A Conversation with Siri
Casey:
Hey, everybody.
Casey:
Hello.
Casey:
This is wild.
Casey:
A little bit.
Casey:
This is a lot of people, but that's cool.
Casey:
So thanks, everyone, for coming.
Casey:
This is super awesome.
Casey:
And thank you again to the Alt Conf people for making this all happen.
Casey:
This is really, really great.
Casey:
And we don't really have an agenda here because this is the Accidentals Hat podcast.
Casey:
So I think you had something you wanted to discuss with the group.
John:
Oh, I just had format notes.
John:
Like... LAUGHTER
John:
How many people in this room regularly listen to the live stream?
John:
Well, anyway, for everyone else, you listen to the downloaded podcast, it's edited.
John:
And during the live stream, we just do a bunch of stuff, and then Marco turns it into a show.
John:
And so we're going to do a bunch of stuff here, including listen to Marco do an Ed Reads Live, which is always fun.
John:
But I have a format question for all three of us, which I didn't mention before, but at some point during this show, during this recording, Marco's going to hit a button that's going to play our theme song.
John:
What happens after that?
Marco:
So I've been kind of postponing thinking about this.
Marco:
Mike had a good idea of why don't we have the audience sing the theme song along?
And...
Marco:
This is exactly the kind of thing that would be totally way too mortifying for the three of us to do.
Marco:
But there's a whole room of people here who might feel differently.
Marco:
So I think that's how we should solve it.
Marco:
All right, but after the song, then what happens?
John:
We talk about cars.
John:
Then we keep talking.
John:
Right, but do they file out while we talk about cars?
John:
Hi, everybody.
John:
We'll figure it out when we get there.
John:
That's the other question I'm afraid to ask.
John:
That's what I'm going to now.
John:
How many people know what happens on the podcast after the theme song?
John:
Anybody not raising their hand, how many people don't know what happens?
John:
All right.
John:
What I'm getting at is I don't know how we're going to end this podcast.
John:
Like, literally, I don't know how we're going to end it because we just kind of tail off in the actual recording.
John:
Anyway, this is all pre-show.
John:
What you're hearing now, this is called pre-show, and this is the stuff that we do while we're trying to figure out what we're going to record.
John:
Anyway, I think I got that in my system.
John:
You have any more pre-show stuff?
John:
Let's get on with the show.
John:
Oh, my word.
Casey:
You know, for an accidental tech podcast, we don't mess around around these parts.
Casey:
So I spent a lot of money today.
Casey:
I just thought I'd let everyone know.
John:
You're not starting with that.
John:
You're already off track.
Casey:
This is how it works.
Casey:
This is how it works.
Casey:
This is what we do.
John:
All right, go ahead.
John:
You can have your moments.
Casey:
Yeah, I bought a MacBook Adorable, and I'm really excited about that.
Casey:
So finally, the MacBook Adorable has been updated.
Casey:
I am very stoked, and I'm really excited for it to arrive in like three freaking weeks because I went all in and got the super fancy one, humblebrag, not so humblebrag, whatever.
Casey:
And I'm really excited that that happened, and that's really all I care about.
Casey:
And oh yeah, iPad stuff happened, and I guess we're done.
Marco:
I love that you are the only, like, it's like, you ever see the pictures of the highways when a place is being evacuated for a hurricane, and you see, like, there's, like, all the people going one direction, and there's one car going the other way?
Marco:
Like, this is, the entire rest of the universe right now is like, oh, my God, iPad productivity, this is the future.
Marco:
They basically made it the Mac, asterisk, asterisk.
Marco:
So we're going there, and you're like, yeah, you know what?
Marco:
This is the perfect time to stop using my iPad.
Marco:
I know, this is great.
Marco:
Finally!
Casey:
Where is Federico?
Casey:
I don't know where he is, but I'm so sorry, buddy.
Casey:
I don't think this is going to put a damper on his day.
Casey:
No, not at all.
Casey:
I don't think that's possible.
Casey:
All right, so we've got to get the show on the road.
Casey:
I should stop distracting everyone.
Casey:
So today is the first day of WWDC.
Casey:
The keynote was just a few hours ago.
Casey:
I don't know when Marco will get the chance to release this as a proper version of the show.
Casey:
Tonight.
Casey:
I'm dedicated.
Casey:
Oh, that's intense.
Casey:
Well, I'm not staying up that late, but I don't ever get involved with that anyway because I'm a big diva.
Casey:
Hey!
Casey:
Anyhow, the keynote was today, and it was quick.
Casey:
They set a really high bar for us getting through this show quickly, which is something that the three of us are entirely incapable of doing.
Casey:
So this is going to be a little bit interesting.
Marco:
Well, this is going to be like a John Godfather situation where the commentary is probably going to be... I was Goodfellas, not the Godfather.
LAUGHTER
John:
Of course it was.
John:
Of course.
John:
Yeah, but this keynote was like a speed run.
John:
Like, at first, Kevin Lynch was up there, and he was going fast.
John:
I thought maybe because he was nervous, but everybody went really fast because they had so much stuff.
John:
And I guess we're going to go through it in keynote order, which means, like, the exciting things are at the end because they saved them to the end.
John:
So we have a bunch of unexciting things in the beginning.
John:
So, tvOS.
LAUGHTER
Marco:
So I have a question.
Marco:
Was the OS or any part of the OS actually mentioned or actually changed?
Marco:
Because a content deal is not the OS.
Marco:
As far as I can tell, the OS is unchanged.
Marco:
Did you watch State of the Union?
John:
In State of the Union, they showed one slide that showed that they had some new things for helping... I don't know.
John:
They had a bunch of icons that made me think they added some more navigation stuff.
John:
But anyway, nothing new in TV that we care about, right?
Casey:
Well, and the funny thing is...
Casey:
Back six months ago, before I knew that the Grand Tour was a pile of garbage, I would have been super amped to have Amazon Prime Video on the Apple TV.
Casey:
And as it turns out... Oh, it's still Man of the High Castle.
Casey:
There's good shows on Amazon.
Casey:
Yeah, well, either way, all I cared about was the Grand Tour, and now it's just a disaster.
Casey:
So, I mean, I'm excited, I guess.
Casey:
This is perhaps the damn breaking, which is really exciting.
Casey:
But, I don't know, tvOS, meh.
Casey:
So let's move on.
Casey:
WatchOS was next, right?
Yeah.
Marco:
And there wasn't that much more there.
Marco:
There was a little bit of new stuff in watchOS.
Marco:
I think it's interesting.
Marco:
I was kind of predicting that this would be kind of a quiet year for those two.
Marco:
And I think that mostly panned out.
Marco:
Most of my other predictions were horrendously wrong, but this one I think I actually thought.
Marco:
Siri Everywhere.
Marco:
I thought you were on the right track because they're like, oh, the Siri watch face.
Marco:
We really are going to see Siri everywhere.
Marco:
So the watch face, I'm like, okay.
Marco:
The watch is computer.
Marco:
You can make it be anything.
Marco:
You can make it show anything.
Marco:
You can give it the intelligence to say, I don't always want to have set at the bottom if I occasionally want a timer down there.
Marco:
But when a timer's running, I want it to be on screen.
Marco:
And so they have this potential since day one of the watch to be like, we can make it smart.
Marco:
It's a smart watch.
Marco:
So we can only show stuff that you need to care about at that moment.
Marco:
But it's mostly been unrealized on the watch faces.
Marco:
They've been pretty much static.
Marco:
You could make multiple ones now with three, but the complications you would set up would be pretty much fixed.
Marco:
And it wasn't actually being very smart about that.
Marco:
So now they make a face where they actually make something smart, but it's only on that face?
Marco:
You can't just put a smart complication as the big bottom one in some of the other faces or anything like that.
Marco:
Why...
Marco:
It's a good step to get smarter, but why is it only on that one kind of interestingly designed face?
John:
Yeah, I thought when they were showing that segment, it's like, oh, you're going to be able to swipe your complications or make your own smart face with different times of day, but no, you're right.
John:
It's just all one face and all Siri-focused.
John:
It doesn't even look like a watch, and I don't know.
John:
I mean, maybe it's just a start to this.
John:
For a brief moment, I thought they were going to say third-party watch faces.
John:
Yeah, so did I. I thought it was coming.
John:
For like eight seconds, there was a little glimmer of hope at the beginning there.
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, I thought your worlds were going to collide, Marco, where you have watches and you can make your own face and you can make it as fancy as you wanted.
Casey:
You know, because your watch is not very smart.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
For those who aren't here, he's wearing a proper mechanical watch.
Casey:
So yours is not a very intelligent watch.
Casey:
It's a feature watch.
Casey:
It's a feature watch.
Marco:
Yeah, but I do want the watch to take advantage of the fact that it's a computer.
Marco:
And clearly they now are considering things like the intelligence of the face by making the Siri face that's more dynamic with what it's showing you.
Marco:
But they didn't take it far enough.
Marco:
So maybe in the future they will.
Marco:
I hope they do.
John:
They did a lot of workout stuff.
John:
I think they're recognizing the watch as mostly a fitness-related thing.
John:
So they did a lot of improvements for workouts.
John:
Yeah.
John:
getting rid of frustrations in terms of like, if I'm in the middle of a workout but I wanna pause the music and stuff like that.
John:
So those seem like smart focus features.
John:
And the lap swimming in the pool, that's pretty esoteric in the grand scheme of things.
Casey:
They had said that they were going to do monthly-based reminders or something like that.
Casey:
Like, hey, if you are near the end of the month and if you hit your move goal the next three days, you will get your move goal for the whole month.
Casey:
And I think that's kind of neat because I pay some amount of attention to my rings.
Casey:
And not all of us are just innately a blue ring stud like me.
Casey:
So for you guys, I'm sure that this is pretty important for your blue rings.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
But no, I thought that was really cool, and I think that a lot of these things were typical evolutionary improvements, but as always with Apple, or mostly with Apple, they were not revolutionary.
Casey:
But the watch, I mean, looked good.
John:
And it was early in the keynote, so they didn't talk about all the things that annoy, like if you wipe your watch or unpair it, you lose all your data, and sometimes you stand every hour during a day, but it doesn't give you your stand ring because it doesn't like you.
John:
Like, I always want a mulligan.
John:
Mm-hmm.
John:
A mulligan feature where it would be like, oh, come on, I get one mulligan per day, and I could say, I totally stood that hour.
John:
Anyway, that's next year for watchOS 5, I guess.
Marco:
I have a small concern with the activity reminders, that right now when you get a watch on default settings, there is increasingly more health and fitness type things that it bugs you about every so often.
Marco:
And I wonder if they push that too far, like they added Breathe last year and everything.
Marco:
If they push that too far, people will turn those off.
Marco:
And I feel like they're really on the edge of that right now.
Casey:
Well, to some degree, it's all about the way the person perceives it, right?
Casey:
Because to you, it's frustrating and annoying.
Casey:
And especially with Breathe, I agree with you.
Casey:
Otherwise, I think that most of these reminders are kind of nice.
Casey:
And I like to try to get reminded from something external to myself.
Casey:
Hey, get off your lazy butt and move a little bit.
Casey:
You've been writing code for the last six hours.
Casey:
Maybe you should go, I don't know, get a drink of water or something.
Casey:
And so for me, I actually think it's really cool, again, with the breathe accepted because I don't dig that at all.
Casey:
I breathed during the keynote.
Casey:
Did you stand at 50 minutes?
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
No, not so much.
Casey:
All right, so anything else on watch?
Marco:
Nope.
Nope.
Marco:
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Casey:
Nailed it.
Casey:
Well done, sir.
Casey:
That's how you do.
Casey:
I've done this a few times.
Casey:
So for those that don't listen to the live broadcast, when Marco used to do the reads during the live broadcast... It was a train wreck.
Casey:
It was not a train wreck, but it was a... There were occasional derailments of a minor variety.
Casey:
So are there really minor train derailments?
Casey:
Anyway, so... All right.
Casey:
So speaking of derailing trains, High Sierra?
Casey:
Seriously?
Marco:
What is that?
Marco:
I mean, come on.
Marco:
I mean, we'll get to this later, but what do you think is the worst name?
Marco:
High Sierra or HomePod?
John:
Oh, High Sierra.
John:
I think they're both fine.
John:
I thought they were going to call it Sierra Nevada, but High Sierra is fine.
John:
That's a thing.
John:
And Casey didn't know it was a thing either.
John:
But it is a place and a thing.
John:
And wasn't there a High Sierra, like, volume format or, like, CD-ROM standard?
John:
This is where you are the live chat room and someone tells you...
John:
Nobody know old people?
Marco:
Some kind of CD-ROM, like Mount Rainier kind of standard.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah, I see.
Marco:
Anyway.
Casey:
I thought the dad jokes leading up to it, like, I'm a sucker for a good dad joke, so that was fine, whatever.
Casey:
But then I was expecting Craig to be like, oh, no, really, no, it's called something else.
Casey:
And that never happened.
Marco:
It took me about a minute before I realized it wasn't a joke.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
I really thought that Craig was going to be, oh, haha, I'm so funny.
Casey:
I'm such a good guy.
Casey:
And really, it's called Yosemite++ or whatever.
Casey:
Anyways, and so as it turns out, they're rolling with the high Sierra.
Casey:
And on the surface, I thought the loose drug references were kind of funny as a gag.
Casey:
But when you're introducing the new version of your OS with all of these drug references and are like, no, really, this is it, that just, I don't know.
Casey:
That's a little weird to me.
Casey:
But the OS looks good, so there's that.
John:
Yeah, this is kind of what we're complaining about.
John:
They keep having to revise macOS every year, and we're like, you should slow down the pace.
John:
This is them slowing down the pace.
John:
They'll have a marketing release this year, but the number of features they're adding, I mean, this could practically be a point release.
John:
It doesn't look like there's a lot of new stuff in it, or at the very least, not a lot of new stuff they talked about.
John:
Obviously, APFS, which is...
John:
The most important feature of the operating system, as we all know.
John:
They didn't go into detail on it, but they did do the one demo that you can do with the file cloning, which is not really that impressive if you understand what's going on under the covers, but whatever.
John:
What they didn't show, basically, was is APFS faster than HFS Plus?
John:
If you do some big operation to a lot of files, either just using straight POSIX APIs or in your app, is it actually faster than HFS?
John:
Maybe it's not, or maybe it's a wash.
John:
If you're taking advantage of features that only APS has, obviously it's going to look good.
John:
So that was fine.
John:
You might not watch the State of the Union, Marco, because you're busy getting ready over here, but there was kind of a sad note about MagOS Sierra and 32-bit app support.
John:
Scary, sad note, because I think of how many 32-bit apps I have on my Mac, and I have a lot, and I bet everybody has a lot.
John:
And unlike iOS apps, I have little hope that if 32-bit support goes away, that all those app developers, A, are even still developing those apps, and B, will update them all to 64-bit versions.
John:
So 32-bit App Store is not going away in High Sierra, but in the one after that, probably we're going to yell at you if you try to launch it.
John:
Like, we're wishy-washy about it, but bottom line is 32-bit apps are not long for this world in macOS in the next year or two.
Casey:
But hold on, though.
Casey:
Was that just the App Store?
Casey:
Because I don't remember... That's the OS.
John:
My impression is that that's the OS.
John:
We just came from the State of the Union, so we didn't have time to research.
John:
People in the audience are nodding.
John:
That means I'm right.
Marco:
And their wording was like, this will be the last release where you can do it without big problems, right?
Marco:
So maybe they'll do some kind of virtualization layer thing or an emulation layer like Rosetta later on down the road.
Marco:
Or even they'll just say, this app may make your Mac slower, like they do on iOS when you watch 32-bit apps now.
Marco:
As it pages in all the 32-bit libraries to actually run the app.
Marco:
Yeah, absolutely.
Marco:
I'm guessing they'll have some kind of like patchwork solution because it wouldn't be that hard for them to do it.
Marco:
Like they already have all the libraries and they could do like a VM kind of like emulation mode for those apps and just yell at you with dialogue boxes telling you that your computer is not performing very well.
Casey:
You know, we skipped Safari and I don't, I don't think there's a lot to say about it, but I'm super excited about the changes they've made.
Casey:
I mean, autoplay video blocking.
Casey:
That's awesome.
Casey:
How long do you think it'll take people to defeat that?
Casey:
Well, can we at least be positive for a moment?
Casey:
All right, fine.
Casey:
Come on, man.
Casey:
But no, that's exciting.
Casey:
I forget what else was in Safari, but it looks really good.
Casey:
It's faster.
Marco:
It's really fast.
Marco:
It's always fast everywhere.
Marco:
The intelligent tracking prevention, which sounds like some kind of algorithm to detect whether to block third-party cookies on ads.
Marco:
which is pretty cool by default.
Marco:
That's nice.
Marco:
It's kind of like a half ad blocker step.
Marco:
Maybe they would also block things that are the more invisible kind of trackers that you don't necessarily see, the massive three megabytes of includes that most of these websites have now.
Marco:
So maybe this is kind of them building in an ad blocker by default as a baby step.
Marco:
And they probably would never go out and say, we're blocking all your ads because people might sue them.
Marco:
But this is something like, well, our browser just decides not to load your JavaScript sometimes.
John:
I think they're just trying to make you less trackable.
John:
My guess, I mean, we'll have to go to the sessions about this, but they're randomizing identifiable information.
John:
I don't think they're randomizing your user agent string, but they could be randomizing some stuff that people use to pin you down, like exposing whatever APIs they use to get, like, I don't know if they can get you at your battery level like they do on the phone or whatever, but, like, making you appear to be a different phone when you aren't.
John:
So they're not blocking the ads.
John:
They emphasize that because they don't want people to get mad at them, but they are just making you less trackable, which is just good.
John:
I don't know if it's on iOS, too, but I would assume so.
John:
The only other thing I want to talk about in Mac OS, I don't want to talk about the photo stuff because I don't think there was that much there and we need to move on.
John:
Maybe we'll circle back to it.
John:
But the part where they talked about graphics, I'm like, oh, this is it.
John:
They're going to upgrade to OpenGL support and they're going to have Vulkan and it's going to be awesome and, you know, NVIDIA GPUs are going to be in the new Mac Pro next year.
John:
But, you know, no.
John:
So they're doubling down on metal, which is good.
John:
It's their thing.
John:
It's fine.
John:
But I think by them talking so heavily about metal is kind of them saying, we're never going to do Vulkan.
John:
We're just doing metal, and that's our thing.
John:
Because they've got engine support.
John:
They've got Unity and Unreal.
John:
I think they're not hurting from the lack of Vulkan support, which is fine, I suppose.
John:
I'll take what I can get.
John:
But that was one fake out in the Mac OS section for me.
Marco:
I will briefly say, though, because there isn't that much to talk about with photos, this is pretty fast.
Marco:
They added syncing of the metadata stuff.
Marco:
That's awesome.
Marco:
That's like the one huge glaring hole from last year, as you mentioned last week.
Marco:
That was the one big hole in the feature set that they needed to plug, so that way our devices aren't hot for the first two days after we get a new one or restore it.
Marco:
That's a huge thing.
John:
Mine's still be hot when it downloads.
John:
When it downloads, it syncs the data.
John:
So yeah, syncing is good.
John:
And you won't have to recompute it, but you will have to pull it down.
John:
Hopefully the progress bar for pulling it down will be better.
John:
And related to that, we don't have a separate section for iCloud, but it's worth talking about here.
John:
On one of the slides was a thing that said, like, family storage plans for iCloud storage.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Which is one tiny step closer to family photo libraries.
John:
Because if we have family storage, like a family plan on a cell phone thing, we pay for a certain amount for the whole family, and you share it in some way, that's a great place to put a family photo library.
John:
Not this year.
Casey:
Mail got some improvements.
Casey:
That's pretty good.
Casey:
I actually think mail.app is fine.
Casey:
Don't throw tomatoes out of these.
Casey:
So do I. I mean, it's fine for me.
Casey:
It works.
Casey:
I'm not a super productivity guru that needs whatever the fancy mail app of the minute is like a lot of you guys probably are.
John:
You need more than one mail app if you're a fancy mail guru.
Marco:
Yeah, that's true.
Marco:
I've just long ago given up on ever being able to search my mail on iOS.
Casey:
Well, and supposedly that's getting better.
Casey:
It's going to take up a lot less space, et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
Not on iOS.
Casey:
Yeah, well, that's true.
Casey:
And then there's this new HEVC codec, which is H.265.
Casey:
That's kind of cool.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
It's nice that they're bringing support down, like hardware support, to some things, some existing hardware, but if not, have software support.
John:
So that'll really help.
John:
And them converting everything internally, like anything that they make will use their H.265 and their new image container format and everything.
John:
That's all...
John:
really smart and will make everybody happy.
Casey:
And then the beginnings of your good day, they said that you can use external GPUs.
Casey:
So you can play games and do whatever things you need this ridiculous GPU for with an external GPU.
Casey:
So that's exciting, right?
John:
Yeah, like, it was like a dev kit they were giving you.
Marco:
That was a huge surprise, like, that the first bit of new hardware Apple announced was an external GPU.
John:
Yeah, so here's what I want to see from them for real commitment.
John:
This is like, oh, you know, this will let you use higher-powered GPUs on your laptops and turn it into kind of the Mac Pro that we're not yet introducing, right?
John:
But...
John:
are they gonna ship a product?
John:
I want official Apple-supported thing that I can plug a GPU into.
John:
I don't think it's like, oh, it's a third-party opportunity, here's a driver, I hope that company doesn't go out of business.
John:
If they're really committed to it, I want to see an Apple-branded and styled box that you can put GPUs in that you have official support.
John:
This is just the beginning, this is just a dev kit, so we don't know.
John:
We don't know what their product story is there.
John:
I hope they have a product story and not just a
John:
Because they couldn't even, when they left it to third parties, they couldn't even get monitors right with the LG thing.
John:
I don't want them to leave external GPU to third parties and just, you know, good luck.
John:
That seems like an orphan thing.
John:
But yeah, you have the ability to do it with Thunderbolt.
John:
People are already doing it with hacks, right?
John:
This is not new.
John:
And then official Apple support is great and is stepping in the right direction.
Casey:
And then VR was spoken about, which that's kind of cool.
Casey:
At least they're acknowledging that VR is a thing.
John:
What was the headset they have with the little dents in it?
John:
Was that the HTC Vive?
John:
They didn't announce Vive Vive.
John:
You make fun of me for MoV and you say Vive?
Casey:
It's pronounced Vizel.
John:
There you go.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I don't have one.
John:
But that's what the picture they used for the graphics with the logos removed.
John:
They didn't announce, like, Oculus or HTC supporting Apple stuff.
John:
They did announce, like, engine support and Steam VR support, but they didn't have, like, a hardware VR story.
John:
It's good they have a VR story now instead of, like, no, VR is just not a thing.
John:
But it's not as if they came out and said, all the major VR hardware and software vendors are supporting us and VR is the future.
John:
They seem much more heavily into AR.
Yeah.
Marco:
But still, it is a big step for them to acknowledge that VR is a thing and to acknowledge that maybe people who create content in the world might want to create content for VR sometime.
Marco:
So maybe we should ship some computers with some big GPUs in them.
John:
Yeah, or at least better GPUs.
John:
I don't know enough about the Radeon line to know if these are like the super top end.
John:
Being on the current architecture is a nice change, right?
John:
Yeah.
Yeah.
John:
Who'd have thunk it?
John:
We'll see how long that keeps up.
John:
Yeah, they're not going to update the Mac again for another two years.
John:
That'll be fine.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right, so then we started talking about hardware, but there's something else that's awesome that we should talk about.
Marco:
Oh, yeah, okay.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Thank you.
Casey:
Two for three.
Casey:
Nicely done.
Casey:
So we got some IMAX.
Casey:
That's exciting.
Casey:
They've got fancy new displays, which is cool.
Casey:
They're on Kaby Lake, gentlemen.
Casey:
I feel like there should be some sort of excitement about this.
Casey:
I'm surprised the room isn't erupting.
Casey:
This is not a demand.
Casey:
I'm surprised the room isn't erupting in thunderous applause.
Casey:
It really wasn't a demand.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
I'm not that desperate.
Casey:
Good God, guys.
Marco:
He really isn't that much better.
Marco:
I mean, it's nice, but it's not.
Casey:
But it's more modern.
Casey:
I mean, so that's good.
Casey:
So leaving aside the real star of the show as far as the three of us are concerned, I thought the iMacs looked good.
Casey:
I mean, it's an improvement.
Casey:
The displays are better.
Casey:
They're faster.
Casey:
More RAM.
Casey:
All these good things.
John:
I like the fact that they kept USB-A ports on the back because this is like finally you have USB-C and Thunderbolt and so on, but they didn't remove all the A ports because all that would mean is even more dongles hanging out the back of your iMacs at places where you can't reach them and the weight of the dongle makes them bend down and everything.
John:
So I'm glad that they did that and they kept the SD card slot.
John:
They'd be like, no, the future is not SD cards.
John:
We've got to remove it.
John:
They didn't add anything, but they didn't take away anything either.
John:
So this is a very pragmatic iMac update and at least they're differentiating the line in a way that they don't with the portables that like...
John:
The larger and bigger and more complicated the computer, the more you care about legacy ports and less we're going to try to make it even thinner and remove all the ports and just tell you you shouldn't stick SD cards.
John:
If you want an SD card reader, just buy a USB-C hub and then put a USB-C cable into it and then put a card reader into that with your adapter and your dongle and then it's like, just give me the slot to put in the back.
John:
So I like those iMacs.
John:
They look pretty good.
John:
The screen stuff, did they say the standard iMacs have better brightness and everything too?
John:
Yeah, and 10-bit color too.
John:
They said 10-bit dithering.
John:
Which I don't know.
John:
Yeah, right.
John:
It makes me think that the screen is still not capable of it, but that they're going to dither to get the different color things.
John:
I don't know what that means.
John:
Maybe.
John:
Yeah, that's worth clarifying.
John:
And they didn't say anything about image retention, Marcos.
John:
I don't know.
Casey:
Whoops.
Casey:
Yeah, and then there are still some spinning platter models.
Marco:
Yeah, but they're all fusion.
Marco:
No, they're not.
Marco:
The base model 21-inch is still a 5,400 RPM spin.
John:
Really?
John:
Because they made a big point of it.
Marco:
Fusion was standard on all models.
Marco:
They were very careful to say that all 27-ish configurators have Fusion.
Marco:
I don't even think they should have Fusion drives in there.
Marco:
There should be SSD everywhere at this point.
Marco:
Fusion should be an option if you want a ton of space.
Marco:
That's a crutch.
Marco:
They should not be using that.
John:
I don't know yet if Fusion drives are supported with APFS.
John:
I don't know how that works.
John:
Yeah, I don't know.
John:
Both for conversion, which wasn't mentioned at all, and also if you buy one of these things like a year from now and it comes with a fusion drive, is the spinning disk part of it APFS?
John:
Does it make a difference?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I'm shocked that they did not take the 10 seconds in there to talk about file system conversion.
Casey:
That's a scary and important step that everybody has to go through.
Casey:
So they talked about, oh my word, let me talk about the birds and the bees.
John:
The new iMacs, they bump the GPUs.
John:
They give better GPUs across the line, which is, a lot of their GPU talk and their graphics talk is acknowledging a weakness in their entire product line, that their GPUs are not great, they're kind of middle of the road.
John:
And it hurts them.
John:
And so I don't know if you need them for the VR stuff, but it's just embarrassing when there are fancy games that everybody else is playing that are available for the Mac on Steam, but people don't want to play them or can't play them or the frame rates are terrible.
John:
It just doesn't look good.
John:
So I'm glad that they are making progress in that area.
John:
And I didn't look at the pricing.
John:
Are they jacking up the prices compared to the current models based on having a better GPU?
John:
I think they're about the same.
John:
They have a place to jack up the prices, and that's... Oh, sure.
Casey:
Was this where they did the demo of the VR stuff with Star Wars and ILM and all that?
Casey:
I believe so.
Casey:
Yeah, because it struck me as I was watching this.
Casey:
If you think of everyone on stage, they all had...
Casey:
prompters and had people around them.
Casey:
Presumably, they were able to see kind of cues of what they were supposed to talk about next.
Casey:
This poor woman, I don't recall her name.
Casey:
I think I did write it down somewhere, but God knows where it was.
Casey:
But anyway, she had to have goggles on and just do all of this from memory.
Casey:
I can barely remember my own name half the time.
John:
She ducked under Darth Vader's lightsaber that wasn't there.
John:
That was a hell of a demo.
Casey:
It was intense.
Casey:
Like, I'm serious.
Casey:
That was super impressive because everyone else at least can look at a monitor and remind themselves what they're supposed to talk about.
John:
And you can say, oh, it's ILM.
John:
They're good at this.
John:
ILM doesn't do live shows in front of an audience.
John:
They do post-production.
John:
They have all the time in the world.
John:
So they must have rehearsed that like crazy.
John:
And that was impressive.
John:
Obviously, it wasn't a game that you can play, but it was a very cool demo.
Casey:
Yeah, it was super cool.
Casey:
So was iMac Pro next?
Marco:
Well, next they did the quick MacBooks update, which we pretty much already covered.
Marco:
You're welcome.
Marco:
See, what's nice about the MacBook update to Kaby Lake, first of all, they did all of them.
Marco:
Actually, even the MacBook Air.
John:
Yeah, it was a megahertz bump.
Marco:
Same screen, same everything, but you increased the clock speed.
Marco:
Yeah, but if they went to Skylight, that's going to be a big battery boost on the MacBook Air.
Marco:
But what's nice about the MacBook update is that they did it, you know, Kaby Lake came out not that long ago.
Marco:
You know, they're shipping these products on time, basically, and they're doing it all, and it's not that big of a deal.
Marco:
They didn't hold everything back until this winter when the iMac Pro launches or whatever.
Marco:
They're not artificially delaying things.
Marco:
They didn't hold it back until they could get 32 gigs of RAM either.
John:
They just said, look, we're going to do the updates we can do now.
Marco:
It's really nice that
Marco:
that this is the first step in a potential return to regular updates on a healthy schedule for the entire Mac lineup.
Marco:
This is step one of that.
Marco:
We'll see if they can maintain that over time.
Marco:
That'd be nice.
Marco:
I hope they do.
Marco:
But this is the indication that they're at least on that path right now, and that I'm really glad to see.
Casey:
Yeah, because was it Gray and Mike that were talking about, you know, I want to see, like, a line here.
Casey:
I don't want to see just one point where, oh, yeah, they updated, great.
Casey:
I think that was me, but that's fine.
Casey:
It was also you.
Casey:
LAUGHTER
Casey:
I'm so sorry.
Casey:
Excuse me, everyone.
Casey:
My mistake.
Casey:
But the point is still fair, right?
Casey:
Regardless of who made it, the point is that you can start to draw a line here and say, okay, updates are happening with some amount of regularity, which is a great sign.
Casey:
Now, we'll see if that stays true for iPad stuff, which we'll get to in a minute.
Casey:
But, I mean, this is still a step in the right direction, which is good.
John:
Well, it kind of makes me dread when they change the cases again, because maybe we can start attributing the delay to that.
John:
Like, oh, they update them fine when it's all in the same case, but then there's this big update where they're like touch bar and the new form factors and the MacBook one.
John:
I hope the next time they change the form factors, there isn't a weird gap again.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, next, speaking of weird gaps, they kind of addressed the Mac Pro need temporarily with the iMac Pro, which we all knew was a thing that was coming ever since that briefing they had.
Marco:
But for me, it was always a big question mark of, like, what will the iMac Pro have that the Mac Pro doesn't?
Marco:
And what would the iMac Pro have that the regular iMac doesn't?
Marco:
Like, where do they fill this, you know, how do they balance that, and how do they maintain a reason for those other two ends of this scale to exist?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And I still have just as many questions now because what they ended up doing... We saw it.
Marco:
We saw it in the hands-on area.
Casey:
It's space gray.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
Can we just talk about how hot that thing looks?
Casey:
That thing looks amazing.
John:
It was dark in the room.
John:
I wish it was matte black, but I guess they got to save the matte black for the pro.
John:
By the way, on the iMac Pro, let's think of an alternate universe.
John:
An alternate universe exists where the iMac Pro was going to be their story for pro-Mac hardware.
John:
When this project was conceived, the iMac Pro was conceived, there was no plan for the Mac Pro that they've now promised us.
John:
So...
John:
Think about that.
John:
Think about, imagine a world where Apple announces this and they never had the Mac round table and we all look at this and it's cool and everything, but I think people would still be super angry because this is not... People?
John:
I know two people that would be super angry.
John:
Oh, like the people who want pro Macs.
John:
I mean, some people are still saying this pro Mac is not exactly what they want.
John:
But for a top-end iMac, I think it's awesome, because now we know the other one is coming, so this doesn't need to be all things to all people.
John:
It needs to be, and that's why it has these guts in them that are so high-end, like an 18-core Xeon and 128 gigs of ECC RAM.
John:
It's just because this was going to be the Mac Pro story.
John:
So your questions, I guess, are probably like, how did they get all that stuff in there?
John:
Is it gonna melt?
John:
How loud is it gonna be?
Marco:
Are these your questions?
Marco:
Yeah, so my biggest question, so basically, like, the answer, like, on where they put it on the spectrum is they put a Mac Pro in the iMac case.
Marco:
Like, they put Xeon CPUs, workstation-class graphics, we think, you know, high RAM ceiling, ECC RAM, big throughput, it has dual Thunderbolt controllers, so it's like... 10-gig Ethernet, all the...
John:
the highest of the high-end features are in there in this little skinny package.
John:
By the way, the one in the hands-on area, it was a prototype, so I couldn't tell what the noise levels were going to be, but they had the fans set to max.
John:
So it's not representative of hardware, but it was so loud in that room I couldn't tell.
John:
But definitely, there was more airflow coming out of that thing than you would expect.
John:
But otherwise, it just looks like an iMac.
John:
It just looks like an iMac.
John:
It didn't look any thicker to me.
Marco:
No, in fact, it's the exact same dimensions according to their website.
Marco:
It said, without adding a millimeter, we added all this power, which is cute.
Casey:
but it was not just like an iMac.
Casey:
Did you see how good that thing looked?
Casey:
Like, I want that.
Casey:
You just want the space gray magic keyboard.
Casey:
I do, I do.
Marco:
They have the magic trackpad, too.
Marco:
The magic trackpad also comes in space gray.
Marco:
And the mouse, they all come now in space gray, and the keyboard is now wireless with a number pad, a combination that has never existed before.
Marco:
Yeah, that's super awesome.
Casey:
And I asked...
Casey:
I asked the person that was doing the kind of demo.
Casey:
Ten seconds after I asked them.
Casey:
I wasn't there.
Casey:
I walked up right after John, and I was like, so what switches are these exactly?
Casey:
And he said it's exactly like the current Magic Keyboard, which we can all agree is the best keyboard that has ever existed.
Casey:
Good talk.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So, no, it really does.
Casey:
All kidding aside, it looks great.
Casey:
The fan output, like I put my hand behind the exhaust vent, which is in the back, unlike the IMAX that we have today, if I recall correctly.
Casey:
That was moving a lot of air.
Casey:
And admittedly, like John said, it was loud in there.
Casey:
Admittedly, we only had but 30 seconds or whatever in front of it.
Casey:
But it did not sound terribly loud to me at all.
Casey:
And it was moving a stunning amount of air for what looked to be a little tiny area that the vent was taking out.
John:
It's going to be heating
John:
up the foot, because it's blowing back on the little L-shaped foot thingy, and so that foot is going to get hot and act as a radiator and slowly warm.
John:
If you put a piece of chocolate on the top part of that foot while the thing's going to melt into a puddle, it's kind of interesting.
John:
We weren't allowed to touch it, by the way, although I did immediately grab the mouse, but I basically got my hand slapped.
John:
We weren't allowed to touch it.
John:
It's just for them to look at.
John:
The only other thing that we asked that was relevant is it does have socketed RAM that you could see in the diagram when they showed it in the keynote, but there is not user upgradable.
John:
There is no door.
John:
You are not supposed to reach in there, and so it's
John:
not all soldered to the board, but it doesn't matter, you still can't upgrade it.
John:
So order it with as much RAM as you can afford after you mortgage your house to buy one of these things.
Casey:
Yeah, so speaking of, would it start at five grand?
Marco:
Starts at 5,000, which is not bad.
Marco:
But you know, if you configure a Mac Pro with eight cores and one terabyte, which is what that base configuration is, and 32 gigs of RAM, that's actually not that ridiculous.
Marco:
Plus the screen, that's a good deal.
John:
You get a free screen with it, which is nice.
Marco:
Yeah, I consider that, right now, today, having not looked too far into it yet, I consider that pretty reasonable.
Casey:
So, sitting here now, you guys, I shouldn't say we, because I'm not going to get one of these, despite, have we talked about how hot it is?
Casey:
No, but I'm curious, actually, are you guys going to get one of these?
Casey:
Because in a lot of ways, on the surface, well, obviously Marco is, but...
Casey:
I still have to ask the question.
Casey:
Marco's going to get two of them.
Casey:
Let's face it.
Casey:
He's going to get two of these.
Casey:
That's probably true.
Casey:
But, you know, this does seem to solve a lot of problems.
Casey:
And so on the one side, I'm really excited about this for you guys especially, that it solves a lot of problems, and it seems like this is the way of the future.
Casey:
But at the same time, we had that roundtable where they said, no, really, the way of the future is the new Mac Pro that'll come sometime between now and 2030.
Casey:
This is the marshmallow experiment.
John:
What's the name of that one?
John:
Marshmallow thing?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Like you offer the kid, we can have one marshmallow now.
John:
If you wait 30 seconds, you can have two marshmallows, and the kid's like, one marshmallow, now.
John:
So if you can wait until next year or the year after or sometime after that, you can get a Mac Pro, which is going to be probably super awesome, just like this is, because clearly they're showing their willingness to put the best of the best stuff inside a Mac.
John:
They've done it here as best they could in this little skinny thing.
John:
And in the big Mac Pro, it's going to be even, you know, so if you can wait for that, you will get it.
John:
If you can't wait, you can plunk down your life savings on this thing and...
Casey:
So is that what you're going to do?
John:
Are you going to plunk down your life savings on this thing?
John:
No.
John:
I would love to have one of these.
John:
I would love to replace my Mac with it.
John:
It looks like a great computer.
John:
But I bet I'll love the Mac Pro even more.
John:
So...
John:
I can just keep using my... I want to go for a decade.
John:
So if I can just keep using my computer for longer... I mean, you're close at this point.
John:
You might as well wait, right?
John:
If we're having this podcast in 2019 and I still don't have no computer, I swear, I'm going to go back in time and buy an iMac Pro right now.
Marco:
I bet both of those things will be true.
Marco:
I bet that is accurate.
Marco:
The big question for me, which is probably what you're thinking of, also is, well, you're already set on the Mac Pro for shape and political reasons.
Marco:
Political reasons?
Marco:
But I'm thinking, what is left for the Mac Pro to do?
Marco:
And if you look at this, this really is a lot of Mac Pro-type hardware in an iMac case.
Marco:
Why should the Mac Pro still exist with this?
Marco:
And I only came up with a handful of reasons.
Marco:
My big one was...
Marco:
if you want multiple CPUs or GPUs.
Marco:
So, you know, presumably a new Mac Pro would have to support either dual GPU, at least dual GPU sockets, and maybe dual CPU sockets.
Marco:
Because otherwise, again, why would this thing exist?
Marco:
And then, of course, maybe they'd have another Thunderbolt controller, like a third one to make more bandwidth total for external connections and stuff.
Marco:
Maybe they're going to have some kind of 8K story with the Pro display.
Marco:
Two 10-gig Ethernet ports.
Marco:
Yeah, and the big thing also would be presumably quieter cooling.
John:
And reliability.
John:
Just plain reliability and modularity.
John:
Like, what you're looking for is, we would say, oh, it's quieter, and it doesn't get stressed as much.
John:
But for pro hardware, you want it to just be super reliable.
John:
You don't want to be in the edge of the thermal envelope.
John:
Like, I kept thinking of the thermal corner thing.
John:
We painted ourselves into a thermal corner with the old Mac Pro.
John:
I looked at that iMac Pro.
John:
That looks like a hell of a thermal corner.
John:
Like, I don't...
John:
I don't know how much headroom you have in that thing, but it's like 500 watt power supply, and that's a lot of energy to, you know, the waste heat to get out of that system.
John:
The Mac Pro should have headroom.
John:
It should be the type of thing that you can stick either under a desk or on a desk or wherever it's gonna be.
John:
in some editing bay and leave it there and it will just be rock solid, reliable, and quiet-ish.
John:
And that's the role.
John:
And of course, it'll be even more expensive and hopefully also cooler looking.
John:
Like if they're saving matte black for something, use it on the Mac Pro.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I think it's...
Marco:
Actually, I'm a little bit concerned.
Marco:
Why is this iMac not shipping now?
Marco:
Could they not get the CPUs in volume or the GPUs custom part?
John:
I think it was always going to ship.
John:
Here's the interesting thing about this WWDC.
John:
They announced a lot more things than usual that are not shipping.
John:
The old thing was, we're going to tell you things that are shipping in the near future or now, and if there's stuff later, we can always have another event about revised whatever.
John:
But they just announced everything that they have for this year, it seemed like.
John:
They announced almost everything.
John:
even if it's not shipping until December.
John:
So it makes for a better keynote.
John:
I think we all, it makes for a better keynote to show the iMac Pro now, they already told us it's coming, than to wait until December.
John:
And they're gonna miss the holiday season with it too.
John:
It's better, I think they learned from the Mac Pro thing, it's better to let people know what's coming and show it to them and get them excited about it.
John:
When it releases, everyone will buy it and it'll be fine.
John:
There's no reason they need to have an October event to reveal the iMac Pro, so I'm happy.
Casey:
Not everyone will be buying it, apparently, but I'm with you in principle.
Casey:
I think to answer your question, Marco, what about user-replaceable stuff, like having RAM that is user-replaceable?
Casey:
I think to me, in addition to what you were saying, especially about cooling, I think the advantage would be user-replaceable RAM, user-replaceable storage, and user-replaceable perhaps graphics card or something like that.
Casey:
I think that's where a true Mac Pro would shine.
Casey:
And then for people who don't buy computers and keep them for a decade, then you can get the iMac Pro.
Casey:
But if you like to have computers that are as old as children, then you can get a Mac Pro.
Marco:
Yeah, that seems reasonable.
Casey:
So what else in the hardware?
Casey:
That was it for the hardware at this point, right?
Casey:
And then we jumped right into iOS 11.
Marco:
Yeah, right into messages.
Casey:
Yeah, because woo.
Marco:
Yeah, I did lose the bet that message apps wouldn't be mentioned at all, but not by much.
Marco:
Message apps were slightly mentioned, and I'm sure there were some minor improvements to them, but for the most part, I think it's...
Marco:
kind of like on the scale of watchOS and tvOS.
Marco:
Well, more than TV.
Marco:
I mean, everything's more than TV.
Marco:
But kind of on the same scale of watchOS of like minor improvements here and there, but we didn't, like for this brand new app store and app type that launched only a year ago, we heard fairly little about it.
Marco:
And I think that's a little bit concerning for people who are making iMessage apps or who thought that was going to be a bigger thing.
John:
They're dogfooding it.
John:
They did Apple Pay as an iMessage app.
John:
But I think this is the most important messages release ever because it's finally going to work
John:
in theory, the way that everyone thinks that message apps should work, which is if you send a bunch of messages on one device and then you go to another device, the conversation you just had on another device is there with the iCloud syncing of the messages.
John:
I don't know how they're doing that, preserving the privacy, because the old answer was like, oh, we can't do that because it's end-to-end encrypted and we can't send those messages elsewhere, but I just want, and I hope they're actually chronological and not...
John:
whatever order they're in now.
John:
So if they do that successfully, have a time-ordered series of back and forths of text messages between people that is the same on all my devices, this will be the most important messages update ever.
Casey:
You know, it's funny because I am not trying to joke right now, but when they were talking about how everything syncs across devices, I was genuinely confused because that's pretty much the behavior I see.
John:
You're a messages unicorn.
Casey:
I was just about to say, you stole my joke, that I must be an iMessage unicorn, because almost always, I mean, there are definitely hiccups from time to time, but almost always, that is what happens today.
Casey:
And I was really surprised to see, yeah, for me anyway.
John:
When I got off the plane, I sent a text message to somebody, and then their text messages for when I was flying came in below the message I just sent.
John:
Because even though they were like four hours old, I want that to go away.
John:
I want it to just work normally.
Marco:
There's probably also a good security white paper to read about how the heck they did this while also maintaining all their end-to-end encryption stuff.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
I don't know.
John:
It seems like...
John:
I would be willing to sacrifice the antenna encryption just to get the messages in sync because it's so frustrating to not see your conversations be the same in both places.
Casey:
You know, another thing that was a little weird, I have a complaint for the Apple AV people that I would like to air in front of everyone.
Casey:
If you're in the back of the room or toward the back of the room, the screen that the presenters are presenting in front of, it goes all the way to the floor of the stage.
Casey:
Like this logo behind it.
Casey:
Yeah, kind of like the logo behind us, right?
Casey:
So it goes to the floor of the stage, which means anything that's happening on the bottom, like, quarter of the screen, unless you're in the first 10 or 15 rows, you have no freaking clue what is happening.
John:
Yeah, like the prices, like they put the prices and stuff on the bottom.
John:
All you can see is the back of people's heads, and then everyone's craning their necks.
John:
It wasn't a great setup, but they'll fix that next year.
Casey:
Well, this is the way it's always been, and maybe we just made a poor choice.
John:
It's a little bit higher.
John:
In Presidio, the screen is a little bit higher.
John:
Yeah, like hanging it from the ceiling in Presidio.
Marco:
That was never a problem.
John:
No, no, the front screen.
John:
The front screen in front of the room.
Marco:
Oh, yeah, I forgot it.
Casey:
All right, so iOS 11, it had messages improvements.
Casey:
I am really stoked about the peer-to-peer Apple Pay.
Casey:
I don't know how much that's going to blow up, but a lot of my family and friends use iPhones.
Casey:
And so for that, it'll be super simple.
Casey:
I'm curious to see what the extract from Apple Pay kind of workflow is.
Casey:
How clunky is it to get it into your bank?
Casey:
Do you have to just associate a debit card, and then it's just magic after that?
John:
Yeah, I think that it'll be fine.
Casey:
Yeah, but I mean, I'm just curious to see it.
John:
Because they're competing with like Douala and Square and other companies that have a similar experience.
John:
So I don't think they're going to be worse.
John:
But it is kind of fragmenting the payment ecosystem now.
John:
Because I guess it already was fragmented.
John:
If you try to send somebody money, you have to go through this little dance first.
John:
Do you have Square?
John:
Do you use Douala?
John:
Are you willing to sign up an account for any of these?
John:
Hello, Venmo?
John:
Yeah, do you have Apple Pay?
John:
We'll work it out.
John:
I mean, if you go to this conference next year, everyone will be giving each other money for meals on Apple Pay.
John:
So that'll work out fine.
Casey:
It'll be pretty nice.
Casey:
So Siri's still a thing.
Casey:
It is more and more things over time.
Casey:
There's new voices, which are good.
Casey:
Translation, which does look super cool, but what I'm a little concerned with is, so I can say in some arbitrary other language, you know, hey, where's the bathroom?
Casey:
What happens when they reply?
Casey:
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
John:
Hold on.
John:
There are apps for that in the App Store, right?
John:
They'll take their text, take their speech and translate it for you?
John:
I guess.
Marco:
Yeah, probably.
Marco:
They're probably made by Google.
Marco:
Yeah, that's a good point.
Marco:
When I saw the feature, I'm like, oh, that'll be great for travel.
Marco:
I didn't even think about what I'd do with the responses.
Marco:
That's the problem.
Marco:
Do I hand them the phone and have them hold the button down and then record their response?
Casey:
I'm not trying to rain on the parade.
Casey:
I'm really not.
Casey:
It's an amazing feature, and I'm sure it's going to be super cool.
Casey:
But if it's only one-way communication, it only takes you, but so far, it only takes you one way.
Marco:
Well, we are Americans traveling to places that don't speak English, so it is kind of our style to just yell at people and not have any kind of response parts.
Casey:
That is a fair point.
Casey:
But there's not... I don't recall seeing very much SiriKit for you.
Casey:
It was, right?
John:
You were asking for people to pause on that slide that had all the new intents on it.
John:
Did you ever get that info?
John:
Yeah, I did.
Marco:
There was nothing.
Marco:
And this was actually a big disappointment for me that there was no SiriKit expansion into audio-type services so that I could use it for Overcast and people could use it for things like Spotify and everything.
Marco:
And I think last year when this was not present, the theory we came up with was, well...
Marco:
it's probably because they just didn't get to it.
Marco:
But it might be to protect and enhance Apple Music, because that's giving Apple Music a big advantage in Syria and having that integration, and that will drive subscriptions to Apple Music over the competitors.
Marco:
So this year, as another year goes by and it's not there,
Marco:
I still think those are the two explanations, but the probability shifted a little bit.
Marco:
They might have still just not gotten to it.
Marco:
The things they added, the list was not very long.
Marco:
So maybe they just didn't get to it yet.
Marco:
Because it is a big job.
Marco:
You do have to have some kind of way to...
Marco:
index the content of the audio service so that they know even how to parse things to know what people are talking about.
Marco:
So I'd have to have some kind of indexing extension for them to index all the shows and overcast in the whole online service and things like that.
Marco:
So that is a lot for them to build.
Marco:
There's parts of it there already, but that's a lot to build.
Marco:
So maybe they just didn't get to it.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
They are also still a really, you know, Apple Music is still in a pretty good place now because it has Siri integration and nothing else does.
Marco:
And as they go into things like the HomePod, it's going to have, you know, a similar effect of, like, well, if you want to use a stream of music with this new speaker that you want to buy from Apple, you can only use Apple Music with it, basically.
Marco:
So that is, I think...
Marco:
Again, they might have just not gotten to it yet, but as more time goes on that they don't add this fairly obvious feature that a lot of people want, I think the answer is going to be much more likely to just be, yeah, they just want to have that Apple Music only.
John:
But what intents did they add?
John:
They might just be doing it in priority order.
John:
Obviously, your priority is audio, but maybe they're doing the most common ones, the ones that have the most apps, the most users, and they're working their way down the list getting to audio eventually.
Marco:
Right, and again, it depends on how long they go before this happens, how you evaluate this.
Marco:
Honestly, they didn't add as much as I thought they would this year.
Marco:
I thought there would be a large expansion of SiriKit Intense, and there really wasn't.
Marco:
There were three or four of them, and they were fairly basic type things.
Marco:
So my whole prediction of this being an all Siri-heavy keynote was mostly wrong, because it really was not as much about Siri as I expected.
John:
You were right about one thing, though.
John:
I was totally expecting them, especially with the HomePod business, I was expecting them to say, Siri is massively improved.
John:
We have made Siri so much better, it's smarter, and just call it Siri 2.
John:
Really promoting the idea that Siri
John:
doesn't do things that are as silly as it currently does, but they didn't.
John:
I remember last week you were like, I don't think it's going to be the same old Siri.
John:
Aside from new capabilities, obviously a whole new vocabulary.
John:
We're talking about music to work with the Apple Music thing.
John:
But what about all the other things that we currently ask?
John:
Before the show, people were sharing screenshots of them asking, when is the keynote?
John:
When is the Apple event?
John:
I think someone said, when is the Apple keynote?
John:
And it said,
John:
June 5th or whatever.
John:
Like, what time does it start?
John:
And it said June 5th.
John:
And other people said, oh, you just got to ask it the right way.
John:
When is the Apple event?
John:
And it gave all the info down to the time, right?
John:
And then people followed up with that with the exact same text asking Siri the same question.
John:
Siri going, I don't know.
John:
And so there's nothing in here that says we have massively improved Siri.
John:
They have expanded Siri to be able to do more things by extending its vocabulary, adding a few intents, and putting it in HomePod.
John:
But
John:
It seems like it's the same old Siri.
John:
They seem to be happy with Siri's understanding of things, and I really think they need to, I mean, obviously you can do the marketing push without the tech, but I hope they need to improve the tech.
John:
I would love to have a conversation with Siri.
John:
I would love to go back and forth to be able to correct Siri, to have it learn, to have it just darn be smarter.
Marco:
Yeah, and also to be more reliable and to be more consistent.
Marco:
Like, that's the one thing where, you know, we'll get to it with HomePod later, but, like, that's one area where Siri has always been a little bit behind competitors, just reliability and consistency in the responses and, you know, getting it right every time.
John:
That's why people love to post the screenshots, because as soon as someone has a comeback, like, oh, I asked it and it got the thing right.
John:
Someone just immediately thought, I asked the exact same question.
John:
And we're sitting next to each other in a room.
John:
It's not like we're in different countries.
John:
Like, what...
John:
Very frustrating.
John:
It makes you want to use it less.
John:
We'll get to that with the HomePod stuff when we talk about that, but we talked about it with the cylinders.
John:
If it doesn't do what you want, you stop asking it that question because it's not worth your time and potential self-consciousness to talk to your device and have it come back to you in a way that is not satisfactory.
John:
You just say, well, I'm not going through that again.
Casey:
So this year was the year of iPads, and it was the year of Codex, because not only is there HEVC, like we talked about earlier, which is going to be used for iPhone-captured videos, but HEAF is what they call it?
Casey:
HEAF.
Casey:
That's what it was.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
That's replacing JPEG, apparently, which in and of itself, that sounds good, especially if it's better in every measurable way, but it needs to be adopted everywhere like JPEG is, and I presume over time it will.
Casey:
And they may have mentioned in the State of the Union that it's like an ISO standard or something like
John:
Yeah, it's not the Apple proprietary thing, is people worrying.
John:
It's not something they invented.
John:
And I think they had a good story about compatibility.
John:
Like, yeah, we're using this internally.
John:
It takes up the big selling point, which they emphasize a little bit, is your phone won't fill with videos and photos as fast.
John:
because they'll be smaller.
John:
And also, by the way, they'll be nicer quality, and at the same time, they're smaller.
John:
So that's a great product story, because that's a common problem people have with filling their phone up with stuff.
John:
But then the story is, okay, well, how do I share them?
John:
And they're gonna be super conservative.
John:
If you send your Heaf thing anywhere else, if you email it to somebody, if you try to import it to another app, if you send it in messages, anything like that, then it converts on the fly to JPEG at that point.
John:
And you don't get the big win unless everybody switches to Heath, but I don't know if they will.
John:
But even if it's just on device, if Heath never leaves your device, it's just on device and may be syncing with photos, that is still a big win for the product.
John:
Because if no one else is doing that, their phones are gonna fill up with photos faster than Apple's of the same size.
Casey:
Additionally, depth API for those of you who use the preposterously oversized, ridiculous phone that you shouldn't use.
Casey:
So that's kind of exciting.
Casey:
It's going to come to our phone this fall.
Casey:
But that's kind of cool.
Casey:
I'm curious to see, all snark aside, I think that is one of the more interesting APIs that they've made mention of so far.
Casey:
Because I think there could be some really cool and clever stuff done with that.
Casey:
I don't know exactly what that would be.
Casey:
Otherwise, I would probably be back and writing it right now because that's clearly the way to a billion dollars.
Casey:
But I'm really anxious to see it's happening with depth, now with depth.
Casey:
But I'm really curious to see kind of where that goes and what all of you folks do with it because I think it could be really powerful and really interesting.
Casey:
Control Center is better now.
Casey:
It's one page, which is super exciting because I cannot tell you.
Casey:
We can cheer for that.
Casey:
That's cool.
Casey:
I cheered for that.
Casey:
I cannot tell you the amount of times I will swipe up and then swipe left or right immediately because I feel like any time I open Control Center, I am inevitably on the wrong page.
Casey:
It is like a rule that that's the way it works.
John:
So that's really cool.
John:
The biggest problem with Control Center, I would imagine that Apple would know this and we don't, how many people don't even know there's another screen in Control Center?
John:
And especially if that person's phone somehow gets switched to the other screen and they're like, my volume control is gone.
John:
Where did it go?
John:
They don't see the little dots.
John:
I bet that's one of the big reasons why they changed it.
John:
It's not discoverable.
John:
And yes, for the people who do know it, it's frustrating, but...
John:
having it all in one, and especially since it doesn't take up your whole screen.
John:
They have the room to make it bigger, and from what I saw, you can customize Control Center and sort of decide what you want on your one screen.
John:
I'm not sure how much it scales.
John:
Can you put all the widgets and your Control Center fills up the whole screen?
John:
But anyway, definitely an improvement.
Casey:
Yeah, underscore David Smith, I don't know if he's here somewhere, but he put the iOS 11 beta onto an iPhone 6, and I got to play with it very briefly, and I was mostly playing with Control Center, and it worked really well, and they did a really good job of kind of the faux 3D touch, or force touch, whatever it's called, I forget what it's called, this minute, but anyway...
Casey:
So if you tap on, like, the panel that has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and stuff like that, if you deep press on that on a more modern iPhone, it will immediately snap to, you know, the expanded blown-up view where it has text in it and there's a few other controls.
Casey:
And on an iPhone 6 or, you know, one of these ones without force touch, then what it'll end up doing is if you just tap and hold on that pane...
Casey:
I think they had a name fork, didn't they?
Casey:
I forget what they were calling it.
Casey:
But anyway, if you tap and hold on that just for a moment, it'll blow it up as though you had deep touched it, which I thought was really well executed.
Casey:
Visually, it looks good-ish.
Casey:
I feel like it's a little haphazard, but by and large, I'm okay with the design.
Casey:
But I am super amped to use it because I think it is way more functional than what we've got.
Casey:
And I use Control Center constantly.
Casey:
constantly.
John:
So I'm really excited for it.
John:
It's function over form, finally, because the old controls looked more elegant.
John:
It was like a thin line with a tiny little thing on it.
John:
And even though the touch area for the tiny little bulb on your volume control or brightness slider or whatever, the hit area of that was probably bigger.
John:
It looked small and delicate.
John:
It looked better in screenshots.
John:
This looks kind of dorky in screenshots, but the giant bars that you fill, right, that's like the size of your finger.
John:
It's like the OXO Good Grips of Control Center.
John:
LAUGHTER
John:
We don't care how it looks.
John:
It's like, this is a big, chunky thing.
John:
Put your thumb in here, and when you slide it, it'll be clear how much white is filling the bar.
John:
And you can even zoom it to a bigger mode to make it fill your entire screen.
John:
So it doesn't look as nice in screenshots.
John:
Maybe Johnny Abbott is on vacation, or he's too busy designing door handles.
John:
But it functions better.
Casey:
You are always on vacation in California, am I right, everyone?
Casey:
I mean, that's kind of how this works.
Casey:
He lives in England now, right?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Oh.
Casey:
Yikes.
Casey:
All right, what was next?
John:
Any out in the audience, anyone?
John:
No.
John:
Yeah, all right.
Casey:
That sounds likely.
Casey:
Fight me.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Oh, lock center and notification center are now merged.
Casey:
And I don't know what to think about this.
Casey:
I did not get a chance to play with that on Underscore's phone.
Casey:
The way they demoed it, it looked pretty good to me, but I'm going to be perturbed if I swipe down to see past notifications and then swipe up to go back to what I was doing and then immediately have to reauthorize myself and use Touch ID again.
Marco:
I don't think that's how it works.
Marco:
That's the thing.
John:
I'm not sure.
John:
It's showing you the lock screen, but you haven't relocked your phone.
John:
The promise, I confess that I am very bad at dealing with notifications.
John:
I don't understand where notifications go.
Yeah.
John:
I see them, and then I say where, and I will dismiss them or read them, and I want to see that notification again.
John:
I'm hoping what this does is make it so notifications are in a single place, and they stay there forever, and I can just scroll, scroll, scroll, and go back through them at any time.
John:
I'm not sure if that's true, but that would be a usability improvement for me, because having notifications in multiple places and having them sort of, I don't know, auto-dismiss themselves, or they go off into the cornfield, I don't know where they go, but I can't find them again, and it's frustrating.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, it seems like every, for the last few iOS releases, they've messed with the lock screen versus notification center, because ever since Touch ID got super fast, it got kind of weird, and then they tried messing it with it another way last year, and now this year they've been messing with it a different way.
Marco:
They're just trying to solve the problem of how do you make these things
Marco:
continue to be sensible with hardware advances and new UI trends and as these things get more advanced and everything.
Marco:
So I think this is like the annual messing with the lock screen type thing.
Marco:
And whatever it is, it's probably fine, and we're all going to get used to it in like a day.
Marco:
There's going to be a lot of complaining, but everyone will get used to it.
Casey:
So through the magic of iCloud, I've noticed in our shared note that we should talk about something that's awesome.
Yeah.
Marco:
We're sponsored this week by Fracture.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Because what you do, you put a picture on there, it falls off the feed, you never see it again in like a day.
Marco:
Fracture prints your photos in vivid color on glass, and you can hang them on your wall, you can put them on your desk, you can give them as gifts.
Marco:
They make fantastic gifts.
Marco:
People love to get Fractures.
Marco:
They're really a very modern look.
Marco:
You have this nice piece of glass, it's laser cut on a rigid backing, and so it'll hang on the wall, but it's not really heavy.
Marco:
It's a nice lightweight thing, so it's not gonna rip a nail out of your wall or anything like that.
Marco:
It's very beautifully made.
Marco:
They make the color and contrast of your photo really pop,
Marco:
And the sleek, frameless design looks really cool and modern.
Marco:
You don't have to frame it, and that's super expensive and a big pain.
Marco:
You don't have to frame it.
Marco:
It looks great by itself.
Marco:
That's all it is.
Marco:
It's a standalone object.
Marco:
It's modern.
Marco:
It's clean.
Marco:
People love these things when they see them.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
That's actually what they make you do.
Marco:
FractureMe.com slash podcast is not a mistake.
Marco:
And then you put in ATP in the question of where did you hear about it?
Marco:
Which podcast are you talking about?
Marco:
So FractureMe.com slash podcast.
Marco:
Mention ATP in that one question field there to help support the show and to get 10% off your first order.
Marco:
Thank you very much to Fracture for sponsoring our show.
Thank you.
John:
Maybe you should invite people into your house and have them stare at you while you do the ad reads on the show normally because you just nailed three in a row.
John:
I know, three in a row.
John:
Well done, sir.
Casey:
Well done.
Casey:
That does not happen that often, so that's super exciting.
Casey:
All right, we've got to pick up the pace because we've got a lot more to talk about, so I'm going to try to speed run through some stuff.
Casey:
Live Photos has motion smoothing things, looping.
Casey:
They didn't, I don't believe, have the, like, what is that Google app that was super cool, is super cool, that will take your motion photo that's kind of boinging around and kind of lock it down?
Marco:
It actually did that kind of feature.
Marco:
It does a few different features.
Marco:
It does that.
Marco:
It does the cinemagraph kind of thing where you have a motion thing that kind of freezes the background.
Marco:
And they also had the long exposure thing, which kind of looks like that, but in a still version.
Marco:
There were a few different improvements there.
John:
Pretty cool.
John:
So here's my question about live photos, which I don't have an answer to because it's day one at WWDC.
John:
I think that they're using HEAF for live photos and that every single frame of it is an H.265 compressed thing.
John:
That's why you can pick a keyframe.
John:
You know how now we have a high-res JPEG and then this really low-quality MPEG animation for the live picture animation?
John:
You would never want to say, oh, I want to replace my still image with a frame from the crappy low-res video in a live picture.
John:
Seems to me that in the new thing that it takes a series of 17 or 20 pictures or whatever, how long it is, and every single one of them is exactly as if you've taken a photo from your camera.
John:
And that's why you can choose which frame you want.
John:
It could be they're just letting you choose a key frame and if you choose that one your thing looks all blurry and gross, but I really hope that
John:
Live photos are now heath containers, and every single frame of them is max quality, because that would be awesome.
John:
Yeah, that would be really nice.
Marco:
And that might depend on new hardware to be able to dump image data off the sensor at that speed, at that resolution reliably.
Marco:
But if they can do any part of that, if they can just increase the frame rate or increase the resolution of the video segment on current phones or older phones, that would be an awesome improvement for them.
John:
And they do have, they're going to have hardware support for H.265 on existing phones.
John:
So they could do the old way, which is we'll take one really good JPEG or HEIF image at super high res and then take an H.265 video at higher res because now we can do that just to make, you know, to make live photos nicer.
John:
Because very often live photos are really cute, but the live photo-y part, like the animated part, is so much lower res and lower quality than the still image that it's kind of disappointing.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So my speedrun is going excellently.
Casey:
Siri giving you... It always does.
Casey:
It always does.
Casey:
Siri is giving you things, this is air quote, Siri is giving you things from other apps in other places.
Casey:
They use the example of some place in Iceland that I'm not going to try to pronounce.
Casey:
So quote unquote Siri will see you interacting with like a web page about Iceland.
Casey:
And then when you try to type that same name in an iMessage, it'll auto-suggest it.
Casey:
Looked cool.
Casey:
Some machine learning stuff.
John:
And also, it'll rat you out to Apple News.
John:
Because you go to Apple News, you'd be like, do you want some stories about Iceland?
John:
I was like, how do you know I'm interested in Iceland Apple News?
John:
That was a little creepy, I thought.
Casey:
That was a little googly.
Casey:
A little aggressive, a little aggressive.
Casey:
All right, so Maps has internal maps of malls, which aren't going to exist in two years.
Casey:
And it also has... Amazon's opening retail stores, so they'll all be... Oh, yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, it's nothing but Apple stores.
Casey:
And then internal airport maps of the inside of the airport, terminal maps, that's super cool.
Casey:
That's kind of nice.
Casey:
Not my airport.
Well...
Casey:
Of course not yours.
Casey:
Of course.
Casey:
Do not disturb while driving.
Casey:
Two thumbs up.
Casey:
I think that's really cool.
John:
Is that going to be on by default?
John:
I think it is.
Casey:
Yeah, so, I mean, this is the kind of thing like... I mean, that genuinely could save lives.
John:
All right, so everyone who's applauding, and you can all turn it on on your phones and, like, have everyone who texts you get that rude message back that says, I'm driving now.
John:
I'll send you, like...
Marco:
But again, this is kind of like the Apple Watch annoyance of notifications thing.
Marco:
This is the kind of thing that's an awesome thing to do.
Marco:
I assume it's going to be on by default, which is even more awesome.
Marco:
My only hesitation of judging it is, will people leave it on in enough volume to matter?
Marco:
And I think we all should.
Marco:
Let's get started with our audience.
Marco:
That's a lot of people right there.
Marco:
Let's get started and let's leave it on.
John:
But then, like, your mom tries to text you and gets this rude message back and thinks you wrote it because there's no indication in the UI that you are literally not typing that.
John:
And she's going to say, well, if you're driving, how did you have time to write me this grammatically correct, correctly punctuated sentence?
John:
They should know it's not you because everything is spelled right.
Marco:
I know you were at a stoplight.
Marco:
I was going to say, like, is your mom really like that?
Marco:
But I thought, well, actually, I don't know your mom, but she produced you.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
There's a chance.
John:
She sent me a grammar correction for a recent podcast.
Casey:
No way.
Casey:
You don't say.
Casey:
So yeah, we're all friends here, and we're all going to agree to leave Do Not Disturb While Driving on.
Casey:
I also thought it's visually a little bit kind of cheesy and ham-fisted, but the thing where you can say, you can reply, and I guess if you have an urgent message, it'll say...
Casey:
Hey, if this is really urgent, reply with the word urgent, and the phone will let that bubble through.
John:
All it's going to do is let your friends immediately type urgent to tell you, I caught this new Pokemon, and it's totally urgent.
John:
Like, what is urgent, really?
John:
If you tell them how to bypass it, and then you're going to look at your phone and see that they caught a new Magikarp, and you're going to crash into a telephone pole.
Casey:
Well, hopefully your friends are nice enough to know that they're taking your life into their hands.
Marco:
Your friends sound like jerks.
Casey:
Wait, that's us.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Casey:
This took a dark turn.
Casey:
Okay, so HomeKit speakers, AirPlay 2 is a thing.
Marco:
Kind of telegraphing the end of the keynote there.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
Well, yeah, but they have HomeKit now supports a speaker type.
Marco:
HomeKit was not renamed to Siri.
Marco:
I lost that bet as well.
Marco:
I mean, I lost all my predictions.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
But yeah, they have multi-room audio that's presumably synced up and everything like Sonos.
Marco:
Not the first time they took a dig at Sonos during this keynote, but not surprising.
Marco:
And I mean, they actually had multi-room audio with the iTunes share thing forever ago.
Marco:
So yeah, that's...
Marco:
Pretty nice.
Marco:
I'm looking forward to there being the API for that for third-party devs to presumably control.
Marco:
That's actually the only thing on the Overcast to-do list so far of things I should integrate this summer.
John:
I was expecting a lot more.
John:
Just as they go out of business.
John:
Good job, Marco.
John:
Did they have a slide or somebody...
John:
Tweeted something that said they had a list of all the devices that support AirPlay 2, all the manufacturers that are going to support AirPlay 2, so you can use this new, better protocol to talk to them, and Sonos was not on that list.
Marco:
It doesn't support AirPlay 1, either.
Marco:
So to do Sonos on an AirPlay, you basically have to have an airport express that you run into the aux jack of a...
Marco:
quite pricey Sonos Bridge product that has an aux input.
Marco:
And then the main problem with that is that then AirPlay has a two-second lag.
Marco:
Sonos adds its own lag also for like another second or so.
Marco:
So anything, it's like moving through maple syrup.
Marco:
You like hit pause, and then three seconds later it pauses.
Marco:
It's not a great experience.
Casey:
It's not a sweet solution, is it?
Casey:
So, the ghost of Ping is back.
Casey:
That's exciting.
John:
Isn't it the cousin of Kinect?
John:
Because we said Kinect, like, oh, Kinect is not like Ping.
Marco:
I can't keep track of their social... Yeah, Kinect is like Twitter for artists and YouTube for artists, but both Twitter and YouTube are way more popular than it was and is.
Marco:
Is Kinect still there, or did they replace it with whatever this new thing is?
John:
Well, so here's the thing.
John:
It'll show you what your friends are listening to.
John:
Your friends are listening to this, your friends are listening to that.
John:
Where is it getting your friends from?
John:
Does Apple have a social graph?
John:
I mean, they have your contacts, but... I mean, that's what I'm saying.
John:
It's another attempt for Apple to say, please create a new social graph on the social network that we, Apple, are creating and it will totally be here six months from now.
John:
And people don't want to make a new social graph.
John:
It could get them from Twitter.
John:
It can't really get them from contacts.
John:
You have family, which is used for a lot of things, but that's not... You don't want to see what your family is listening to, so... And no one wants to see what I'm listening to.
John:
No, that's a fact.
John:
What does Marco listen to?
Casey:
Just fish.
Casey:
Nothing but fish.
Casey:
All day long.
Casey:
Hard-coded string constant.
Casey:
Yeah, seriously.
Casey:
It really could be.
Casey:
Music Kits.
Casey:
Developers will have access to Apple Music and iCloud Library, which is really cool.
Casey:
That's pretty cool.
Casey:
Maybe I missed something, but Phil was really amped about the new App Store, and I'm really not.
Casey:
Like, I don't...
John:
We just care if the search works, and he didn't demo that, so we don't know.
John:
I guess if you're an app developer, it's cool if you get featured, right?
John:
And you have this big thing, and your pages look nicer, and there'll be sessions during the week to say, here's how you can support more stuff.
John:
One of them had a little award, like this little film... What do you call it?
John:
Film festival thing with the little ivy leaves or whatever they're supposed to be around, that you can say, this is a...
John:
Someone in the audience said it, but I didn't hear it.
John:
Laurels.
John:
Laurels.
John:
There we go.
John:
There you go.
John:
Thank you.
John:
There probably is an API to put up the awards or some sort of thing that your app won at the top of your page.
John:
Wait, I can make my own awards and put them there?
John:
Yeah.
John:
All right.
John:
That's going to quickly become useless if that's what it is.
John:
And also, by the way, Safari blocks autoplaying video, but as you scroll through the new App Store app...
John:
It's a little bit of auto-playing video, and I'm pretty sure Safari's not blocking that one.
John:
Anyway, I think it'll be fine.
John:
Your prediction was that they would revise the Mac App Store, which is quite a laugh about that.
John:
That was a long shot.
John:
I said so.
John:
Maybe they did.
John:
I mean, they didn't show a lot of Mac OS.
John:
High Sierra might have a totally... Did they show any of High Sierra?
Marco:
I can't believe it's called that.
Marco:
It's so bad, dude.
Marco:
It's so bad.
Marco:
I'm not used to it yet.
Marco:
I don't know if I ever will be.
Marco:
That's really bad.
John:
I'm glad they revised the App Store app.
John:
It's fine.
John:
It looks better than the old one, and maybe the search will be better.
Marco:
We're not really going to know how it affects developers until...
Marco:
it's out there because it's going to change everything.
Marco:
We know that.
Marco:
It's gonna change things like click-through rates and how effective search is or isn't for us.
Marco:
It's gonna change purchase rates.
Marco:
It's gonna change a lot because the entire UI is different.
Marco:
The information density is way lower.
Marco:
There's way fewer apps on screen at once.
Marco:
That's gonna be a big effect in some direction.
Marco:
The value of being featured is probably gonna be way higher because those are fewer at a time and it's like a more in-your-face feature.
Marco:
I do really like that they separated out games and apps.
Marco:
That's really nice for both types of app makers there.
Marco:
Because if you're looking for one, you're probably not looking for the other at the same time.
Marco:
So that should help people browsing both places to have separate charts, separate features, and not have to worry about seeing the kind of thing you're not looking for right then.
Casey:
Yeah, there were a bunch of other things that were on the screen of words where some are white and some are gray.
Casey:
Yeah, the word cloud.
Casey:
Yeah, the word cloud.
Casey:
Schedule a call.
Casey:
That's interesting.
John:
Yeah, a bunch of new resetting ratings.
John:
Are we moving on from the App Store already?
John:
Because there's one other major feature for the new App Store app.
John:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is new.
John:
In-app purchases are viewable on the App Store as separately purchasable things.
John:
They're in-app purchases that are not in-app.
John:
This seems like a big deal because so the theory goes that in-app purchases represent a lot of money and you can only see them if you're in the app.
John:
But now, I presume if you have an app and the app offers an in-app purchase, you will see that as a separately purchasable item in the app store.
John:
That seems like a big way to get more money for in-app purchases to remind people if they go there, oh, by the way, that app that you haven't launched has an in-app purchase and it might bring you back into the app and make you buy something.
John:
That seems like a big deal to me.
Casey:
Yeah, so speedrun's still going well.
Casey:
So speaking of, CoreML, it's a thing.
Casey:
Sounds cool.
Casey:
ARKit, it's a thing.
Casey:
Sounds cool.
Marco:
Wait, hold on.
Marco:
No, no, no.
Marco:
We're not going to do that fast.
Marco:
Come on.
Casey:
I'm trying, guys.
Casey:
I'm trying.
Marco:
No, I mean, this is one of those, like, we can't wait to see what you do with it kind of things where that actually makes sense.
Marco:
Like, most people can't, off the top of their head, name a cool app that doesn't yet exist that this now makes possible, but there are a lot of them.
Marco:
And it's the kind of thing where you're going to have some idea, or you're going to hear some idea person's awful idea, and you're going to say, oh, yeah, but that would take like 100 people, staff, and $200 million, and it isn't even possible in the API.
Marco:
Wait, it is now possible in the API.
Marco:
Now you just need the $200 million in the big staff.
John:
Yeah, it'll all work out great.
John:
Well, they had Pokemon Go as a perfect example, which was already doing AR a bad job of it.
John:
Not that it's a core part of the game, but they would try to make your Pokemon look like he's on the sidewalk.
John:
He's bouncing all over the place.
John:
Now he'll be firmly planted on the sidewalk.
John:
I'm sure that will seriously improve Pokemon Go experience.
Casey:
Hooray.
Casey:
Everyone's still playing that, right?
Casey:
Yeah, totally.
Casey:
I also thought the demo was really cool and very Firefly-esque, which of course spoke to me.
Casey:
That was pretty exciting.
Casey:
But no, it does look cool, but I think we should probably skip forward to the iPad.
Casey:
I guess.
Casey:
And there is a new iPad.
Casey:
So moving on... I'm just kidding.
Casey:
I'm just kidding.
Casey:
But no, there is a new iPad.
Casey:
Interestingly, so the new 10-inch iPad does look really cool, and the iPad features of iOS 11...
Casey:
did really appeal to me.
Casey:
And some of the drag and drop stuff, which we'll get to in a second, looks phenomenal.
Casey:
The one thing about the 10-inch iPad, though, is that we had all kind of concluded, and it was Dan Provost that put this together, I believe, a few months ago,
Casey:
that what they would end up doing is making an iPad that was the same resolution, if I remember right, I might be butchering the details here, the same resolution as the 12.9-inch, whatever it is, iPad Pro, so you can basically have two iPad minis side by side, and that's what this 10-inch will be, and they will get that by shrinking bezels, John, shrinking bezels and doing all that sorts of magic, but it's actually an in-between resolution between the
Casey:
the 9-point-whatever-inch iPad Pro, then this, which is in the middle, and the 12-inch iPad Pro, which is fine.
Casey:
It seems like they've kept the density the same.
Casey:
They're just clipping the edge of the screen in a slightly different spot.
Casey:
But that seems weird to me.
Casey:
Like, how is that going to work with size classes?
Casey:
It's just a peculiar choice.
Marco:
It'll be fine.
Marco:
I mean, I'm actually kind of glad they did that because I think having the full 12.9 resolution in that size screen would have made things a little bit small, a little bit small text targets, a little bit small text for some people.
Marco:
And so I think they probably made the right choice on that.
Marco:
But I'm also very happy to see with this model and with the new 12.9 update, which I did not expect to happen, that there's no other glaring, as far as I know yet, there's no other glaring...
Marco:
differences between those two sizes.
Marco:
Like, you know, last time it was like, well, the 12.9 had USB 3 and fast charging, and the 9.7 had the better screen and the True Tone, and there were like these weird differences that they had.
Marco:
Now they all seem to have the same features, just two different sizes of the same features.
Marco:
And that's really nice.
John:
I didn't get to look at the 12.9, which, by the way, I'm also glad that they're still doing the 12.9, because now they have a reason to, because it is a different res.
John:
But the 10.5, no headphone jack.
John:
What?
What?
John:
No headphone jack that I could find.
John:
I held it in my hands.
John:
Someone can look on the website now and look it up, but I held it in my hands and I wrote it around and I did not find a headphone jack.
John:
Maybe I missed it.
John:
They also moved the volume control and the power button really close to the corners of the device.
John:
I don't know why they did that.
John:
I'll have to see what the inside of this thing looks like.
John:
The SIM slot is way down in one of the corners as well.
John:
But anyway, if you're afraid that the 10.5 is gonna feel too big if you have a current 9.7,
John:
Handling it just, you know, without a case by itself, it didn't feel that bad.
John:
Like, I think that's the next, I think that's the size I will buy.
John:
Probably have no choice, because they're not gonna make a 9.7 Pro, I'm assuming, going forward.
John:
But it is a nice, compromised size.
John:
It is bigger, better, faster, but not, it doesn't feel like a lunch tray.
John:
Who knows, maybe I'll miss the 9.7 as time goes on.
John:
And they made the little, like,
John:
Weight-wise, it felt kind of the same.
John:
It's really hard to tell.
John:
But if you're afraid that the 10.5 is going to be too huge, don't be afraid.
John:
Go to your Apple Store visit and try it out.
John:
I think it will be extremely popular among the same crowd that bought the 9.7 Pro.
Marco:
Yeah, it's going to be like, this is the new iPad that you should probably get.
Marco:
Unless you really want one of those sizes, you can either get the old decrepit mini or you can get the massive lungs tray.
Marco:
Or mini.
Marco:
But if you really don't have any specific need for something super big or super small, the 10.5 is the one to get.
Marco:
Unless you need it to be super cheap, then you get the cheap 9.7 that came out last week or whatever.
John:
HDR support.
John:
Lots of display-related things.
John:
120 hertz refresh and HDR support, which I was really surprised about.
John:
Now, HDR support is basically, like, you can put that label on anything that gets brighter than normal.
John:
Like, I don't know.
John:
Like, the full range of, like, Dolby Vision HDR is an incredible brightness, retina-searing brightness.
John:
This does not reach that level.
John:
But like a lot of HDR monitors for PCs and stuff, as long as you go way brighter than a normal monitor and you can accept HDR input and display it in a nice way,
John:
you get to call yourself HDR.
John:
So I think this is probably middle of the road there.
John:
But 120 hertz refresh, which is kind of weird because like in the old, the 12.9 inch, the pencil was sampled at 120 hertz, but the screen's still refreshed at 60, and now they've just synced it all up.
John:
It's 120 everywhere.
John:
And then finally on the refresh rate front, they advertised the fact that you can do different refresh rates for videos.
John:
If you're watching a 48 frames per second or 24 frames per second video, the display will refresh at that rate as well.
John:
which is kind of depressing for me because I want the Apple TV to put out 24 frames per second.
John:
So I can watch on my big fancy TV, but I won't get the right frame cadence, so I guess I'll just watch everything through Plex.
John:
Plex will probably support 24 frames per second cadence before the Apple TV does, so I'll just watch everything on my 10.5-inch iPad Pro.
Casey:
And that will just teach everyone you should be using Plex.
Casey:
I actually have real-time follow-up.
Casey:
I am not kidding.
Casey:
It turns out, ladies and gentlemen, that the 10.5-inch does have a headphone jack, and apparently it is way, way, way in the corner, or so I'm being told.
Casey:
It is supposedly there.
Casey:
I could not find it.
John:
Wow, that is far in the corner.
John:
Is it on the bottom?
John:
I don't know.
John:
No, it's on the top.
John:
That's why I couldn't find it.
John:
They've always been on the top of the eye.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I was thinking of it like a big phone.
John:
Okay.
John:
My bad.
Marco:
So I'm curious.
Marco:
I saw during the keynote when they were talking about the 120 hertz frame rate now.
Marco:
Now that's the actual display frame rate or at least it can be.
Marco:
I noticed a few people who would probably have seen it inside of Apple tweeting about how that is like game changing and it's just so amazing to have a 120 hertz refresh rate.
Marco:
In the hands-on were you able to get an idea of that?
Marco:
I was.
Marco:
How did that seem?
Marco:
Did you notice it?
Casey:
So I didn't
Casey:
I wasn't using it.
Casey:
I was there with Federico, and I naturally stepped back because I didn't want to lose an arm.
Casey:
But I did see Federico scrolling it.
Casey:
And I don't know if I would call it earth-shattering, life-changing, etc., but it definitely looked really good.
John:
I've got a placebo effect on a lot of this.
John:
Maybe, maybe.
John:
People who are into the video game scene know the debates about frame rate, like at what frame rate can you still see the difference?
John:
Obviously, you know, the gamer's like, I can see 60 and 30.
John:
Yes, we can all see 60, 30 difference.
John:
Once you get up above 60, 70, 80, 90, you know, can you tell it between 120 and 110?
John:
Can you tell it between 60 and 120?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Some people say they can, but if you double-blind to this, I bet a lot of people, like 60 is around the limit that most people can't tell any faster.
John:
Not that I'm saying this shouldn't be 120.
John:
It totally should, especially since it syncs up with the pencil input, and it just makes more sense from that perspective, but I don't know.
John:
This is another thing we'll have to research.
John:
Frame rates over 60.
John:
Can humans tell the difference, or just very special people who have gold-plated audio cables with the oxygen removed?
LAUGHTER
Marco:
I wonder, too, is it the kind of thing where maybe the frame rate you might not be able to tell exactly, but maybe because there would just be less latency between when you move your finger and when the screen has another frame to update, maybe you notice that?
John:
They threw out that number, like 20 milliseconds.
John:
There was that post I didn't...
John:
at this point years ago about refresh rate.
John:
Remember it was like a Microsoft project where they were showing different refresh rates.
John:
They calibrate it and say, here's what 100 millisecond lag looks like.
John:
And they would crank it down, down, down to like one millisecond.
John:
And I think one was the bottom.
John:
And it was amazingly different than like 20 or 50 or 100.
John:
So 20 is great, but there's still headroom.
John:
And yeah, if they're doing 120 hertz to get the latency down, that is 100% worth it, even if nobody can tell the difference in the frame rate.
John:
Because every little bit of latency you will detect and it will feel nicer.
Casey:
So the hardware looks great.
Casey:
It seems to level the playing field, one of you guys had said earlier, between the different devices.
Casey:
It has the iPhone 7 cameras, which is great, although if you're taking pictures with your iPad, you're a big jerk, especially the 12-inch.
Casey:
You haven't come around on that yet?
Marco:
I've now become like, you know, that's fine.
Casey:
If you want to take pictures with your iPad, if you want to take portrait video... Were you in High Sierra earlier?
Casey:
Anyway...
Casey:
So the capacities have been doubled, which is great.
Casey:
It's good things all around.
Casey:
It looks really awesome.
Casey:
And we should talk about the updates in iOS 11 because, holy smokes, they look great.
Casey:
Like, I just bought a MacBook Adorable.
Casey:
Did I tell you?
Casey:
I'm excited.
Casey:
I just bought a MacBook Adorable because I don't want to use an iPad anymore, but holy crap, these things look awesome.
Casey:
Like, this looks super, super cool.
Casey:
And I don't even know where to begin.
Casey:
Like, the drag and drop just seems so well thought out
Casey:
and so well executed from top to bottom.
Casey:
I am genuinely deeply, deeply impressed at what they're showing, and I hope it works as well as they've been demonstrating.
John:
So these are all, these seem like pro-level features to me, which is exactly what we wanted.
John:
We wanted like the pro-level features that, you know, people who want to be more productive, who are already doing these weird makeshift systems to do the tasks that they can now accomplish much more easily, but kind of like drag-and-drop on the Mac, where we take all this for granted,
John:
I think most people don't do the breath-holding maneuvers.
John:
Any operation in the UI where you initiate, and you have to hold your breath, and then you can do other things, but you're holding, because if you let go, then everything just scatters to the four winds.
John:
It's like that with drag and drop, where if you're an experienced Mac user and the Mac OS X error,
John:
band select a bunch of files in the Finder, grab them, slam your mouse cursor into the corner to slide away and show a mission control or whatever and hover onto another application and have it move to the front and move over a window and it pops forward.
John:
Those type of operations, regular people don't do those most of the time.
John:
They find another way to do it.
John:
They can do a simple drag from one location, but they don't do grab a bunch of stuff and then manipulate, manipulate, manipulate, drop in a place.
John:
Because there's so many places things can go wrong and you can accidentally drop it in the wrong place or whatever.
John:
So these are definitely pro features.
John:
But almost everything, I was struck by almost everything that they were talking about, how, look, the rest of your UI is responsive and your app gets the events and so on and so forth, are things that we've taken for granted on the Mac platform for literally decades.
John:
Yes, of course, when you're initiating a drag and the drag manager is going, of course you can do other things in the OS.
John:
You can alt-tab, you can go hover over Windows and stuff like that, and it's kind of like Marco snarkily tweeted.
John:
It turns out desktop operating systems had a bunch of good ideas after all, didn't they?
Marco:
Yeah, it's like this is the future of computing.
Marco:
Everyone's like, I've had the future of computing.
Marco:
Well, the future of computing, so far everyone's now celebrating.
Marco:
It got a huge step forward by adding a whole bunch of stuff from the past of computing.
John:
But they do have, I mean, the advantage they have now, I think, and they demoed it, and again, this is what I was talking about in the last show, how a sort of a grab and then pop forward stuff is actually better on a big screen.
John:
You have a second hand, whereas you don't have a second mouse that you can grab onto.
John:
So now you grab a bunch of things, and your second hand can fully manipulate the UI to do whatever you want to do to get to the point where you can drop it.
John:
So I think it is very impressive, and it's what we were looking for, per-level features.
John:
And as Casey said, the API is clearly an API created by a company that has done three different drag managers over the past several decades.
John:
They know what they're doing, and building it into all the default classes, and especially since most people do use the default classes on iOS instead of rolling their own because the default classes are really good, means they can do that demo of, like, look, I can drag this tech snippet into Slack, and Slack has no idea what the hell the drag manager is because they use standard controls.
John:
It just works.
Casey:
It was super, super impressive.
Casey:
And we could probably go through every single one of these things line by line, but we want to leave here today.
Casey:
The drag and drop looks great.
Casey:
I was super impressed by all of it.
Casey:
And I'm really excited to try using all this stuff.
Casey:
I didn't really have time in the hands-on area.
Casey:
I'm sure all of you, or probably a lot of you anyway, are silly enough to run a beta even on your iPad.
Casey:
On what iPad are you going to try?
Casey:
I have my iPad mini.
Casey:
I was using it all day long, thank you very much.
Casey:
It's delightful.
Casey:
Can it do a lot of this stuff?
Casey:
I honestly don't know.
Casey:
But to that end, the iOS 11 does support like way, way, way back in terms of hardware, which was impressive.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm sure some of the stuff is like pro only where there's limits.
Marco:
Like maybe you can't do, like it probably doesn't have enough RAM to have all the apps on, you know.
John:
I'm sure there's different.
John:
For a brief second when they said, and we're doubling the memory for a brief second, I said, really?
John:
They're going to have eight gigs of RAM?
John:
Oh, never.
Casey:
Seriously.
Casey:
So can we get a ruling, though?
Casey:
Now, again, I haven't played with this, but it appears as though you can do some sort of floaty sort of sidebar-y thing in addition to side-by-side apps.
Casey:
Are we in windowing at this point?
Casey:
Have we crossed that uncanny valley into windowing?
Marco:
They're never going to call it that.
Casey:
Right, but are we there?
Marco:
It's basically a simplified version of windowing, yeah.
Casey:
Exactly.
Marco:
But you just can't define the sizes.
Marco:
It's a weird limited tiling window manager.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Right.
John:
Which I think is appropriate for the form factor, because people, there's no controls on Windows, there's no way to resize them and rearrange them, but they are not shying away from, there's a rectangle that belongs to another app on top of a rectangle that belongs to a different app, and they're embracing that.
John:
Although, I'm not quite sure, like you mentioned that iOS 11 would be about rounded rectangles floating over things, sure enough, there's a lot of rounded rectangles floating over things in this.
John:
What benefit do we get?
John:
I guess they have to show that it is not in split view.
John:
Like they're wasting pixels to show you the little border thing around.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I'm sure it will work a lot better than the current system.
John:
Especially the fact that you can go to the multitasking switcher and see all your different, I don't know, they're calling it the spaces or whatever.
John:
That seems like a big improvement over the current terrible multitasking switcher.
Marco:
And it's a hard thing to design because iOS apps are designed, like there's no window borders in iOS, there's no title bars, there's no window chrome.
Marco:
iOS apps are designed to be full screen.
Marco:
And most of the time in use, that's what they are.
Marco:
So to design a feature like this in the OS,
Marco:
it's actually not trivial to have visual design that makes sense where the borders of apps actually look reasonable and are easy to see that they are borders, but doesn't look like overly skeuomorphic with big shadows.
Marco:
It's a hard problem to solve.
Marco:
They did it in iOS 9's multitasking.
Marco:
They did just like the big border lines.
Marco:
that you would drag around and everything.
Marco:
And I think they still have a similar one for the side-by-side, but now they have the float over, and they still have picture-in-picture, which is a little rounded thing, so a whole bunch of different options now that are, it's gonna be a little confusing getting used to all this stuff, but
Marco:
The best thing about this, I'm not looking at any of the particular details of this and saying, oh, that's great or that's terrible.
Marco:
I'm just glad that they have done something here.
Marco:
They have all summer to work out the minor kinks, and they're going to have the next couple of years, hopefully, to work out any bigger ones in different updates.
Marco:
But the fact that they have finally, for iPad people, this is the biggest finally ever, they finally...
Marco:
taken the system that they started in a really basic way two years ago, and have let basically unchanged since, they have finally given it, like they fleshed it out, they've given it more, they've indicated, not only have they added nice features, but they've now also indicated to iPad Pro users that this is the kind of thing that we intend to keep moving forward, that we're not done, that what you got with iOS 9 isn't it forever.
Marco:
We're gonna keep moving this forward, and in so many ways,
Marco:
they are making the iPad like a Mac, and they're never gonna really say that, and they're doing new, edited versions of these features with 20 years of wisdom accumulated and things like that, but they really are making this more and more Mac-like, and it seems like for all of iOS users, talking about how much they hate using Macs, it seems like what they wanted was the iPad to become more like the Mac.
Casey:
Okay, so we should move on before we get stoned.
Casey:
So anyway, it does look really great.
Casey:
I'm really excited about it.
Casey:
There's a bunch of other stuff that we're going to kind of have to gloss over because I think before we go, we should definitely talk about the end of the keynote in music.
Casey:
So before we move on, are there any other iPad thoughts that we just cannot resist talking about right now?
Casey:
Okay, good.
Casey:
Quick thing.
Marco:
Notes improvements?
Marco:
Thumbs up.
Casey:
Notes improvements do look great.
Marco:
I'm a big Notes user.
Marco:
I like Notes a lot.
Marco:
As long as it reliably syncs, which is about most of the time, it is wonderful.
Marco:
I really enjoy it.
Marco:
It's funny that Notes has kind of become the center of Apple Sherlocking things these days.
Marco:
It's like notes I think has the record for like the most app types it has I wonder if that's discoverable though like the whole thing you can scan documents no one's gonna think to launch notes to do that if you already know it does it it's fine and once you learn maybe but it doesn't seem particularly discoverable because it's not it's not the entry point for yeah it is it is kind of like a junk drawer of features but if you know they're there it's a really great app and it has a few rough edges but overall it's pretty great
Marco:
So very happy to see that.
Marco:
All the handwriting stuff with the pencil, that's a lot of major enhancements for both iPad note-taking in general and also just the Notes app itself.
Marco:
That's pretty cool.
Marco:
That deserves a big thumbs up from me.
John:
Did we ever find out if the pencil can still manipulate the UI?
Yes.
John:
All right, there we go.
John:
The answer is yes, it can.
Casey:
Well, there's a switch, I believe.
Casey:
I don't know if there was, but there certainly seems to be a switch that lets you either manipulate everything or just drawing.
Casey:
We're getting so much feedback.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, I know.
Marco:
Next week, all follow-up.
Casey:
Nobody's surprised.
Casey:
Just so you're aware.
Casey:
No, the iPads look great.
Casey:
iOS 11 genuinely looks awesome.
Casey:
I'm really stoked.
Casey:
So one last thing.
Casey:
Not one more thing, but one last thing.
Marco:
That was a little... I think it was respectful.
Marco:
I approve of it.
Casey:
Oh, okay.
Casey:
It's been decided.
Casey:
It has been decided.
Marco:
All right.
Casey:
I'll allow it.
Casey:
The best part is, one last thing, music.
Casey:
And the whole crowd goes, uh.
John:
I don't know why they went, uh.
John:
The people who went, uh, obviously didn't listen to the last couple episodes of ATB.
John:
Of course the thing was going to be about music.
John:
It was just a question of what they chose to emphasize.
John:
I think all the way through the HomePod thing, people were like, so is this just music or whatever?
John:
And at the end, they came in with the big slide that said, no, it's what you think it is.
Marco:
No, but this was before it was even announced.
Marco:
This is like the one more thing, and we're all expecting a Siri speaker.
Marco:
And they say music.
John:
Well, of course.
John:
How often can you advertise a Siri speaker?
John:
What do you play on your Siri speaker?
John:
Podcasts?
John:
I mean, that's crazy talk.
John:
Apparently you can, because they didn't mention it.
John:
If you use an inferior app.
John:
Do you know the answer to that?
John:
By the way, we were asking that before, Marcus.
John:
Well, you need to come to the conference with us so we can ask you these questions.
John:
So the HomePod can play podcasts.
John:
Can it only play them if you are subscribed to them in the Apple Podcast app?
John:
We don't know at all.
John:
I don't think anybody knows that yet.
Marco:
It's going to be sad if that's true.
Marco:
So first of all, credit to Apple for, as far as I remember, not having an awkward music demo this year.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
That's a very good point.
Right?
Casey:
The times, they are a-changing.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Well, I'm going to count that thing where they showed the waveforms coming out of the speakers that was supposed to illustrate something to us.
John:
At least no one danced.
Marco:
Yeah, we didn't see an EQ dance.
Marco:
We had to reset all the bets for the shirt button thing.
Marco:
So overall, nicely omitted from the keynote.
Marco:
Also, I was happy to see in this keynote not a heavy reliance on videos.
Marco:
Like, there were some, but I think it was a healthy amount.
Marco:
There's no time.
Marco:
No time for videos.
Marco:
You've got to talk fast.
Marco:
And they've relied on them a little bit too much in the past.
Marco:
That was good to see.
Marco:
But one last thing.
Marco:
Apple Music, blah, blah.
Marco:
And then, okay, now Siri Speaker, and it's called HomePod.
Casey:
I'm not as bothered by this.
John:
Listen, listen, we all got on board with MacBook, which I think is a worse name than HomePod.
John:
HomePod will be fine.
John:
We will be so used to it in, like, three months.
Casey:
I don't think HomePod is bad.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Maybe I just don't know.
Marco:
I mean, we always get used to Apple's bad names for things.
Marco:
High Sierra?
Marco:
What would you have called it?
Marco:
Would you have called it Siri Speaker?
Marco:
Because that's worse than HomePod.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I haven't put a lot of thought into it, actually.
Marco:
Maybe.
Marco:
I mean, there has to be.
Marco:
That can't possibly be the best name they could have used.
Marco:
I think it's okay.
Casey:
I think it's fine.
Casey:
But anyway, so they said basically you can have a smart speaker or you can have, what was the other thing?
Casey:
Amazon Echo.
Marco:
And that was, by the way, shock of, to me I think one of the biggest shocks is that they actually put a Sonos and an Amazon Echo on the slide.
John:
They didn't erase the word Sonos.
John:
Sometimes they show a device but erase the branding.
Marco:
No, they were ice cold.
Marco:
Like, here's these two products that suck in these ways.
Marco:
They pulled no punches on that.
Marco:
That was quite interesting to see.
Marco:
And I think that what they were saying was basically the market's opinion of these things, which is basically, yeah, Sonos has great sound, but the downsides to it are it's pretty expensive, and it doesn't have any kind of voice control.
Marco:
And then Amazon Echo has...
Marco:
crap sound, but it's pretty convenient and it has pretty good voice control and doesn't have any multi-room stuff like Sonos does.
Marco:
By them coming in with the HomePod and adding... What they're basically doing is they're basically attacking Sonos head-on with a little bit of Amazon Echo attacking.
Marco:
I think the people at Sonos should be more upset by this than the people at Amazon because they're focusing strongly on music for lots of reasons probably right now, but
Marco:
they're focusing very strongly on music.
Marco:
As far as I can tell, did they say, is there going to be any kind of Siri kit integration with it?
Marco:
Do we know that?
John:
I don't think we know.
John:
That was another place where the Siri thing was weird because so much emphasis on music, which I think is smart because it plays to their strengths, but so little emphasis on talking to the thing.
John:
Like there was one slide, oh, you can talk to it and ask this a bunch of stuff, yada, yada, yada, no third party.
John:
And it's way better, we promise, wink.
John:
No screen, no apps, no developer story as far as I can see.
Marco:
Yeah, I was very surprised to see it didn't have a screen.
Marco:
Like, now that we're seeing what's coming out from Amazon and then presumably the next Google air freshener will have one too, like, there's a lot of value, I think.
Marco:
I mean, I haven't tried any of these things yet with the screen, but I think there's a lot of value to having a screen on a device that's like a home assistant thing.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
If you look at the way the HomePod seems to be designed for your living room, and in that kind of context, I can see a screen being less useful because you're probably not going to be using it as a timer and stuff.
Marco:
But for the kitchen, which is where the Echo has really shown to be very useful, a screen would be nice to see things like your timer statuses and the current weather as you're walking by in the morning and stuff like that.
Marco:
So to not have that kind of focus...
Marco:
and to be coming in at a premium price point, they're coming in at $350.
Marco:
That's a pretty healthy price point there.
Marco:
They're really attacking Sonos mostly, because Sonos speakers start at about $200 or $300, and they go up from there.
Marco:
I don't know how well this is going to sell.
Marco:
I think the tech press is probably going to rate them over the Coles for the price compared to the competitors.
Marco:
I'm probably going to buy one.
Marco:
You're probably going to make fun of me.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
We're all going to buy one.
Marco:
Casey's going to buy one.
Casey:
You're right, but why are you so confident about this?
John:
Because as soon as I saw that on the screen, I'm like, you are absolutely... Like, the marketing pitch works on you.
John:
Them pitching it as a music thing, you're like, well, I don't want one of those cylinders that I talk to, but this is just an awesome way to play music.
John:
And so you're going to get one.
Casey:
But it doesn't have that rich vinyl... No, never mind.
Casey:
No.
Casey:
But no, it does have that warmth that I'm used to.
John:
No, it does look really good.
Casey:
And I probably will buy one, to be honest with you.
Casey:
No, I think it looked awesome.
Casey:
I think that I saw one in the hands-on area very briefly.
Casey:
We did not hear it, but we saw both the black and the white.
Casey:
They both look great.
Casey:
John made a very funny comment, though, that there's this not insignificant cable coming out of the back of this thing.
Casey:
And in the Apple hands-on area, there's a hole in the table that it goes through, which is super convenient for Apple.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
And so it's not going to be quite so beautiful and bespoke in my house.
John:
It's a pretty thick power cable.
John:
It's more like the power cable to your Mac, like a big cylindrical thing.
John:
It's less like just a little thing with the wallboard or whatever.
John:
Anyway, I think it'll be fine.
John:
It's also a little bit chunkier.
John:
It is chunkier than the Google Home.
John:
It looks fat.
Marco:
Well, and there's no great way to make a tiny speaker sound good.
Marco:
So, like, I don't mind it getting a little bit bigger.
Marco:
Like, the Sonos Play 1, their smallest speaker, is chunkier than the Echo.
Marco:
It's shorter but fatter.
Marco:
And I think it's great.
Marco:
Like, the Sonos Play 1 sounds awesome.
Marco:
And a lot of Apple's features with, like, measuring the room, response, and everything else, that's all out of Sonos' playbook for years.
Marco:
But it sounds... It's probably going to sound great, right?
Casey:
Yeah, and it appears as though it's going to sound phenomenal, and I am really anxious to hear one and try one out.
Casey:
And I don't know that I necessarily have a place in my home that I am in desperate need of a new speaker.
Casey:
But that being said, this is appealing enough to me just in principle, and I trust Apple to, of all things, understand how to make music sound good.
Casey:
That to me, I'm like, well, okay, this is an insta-buy.
Casey:
It's just gonna have to happen.
Casey:
The same intro price as the iPod Hi-Fi, too.
Casey:
It was also $349.
Casey:
It turns out.
Marco:
Honestly, I think it's probably gonna be a good product, but I do have concerns.
Marco:
First of all, that is pretty expensive for this market.
Marco:
Again, they're really going after Sonos, not the Echo.
Marco:
The Echo and the Google Home are always gonna be cheaper than this.
Marco:
And I don't see Apple playing a race to the bottom price game on this product.
Marco:
I see this being a nice profit center for them and to make high-end stuff only.
Marco:
And by positioning themselves pretty much only against Sonos, then they kind of avoid having to compete in the super low margin stuff.
Marco:
But they're going to be better on privacy than Amazon and Google.
Marco:
As I said, sound quality is going to be great.
Marco:
I think overall, many of us are going to have these, but it's going to be...
Marco:
market size-wise more like the airport extreme than like, you know, the Apple TV.
John:
Well, they kind of, like, so the marketing push was for music, right?
John:
But if you look at the hardware, it's got a whole bunch of microphones in it.
John:
Like, it is well-equipped hardware-wise to do everything that the Echo does.
John:
And BA8 as well.
Casey:
I mean, it's powered by an iPhone processor, which is not as well.
John:
Right, it is powerful, it is fancy.
John:
But still, though...
John:
Because the hardware is well equipped to do that, they didn't emphasize it, and we all just assume it will be worse at answering your questions than the Echo and the Google things, which is why they're wise not to emphasize it.
John:
But say many years pass and they get better at that part, there's no reason they can't make a cheaper model if they decide to compete on price, tone down the speakers, make the one that is focused more on answering your questions and being a voice assistant, and less on playing music with high fidelity, and then they're right in that market, right?
John:
It's just a question of,
John:
Because they listed on that big thing all the things you can do.
John:
You can set timers, have reminders, ask it questions.
John:
All the things they said it can do are the things that Google Home and Amazon Echo do.
John:
We just all assume that Apple does them worse.
John:
And them not demoing them at all doesn't help us.
John:
Plus, they didn't even try to show off or say, they didn't touch it at all.
John:
You would be forgiven for thinking that this thing doesn't do anything except for play music, but it does everything that all the other devices do.
John:
So I think they have left the door open to come after Google Home and Amazon whenever the heck they can get their act together to actually be competitive in that.
John:
And who knows?
John:
Maybe they're already competitive in that area.
John:
We don't know.
John:
They never even demoed or never talked about it.
John:
It was just a word cloud.
Marco:
The impression I get is that this is still in a very early stage of development.
Marco:
It isn't even coming out until December, which raises the question of if this is a product that has apparently no developer support, no thing that anybody can do between now and when it comes out, and there's going to be a September event, presumably, where they announce new iPhones and stuff, why do they announce this now?
Casey:
That's an interesting point.
Casey:
I didn't think about that.
John:
We should have opened up the hardware and see if there's anything inside there.
John:
It's just empty shells.
John:
You can look at the hardware and it had little lights.
John:
They do the same thing as Google Home with colored LEDs on the top showing through with the Siri logo-y type thing.
John:
It looked like finished-ish hardware.
Casey:
Yeah, but overall, let's kind of wrap this up.
Casey:
Impressions of the keynote, I thought it was really good.
Casey:
I'm a little concerned is too strong a word, but I feel like it was a lot of catch-up or things that we maybe expected to happen a long time ago, particularly with the iPad productivity enhancements.
Casey:
That said, it was still a very impressive keynote.
Casey:
And we got hardware that I would have told you, I think I said to somebody as we're sitting in the keynote, there's no way we're going to get a whole bunch of hardware today.
Casey:
I finally gave Apple a bunch of my money, which is really exciting, sort of.
Casey:
And so we got a lot of hardware.
Casey:
We got iPads.
Casey:
We got Macs.
Casey:
The playing field has been leveled within each of these lines for the most part.
Casey:
It's a level playing field in the iPad world.
Casey:
Sorry, Mini.
Casey:
It's a level playing field in the Mac world.
Casey:
Sorry, iPad Air.
Casey:
And Mini.
Casey:
And yet.
Casey:
And yet, I mean, all in all, I thought it was pretty good.
Casey:
But what did the two of you think?
Casey:
Let's start with you, John.
John:
You said it was like a lot of ketchup.
John:
I would just change the emphasis.
John:
It was a lot of ketchup.
John:
Like, last show, Marco was listing all the things that he wanted.
John:
I was like, they can't do all those things.
John:
And the emphasis may have been different in the products they did, but...
John:
They did almost all of those things.
John:
They revised all the hardware that we thought they could possibly revise.
John:
This is what I thought was great about it, and I think it was a really smart move, was the stuff that wasn't ready, they announced that anyway.
John:
It's fine.
John:
It's such a rush to say, okay, I can order that today, but that's going to be December, but that's going to be later in the fall.
John:
It's like, you don't care.
John:
Just show me all the cool new things.
John:
I think that was super smart, and I came away thinking this was
John:
A very impressive keynote where everything they showed met expectations at the very least.
John:
And I was excited to see the iMac Pro and stuff like this.
John:
I don't care when it's shipping.
John:
Just show it to me.
John:
Thumbs up.
Marco:
What do you think, Marco?
Marco:
So I think Tim Cook opened it by saying this is going to be the biggest and best WWDC ever.
Marco:
And I don't think it was.
Marco:
I think that was setting it a little bit too high.
Marco:
I think the one a couple years ago when Switch was announced was probably the biggest and best WWDC ever to date.
Marco:
But I do think overall this was pretty packed full of good stuff.
Marco:
And a lot of this stuff, we're not going to develop an understanding and appreciation of a lot of it until we get to use it for a while or until it launches to the public.
Marco:
So we all have to actually use the new multitasking and productivity and files type things.
Marco:
We have to write apps against this stuff.
Marco:
We have to wait for the apps that we use to get updated to actually enjoy and use and get to see a lot of this stuff.
Marco:
We have to wait for the App Store launch until presumably the fall before we get any benefit from that.
Marco:
So there's a lot of, and we have to wait until
Marco:
quote, December, but in Apple parlance, that probably means March before we can actually get one.
Marco:
So, you know, we have to wait until next spring, presumably, before we can actually see the HomePod.
Marco:
God, I still... I almost said Siri speaker.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
You'll be fine.
Marco:
Two weeks, you'll be fine.
John:
Exactly.
Marco:
So, like, you know, we have to wait to see that.
Marco:
We have to wait to see the iMac Pro and then later on the Mac Pro.
Marco:
So there's a lot of, like...
Marco:
just wait, this is gonna be awesome, but they've backed it up with enough actual output and solid announcements and firm commitments to things and actual changes to stuff that overall, I think this is pretty cool.
Marco:
There are certainly areas that I'm concerned about, like the TV and the watch and messages and stuff like that.
Marco:
There's areas that are not as...
Marco:
have had slow years, and they didn't do everything I wanted them to do in certain things, like SiriKit.
Marco:
But overall, I think it's pretty good.
Marco:
And I enjoyed the presentation itself, as I said earlier, the video stuff and the not having Apple Music presentation.
Marco:
Overall, I think pretty good WBDC.
Marco:
Certainly in the top half, maybe the top quarter, if not number one ever.
Casey:
Yeah, I thought it was really well done.
Casey:
So at this point, I don't know what we're going to do because we didn't discuss this in advance because it's the Accidental Tech Podcast.
John:
Mark has to do his thing.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Squarespace, Audible, and Fracture, and we will see you next week.
Marco:
Gotcha.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Casey:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Casey:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
30 seconds.
Casey:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey would let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
Marco:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's K-C-L-S-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M
Casey:
They didn't mean to accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
John:
Tech podcast so long.
Casey:
Well done.
Well done.
So, I think we're...
Casey:
I think we'll probably skip an after show and God knows what we're going to do about the titles.
Marco:
That was exactly as awkward and awesome as I am.
Casey:
If you had told me back in 2012 when I'm listening to these two and you had told me that not only would I be up on stage with these two, but all of you amazing, wonderful people would come to see us and sing us our song.
Casey:
Like, what a weird world we live in.
Casey:
And I know I speak for the two of these guys that we are so deeply, deeply grateful for you guys coming out.
Casey:
And it really means a ton to all of us.
Casey:
And I hope you enjoy the rest of your week if you're at any of the wonderful conferences, including but not limited to all comps.
Casey:
So thank you so much to all comps for having us come in.
Casey:
Can we give them a big round of applause as well?
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
As usual, with the exception of Marco, John and I just kind of showed up, did our thing, and then we're going to go soon.
Casey:
But really, you guys, thank you so much for coming.
Marco:
Also, a nice announcement.
Marco:
AllConf raised a whole bunch of money for AppCamp for girls over the last couple days.
Marco:
Also, there's a benefit concert by James Dempsey and the Breakpoints.
Marco:
I've seen them.
Marco:
It's a great show.
Marco:
Highly recommend it.
Marco:
There's still tickets left, and the proceeds of that go to AppCamp for Girls.
Marco:
Add you the tickets for this event, but they're going to raise way more because they're awesome.
Marco:
So please go buy a ticket to that if you haven't already.
Marco:
It's tomorrow night, right?
Marco:
Or Wednesday.
Marco:
Wednesday night.
Marco:
Wednesday, I highly suggest seeing them in person, and you cannot pick a better organization to support than App Camp for Girls.
Marco:
So please go buy those last tickets.
Marco:
I want to see that show sold out.
Marco:
So thank you, everyone, for listening.
Marco:
Anything else before we go?
Casey:
I think we're good.
Casey:
We've got to pick titles.
Casey:
All right, so I think... So in a deeply embarrassing turn of events, I looked earlier about halfway through the show, and I think the show bot was down?
Marco:
I was wondering if you were even running the show bot.
Casey:
Well, I usually never touch it, and everything just magically works.
Casey:
Just like Apple stuff, am I right?
John:
I feel like we didn't fulfill our promise.
John:
Like, when we record live, we were way worse than this.
John:
Yeah.
John:
We talked all sorts of crazy things, and there's lots of diversions, and Marco puts it back together.
John:
This was pretty coherent.
John:
Yeah, we did all right, but... I apologize for not giving you the full experience, but this...
Marco:
The real reason is that I'm pretty hungry, and so I don't want to have to edit a lot tonight.
Casey:
So here's the thing.
Casey:
We didn't have a show bot, but I have five title options that I will read to the group.
Casey:
And then when I am done, you can perhaps, we will go through again, and you can cheer for the one you like most.
Casey:
I'm not a democracy.
Casey:
What if you know I tried?
Casey:
Off into the cornfield was option one.
Casey:
That's pretty good.
Casey:
I can't even read my own damn handwriting.
Casey:
I was going to say, you can read that?
Casey:
What the hell?
Casey:
On the somethingness of controls.
Casey:
On the good grips of controls.
John:
OXO good grips.
John:
There we go.
John:
I put it together.
Casey:
OXO good grips of controls.
Casey:
That's a trademark.
Casey:
We can't use that.
Casey:
That's the second one.
Casey:
Okay, fine.
Casey:
Third one, a conversation with Siri.
Casey:
Number four, practically a point release and number five, compromise size.
Casey:
I think off into the cornfields.
John:
It's got to be cornfields, right?
John:
No, I flubbed that.
John:
That's a reference to a Twilight Zone episode that I don't know enough about to get the right quote.
John:
I don't want to flub the quote.
LAUGHTER
Casey:
This is what we see.
Casey:
If you don't listen live, this is what happens every friggin' time.
John:
What was the other one?
Casey:
Okay, Oxo Good Grips of Control, Conversation with Siri.
Casey:
Conversation with Siri is the winner.
Casey:
That's not bad.
Casey:
All right, fine.
Casey:
Are we all too many for you on that?
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Do the all-con people, do you guys want to say anything else before we kind of shut this all down and go do our thing?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
Cool.
Casey:
Awesome.
Marco:
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
Casey:
Yeah, thank you so much.
Casey:
We'll try to hang around for just a minute.
Thank you.
Thank you.