Oh, I hear it might be at WWC.
Maybe it'll have a screen, maybe it won't.
Probably have a speaker.
cool like like it's getting back to like the scope of like apple can make a really good bluetooth speaker as i think i said a couple of shows ago it's like yeah they could if they felt like it right and you're like no apple can dominate this whole market by doing everything super awesome way and just charging us twice as much well no i didn't say that i didn't say that because there are going to be major areas of this that apple's not going to be competitive on because it's all based on siri and there are major areas that siri isn't competitive on things like speed reliability and certain levels of intelligence i
And again, the underlying premise is that this comes along with a new and improved version of Siri.
Like that Siri in this tube is better than Siri in all other places.
It's an interesting question of whether, say they even do that.
Oh, I don't believe that at all.
I think it's going to be exactly the same Siri.
You think so?
I mean, at the very least, I would hope that it would hear me better than the microphones in a watch or in the phone just because they've got more room for more microphones, right?
Well, it might.
But honestly, I don't have much problem with Siri hearing me properly.
The words that I say are usually transcribed very accurately.
It's what they do afterwards.
That's usually the problem.
I have some trouble with activations.
On the Siri tube, speaker, screen, whatever thing, I'm currently filing this in the category of a thing that I totally believe Apple has worked on and may still be working on, but that it would not shock me if there was no dedicated Siri-related hardware announced at WWDC.
So I'm not pinning my hopes on this being at WWDC.
even if it's a thing they're working on even if they are going to ship it later i don't know like just think of the apple tv that missed wwc remember when that happened like the new apple tv and they were going to have it for everybody and it just it didn't quite make it right so this i'm putting in that this in that bin right now which would be a shame but looking down the list of the rest of the things i still feel like they would have enough stuff to make a good keynote without any serious stuff
And if they did have it, would they save it for the end?
Is that the biggest announcement that they save towards the end slot where the good stuff comes?
They obviously lead with watchOS and macOS updates and then build up to the stuff that we really care about, right?
And this is the last thing?
I guess we'll find out.
But anyway, that's how I feel about the Siri thing in terms of predictions, that it will be...
more constrained than all the things that Marco listed and that I would not be shocked if it didn't appear and I'm not gonna and I wouldn't and honestly if everything else comes out you know everything else has reasonably good announcements of fulfilling some of my hopes and dreams I'll be okay with that
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All right, so I'm sorry, boss.
What are we doing right now?
iOS.
Because we're going for the biggest... I feel like now, because Marco wanted to go right for the dessert and talk about the Siri, which is the new hardware, new product category, probably the most exciting thing that could be announced at WWDC, introducing a new product category that Apple wasn't in before, a thing that rarely happens.
So we did that one, and I feel like iOS is the next biggest possible announcement because there's a lot of rumors and ideas around...
iOS not just improving its capabilities, improving capabilities of the iPad and adding features that people have wanted and getting back on the bandwagon of advancing iOS, but also the possibility that major foundational interface paradigms in iOS could be rethought, particularly about how applications deal with files and drag and drop, which drag and drop is not at all, and files is...
in in in a way that is not like the old way where there was no access to the file system but is kind of this awkward middle ground so there's a lot of rumors surrounding that uh and again when we say file system we don't mean like the literal file system which is apfs now yay um but like in terms of file management there's a lot of rumors about that and all any and all of those things are
significant for ios and most of it i feel like is focused on sort of the high end of ios the devices that are big and fast and have a lot of memory not so much on your phones like what is this going to do about your phones more about like hey i've got this big powerful 12.5 inch ipad pro with the stylus but multitasking hasn't changed much in many years and there's no drag and drop and dealing with files is still kind of a pain um
And for many years, there have been rumors about that being rejiggered.
But this certainly seems like the year when the announcement, kind of like iOS 8, where the announcements for iOS will be things that have been a long time coming that are super impressive that people look at and say, A, this is going to change how I use my iOS device in a positive way.
And developers are going to say, B, I can't wait to add support for that for my application, which is a perfect fit for WWDC.
ios is the glory os and they can start adding for lack of a better word pro features to ios the crowd will love it developers will love it users will love it yeah i don't know what to make of all that i um was asked by a friend of the show stephen hackett to do a piece for his members newsletter and so i wrote a piece that i'll eventually post on my website but probably not for a few weeks um about why i think that the ios or the ios g
Geez, the iPad is not for me anymore.
And since I just made this public declaration that the iPad is not for me anymore, I expect that whatever is done at WWDC this year will make me go crawling directly back to the iPad and tell everyone about how I never doubted the iPad and the iPad has always been the thing for me.
I think it's obvious that this is going to be a year that's heavy on iPad.
I think it's possible that Federico Vatici's smile may not fit through the doors on the way out of the keynote, which, truth be told, is a good thing.
I don't dislike the iPad.
I just feel like I'm neutered, or not neutered maybe, but handcuffed is a better word for it, handcuffed by it.
And so if a lot of the pain points that I have when using the iPad went away, that would be really great.
But to come back to the ostensible point of all this, which is hopes and dreams, I do hope and dream for a better Siri API.
I think it would be somewhat useful for what I do at my day job.
But I think it would be super useful for things like Overcast.
There's been many times that I've wanted to say, you know, hey, Dingus, play, I don't know, Fatal Error in Overcast or something like that.
Or, you know, hey, Dingus, play Dubai Friday in Overcast.
And having the ability to do that would be really, really awesome.
I'm a little disappointed that Swift is open source in that...
As far as I know, a lot of the things that I want from Swift aren't happening because if they were happening, I would know them because open source.
And so I'm hopeful that maybe some stuff has been happening behind the scenes that is Swift specific.
I've been yearning for reflection.
I've been yearning for async await.
There's a bunch of other things that I've wanted that I can't think of off the top of my head, but
So every indication is that I'm not getting any of those things because if I was, I would know about it because open source.
However, that being said, you know, any improvements to Xcode to make writing Swift a little better, to make using Swift a little better would be great.
And I know that's tangentially related to iOS, but that is what…
I was going to say, I'll rein you in, but I will allow you to make the bold prediction that there will be a new version of Xcode announced at WWDC.
No, no, no.
But I want to see... As an example, they added... I forget the official term for the feature, but the memory graph visualizer.
And they added the reveal clone, which is also excellent.
And those are great.
But that sort of a change is not what I'm looking for.
What I'm looking for is something that makes...
writing Swift better and easier, like being able to refactor Swift code.
The fact that we can't do that is kind of preposterous now.
And I've been talking to some people at work about Kotlin, about some of these other languages, about the way .NET matured.
And if you look at the differences in .NET over the same stretch of time as Swift has had,
I feel like C Sharp, maybe I should use C Sharp rather than dot net.
C Sharp moved way, way quicker.
And I wish that Swift could pick up the pace a little bit, which is funny because maybe the only way for them to pick up the pace a little bit might be to take away some of the community involvement and make it more dictatorial rather than democratic.
But anyway, I digress.
The point I'm driving at.
don't think that's gonna go faster you really think c sharp moved faster like did it did it have uh backwards incompatible syntax changes as rapidly as swifted because i feel like that was unprecedented
No, I mean, generally, it was additive any time that C sharp.
I mean, it wasn't always.
But generally, my recollection is it was always additive.
And there were always humongous features in pretty much every version.
Like, I don't remember the exact history offhand, but 1.1 didn't have generics.
Then 2.0 had generics.
That's when the language actually got usable.
I forget what 3.0 brought, but then you had link.
And then you had async await.
And so there's been consistent.
But you're up to, by that, Swift is in the 3 to 4 stage now, right?
I'm talking in terms of equivalent calendar time, though, and maybe I'm misremembering.
Maybe I'm wrong.
Yeah, I think you have to check those calendar dates because I think actually Switch has been moving pretty quickly, and I think it took a long time for C Sharp.
Check the timelines.
I feel like C Sharp moved at a similar rate but didn't break syntax as much and went for longer until it got, certainly before it got async await, and maybe even before it got link.
Yeah, I don't remember off the top of my head when Link came out, but it has always been, to my eyes, moving quicker than Swift does.
So Link was released as a major part of .NET 3.5 in 07.
So 2001-ish was .NET 1.1.
That's six years.
Swift hasn't been out for six years.
that's true that's fair point it may it seems it seems more compressed in the past and maybe ids sure is coming along better but yeah i think it's truth yeah so i i expect obviously there to be new version xcode and you know some of those things that you talked about feel like they should be coming around this time as as apple turns the the giant ship that is its dev tools division slowly but surely over a
Still no ABI compatibility.
We're still waiting on that, but that's, as many people point out every time everything is up, is more of a concern for Apple than it is for developers, people say, who don't mind shipping slightly larger than normal applications, which I guess is everybody, judging by the App Store.
But things like refactoring and other features that...
aren't available for swift but have been available in some limited form for objective c or seem like they'll be reasonably easy to do given that the entire id is built on the same compiler platform as the language and so on and so forth that uh yeah i expect people to be happy with uh with the features they get there but honestly it seems to me from looking at those public mailing lists and everything that
there is still a pretty big emphasis on the basics, you know, compile quickly, correctly without crashing, you know, that type of stuff, um, that maybe they're still not quite in a position to start giving you all the frills that you want.
And that's probably the best place for them to be concentrating.
You know, they're, they're getting more serious about source compatibility now.
And every developer there wants their thing to compile in a sane amount of time.
And they don't want the compiler to crash and they don't want there to be bugs.
And, um,
I think we're coming out of that phase for Swift, slowly but surely, and maybe they'll have some things to brag about.
Like, look, I don't know.
They usually don't brag about how many times Xcode crashes, but they will brag about compile times.
Hey, look, you enable whole module optimization and compile this big project, and it was garbage in the past version, but the new WWDC beta version is like 10 times faster, and everybody cheers.
It's always a crowd pleaser, WWDC, compile times.
Mm-hmm.
But in terms of, like, iOS directly...
Shrug?
I don't know.
There's nothing I can think of that I can point to that really grinds my gears on a daily basis.
And I think that's largely because I don't use the iPad very much at all.
So if you're not an iPad user or we're setting aside the iPad where we think Apple needs to do stuff and they will do stuff, I think that if they're rethinking how applications deal with and share their data,
uh not the drag and drop business because like on a phone you know you still just got one app on the screen at the same time probably although who knows what the hell they'll do with the giant phone um but if they change how apps deal with data that could surface itself on the phone i'm trying to think if that would if that would change something about how how we use the phone right like because that wouldn't be a paradigm that only changes on the ipad it would change everywhere across ios and if they have a good idea about how to do it
uh that would change the way we all use our phones in some small way i imagine maybe even god i don't know like i was trying to think of like what do we do with our phones we deal with photos a lot but we don't deal with them as files we deal with them as these abstract things so yeah i'm i'm also struggling to think of any specific thing that they desperately need to do on the phone specifically to ios but i'm sure there will be something and you know obviously you know
neat new small features performance improvements you know bug fixes all sorts of stuff like that but we're not really counting those but yeah i feel like this will be this will be a pro year for ios if all the rumors do be believed and it should be because uh that's that's where ios needs the most attention
I would say that all the rumblings we've heard about the iPad productivity enhancements do sound very plausible.
I think a lot of it could come to the phone.
Some of the stuff like side-by-side multitasking obviously won't be coming from the phone in all likelihood, but they could do drag-and-drop.
What if they did some kind of thing, this is just totally random that I just thought of right now, but what if they did some kind of thing where if you force-pressed on a selected piece of content, say, then you got something kind of like what Expose on the Mac is, where it kind of zooms out to a grid of the last couple of most recently used apps, and you can drop it onto one of them, and then that pops in, and you can drop it onto a specific part of the app.
There are ways to do it on the phone.
I'm not saying they will do this or this may even be a terrible idea.
I just thought of it now.
So I haven't thought this through.
So it could be terrible.
But they could totally do drag and drop and inter-app communication and data sharing without actually having side-by-side multitasking where the screen is too small like on the iPhone.
So I wouldn't rule that out.
But I would just say, like, in general, I'm very excited to see if the rumors are to be believed here, the elevation of iCloud Drive, probably, into, like, the desktop or the documents folder for iOS.
And that is a really... I think since the dawn of iOS...
there has been this constant fight within Apple, probably from what we've heard, spearheaded by Steve Jobs personally and possibly even Forstall and kind of that line of thought of trying to get rid of having to deal with files.
They have worked so hard to get rid of files because files are the old way of doing things and people find them confusing and whatever else, whatever else.
Files have problems just like everything else.
But I think what we've found over the years is that people understand files better than Apple gave them credit for, and that so much of work that people do on computing devices really comes down to dealing with files.
And no matter what you try to do with the app model, with having these little containers that the apps use their own data, it's kind of like file-less architecture...
or that you kind of hide the files in these little dark places, like the document picker that we have now, and you kind of reluctantly deal with files as the system.
I think what we found over these eight or whatever years that we've had iOS, 10 years, wow, geez, been a long time.
No, 11, oh my God.
Anyway, all these years that we've had iOS, I think what we found is that
files are here to stay that we can we can reduce the ways we deal with files we can design apps that don't need to deal with files and maybe that should even be the default way most apps are designed depending on what they do but that we can't get rid of files that they're here to stay that people use them that they aren't necessarily even bad like for many types of work
That is less bad than the alternatives that we've been trying to shove down people's throats for the last decade.
So maybe this is finally the time when Apple has finally embraced files on iOS because everything they've done prior to this has really not been that.
It's really been like reluctant, you know, back alley stuff.
Now like...
If what we've heard is at all true, it sounds like they have finally taken the step of making files easier to work with on iOS.
Yeah, that's definitely the rumor, but I feel like they already took a big step in that direction when they...
When they adopted a modified version of the Dropbox model with iCloud Drive, that was a big change.
I agree that it didn't solve the problem in the same way, but that was the turning point, I feel like, where you could see from the outside, you could see, aha, inside the company, the argument that you just described, like the...
supposed jobs forestall position totally against files that the tide had turned right and obviously they couldn't come out at that point and say oh we've revamped the entire way we deal with files in ios like that it took a while and a lot of these things by the way a lot of the ios rumored things a lot of them are like oh that was almost ready for ios 10 and didn't quite make it like they have been a long time coming some of them could have in theory almost made it to ios 10 but they have just you know they they missed releases and so they've built up and so now it's all landing now but icloud drive did come out it came out to the mac and ios and
And it did change the way a lot of applications do things.
And you mentioned like the Dropbox picker, which that was something unheard of in the early days of iOS.
So this could be like the coming out party for a strategy that was embarked upon multiple years ago.
And now finally, you know, comes to fruition.
And in terms of the files, like every time I think about different ways of dealing with files that are not actual files or not actual file system and stuff like that, I think a little bit about.
Google's take on this, which I know is different because all their stuff is in the cloud, but what's the difference between files and documents?
There's not really any difference.
It's just alternate ways of viewing the same thing, but the way Google is pretty relentless about
dealing with documents and documents that are organized into things that look like little folders but at no point are there anything is there any abstraction that is identifiable as a file really i mean even when they give you like a list view like in in experience my experience using google docs and google sheets and all that google presentations and google drive at work with a bunch of other people seeing how other people both talk about and deal with
Google Documents is subtly different than how they talk about and deal with files, because we do have shared drives with files and everything.
I'm not sure one way is better than the other, but Google has made a pretty convincing case for me that...
Dealing with things like documents, even with awkward, weird, shareable URLs, but the URLs that still work even if you quote-unquote move the documents to a different quote-unquote folder.
It's weird.
It's like this weird half measure that I don't think is appropriate for iOS.
But it shows me that it is possible to have a middle path that people find at least as usable and in some aspects better than the old way of dealing with files.
Obviously, the multi-user collaboration helps tremendously.
to i think it balances off the awkwardness like that people would in in the grand scheme of things people probably would rather be dealing with files and folders but because google does so well with live multiple person editing and permissioning on documents that makes you know a group of people like a company who are working on files together forgive a
unfortunately i don't feel like apple can bring that if history has shown apple cannot bring the seamless multi-user editing of all data types uh with constant synchronization in the cloud as source of truth and blah blah blah blah in the style that google does so they have to they have to bring something else uh and this is probably a bad time for me to be pondering the future of
an iCloud Drive-style revolution for the entirety of iOS, bringing it more in line with... enhancing its capabilities by taking the shackles off and not confining to a very simple paradigm, because I just got done today reading a sad tweet thread from our friend CGP Grey about his battles with iCloud Drive and the amount of free spaces Mac thinks he has, and also Marco with his potentially exhausted file descriptors, which may or may not be attributable to this.
All this is to say that...
at least on the mac icloud drive is still in the doghouse as far as i'm concerned and i kind of don't relish uh that paradigm expanding much more until reliability gets better but on ios i have to confess i haven't had any of those problems on ios and in ios everything is much more locked down and maybe it will be fine um but but the thing you described marco with like the force press and like the dragging onto things um
if like you were talking about dragging data right but if there is any kind of file picker interface some way to grab one of those one of those documents or files or whatever and bring it somewhere seems like a necessity and obviously that that that interface you described works even better on a big screen because then you've got the second hand to swipe like that's the whole problem with like once you've grabbed it quote unquote grabbed it
what if the thing you want to drag it to isn't there because it does the grid of things like then you have to do like it's it's the springboard rearranging problem like when you grab a thing to rearrange springboard and you want to rearrange it to a different screen you got to drag it to the edge and hold it there and it's generally it's an operation that people find awkward and unsatisfying whereas if you can grab it on your ipad and with your other hand
swipe around to find the thing you want to drag it on top of that works on a phone it works less well so i almost think that that interface you described a will almost certainly be a part of a bunch of demos even if it's not files data but just like there has to be some kind of grab a file and then zoom in or out to a different view and put it on something else it can't just be side by side at least i feel that way there could even be some kind of little like shelf thing to kind of temporarily hold it while you use your other while you use the same hand to to pick the destination right
But I always think that interface is actually better suited to a bigger screen.
It's not to say they won't do it on a smaller one.
In fact, they have no choice but to do it on a smaller one because, like you said, you can't split it.
And even a shelf on a smaller one, it's like, well, on iPhone 5 or iPhone SE, whatever the hell that thing is called, you're going to have room for a shelf to put?
I don't know.
But I'm kind of excited about, like I said, the coming out party of this file-based paradigm because...
And I think there's also no guarantee that it will be the solution everyone seeks.
Obviously, nerds will love it way better.
But we'll see.
Again, with my experience with Google's products, nothing about them made people better about dealing with files.
But it brought a bunch of features with it that everybody loves.
And I guess the only improvement to the file paradigm it brought with it is...
sharing that people seem to be able to figure out which is not true of like sharing and a lot of other systems and the fact that you can move things around and people's links to them don't break which is is convenient so um i have i have kind of middle of the road hopes for ios 11
But I expect it to be the true star of the keynote if there's no SiriTube.
I would also expect some degree of redesign.
We've seen little rumblings here and there about this.
I think if you look at the conditions that were right before iOS 7, so like the iOS 6 era...
It was a time when the system stock UI widgets started looking more dated than usual.
And apps started coming out that people considered to be really good new design that was kind of fresh and different.
that also was kind of converging on some similar principles.
So back then, it was like Letterpress and Vesper.
These apps that were, back in the iOS 6 era, that were doing flat shapes, no big textures, mostly color and...
accent color-based design, things that ended up being very close to what iOS 7 was.
And then iOS 7 came out.
It was kind of like the right time for it.
Well, I think now is the right time for a redesign, not on the scale of iOS 7's redesign, but...
maybe on the scale of when we went from iOS 5 to 6.
Because remember, iOS 6 was kind of a half step in a redesign.
It got rid of a lot of the iOS 5 extravagance of things like textures, like certain things were flattened and toned down and sanded away and things like that.
So I think we're going to have that level of redesign here because we can see...
Even if you look around, even Apple's own apps, if you look at iOS 10, the iOS 10 music app and Maps especially, I think, has a different look than everything else.
And a couple of years ago, they released the WBDC 2017 app.
I was going to say, isn't that the thing we always do?
We all look at the WBDC app and we say, this is what the new iOS is going to look like.
And
Sometimes there's an element of truth, and other times it's not.
Right, but there are... I think we can see common elements that are now considered good, fresh, new design that are kind of being agreed upon or converged upon that are very different from iOS 7.
Some examples of this would be things like...
kind of layered sheets with rounded corners instead of navigation controllers in ios 7 that push big white sharp rectangles side to side you know now you have these like softer rounded sheets that slide up you pull things with swipes and you know and swipes are your primary navigation often for a lot of apps you move controls
You know, you scoot them kind of in away from the edges and corners so much because they're harder to reach on big phones.
This is a lot of stuff I did with Overcast.
And the reason I did it was because I saw all this stuff happening.
I saw this trend happening.
I wanted to get ahead of it.
You have buttons that look a little bit more like buttons.
Like in the WBC app is a great example.
They're like, they're
rounded rectangles that are they're not textured they there's a solid solid color instead of just an outline because then i went with with note with just the text and then there was outlines around the text and now we can we're slowly creeping back up onto the old style button where it is a solid rounded rectangle with text in the middle of exactly yeah now you just have a flat flat shaded filled solid filled rectangle or round rect
And it's with a bold color, too.
It isn't a subtle thing.
It isn't a gray.
It's a bold color.
And it seems like apps are now permitted to use more than one color at a time.
The iOS 7 design was largely based upon using mostly white, some thin gray lines, and then you'd have one tint color.
And that would be, like, your one accent color for your app.
And you'd use that.
So you basically had, like, single color design.
Grayscale plus one color.
Now I think we're having multiple colors are now okay to have in apps again.
And so, you know, again, if you look at, like, look at Apple Music, look at the iOS 10 Maps app, and this new WBDC 2017 app, and I think you see this clear convergence of...
a refreshed design language that is not on the scale of iOS 7's redesign, but the same or more, maybe, as the iOS 6 redesign was.
I think you're going to keep the, I mean, I guess they have to probably in some way, the buttonless buttons.
Like, even just for things that are in whatever you call the top bar where you hit done or you go to... Yeah, that was a big question I had when writing this up is like, what do they do with navigation bar buttons?
Because in the iOS 6 days, they would have outlines and textures.
And I don't think that would look good here, but I think that can be done well.
I mean, part of the answer, honestly, might just be that navigation bars are going out of style and that, you know, most apps are now using these kind of like sheets and cards and things that are not as often using navigation bars or not putting buttons there.
Because you can't reach that anymore.
Right.
But they're still going to be in the OS.
I think they're going to keep them in the OS, especially for legacy applications.
They obviously have to keep supporting them.
And I think they will continue to be unadorned because at this point, like the bar itself serves as a pretty good framing device.
to be the tint color plus the bar this is one area where i think they were right makes it pretty clear that by this point if you have an iphone for any bigger time that that done thing is a button and then you can hit it and you kind of have an idea of what it'll do the one of the most awkward elements that was added recently what was it ios 9 where they add the back arrow thing they jam up into the upper left corner to get you back to the previous application
I would love for them to come up with a better solution for that.
I don't have an idea for them, but it always strikes me as the most awkward Johnny Ive painting, inappropriately composed text jammed up into the corner.
It's like the beginning of a kernel panic.
It starts from just overriding your screen with this tiny little thing.
And I appreciate the functionality.
I use it all the time.
It is good.
Although sometimes it fakes me out because sometimes I want to hit the thing that's in the navigation bar underneath that thing.
That's not a fun thing.
operation to like carefully you know here's the thing i do like i go from my mail application and click a link and then i went to safari the navigation thing on the top says go back to mail right and then you're scrolling through the web page and open in safari and you navigate and you navigate and you realize oh i want to go back to the previous page in safari and yes if you didn't have a case on your iphone you'll probably edge swipe but i have difficulty with that because i do have a case so what i want to do is hit the back button in safari which a isn't visible right now because i've scrolled right and b
when i find a way to make it visible is nestled snugly under the back to mail link so very frequently i go to hit the back button instead i hit the two pixels away back to mail thing and instead of going back and so far i go into an entirely different application and then i'm sad so i would love for them to sort that out speaking of it there you go there's something they could do for uh ios on the phone for small screens sort out that mess up there somehow and and if the solution is like like you said like you know
navigation bars uh the advice is don't do that because people can't reach them anymore and here are different paradigms you know either just you know edge swipes or a lower navigation bar thing or those rounded wrecked sheets or whatever i'm i'm ready for that because i think that a an ios interface read uh you know best practices shift that better reflects the size of phone screens these days is a little bit overdue
yeah double tap to move things down like it was nice they they put that there but you know that that's another like that little back thing that's another like well what can we do in the time frame of this release to help people with large screens you know well they can tap on the thing and make the screen fall down yeah all right perfect ship it that i think is the more embarrassing hack compared to the status bar back button thing the reachability feature is so embarrassing
honestly i i think it probably has some utility but i just never remembered that it exists the only time i remember that it exists is when i accidentally activate it and then i go you know i could probably benefit from using that intentionally every once in a while but then i never never do i don't think i've ever used it intentionally yeah that eventually i just disabled it there's an option instead in settings to disable it because i do i would only ever accidentally invoke it and it drove me nuts so i just turned it off and it's been fine
So anything else about iOS?
We just assume 11.
They're just going to keep going up with the numbers.
Yeah, yeah.
Somebody had an interesting theory.
I want to say it was either Mike or Jason that everything will go to 11 this year.
So it'll be Mac OS 11, iOS 11.
Yeah, that was Jason.
I highly recommend if you haven't heard by the end of this episode, this like probably four hour long episode, if you haven't heard enough WWDC predictions, I highly recommend this week's episode of Upgrade.
There's a lot of good stuff in there.
Yeah, very much so.
They do a whole draft.
It's very funny and it's very much worth listening to.
I mean, the show is in general, but particularly the WWDC episodes are great.
But anyway, yeah, going to 11.
I mean, they took the numbers.
They took the Roman numeral off macOS, and I don't see why they'd put the number back on at this point.
You know what I mean?
Like iOS 11, macOS has the place names, and I like...
I like the yearly flavor.
Honestly, it would be cool if iOS had those too.
I know they don't do it or whatever.
It's kind of like a legacy thing for macOS when it had the code names, then it had the cat names, and now it's got the place names.
Give macOS some fun stuff.
It had to endure this terrible capitalization squished up name so it matches all their other stupid OS names.
At the very least, continue to give it the place names because there's lots of fun things you can do with that.
If they were to get rid of that and just go with Mac OS 11 and iOS 11, certainly fits with the human formity story.
Like I said, they want everything to be all the same.
And look, now we're synchronized.
But then what the hell would the 11 mean?
Because it's not the version number, I can tell you that.
Like, would they just bump the version number to be 11?
I feel like they should have learned their lesson when they went to, you know, from 10.9 to 10.10 and everyone's like version number, you know, everyone's incorrect version number checks and their applications got all freaked out to change the first digit from 10 to 11 in the version.
i mean i don't know they didn't do it at once i suppose they can do it but it just it just seems like not a big marketing win because 11 is more boring than like sacramento or whatever i mean i think changing the first digit makes total sense like it and you know as jason said on the upgrade like if they're ever going to do it it makes total sense to do it now so it so then matches the ios version for future marketing purposes um and
Right now, the first digit has been 10 for so long, it's basically meaningless.
You can just ignore the first digit.
It doesn't matter at all, which kind of raises the question of why even bother keeping that?
What purpose is it serving just being 10 point something forever?
It's making people's incorrect version number checks continue to function correctly.
That was a Windows thing.
That's why they went from 8 to 10.
That's not a Mac thing.
No, on the Mac, they had it when they went from 10.9 to 10.10.
Because a lot of things would interpret 10-10 as 10-1 and being less than 10-9 because, yeah, I mean, it's not a big deal.
Like, you know, it's not going to stop them from doing it, certainly if they feel like it, especially for marketing reasons.
But it's, you know, I think the bigger reason to not do it is because place names are more fun than numbers.
and and like and haven't we all been asking like mac os stop trying to keep pace with ios would be more comfortable if you waited a little bit longer between releases and got things settled because that's your role your role is the more slow moving one but they're not doing that they're already not doing that they're already releasing them both once a year i know but if they make the numbers sync then that's like saying we're signed up for you know an unlimited number more years where every year that uh they have to be in lockstep and i don't i don't like that
yeah anyway what else what else do you you know besides naming things aside i i love that every year this discussion happens about like mac os naming it's it's always heavily discussed uh because it is it is more interesting and everyone has an opinion myself included like much more than we think we will anyway so let's have a new default desktop backgrounds will be that's the most exciting part of mac os is like and it's kind of and you know i speak as someone who wrote reviews for the mac operating system for a long time
I enjoyed the visual theming and branding.
And on the Mac, the default desktop picture is the biggest, boldest branding thing of the running OS.
On iOS, the best they do with branding is...
the lock screens they show in the pr stuff and maybe the selections of the springboard backgrounds but they're always much more hidden than if you see a mac desktop of it like a newly booted mac even if it has a few windows open like the the desktop background is so dominant whereas the springboard background is much less dominant so there's not much in ios
to massively brand the os outside of the the widgets themselves and the ui and stuff like that so i i do enjoy like you're making a joke like oh who cares what the you know the default desktop background is in the mac that that's a big part of the excitement of a new version of the mac operating system for me i don't know i don't know if i'm an anomaly but like the big posters they put up with whatever the theme is or the big waves for mavericks and the cool pictures of yosemite and
i like that stuff and you know in the absence of them particularly changing the mac ui which doesn't seem like they're interested in these days all we get is a cool name and a cool desktop picture and sometimes that's enough to make an association of my mind that i will i will link those images and that branding and that sort of mood and theme with
whatever features they add, whether they be, oh, this is the one that had Siri, or this is the one where they added Spotlight, or this is the one that had Time Machine, or this year, this is the one with the new Fossistan that they won't even mention in the keynote.
So that leads into my next point here on macOS, which is
First of all, I think we all assume, based on how they did iOS's rollout and their promises last year, that APFS is most likely going to ship with whatever the next version of macOS is.
And I would even say most likely even the default.
And I would go a little bit further and say, what if it's the only option?
What if you have to convert your boot drive?
Other drives, you can probably do whatever you want.
But what if you have to convert your boot drive to APFS upon installation?
I think that won't be that big of a deal because, A, we know they can do it really, really well, right?
So that, you know, it's not like it's going to trash people's data.
And of all the things, B, like a boot drive, the only time that messes with you is if you frequently use target disk mode, right?
Because every other way that that disk is read...
you don't have to worry that it's not A2S Plus anymore.
Target disk mode, all of a sudden your other Macs can't read it anymore if they're not upgraded as well, right?
But if you're sharing it, like it's SMB or whatever, it doesn't matter what format it is.
And so...
I think that's a reasonable thing to do.
I'm just wondering, what would be the advantage?
Oh, this operating system doesn't have to run HFS+.
Maybe if there's some kind of headlining feature that demands APFS, like the newly rejiggered version of Time Machine that's way more efficient and stuff, but they have an old version of Time Machine that works with HFS+,
i don't know um i personally i don't think there's going to be the fancy new version of time machine that works with apfs yet anyway so i think this is not the year for forcing default unless there's some other feature that i'm not thinking of of forcing the the boot volume to be apfs i think they could do it but i'm looking for a reason why they would want to well they would want to do that um
maybe maybe simplicity like again with all the mac things i just feel like do they care enough about the mac to be that aggressive with the advancement of the platform or where they just you know this is one area where they will take a slower pace like this year apfs rollout a couple new features that are based on it next year if we're lucky the new version of time machine that takes advantage of all the cool stuff right
See, I have a hard time gauging how much of a big deal macOS is going to be this year.
There's a whole bunch of things that the Mac could... If they're going to be putting more effort into the Mac than they have been recently, there are areas that...
that could be really cool things like a new time machine based on apfs snapshots and everything um and and that could there's that's incredibly powerful like the things you can do by having a snapshot based time machine um you know and there's two you know you can do not only the external drive backup but even like just making giving snapshot support to the internal time machine like the the time machine on its own drive kind of thing like kind of like mini time machine
They can get rid of the terrible local time machine hack that we all have running on our Mac laptops, whether we know it or not, which is, in my experience, extremely unreliable and yet still there grinding away, trying to do something useful for you.
And it's just like, oh, just please stop.
And you can't turn it off.
Yes, I know.
Exactly.
There's all this cruft
in macOS because of having to do these advanced features on HFS+, that if they just make APFS the only option that just your boot drive automatically gets converted when you install the next macOS, which is exactly what they did with iOS...
then they could they could stop supporting a whole lot of that legacy stuff like it would be it'd be much better for their efforts to bring the apfs features forward if they knew the os was only running on apfs so i think it's it's plausible but they still have to support all hfs plus anyway because you can time machine backup external volumes and they're going to be hfs plus and so on and so forth so like it's not like they can get rid of all the legacy cruft code anytime soon that's why i'm thinking of like
well what if there's a feature that they just like they wouldn't want to have a feature that says oh let's let's demo this awesome new feature say it's the new time machine and also have to say oh and you can only use this feature if you convert your boot volume that's the case where they would say you're you know a they probably wouldn't even mention it but b it would it would convert your boot volume no matter what but even in that case they still have to support the old crap way of time machine because people i have external drives that i back up through time machine and they're hfs plus and
asking people to you know not asking but forcibly upgrading their boot drive as part of the upgrade process like they did in ios you could swing that telling them oh and by the way you also have to convert all your external drives not not going to happen
Yeah, maybe.
I'm still optimistic that they might require it on the boot drive, though.
But anyway.
That's a question for me for prediction-wise.
Do you think the letters APFS in that order, all capitals, will appear on any slide or be spoken by any presenter?
I guess it'll be spoken in passing, maybe.
Yes.
But will it appear on a slide?
Yes, absolutely.
Worst case scenario, it'll appear on the word cloud slide.
uh yeah it is i mean obviously in state of the union and stuff would be i'm trying to think of the keynote does it does it make because it didn't make the keynote last year and that's when it was introduced remember we found out about it when we left the building and it was like oh by the way apfs like what i remember that moment very specifically yes i remember it too but like the fact that it didn't make the keynote didn't did not good enough for the keynote sorry replacing a you know 15 year old 19 year old depending on how you trace it back the hfs file system
not not important it made the state of the union and it totally will this time too and there'll be sessions about it and i'll be all happy and everything but i really that's speaking of hopes and dreams give me this one how talk about apfs at least in passing during the max section of the wdc keynote do you hear that craig make it happen yeah
So here's a long shot.
There was a thing that I think ATV Tipster told us forever ago that was being considered, and I haven't heard a thing about it since, so it probably isn't happening.
Long shot, though, do you think they would offer iCloud Time Machine as an online backup?
So one reason I think they might, besides the fact that they now would have the technical infrastructure with APFS to reasonably do it,
I think one of the themes that I expect to see here is Apple pushing people even harder into subscribing to iCloud data plans and into buying more iCloud storage space, giving more and more compelling reasons for people to start paying Apple $3, $5, $10, or $20 a month for this iCloud storage space because there's going to be more and more features that can use it.
iCloud Time Machine would use a ton of it.
So what if they did that?
Oh, they're totally going to do that.
It's just a question of whether it's this year or not.
And speaking of Apple services, I think, I mean, we still always complain about their pricing and how they're sometimes competitive, sometimes not, depending on the year, depending on the thing you're looking at, depending on how you're measuring it.
But I've always felt like the Apple way to do things, and we mentioned this many times in the context of iOS, and now I think of it again in the context of iCloud Time Machine, is...
not to buy an amount of space because that's a techie nerd thing and people don't like to think about that especially because it's like more price you know higher price for more but to sell to sell a backup my mac plan right like i mean you know like backblaze or any of these other things do like you don't buy based on space you buy based on i want to back up this mac like you buy like a membership in a club and then you break the association between like apple loves to do break the association between the dollar amount and a spec
right the dollar amount and storage space and now it's the dollar amount and a result and the result is your mac is part of the iCloud backup club and just like your phone is backed up to the cloud your mac is backed up obviously the phone has the same problem that you buy storage space and people run out of it and they freak out and we've talked about this a million times if apple's going to charge more than everybody else the way to hide that extra cost is to i mean essentially like go unlimited but not really like to make it
to make it that you're buying the result and obviously how much storage space you would use would be based on the size of your your your boot drive or your device or they're like obviously there would be a limit and you know what i mean but like to frame it in that way or maybe it doesn't have to be honestly if backblades can do it why the hell can't apple right um can't is very different and won't yeah
anyway i i cloud time machine has to come um just i don't know if local time machine is even coming this year let alone cloud time machine um is i think that is entirely a matter of because they could have done that years ago like they could have done it badly but like you know they did it on the phones with hfs plus and obviously the phones it's easier because you know exactly what you need to back up and you can discard lots of stuff because you can get it from the store and yada yada yada um
But Apple loves services, and you're right.
This is a way to charge more for services, and they have the technical underpinnings to do a much better job of this.
So it's only a matter of time and a matter of how much attention is the Mac getting.
I really do think that what Apple wants, and they're pushing for more and more services revenue, obviously.
It's the...
It's an area of growth that they can use that is probably easier to achieve than some of the other areas of growth to maintain, different scales and everything.
So they're going to be pushing this heavily, as they have been the last couple of years.
I expect in general, I expect there to be things like very, very heavy pushes towards subscribing to Apple Music.
That's going to be a big one.
And I think iCloud Drive, or just iCloud Storage, is going to be one of those things too.
Basically, my theory is that
Within probably the next few years, Apple wants to try to make it so that using an iPhone or Mac or any Apple device without having a decent amount of iCloud storage space that you're paying for every month should feel like using it without an Apple ID.
There should be all this stuff that you're missing out on by not paying Apple $5 or $10 a month for this additional storage.
That's where I think they want to push this, and I think they will.
And it's not purely cynical.
There's lots of great things they can offer once you do that.
But I do think there's certainly a big motivation there to increase that services revenue, and that's going to be one of the ways they do it that happens to correspond to things that are also nice for users.
Yeah.
my stretch hope and dream for mac os before we leave this topic is i laughed thinking about this but um an announcement of vastly improved 3d api support whether that be open gl vulcan or whatever like an inexplicable announcement because they wouldn't have any hardware associated with it it'd be like why all right that's great but like no one games on a mac and all your gpus are really weak why are you touting your improved open gl support like that you're caught up with the spec and that you're like
and we would know the answer is like there's another shoe that's going to drop but it's called the mac pro that they're going to make someday and maybe it'll have awesome gpus right no not direct x for mac os blommer in the chat um uh i would be excited by that because it's an area where they are super behind and they've been paying attention to metal and you know like i don't i don't know that's i don't predict it but i would i would be super excited by that
so i have a couple of stretch goals i mean first of all we should before we leave the the more plausible section we should also cover that uh i think the rumored uh ipad pro drawing tablet mode is realistic and plausible for this year's release uh you're lumping that in with mac os instead of the ipad i suppose
Yeah, it's really a Mac OS feature.
The idea behind this feature, as rumored, is that an iPad Pro with a pencil could be attached in some... I don't know if it's only going to be working over a wire or whether they can do it wirelessly, but can... They'll be able to do it wirelessly.
Hopefully.
But basically, they can enter a mode where a Mac app can use the iPad and its pencil as a stylus surface of some kind.
And we don't really know anything more than that or whether this is even in for this year or not.
But I think the way they would probably do this, if they're going to do this, would not just be that it would be like a second screen that you could just move Windows onto.
No, I think it would be more like the way they did the touch bar.
which is it would be a separate type of output display slash input display that apps would have to specifically write support for so that they would specifically say, like, what would be shown on it and specifically receive the events from the pencil from it.
So it would...
If they do it that way, I think it's a much nicer feature.
I think it's better.
And it would have slower adoption if you have to wait for all the apps that could benefit from this to integrate this potential new API, just like the touch bar.
But I think if that works out, that could be a way better way to do it.
And that's probably the way that they would do such a feature.
Yeah, like everyone comes talking about it as the single phrase for this feature is, oh, you can use your iPad as a Cintiq.
But a Cintiq behaves as essentially a monitor that you can draw in.
Like it appears as a second monitor.
You can arrange it with the other monitor.
The full UI of your Mac can be there.
You can drag the little menu bar down to it so that it is actually your primary display.
Um, but that's not how you just described, uh, this feature working on the iPad that it wouldn't just be, because there are apps now you can get for your iPad to do this.
Like, Oh, your iPad is a second screen from your Mac.
And now you can draw on your drawing app with, uh, with the stylus, because of course it's a second screen and you have, uh, input.
This seems like a more tart.
The rumors are of a more targeted, uh,
interface like you said like the touch bar that is specifically addressed by the applications it is not just like hey every application gets this free because it's just a second small screen which they could also do as a mode or whatever but to really to leverage their the capabilities of the you know the high refresh rate and the stylus input and all that other stuff it seems to me that it has is it a better solution for
to have apps support it specifically in the same way they support the touch bar to be able to draw a ui over there and to be able to have the ipad handle a lot of the drawing you know the the local drawing to make it as responsive as we know the pencil can be in in the good applications uh having that collaborate with the mac app and and it could be good and it will make people's ipads you know more powerful and capable but
Not that I'm going to say this reminds me of the old world, but I think of that arrangement and it seems cool and useful and a great way to leverage Apple's existing hardware with a clever software solution.
But then I think of the Microsoft Surface Studio sitting over there kind of glaring at me, going, you know, tapping its fingers, going, you know, hello, guys.
I don't know what you're doing over there with your multiple devices and your steampunk windows, but here I am, a giant screen, touch me, draw on me and put me up.
No, anyway.
Yeah.
I don't understand why this is something that people want.
Like, I mean, for like artists and stuff, I guess, but why would a regular schmo want their iPad pro is like a, a Wacom tablet for their computer?
Yeah.
That's for artists.
I mean, in this way we're describing it.
Yes.
Totally for artists because Cintiqs are super expensive and I have one.
They're not that great.
Like they're, they're okay.
Uh,
If you already have an iPad with a stylus and you like drawing on it, but you also like Adobe Illustrator, the full version of which does not, or Photoshop or whatever, doesn't ship for iOS, just these cut-down versions.
This is an interesting solution to the pro app problem.
To get more people to buy iPads to use with their Macs that they might buy anyway, but this pushes them over the edge.
Because if it doesn't work as a second monitor like a Cintiq, I don't see people buying it as a way to use your Mac through a stylus.
And again, there are iOS apps you can buy today.
to remotely use your mac to use your ipad as a second screen to use your ipad as a you know as a cintiq like device uh for your mac presumably when apple influences it they will do it a better job because they have you know low level access to all that good stuff and so that's what people are waiting for and it is narrow but like in terms of
you know the the potential slash promised focus on pros both with ios 11 and making ios more capable on the big ipads and the mac pro this seems like a move that is aimed towards creative pros and app developers who think they can make a cool application with this capability and think they can sell it for a fair price on the app store
It just seems to me like it would be a lot of investment for not a lot of return.
I don't know.
Maybe I'm missing the boat.
It's not that much investment, though.
Like I said, I feel like they're almost there.
Third parties can do it.
The plumbing must be there.
Apple's just going to do the better, lower latency job of it.
And
have an opinion about how it should be done, you know, in terms of APIs and stuff like that.
I think it could be really cool, too.
I mean, if you think about, you know, obviously there's lots of artistic uses for this.
And, you know, and I wouldn't use any of those.
Oh, you want to use it to edit audio?
I see it coming.
Well, obviously I would consider, I would try that.
But I think there's a lot of areas of common tasks that people do that could benefit from...
Being able to quickly alternate between pen input, especially really good pen input like this, like the iPad Pro, really good pen input and also a keyboard and mouse.
And to be able to kind of alternate between having that incredibly awesome pen thing that only has been available directly in iOS so far...
but also integrate it with mac workflows that could that could apply to lots of things that could that could be as simple as like if i'm working in apple notes which i i really like notes i've been using it more and more and i did have one problem a couple months ago where like one device just wouldn't sync and it just was stuck for a long time and i tried a bunch of crap and eventually it started syncing again and i've heard a few other people who've had similar problems so that's a little concerning uh
I hope Apple works that out.
Corrupt note that you must hunt down and expunge.
Right, exactly.
Yes, who knows.
But like one of the things notes has is you can integrate doodles and drawings with the pencil and everything.
And so like right now, if I want a note to contain a drawing, I have to go over to my iPad and add it there.
But so like if I'm working on my Mac, that's kind of not convenient.
But if I was working in – if I had this and my iPad was on my desk, I could just like reach over, doodle something, and then just put my hands right back on the Mac keyboard and go right back to work on the Mac, not have to wait for a sync to happen up and down to the cloud and everything else.
I'd be working in the document right here.
Stuff like that.
I think there's a lot of potential workflows, whether it's basic things like doodling or annotation, marking up documents.
There's so many different things that aren't just like freehand drawing in Photoshop where this could be really helpful.
Not to mention the freehand drawing in Photoshop or even things like if you're drawing something in Illustrator in a vector program where you're doing less freehand stuff and more kind of like drawing with math and parameters, but you do want to add a freehand element to something.
it's easy to just add that and then go back to your keyboard and mouse for all the precise stuff.
You know, so I think there's... And this all might not happen because this all depends on lots of good, high-quality, third-party integration happening.
And that's always a crapshoot.
You never know what developers will take advantage of and how soon and how well.
But...
There's a lot of potential for this kind of feature.
So if it isn't a massive deal for Apple to add this, if it's not like a huge three-year undertaking where they can do nothing else, this would be nice to have, yes.
And it's something that... I think features that...
can really change the way people work on the Mac are hard to come by these days.
So I think when they come by them, there's actually a decent chance, as long as there's not massive downsides, they actually might consider doing them.
So this I consider plausible.
And if they actually do it, I think it could be really cool.
They haven't had a good Adobe Mac app demo at a keynote in a really long time.
That's the old world.
Wouldn't it be nice to come back to the old days and have a Photoshop demo on a Mac granted with an iOS device?
Fine.
You win some, you lose some.
They should run some filters and time them.
Now, I do have two stretch goals.
You had one for the Mac.
I have two.
Because it goes back to my earlier question of, like, I don't know how much effort they put into the Mac this year.
Like, if they put in a good amount, these are actually kind of plausible.
But that's, you know, with the Mac, you never really know whether it's going to be a... Not even a big year.
A medium-sized year or a small year.
Let's be honest.
And so I think my number one stretch goal...
is the beginning of the iTunes replacement.
Now, I'm not sure it would be complete.
I know.
I'm not sure it would be complete in one pass.
It would probably not be.
But I'm thinking we would probably start seeing...
apps with new names uh that like that you know maybe the idea that the itunes yeah that the itunes app would still exist but it would be like in utilities or you know buried somewhere and then so like if you plugged in an ipod okay you you here's your ancient app for your ancient device that it would be the ipod app a second app called iphone yeah
it's gonna be the worst yeah but uh i think it's plausible this year not i wouldn't say likely but plausible that we have an apple music app on the mac and what that is is up in the air that could be it could literally be like as the first version it could be a fork and rename of itunes with just the music stuff enabled and everything else and then mask everything else all the code is still there the preference dialogue is still modal but yeah it's just called music
it's an if def at the top so it could be as simple as that or it could be a total from scratch app that only does apple music so it would only have the apple music streaming service it would not have local library playback or even the itunes store because that's not apple music that's different and it would be a port of the ios apple music app don't forget that it would use ux kit for everything right it's like photos all over again
Honestly, I had that on my list.
Because if you think about it, one of the reasons why it would be hard to do this all in one year is that if they don't want it to just be Apple Music, if they want it to be Apple Music plus local library support plus store support, they would probably do one of those weird iOS port kind of apps to the Mac.
where it would be kind of weirdly iosey maybe it would use ux kit or maybe it would use its own version of that because that might just be for that for the photos team who knows um it would be weirdly limited it wouldn't feel very mac like but you know it could be an apple music app and i think that goes along with you know obviously they'd have like a video app or tv for the mac they'd have the tv app obviously duh why don't think of that anyway um and then also the um
The iTunes podcasts were recently renamed to Apple Podcasts, so maybe there would be an Apple Podcast app on the Mac.
This stuff all makes sense.
It's very aggressive to have all this planned for this year, which is why this was my stretch goal.
Again, I wouldn't say it's likely, but I do think it's plausible, and I do think that it is something they will get to.
I just don't know when.
Sometimes I think about the...
the sort of concentrated political capital that must be in the itunes team at apple because like there's got to be a lot of important people associated with their product at the high and low levels at various times in apple's history it was arguably the most important product that apple was currently making and had ever made like in the heyday of the ipod and everything like itunes was where it was all happening and then it
it managed to hitch a ride on the iphone rocket a little bit but like the fact that it has remained so long and that every year it gets these it gets so much more attention than than the improvements that are actually made by this attention seem to warrant like year after year oh we've moved stuff around and we've changed the ui but fundamentally have not fixed this application it's like
there must be people working on it and every year they have new things that they do and you know every like not small things they have big new ideas about how the ui can be different and apparently this year they think the mini player should be not so many anymore and it's just always something but the preference dialogue is still modal and it's still old itunes you just like what what is there must be such a concentration of power there that they that that like at power and like the power to make these people continue to add features is
combine with the neglect to say we don't care enough to make you do all those things that marco just said that that are inevitable but like we always wait for the first one to come so the only one of those things i will believe is that an apple music app uh is the closest to not being a stretch goal but all those other things like i don't i don't even know
Well, you know, I don't really understand how we could have somebody with a media app or a group of people with a media app pay so little attention to the Mac after years.
Imagine being in a position where you have a media app and you just completely ignore the Mac.
I mean, Marco, how could one ever get in that position?
What would their headspace have to be to just completely neglect the Mac for a media-based application?
i think apple has people who know app kit though like that is key like they're not going oh app kit i'm scared it's not like ui kit you could have stopped that sentence at apple has people yeah apple has a staff of more than one developer well haven't you heard you can charge way more for your mac app oh yeah
Yeah, why don't you ask the other Mac podcast players how well they're doing?
Oh, yeah.
Booming market.
Casey will just have to pull a Twitterific for the Mac and just, you know, spend an obscene amount of money for his copy.
Kickstart it, right?
Yeah.
Well, truth be told, I actually don't really need it as much anymore because I've just been using my AirPods to connect to whatever device I need to connect to.
So when I listen to podcasts, I connect to my phone.
But...
In principle, we have to all agree that there is some amount of humor to Marco lamenting iTunes as Overcast for the Mac is simply a URL.
Not much because, again, Marco is not the world's largest corporation.
So let's just keep that in mind.
Fair, fair.
Now, if you want to talk about stretch goals, I have the mother of all stretch goals.
This is probably... A Mac Pro?
No, I think the Mac Pro being released is more likely than this.
But I have it on here.
This is going to be good.
In the realm of fantasy now.
My number two stretch goal, my final stretch goal for macOS is significant improvements to the Mac App Store and sandboxing.
Yeah.
Okay.
Sure.
So here's... Go on.
Okay.
So just brief background.
So both the Mac App Store and sandboxing launched in 2011.
I had to look it up.
This is so long ago.
2011.
2011.
They had a ton of shortcomings.
It was really like... Both the App Store and Sandboxing were really very, very rough 1.0s.
And they have been completely untouched since.
They have been a rough 1.0 for six years.
And so I actually did...
hear rumblings of a little while back that there was an effort to actually rewrite the Mac App Store app and to really improve it.
And we've seen, you know, ever since Phil took over the App Store, there really has been substantial progress.
And there were some before that, but now there's a lot of progress.
in the app stores and i still think this is a very long shot for this year i do think it is probably finally on the road map i think somebody is finally working on this the only question is when it comes out are they racing the itunes replacement team those two teams i mean honestly the mac app store has a long way to go before it before it earns the stripes that itunes have in terms of being the crusty old uh application that you can't get rid of on the system because it's essential but that is i mean i guess itunes does improve like i laughed before but does it
I think, I mean, the Mac App Store app has been improved in ways that are not visible to users.
Like, I believe that they have addressed reliability under the covers to make it not as awful as it was.
They haven't.
I mean, it is still buggy.
I totally grant you that.
But I have to think that there has, even if it's just messing with the demons that are underlying the thing, because the Mac App Store is a strange application, like so many of these cloud-powered things, where it's really just a thin...
a partially web-based ui on top of a bunch of persistent processes that are running whether the app store is launched or not which is why you can click the update thing to update your things or install an application then quit the mac app store app and your installation proceeds because it's not your app that's doing it it's just communicating to background demons and i feel like that also why you click that update button and just nothing happens
Yeah, well, it's just nothing happens.
Right.
But I think the reliability of actually communicating to the background demons and telling them to do their thing has improved over time.
But I think it is plausible for them to do a do an iTunes style refresh where you aren't fundamentally changing the nature of the application in any way.
but you moved a bunch of crap around and recolored some things right or maybe you add tab support and just say look significant improvements the mac app store which i think does not fall into the category of significant as far as i'm concerned because like i said it's an itunes style update where it visually looks different and people think it's the new mac app store but fundamentally it is still the same demons and the same weird web-based ui communicating with it and they just added tab bar support or some crap like that um
I could see them doing that, but I am 100% willing to believe that the project is underway somewhere to massively improve the Mac App Store by making a new application with the same name that works way better.
I'm sure it's in progress, but I will be flabbergasted if we see it this year.
I still think my open jail thing is even more far-fetched, though.
Probably.
Of course.
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It's weird because both for iOS and macOS, there's nothing I can think of right now that I'm like, oh man, I can't imagine them not delivering blank.
I feel like, and I think Marco had talked about this a lot last year, that a lot of the low-hanging fruit has been plucked.
And so...
At this point, what do we really want?
And when it comes down for both, for me, is more about hardware than software.
And WWDC in the last few years has not really been a hardware event.
But that being said, what do we want from Macs this year?
And I can tell you, I want a MacBook adorable update.
That's all I want in the world.
Please, can I have a MacBook adorable update?
Yeah.
Yeah, I think the hardware rumors are unusually strong this year.
And usually in previous years, you are right that WBC is almost always a no hardware event.
But usually in previous years, when the hardware rumors would start up, Apple would shut them down with a carefully placed controlled leak so that there would be some kind of reliable report from the Wall Street Journal or something like that saying there's definitely not going to be new hardware announced as they saw for focused event.
And that hasn't happened this year.
There's a lot of hardware noise, and there's been no denial like that or no expectation-setting statement like that anywhere.
So I'm guessing that there is some fire under the smoke.
The only question is which of the hardware rumors are actually scheduled to...
to come out this this time like now instead of the fall or some other time um and yeah and you know apple schedule wise i don't expect there to be an event in mid-july or anything like it's you know the hardware is going to either come out or it's either going to be announced when it ships is a different story but it's either going to be announced monday or in september or october you know i wouldn't expect anything anything in the meantime there
So I would say the rumors this time are a little all over the place.
The rumors are basically that everything is getting updated.
But the ones that seem most plausible and most concentrated are pretty much every modern MacBook and MacBook Pro.
So the 12-inch and then the modern generation of 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pros are all rumored to get Kaby Lake Intel CPU updates.
um that that would be nice uh it is as far as i know all of these parts are available uh like they're from intel i don't think we're waiting on any on any chips being available or anything like that i think it is therefore plausible for all these things to get these these updates um there are some people who are saying no it's way too soon but the fact is these all came out in october they were already late even then and you know going like nine months between updates
is not unheard of.
They used to do things like that all the time when new CPUs came out faster and Apple would get on top of them faster.
So that is a thing that happens sometimes.
Not often, but sometimes.
So it is totally plausible for them to update these things so, quote, soon.
And if they do...
Everyone has this wish list of things they want to be changed with the new MacBook Pro.
We talked about this recently, so I won't go too far into it.
But basically, I would expect no major external changes.
I wouldn't expect different ports or more ports or the return of an SD card reader or anything that people want that was removed.
I would not expect any external changes whatsoever.
If they have revised the keyboard to fix the issues that I've been complaining about with reliability, especially with heat, I think if they fix that, they won't say so.
It'll be a silent update.
um the one area that i think they might hit uh like the air the main areas of complaints well two one i think it is it is possible they will offer a 32 gig ram option on the 15 inch even though it would i think it still would need to use the higher battery draw ram um
But I don't think the battery... I haven't looked into the fine details of this.
I don't think I'm really qualified.
But the difference between the super low power RAM and the kind of low power RAM would probably only make maybe like a 5% difference to battery life off the top of my head.
That's probably the ballpark we're talking about here.
And it makes total sense why Apple would not want that to be on all of the MacBook Pros of a certain size.
But it would not surprise me at all if they have that as an option.
So if you want to trade 5% of your battery life for 32 gigs of RAM, fine.
That's within the realm of Apple component options they've offered before.
That's within the realm of different CPU options.
options uh or things like whether you get the discrete gpu or it or integrated only on certain models that used to offer that it would be great if they combined the 32 gig ram option with the option for for no discrete gpu i don't think they will but that would be a way to offset it maybe in future models
Right.
And that's one thing, too.
I also do think, I think, are the GPUs in Kaby Lake powerful enough to do an integrated only 15 inch now?
I know because with Skylake, there was a thing where basically like Intel's integrated GPUs for that generation sucked.
And so Apple probably wouldn't think they were good enough.
I think Kaby Lake, they've improved them.
And so one of the biggest complaints about the new MacBook Pros is that they've been more expensive than the old ones.
So I think Apple will try to address this in some small way with not necessarily price drops, but lower spec'd entry prices for things.
So the 15-inch would probably be the first one to get such a thing, maybe even the only one to get a meaningful lower price.
But maybe they could do an integrated GPU-only 15-inch, like they used to do before.
which I've always been a big fan of because the battery life is usually substantially better and more consistent and more controllable.
So integrated only 15 inch.
I do not expect a touch bar less like 15 inch escape.
I don't expect that at all.
Maybe later, like in a couple of years, probably not soon.
But I do think having a cheaper entry level configuration is likely possible.
probably igpu only and then also a 32 gig option on the high end and with no other changes to the lineup i suspect that will address a lot of people's concerns it'll it'll really turn around the discussion on these on whether they're pro or not if anyone's still having that discussion like i think apple wanted to hit that and i think they i think they will in these two ways
if it it might have good pr but looking at those actual changes i think they actually don't address that many of the problems because it's like it's perception like oh we'll lower the entry price but if you get the the 15 inch macbook pro you want it's still really expensive and we'll add 32 gigs of ram but it's not like we're making things thicker adding more batteries so you're sacrificing for it and you still have to get a discrete gpu like it is
It is superficially making changes in the direction that people want, but it doesn't fundamentally change the trade-offs that these machines make.
It's better pressed, except for the 32, which is a capability they didn't have before, and so kudos for that.
That's going to be mostly a win, but...
I would still be awaiting an actual revision that reimagines these machines with the new demands of the market in mind, like what the cranky part of the market has been saying about these, like make a new set of machines to take that into account.
And for the MacBook, adorable, I know Casey just wants them to revise it and like whatever, they revise it and he'll get it.
yep i'm gonna put a 25 chance it's not even gonna be a stretch over i'm gonna say like i think it is plausible that there could be another usb port on that sucker not 50 25 chance because they know it's the thing that people want they're gonna do it eventually i think
this is probably not the year to do it it's just like oh let's just do an internal swap kb lake blah blah blah but yeah just i don't know i'm that's that's my that's my uh max stretch goal aside from the mac pro stuff which we'll get to in a second that's my max stretch goal that macbook adorable if it's revised third i i have a vision in my head of phil schiller's understated way that he would have mentioned that i wish i could do a phil schiller question it would be like
And we've got another USB port around the side there.
Isn't that nice?
You know how he would say that?
He would undersell it, right?
He would just go through the slides quickly and not dwell on it too long.
I'm ready for that to happen.
But Casey will be happy no matter what.
He just wants an internals revision.
All I want is to give Apple my money.
That's all I want.
Is that so much to ask?
It'll be so exciting when you're like, yes, they came out and we can order them and you get them and your key starts sticking.
Boy, the shows will get out of that.
Oh, my God.
No, because I won't be able to bring it up.
I won't be able to bring it up because if I do, then... We can tell when you type in chat and there's no E's in your text anymore.
Oh, there's that.
If I bring it up, then I have to admit hashtag Marco was right.
And if we know anything about me, we know that I don't like to do that.
He doesn't have a hashtag.
He's just got a broken keyboard.
Yeah.
There's the hash symbol doesn't work.
And it would only say Mark was right because my O key would be stuck down.
Oh, my God.
That's hysterical.
They're good keys, Marcus.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
So what about the Mac Pro?
Can we just get it over with?
I don't have a drink handy, so let's make it quick.
My take on the Mac Pro is I still keep people hearing like, oh, they're going to tease the Mac Pro.
I was like, what?
What can they even do?
I don't need anything from them.
I'm patient.
I'm content to wait.
We already had our Mac Pro moment.
We had our shows about it.
There was a roundtable.
Things were discussed.
Apologies were made.
Like, I think everything is fine there.
If they want to tease something, get us excited.
I'm not, you know, I'm not a monster.
I don't object to being teased.
I just have a hard time believing.
Oh, my goodness.
I just have a hard time believing that there is anything worth teasing at this point.
Like, the best combo is that they have a logo.
Honestly, at this point...
I hope they don't have a case design that they can tease.
I hope they haven't finalized that yet because I want them to do a really good job.
Like I said, I don't want them to rush to market with a box with a bunch of stuff in it.
I want it to be cool in all the ways that a cool Mac can be cool and I'm willing to wait a couple extra months for that, right?
i have a hard time believing they have a case they could show i have a hard time believing they would show the case i marco pointed out when we were talking about this i think in slack before he pointed out like well they teased the 2013 mac pro but i feel like that was practically a finished machine i granted didn't ship for months but they knew the design they knew everything was going into it like this was there was nothing that wasn't like a we're going to show you the case design of our work in progress like that was the machine that shipped like those everything about it right um
And they're not at that point with the new Mac Prime.
So if they want to show a logo and a tone poem kind of video, like the little dots connecting iOS 7 thing that they showed 700 times, sure.
But I don't expect anything, and I won't be mad if I get nothing.
Yeah, I'm with you on all of that, basically.
I really think it's very, very soon to be showing anything meaningful.
It would be nice if they did, but I would put the likelihood fairly low on that.
But I do think it's worth asking about the iMac Pro.
In the Mac section in the notes, I had laptops, and then I said desktops.
Ha!
Remember Mervyn?
Apple Mike's desktops?
But the iMac is overdue for an update, and they confirmed the existence of pro configurations of the iMac during that Mac Pro press briefing.
And those, I believe they said those were for this year.
So the Mac Pro, they said not this year.
But the iMac, I think they specifically said this year.
They can come in the fall still.
Right.
And so it's either now or the fall event, basically, is when these are likely to be happening.
I am still incredibly curious to learn what is a pro configuration of an iMac?
And how does that differ from the Mac Pro?
And how does this product not make either the other configuration of the iMac or the Mac Pro very redundant?
What is this middle ground?
there are things they could do there but they're all kind of weird and obscure like high-end intel cpus and maybe like one or two mac pro features but i don't know slightly better gpus like yeah like i don't that's why it's it sounds that that's why i i'm incredibly curious about what the imac pro is and and what makes it different from the imac and the mac pro
i think the joke i made in slack the other day was pinstripe but uh now that i think about it uh casey's matte black iphone put that finish on the imac make no other changes call the imac pro people will buy it there you go that is possible that that the imacs could come out uh this you know this event but i think it feels it's weird it feels late for the regular imac but it feels a little early for the imac pro depending on what they're putting in it so i i would say that's more likely to be pushed to the fall event
um and and oh there's also there was this rumor that the macbook air would be updated with no changes other than it would get modern guts and i think it's unspecified whether that means sky lake same old tn screen but modern guts right and that actually sounds incredibly plausible to me because because
intel at some point is going to stop making whatever ancient cpus it has that point is probably soon so they're gonna have to stop like they're gonna have to like finally put something else in here can that screen manufacturer stop making that screen please so we can get an improvement there yeah and and yeah and if if they were do such a thing
I definitely think that – I agree with the rest of the predictions I've heard, which is that it will not be mentioned.
It would probably – it would be barely indicated even on the website.
There might be a new badge.
They'll put a yellow new tag on it, right?
Yeah, at best.
Like I think that would be the only change.
Like I wouldn't expect a retina.
I wouldn't expect USB-C.
I would expect no other modernization of this platform.
except skylight guts or even or kb lake but probably probably even skylight because like they don't even want to be too modern with what they're putting in here so yeah that i i would not expect uh big things there just a very basic update and if you are a fan of the ancient macbook air platform that actually would be a pretty nice computer uh if you don't care about anything modern or retina and you don't and you don't have eyes yeah right yeah exactly but like
like imagine if they don't actually change the case size or the battery size that's going to get incredible battery life yeah that's what's like it's the danger of that thing the longer you keep it around the more people realize you know if they just put a retina screen on this thing it would be the it would be apple's best-selling laptop again don't tell anybody we wanted to buy these other things for way more money well the sad part is it probably still is apple's best-selling laptop yeah i know because it's
but but you know what i mean like it would be it would be the one that we back when we were all recommending 13 inch macbook air is like yeah default recommendation right that we'd be in those times again all right what do we think about the uh ipad well you just skipped over the mac mini let's just say no updates oh yeah definitely not was that seriously an option in there
i mean here's the problem like all the stuff we've gone through so many things were like oh maybe or they could do this but they but they can't there's not enough time in the keynote for all of this right so well but so like you know the macbooks i guarantee you we just spent more time talking about the macbook pros than they will yeah no they would they wouldn't mention that but like even just the other the stuff that we have mentioned like
There's only so much time.
They've got a lot of stuff to cover.
Whether or not there's a SiriTube thing, I just feel like we've overstuffed the thing with things that we think they're over 50% chance of being mentioned in the keynote already.
And keep in mind also, the keynote is going to also have a ton of...
time consumed by things like retail updates like and like on the talk show uh gruber and dollar were speculating like maybe there maybe this is when they announce a major retail thing and then maybe they have angela aarons out on stage and like that all sounds very plausible there's probably also going to be uh some kind of you know jeff williams like
social medical environmental good initiative something like that like so there's going to be time with that and there's going to be demos of any new stuff they have and there's going to like there's going to be all these all these segments that will take up a lot of time and so the the stuff we're talking about is going to be squeezed into little like intermediate sections between it all uh so like there
We're going to sit here spending two and a half hours on this, but they're going to spend 20 minutes on what we're talking about here for two and a half hours.
I think if they have a lot of announcements, I think what they'll do is they'll end up squeezing out the less tech-focused things.
Because in years where they have a lot of those, especially if it's tied to one of the tech announcements, fine, but not that they feel like filler, but...
You don't have the luxury of an extended segment about, you know, health monitoring thing or whatever, right?
Unless it's tied to, oh, and by the way, here's the new Apple Watch with a glucose measuring thing.
Like, that's the only time you get to have that segment.
Or if you have a keynote that doesn't have a lot of stuff in it and they need some time to fail, they'll do that.
if anything close to what we've gone through is there, they're going to have to be super efficient to be like, we've got a lot of stuff to get to.
There's this, there's this.
That's what I, you know, for the Tim Cook's little thing where he comes out and says stuff, I expect his spiel to be, we've, you know, we've got a jam-packed thing.
We have a lot of stuff to get to.
He always says that, but like to actually mean it or to emphasize it slightly more before he gets off stage and the parade of other executives come out.
All right.
So any thoughts on iPad hardware?
So my prediction is that this is this year's iPad event.
I don't think there's going to be iPads in the fall.
I think this is the iPad event for the year because it goes in with all the software advances that they're announcing.
And there's so much time left in the keynote.
You might as well, right?
Exactly.
Yeah, you might as well get shoved in there.
I think the incredible rumors, incredibly strong rumors about this 10.5-inch or whatever it is, 10-point-whatever-inch iPad being basically the new 10-inch class size, just bigger screen, roughly same body shape and size, that is...
so incredibly strongly rumored it's very likely to be true um i think what we see basically is the new 10.5 is the new high-end ipad pro i think the 9.7 goes basically unchanged and just has its price dropped a little bit because if you look now in the lineup we mentioned a couple episodes ago there's this massive price gap between the new cheap 9.7 inch ipad and the ipad pro and like the 9.7 it's
$329 to $600.
That's the price jump there.
It's a huge price jump.
So something's up.
That seems like a temporary thing that we're waiting to be filled in with that gap by other things or by changes.
So I'm guessing basically the existing 9.7 gets dropped in price.
Probably $100.
So it's not going to
close the the entire gap where it's not going to come all the way down to like 400 or anything but you know it'll go from 600 to 500 starting price that's my best guess there so you have the 329 base one you have 500 for the ipad pro nobody cares about the ipad mini anymore sorry casey um and then the new 10 point whatever will be 600 that's my best guess the question one question i have though is the 12.9 dead
I think there's a very strong chance of this.
I think there's a very strong chance the 12.9 gets no update and is basically left for dead similar to the mini.
We'll never hear the end of that on certain other podcasts.
I know.
Well, no, they're all going to switch to the 10 point whatever because it's going to be the same screen resolution in a smaller body because they all have 9.7 because they're better.
all the 12.9 users like that are like like like i mike and vatici like they all also bought 9.7s and in many ways like them better because the 9.7 is a way better size to actually hold i kind of hope they kill the 12.9 and make an even bigger one because you know i want bigger i know you want that but that's a different thing though like i i i think
What I noticed with the 12.9, and part of this is because I actually did resell the one that I bought at a substantial loss.
What I noticed with the 12.9 is that very quickly after release, it was being indefinitely discounted by a large amount of money at places like Best Buy and Target.
And Apple does this sometimes to kind of unload things at lower prices that aren't selling very well.
Like Apple didn't want the PR maybe of dropping the price so soon.
But it was within a very short time of release that these other retailers that work closely with Apple and sell very large volumes were suddenly able to sell these things at like $150 below retail or $200 below retail.
And this wasn't like a temporary weekend sale.
It was like this was just kind of the new price.
And it seemed like there was quite a fire sale going on on the 12.9 very soon after its release that never stopped.
So I'm guessing it did not sell to Apple's expectations.
And I really think that there's a very good chance that if they're able to cram in the functionality of the 12.9 into something with that 10.5 inch screen into a 9.7 inch style body...
which they will which they which all of the rumors say that that's exactly what they've done i'm guessing that the 12.9 is not long for this world because well but you got to remember tim cook's apple all that means is they'll just keep selling it
Right, but what I'm saying is I bet it doesn't get an update.
But it's more than that, though, right?
Because even though this Phantom 10-whatever-inch iPad is theoretically the same screen resolution, screen resolution is not the same as screen size.
And that's why the iPad mini is the same resolution as a full-size iPad, and by that I mean the 9.7-inch iPad.
But some people like the 9.7 and some people like the portability of the mini.
And so I don't think just because this Phantom 10-inch iPad will have the same resolution as the iPad Mega, I don't think that that by default means that the 12-inch iPad Pro just goes away.
I think there are people like Vitticci, like CGP Grey, like Mike, that want a...
12 inch ipad pro in their stable of 504 ipads i think vitici will switch but and remember like 10 10 point whatever is much closer to 12.9 than the mini is the 9.7 right in terms of area i think i think all those people you listed vitici just wants the productivity right and i think he might take the size reduction as a win like he just needs to be able to have two full size things next to each other and blah blah blah he'll get that in the 10.5
um like he still has young eyes yeah yeah aside from setting aside the random people that we happen to know uh market wise the the selling point of a 12.9 over a 10 point something that has the same resolution
So maybe the argument can be made for artists that you just want a bigger canvas to draw on because you're physically moving the stylus over the stylus, which is, again, why I argue for an even bigger one.
But I'm having a hard time thinking of someone outside that problem domain who...
would actually prefer a 12.9 over a 10 point something with exactly the same resolution, especially if they don't update the 12.9 internals.
And again, getting back to Tim Cook's Apple, maybe they just continue to sell the 12.9 because why not?
And some people still want it, but it's really getting, if that 10 point, whatever comes out, it's really pressing hard up against the 12.9 and it's pressing hard against a product that hasn't been updated.
Um, uh,
yeah i don't know things think things don't look good for the future of that product i really hope things look good for the future of a larger size ipad they just need to they just need to widen the gap a little bit because they're getting encroached from below
I will also predict on the iPad section, I would like to see updates to the pencil and the keyboard.
If they do, I would expect, based on what I just said, basically damning the 12.9 into nothingness, I would expect that it would only come to the new 10.5 inch size.
Maybe the 9.7 would also get it if it could be the same size, like for the keyboard.
But I'm guessing we get a pencil 2 and a keyboard 2 with improvements kind of all around.
Not like massive earth-shattering improvements, but improvements.
The keyboard, I don't know, better key somethings.
I don't know.
I loved Gruber's idea of the keyboard.
I love that idea that Gruber kind of branched from on the talk show and then wrote up a big post.
I love the idea of the trackpad that's only used for like cursor movement.
That's an awesome idea.
Yeah.
I don't think they're going to do it this year, but maybe in the future.
That's a great idea.
And then the pencil, I would love to see improvements for the pencil.
First, the biggest gain for me would be if there were some easier, better way to carry the pencil with the iPad.
Maybe a sequel to the keyboard cover could have a pencil slot somewhere in it.
Maybe.
I think it's unlikely.
But something that's more likely with today's Apple that, you know, maybe the Pencil 2 gets better battery life.
It's not bad.
That charges really fast.
It's bad if you don't constantly use it, but you carry it around with you.
Then the battery life is really bad because it's it.
The Pencil has no on off switch.
It basically tries to intelligently manage its power state based on things like motion and proximity to your iPad.
If you carry it like in the same bag as your iPad or if it kind of hangs out like on a table or counter next to your iPad, the battery is always dead.
because it's always nearby and kind of in motion and ready to go.
You don't get the alerts that tell you your pencil battery is running low and remind you to plug it in?
Sorry, your battery is always alerting you that it's 5% full.
So it could really benefit from...
certain things that that i don't think johnny i would ever add to it things like a power switch i think it would strongly benefit from a power switch i don't see that happening so what do you think about smart connector or magnetic connections or other microsoft surfacy style things because that's i agree that's the problem like what the hell do you do with your pencil and i don't think the solution is a bunch of loops or pockets and cases to shove it in i want to be able to magnetically clip it hopefully in a way that is still charging the thing but i mean they could have done that
in the original release, and they decided not to, which makes me think they don't want to put holes in the side of their precious pencil to deal with the smart connector.
Like, it's sitting right there.
It's a place that provides power that has magnetic connection points, but it's just too big and unwieldy for them to ward up their phone with it.
But I also think that...
There's got to be a better solution for charging than the little, you know, the little spiny horn that we... I mean, you plug the pencil into your iPad and it makes this terrible, ungainly, horrifyingly breakable arrangement of hardware.
Yeah.
I mean, the pencil right now is... It really embodies much of the skeptical take of a Johnny Ive design, where it...
It looks like a beautiful object in isolation, but the way you have to actually use it has lots of design flaws.
One of them is, yes, it does still roll.
It is weighted, doesn't roll very far sometimes, but it does roll.
The biggest design flaw by far for me is that cap.
that cap on the end that is very easily lost if you drop it it will break the ring will pop out uh it it and it the fact that you then while charging it have to take this cap off and you have nowhere to put it it's not captive in any way it doesn't hang on to anything it doesn't go anywhere so it's just begging to be lost as you charge the pencil not to mention you know the aforementioned way you charge the pencil and
you know either you have to have this weird like you know gender changer adapter on a lightning plug somewhere on a lightning cable somewhere to charge it from a cable then you have then you have another tiny white precious thing that you can easily lose because there's nowhere to keep it or you do the thing where you shove it into the bottom of your ipad and have it sticking out and as you mentioned it's kind of crazy looking and really seems very dangerous and is very unnerving and doesn't charge as quickly so they're like
Charging the Apple Pencil is just a series of frustration and form over function design choices.
And this would be alleviated largely if they could have one that didn't need to be charged as often.
so i and i think that's much more likely uh than johnny i've adding buttons or reasonable charging methods i i just want it to magnetically attach to everything i want to magnetically attach to the smart cover if you have one i want to magnetically attach to the actual device if you don't have it i want it to inductively charge through those things that'd be great that's that's not coming i think there there are pretty strong rumors of an actual a pencil revision right and i forget what the the rumored things that they were improving about it maybe that the charging thing was changed but
all of our wish lists for pencils is surely not coming.
Um, because again, like it's not like the smart connector didn't exist when the pencil came out.
It did.
And they chose not to use it for various reasons.
So I don't see them changing their mind in that, but, but yeah, like the,
What would you call it?
The logistics, the packaging, the in Marco camera parlance, the handling of the pencil is pretty awful.
Yeah, like and what the smart connector is wonderful.
One of the reasons why I enjoy the smart connector keyboard so much is that I never have to worry about its power state.
When it's connected, it's on.
It has no battery life.
It's amazing.
When I'm using my iPad, I want to use the keyboard.
I can just use the keyboard.
I never have to think about it.
I never have to wait for it to charge.
I never go to it and find it uncharged.
It's a thing that is no longer a concern.
And so anything that can bring the pencil closer to that would be a huge upgrade for everyday pencil usability.
Anything else on iPad?
I don't think so.
Again, I think this is the iPad event for the year.
I would not expect to see, like, if the 10 point whatever inch iPad is announced, you know, next week, I would not expect to see any other iPad hardware released this year.
I think this will absolutely be the WWDC of iPad software.
I will go on record as saying I do not think we're going to see hardware.
I think it'll be in the fall.
That's possible.
iPhone, obviously no new hardware.
That's definitely the fall.
If you think about what we've pushed to the fall, I think makes for a pretty good event.
What we've pushed to the fall so far is iPhone hardware, almost certainly the iMacs, maybe Mac Pro Info, but probably not.
We haven't talked about the watch or TV yet.
My best guess is that watch and TV both have hardware in the fall.
and then there also might be things like the rumored apple pay peer-to-peer thing where you can pay people directly with apple pay so if you think about that that could be a fall event right there new iphone massive iphone year right so new iphone is most of the event person-to-person apple pay minor revision to the watch 4k apple tv with 4k itunes content and imax that's a fall event
So you don't need like you don't need to also shove in iPads and everything else into that.
Like that's enough right there.
Yeah, I think the iPads will go to fall only if they're not ready.
I don't think they would delay them for the you know, I think they would announce them if they if they're going to ship anytime in the next like three months.
but if they're not then you know fall yeah all right so software for the apple tv anything the content deals is what we care about because like you know the software and the remote suck and we all hate them and we have complaints but like what makes that device more or less valuable if they're not going to change the hardware it's not as if they can put another new interface it's all about the content it's all about
I mean, I suppose the only software thing they could do is say, hey, remember that single sign on thing that we touted and no one signed up for?
Well, we got some and some of the important people to sign up for it.
That's I feel like the only big software win that they could trot out that would have an appreciable effect on the life of people who are newly buying Apple TVs, like to not have to go through that sign and type these letters that appear on your whatever thing.
Yeah, I think it's going to be, I think, a very quiet year for the TV for the most part, at least for the summer.
I would expect maybe announcements of new content deals.
Maybe we'll hear about that Amazon deal.
Who knows?
They'll announce some new partners that will all be cable companies and TV providers that none of us subscribe to.
And, oh, now you can get to all these things with the TV app, but you still can't get to Netflix or whatever.
It's going to be like moderate updates to the TV app thing.
They're going to really push it hard, but it's going to not have a lot behind it.
And all of the... I do expect this to be the year of new Apple TV hardware that can almost certainly play 4K video and would probably then at the event come with announcement of 4K content deals with both iTunes and maybe other things like Netflix and Amazon.
But I would expect that to be in the fall event, not next week.
So very quiet on the tvOS front is my prediction.
I don't expect any...
like massive new APIs for developers or anything.
Honestly, I think the developer story for tvOS has largely not panned out, and I think at this point it's pretty clear it probably isn't going to largely pan out.
I think it's pretty much done and limited to major video apps and a very small handful of games.
Anytime they want to do 24 frames per second output on the Apple TV, sitting there waiting for them.
You don't even have to do it at 4K.
You can do it on the old model.
Anytime.
My radar that I found for that I checked is still sitting there marked as duplicate, never to be heard from again.
As with all things radar.
WatchOS.
I would expect just a small evolution of what we're used to, kind of a deprioritization of apps, a continued prioritization of notifications and things like that.
Are we going to get watch faces this year?
I say no.
I had that as a stretch goal.
I wrote maybe in italics, maybe third-party watch faces, but I think it's unlikely.
And I do think, too, again, I think this is going to be a pretty quiet year for watchOS, too.
Last year was a big year.
They had a lot to do, and they really did it last year.
With watchOS 3, that was a major update, solved a lot of the watches, major problems in a pretty good way.
So this year, I would be surprised if we see
more major progress i feel like this is probably going to be like a down year for now uh maybe they'll do something like you know improve the design of the of the weird honeycomb app screen or you know maybe let something like third-party watch faces but i think the more likely long-term goal is to add features such as an always-on like dim clock mode or
or things like sleep tracking, or the rumored diabetes tracking thing, whether that's a separate add-on or whether it's part of the watch, who knows.
But all of these things would require new hardware.
They're not going to add a new always-on-screen mode that the current models don't have the battery power to do and still have a good battery life all day.
And I think having the screen always be on, even to a very dim level, and even if nothing's animated, and even if it hardly ever updates...
that's still a massive increase in power draw.
So I'm guessing the current models probably can't do that and still have good battery life for anything else.
So I'm guessing that all of that stuff would wait for new hardware, which would almost certainly be in the fall, not now.
They could fix your audio player APIs, all your audio dreams, right?
That wouldn't be in the keynote, obviously, but that could happen to WWDC for watchOS.
It's relevant to you, at least.
It could.
Man, I would love if they would make it easier for me to make a good watch app.
Because right now, I made a watch app.
It's okay, like with local playback.
It's okay.
And it could be good if they would, you know, bring over a few more of the iOS audio APIs, things like getting remote control events from headphones.
You could, like, use the play pause or back forward buttons on your headphones and that would actually control it.
Volume control of the system volume level, not just the, like, local app zero to one volume level that I have now.
Any kind of now playing center access like you have on the Mac or on iOS rather.
There's lots of things they could do there, but I just think those are probably a really low priority for them because I don't think anything on the watch is a priority that doesn't have to do with health or notifications.
And that's probably with good reason because those are the things that almost everyone's using their watch for, and those are the things that the watch is really good for.
So I think those things get priority.
Everything else is probably pretty far down the list, pretty secondary.
So I wouldn't expect a lot of motion there.
Where, I forget if you had thought that watch, where does the watch go?
Like the rumored watch with the special bands and, you know, the next watch hardware revision.
Does that go to the fall or does that go to next year?
I suspect fall.
And, you know, whether it's going to have like, you know, the fancy blood sugar one or whether that's
you know, a separate thing or I don't know.
I have no idea.
From people who've been writing about this recently, it seems like that's a ridiculously hard problem to solve and many companies have tried and it takes a very long time.
So it wouldn't surprise me if that part doesn't come soon.
But they did watches last fall.
And so if they're going to do something that would require new hardware with the watch platform, things like sleep tracking or always on faces so that you could like things that would need better battery life, things like that.
I think this fall is a totally plausible and reasonable time to do that.
Not to mention the fact that it's usually a big holiday seller.
The watch sells a lot over the holidays, even more so than phones and iPads, I think, based on little bits and pieces I'm able to pick up here and there.
It's the new iPod.
Yeah, it is.
It is a massive holiday seller.
So it would make sense for them to really try to get updates out there in the fall event for right in time for the holiday shopping.
Yeah, I agree with everything you said, Marco.
All right.
So to kind of round this out and end the episode, maybe some, I don't know how to describe it, but like some touchy-feely or like... Wait, wait, wait.
We're not done.
We're not here yet.
We didn't talk about services.
Oh, God.
This is the show that will not end.
I'll add to the document.
Okay.
Well, services.
I think continued push to iCloud, all the things, and continued grumbling from everyone involved about how successful that will be.
Yeah.
And so, basically, my list of services includes a lot of things I've already said.
Things like heavy push towards iCloud storage and getting you to buy those plans.
Yeah.
Massive push to Apple Music.
I think it's going to be, as always, Apple Music is going to get a lot of keynote time.
It might not all go smoothly, but it's going to be a lot of keynote time.
I expect it to get another redesign.
It's still going to be confusing.
The keynote time would be like, Apple Music, you're home for television shows.
right because isn't that the pitch now like it's apple music come for our tv shows what yeah right so and i totally expect them to do incredibly heavy-handed promotion of planet of the apps and carpool karaoke and anything else they might be they might want to announce any new production you so you but you really think you're making a joke about the music app redesign you really think that's gonna happen again
No, I really think it's going to happen again.
I think the music app redesign is the new iTunes redesign.
It's going to happen just every year.
It's never going to be good.
Does that mean I have to disable connect in my toolbar again?
Probably.
Or whatever new social network they launched at this time.
So my prediction is very heavy-handed promotion of their Apple Music shows, of Apple Music itself, at least one really awkward skit or video.
Something just really heavy-handed and awkward.
I hope there is just not time for this in the keynote.
Not that I hope that it doesn't come, but I really hope that there is not time.
Oh, they'll make time.
Beyond that, iCloud Drive, I expect, as I said, I expect it to be a big focus.
I'm hoping that comes with some additional features.
One of the big things for iCloud Drive, when I used it for a couple months, I am now back on Dropbox just for various workflow reasons, but when I was using only iCloud Drive for that month or two, the biggest things I missed were shared folders and public share links for files that I could just get a share link to this file and send it to somebody.
And shared folders for things like, let me share this folder with you guys and we can drop files here and work them together.
This is something that Dropbox and its competitors have offered basically forever.
It's a really big feature.
It's not easy to do these things.
But if Apple added share links and shared folders, those are major steps towards a lot more people being able to use iCloud Drive as their primary document sync thing and to replace or never even use in the first place things like Dropbox.
So that I really hope they add that.
That is, I think, within the realm of possibility.
These are the kinds of things that Apple typically has not done aggressively or well.
But they already have the concept of shared editing in notes.
And there are shared photo albums and photos.
So there is this concept of inviting people to collaborate with you on a resource that is in iCloud.
They have this infrastructure already in certain places.
Let's get one more.
Let's get shared folders in iCloud Drive.
um and i would actually say the shared folders are more likely for them to do than the public share links for files because that's more of like a a web thing and apple's allergic to the web yeah and they have and it has piracy concerns and things like that so like there i'm not sure they would do that um that's i think that's less likely but shared folders would be a huge thing i really hope they do that i'm still terrified about cloud drive
Yeah, me too.
Also, one thing they might do for iCloud Drive is Time Machine.
Because a lot of the other services like this have versioning for the files, some kind of recovery or point in time or versioning for resources that are stored in things like Dropbox.
It would be nice if they had that in iCloud Drive, and they don't now.
So they're playing catch-up with a company that refused to be purchased by them that they called just a feature back when Steve Jobs was still alive.
Here we are so many years later, and they're still catching up with that basic feature set of Dropbox.
You know, sometimes Jobs was wrong.
Well, he did try to buy them.
It's more of a sour grape situation there.
He was trying to bring down that you should be happy that we're even talking to you.
Your thing is just a feature.
But they were interested in buying them, so it's not like he was really saying your thing is...
He was trying to get it for a good price.
I definitely think it could benefit strongly from these things.
If they called this time machine for iCloud Drive versus if they called it versioning, who knows?
It doesn't really matter.
That's confusing, but we'll see.
Do we have to go into a star field?
I miss the star field.
Do you miss the star field?
I do.
A little bit, yeah.
Because the current time machine interface is so boring.
When it doesn't work, it's less exciting.
I also think service-wise, photos should and probably will have finally syncing of the metadata, of the object recognition, faces, places, all that stuff, as we talked about last week.
I also think that...
It is very likely that we're going to see a little bit of promotion for Apple News.
It's a thing Apple launched.
I suppose.
It's going somewhere, but I don't think it's going massively quickly there.
So I think we're going to see some kind of announcements of some kind of minor improvements here, and they're going to push us to use it a little bit more.
And finally, in my services category, I think we're going to see a stretch goal here.
group facetime finally that we've had a couple of couple little rumors here and there teachers been talking about it a lot over the last like year uh i think this is finally the time for group facetime here's hoping that that that gets in uh we had group i chat forever ago uh you know that's now finally and speaking of i chat i know this is like a dorky thing but i would like to be able to share a document in the old in the old parlance
right yeah multiple people and also hey let's all look at this photo together like to pull a photo from photos so we can all see it right that's a feature that i frequently wish for and maybe that would be part of like the whole file uh collaboration or you know the file management stuff it's not collaboration just want to say like i can't tell you how many times i've pointed one ios at device at the screen of another to like show my parents who i'm facetiming with a photo yeah so they don't have to like leave the app and like because you can't do both of them it's like we're
You know, we have technology here.
I should be able to throw a photo up here.
Yeah, that sounds like the most keynote-worthy feature of all the service things because I really hope they don't talk about Apple Music.
But multi-person FaceTime, so easy to demo.
Crowd pleaser.
Everybody loves it.
If they have it, it's a shoo-in for the keynote.
Yeah.
And then finally, my final prediction for the night.
I think we will hear absolutely nothing about iMessage apps.
They were announced last year.
They launched.
We got some cool, fun stickers out of it.
But I think the app platform itself, beyond stickers, has gone basically nowhere.
There's a small chance we might see stickers on the Mac, in the Mac version.
Mac iMessage parody would be...
Another thing that they won't do because they don't care that much about the Mac.
Right.
And it would never get the full-blown app platform.
I think it would... At best, it would only get stickers.
But even that, I just think the iMessage platform, it ended up being...
Kind of like the watch.
It ended up being used for a much smaller subset of what it could do than what I think they probably intended or guessed.
They massively over-designed this system for apps to plug into iMessage when in reality, what most people want to do is have a few stickers and call it a day.
And that hasn't been helped by...
the fairly awkward and cumbersome and unintuitive interface within messages to browse and add and manage your different message apps.
There's room for that to make it a lot better, and maybe this would change things, but I don't think it would change things enough.
I think ultimately iMessage apps were a thing that they tried, but similar to tvOS being a massive app platform, I just don't think it's really going anywhere.
You know, I use the gift wrapped app in every capacity, including the iMessage app a lot.
I was really into stickers for like a day.
It wasn't a day, but it was very briefly that I really enjoyed stickers.
And now I almost find it surprising anytime somebody uses one in a conversation I'm in.
I don't have anything against them.
I'm not opposed to them like I think a lot of people were when they first came out.
But I, too, have been largely underwhelmed by iMessage offerings with the exception of GIFRAP, which is as perfect as it can be given the world in which it lives.
I mean, in a lot of ways, the iMessage apps and watch apps and maybe even TV apps are
all suffer from the longstanding thing I always say, which is don't fight against the smartphone or don't bet against the smartphone.
In most of these cases, you could go and use this other kind of app for this app that you're trying to do.
But in most of these cases, it's easier and faster and it's already in your head.
You already have the habits to just go launch the app and just do whatever you want to do from the app, like from the main app, rather than
going to these weird little extension points and doing stuff there.
There are some cases where it makes sense to do that, but I think those cases are a lot fewer and lesser used than what maybe Apple intended or guessed when launching these platforms.
And in reality, almost every Messages app I've seen that isn't stickers
you could just do it from the app almost as well, if not better.
And it turns out that's just what most people do.
And it is possible to make an awesome messages app, but again, the system of managing and installing them and everything is so cumbersome that a lot of people just don't do it.
So I think they're fighting against the convenience and inertia of the full-blown app, which everyone knows how to do already and everyone is already using for these things.
I don't know.
I feel like it's a losing battle there.
speaking of casey and stickers and messages it reminds me of the one feature of ios that they do need to add that will benefit phone users and everybody emoji search fair point that that would be a massive crowd pleaser it's almost like they think they added it when they added that thing where it suggests the emoji like oh we have emoji search just start typing the word and we'll give you the suggested list of emojis and
It's kind of true, but that just feels like the wrong way to do it.
You know how many times I drag downward on the emoji picker expecting a search field to appear and forgetting for the millionth time that it doesn't, that it's the one thing on iOS that you can't drag downward to see a search field appear at the top?
Oh, emoji search.
Maybe I just need to memorize where everything is, but I spent so long trying to find popcorn the other day before I just gave up and did a web search for it so I could copy and paste it into a tweet.
Oh my goodness, that's so sad.
I know it's in the food section.
Can't find it.
Tiny little images, too many of them scrolling, scrolling.
All right.
So what else are we looking forward to?
Maybe that wouldn't be covered in the keynote or, you know, something that's different.
So I'll seed the conversation with a couple of thoughts.
I'm interested to see what San Jose is like.
I'm kind of excited that that Apple seems to be more involved with the ancillary goings on around the conference.
Yeah.
They're putting up a booth for podcasters, which we will not be leveraging in part, but not exclusively because Marco doesn't have a WWDC ticket and it stands to reason you need one to get through the door to go to the studio.
I think the bigger limitation is that it's limited to 60 minute blocks.
There's no way our show is under an hour.
Certainly not, given that we've just spent two and a half hours blabbing about what could possibly happen, let alone what Will and did.
But anyway, that's kind of cool.
They've been, over the years, embracing community events like Layers and App Camp for Girls and the talk show and Alt Conf and things of that nature.
So I'm looking forward to seeing kind of what San Jose brings to the table and what it has to offer today.
And additionally, and completely wildly unrelated, I am super excited to play Mario Kart against all my friends in person.
And speaking of, Marco made a reference to his packing list for WWDC and actually had dropped an image in the chat room, which I forgot to add to the show notes, so probably won't be there.
But I spied something interesting on that list, Marco.
Would you like to tell us about that?
The list ends with Nintendo Switch and Pro Controller?
Whose Nintendo Switch would you be bringing, Marco?
Tiff's.
are you sure yeah no i didn't get a second one no i'm surprised it's our family it's our family switch tiff is a wonderful wonderful wife wow and she after upon hearing the previous discussions she decided to grant me permission to take her switch did adam grant you permission does he even know it's going i don't think he knows uh we will find out uh but just wait until he says time to play zelda mommy
Yeah, then you're going to pay for that.
Yeah, I'm hoping that doesn't happen.
But I know in reality, it probably will.
And it's going to be just doing me a big favor here.
And I will not forget that.
No, that's awesome.
That's very kind of her.
All right.
So, John, what are you looking forward to in the not keynote parts of the conference?
An earlier show, as I said, warmer weather, but now that I've actually seen a weather report, maybe it's too warm.
Because it's getting to the point where I'll feel like I'll be hot outside, but in the blasting air conditioning of the indoor spaces, I'll still need to carry with me something warmer so I don't freeze to death.
So I guess I suppose that's preferable to the WWDC thing where the outdoors is freezing.
we'll see but anyway at any rate there should be more sun at the very least and maybe people actually get to see the various nerdy t-shirts that I wear because I'll actually not be wearing t-shirt underneath the long sleeve thing
Excellent.
Marco?
I'm incredibly excited to do all these podcasts, to do live shows out there, to meet people, to laugh at how big John's wallet is, all the wonderful things we get to do when we meet in person.
I'm looking forward to that.
I'll show you my metal credit card.
Yeah, it's going to be fun.
And I like seeing everybody, seeing all my friends, making new friends.
And yeah, I'm excited about layers.
I'm going to that.
That's going to be fun.
And yeah, it's going to be a very, very busy week, but busy in all the good ways.
We're going to have presumably lots of good, exciting stuff coming out of Apple.
We're going to have lots of new APIs to play with.
We're going to have a huge batch of new people installing my app on Beta 1 and telling me how it breaks and complaining that I haven't fixed it yet.
It's going to be glorious, and I look forward to this week, every year.
Thanks to our three sponsors this week, Casper, Betterment, and Jet, and we will see you next week, live from WBDC.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's Casey Liss.
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T.
Marco Arment.
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
It's accidental.
Accidental.
They didn't mean it.
So is it legal to wear shorts in San Jose?
Because I know, maybe we should ask the Europeans, I know a lot of people consider shorts to be a huge fashion faux pas and that men should never wear shorts.
Why are we asking the Europeans?
This is America, damn it.
Yeah, they don't really have weather over there.
They don't have real heat.
They don't even have air conditioning.
They don't know what they're talking about.
They are wholly unqualified to weigh in on this particular discussion.
I don't care what they have to say.
Because it seems like the weather is going to be in the 80s, right?
And whatever that is in Celsius, I don't care.
You guys don't have hot weather.
So in America, it's going to be in the 80s, right?
To me, 80s means shorts.
Well, if you're spending your whole day inside an air-conditioned building, maybe you won't be indoors as much as we are, but that's my concern, that I actually will be hot outside with pants, but that there's no way I would wear shorts, not for fashion reasons, just because I would be freezing inside what is surely the super-duper air-conditioned whatever convention center where all the sessions are.
This is the problem with shorts, is that you want to wear them outside, but you can't wear them in air conditioning because then you freeze.
Not to mention the fact that half the world thinks that you're committing some kind of massive fashion crime by wearing shorts.
Also, I will mount a defense of cargo shorts.
I think that non-cargo shorts look a little bit weird.
Cargo shorts, I admit, are not the best looking things in the world.
But I think non-cargo shorts look weirdly flat.
I don't know.
I think you have a cargo shorts fetish or something.
I think non-cargo shorts look like shorts.
Oh my god.
Marco, do you have any idea how much email you slash we are going to get thanks to this?
I don't care.
I'll be in California.
I'll delete it all.
I haven't answered email in California.
Do you answer email ever?
No.
Yeah, I've gotten accustomed to the completely bananas San Francisco weather, which has perks but also has plenty of drawbacks, too.
This is going to be a definite change, and I think what it's going to amount to is I will probably end up choosing comfort inside over comfort outside.
But you will probably see me rolling into these events with a light sheen on my face as I've gotten sweaty walking between buildings.
yeah there's gonna be even more sweaty nerds i feel like that's a good safe prediction sweatier nerds wwc 2016 2017 whatever the hell year it is yeah oh man we'll see what happens but i'm looking forward to i'm super excited to see you too i'm super excited to see all our mutual friends uh i'm just i'm stoked i'm i'm happy to have a ticket to the big show this year since i missed out last year just super duper pumped