A Rebuilding Year
Casey:
Are you telling me I watched 10 minutes of YouTube videos for nothing?
John:
I mean, it's good to learn about that stuff anyway, but, you know.
John:
Was it full of ads?
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
I've got to get.
Casey:
You shouldn't be seeing any.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
I've got to start paying for YouTube.
Casey:
It's gotten so bad recently.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
I haven't gotten around to it.
John:
You haven't gotten around to it for like seven years or however old your kids are.
Casey:
Well, but I didn't want to pay for it until they had the slightly cheaper plan.
John:
You should find out how many ads your kids know from YouTube.
John:
I think we talked about this in the show when I did it.
John:
I got the family one that I had to use an emulator to run Android to get because they didn't offer it on the web or to Mac or iOS users.
John:
So literally only available to people through Android phones.
John:
So I read that that blue tax or whatever emulator where I ran Android to sign up for the family thing.
John:
Gracious.
Casey:
That's bad.
Casey:
Anyways, I need to do it because all I'm trying to say is it is so bad out there.
Casey:
I feel like, and obviously I was a YouTuber for like 10 minutes several years ago, and I don't recall one way or the other what amount of control the people who make the video have or don't have about, you know, how many ads there are, when they're placed, et cetera.
Casey:
I thought there was at least a modicum of control, but holy fart nuggets that
Casey:
There are so many ads on YouTube right now.
Casey:
It is unbelievable.
Casey:
It has well since crossed the Rubicon from, okay, you know, I'm going to watch an ad or two because I'm getting something for free, not unlike this very program, to, oh my gosh, can I go 15 seconds without getting interrupted by an ad?
Casey:
And obviously I'm being a bit hyperbolic, but it's bad.
Casey:
It's real bad.
Marco:
That's the nature of things of ads.
Marco:
Ads beget more ads.
Marco:
It's like mice.
Marco:
Once you have two ads, there will become an infinite number of ads over time.
Marco:
Not sure that's how ads reproduce, but forget the analogy.
Casey:
So let's do some follow up.
Casey:
Apple was told earlier today, just moments before we started recording to go outside and play hide and go screw themselves because reading from the verge and appeals court has now denied Apple's emergency request, emergency request to block the order.
Casey:
This is the order that says that they should there.
Casey:
They have to allow link outs and, you know, get rid of the anti steering stuff.
Casey:
Coming back to The Verge, the court has said it was not persuaded that blocking the order was appropriate after weighing Apple's chances to succeed on appeal, whether Apple would irreparably be harmed, and whether other parties would be hurt if the order is halted, and what supports the public interest.
Casey:
You just love to see it.
Marco:
To nobody's surprise, Apple was not able to prove that allowing people to link to a website was causing irreparable, immediate emergency damage to their entire company.
Marco:
But, you know, they're still going to go through the rest of the appeal process.
Marco:
And, you know, the story is not over and it won't be over for probably another few years, I would have to guess.
Marco:
But it's looking like for the time being...
Marco:
probably because you know with with just a system it's always you know a lot of like asterisks and probably is and maybes and for nows but for now for the time being it probably looks like apple will be forced to allow people to link out to the websites uh to make payments in the u.s app store at least for a while we'll see again we'll see where it goes i stand by what i said before which is
Marco:
Don't build a business that relies on this.
Marco:
If you want to temporarily do this and view it as a temporary thing for now that you might be able to maybe continue doing in the future, go for it.
Marco:
This is something that can be changed or taken away abruptly in the future as soon as Apple gets the ability to do so.
Marco:
They're not allowing this willingly.
Marco:
This is not a policy change with Apple saying, we've decided to allow this.
Marco:
No, this is Apple being forced.
Marco:
And as soon as they can find any way to stop it, they will stop it.
Marco:
So treat it as a temporary situation that you might be able to use and that might bear other downsides.
Marco:
For instance, I don't think I'm going to be doing anything with this because, first of all, I don't want to deal with it.
Marco:
But second of all, if you have this in your app, Apple might make your app reviews take longer.
Marco:
You might get held up all the time.
Marco:
Every time you start to submit an update, you might get held up an app review for a long time.
Marco:
Maybe Apple introduces a new API and they say, you aren't allowed to use this API if you have this.
Marco:
There's all sorts of ways that they can and probably will retaliate against apps that do this.
Marco:
So if you are choosing to use this, you have to bear in mind that kind of risk is also part of, you know, the choice.
Marco:
So I personally don't think it's worth it for my app.
Marco:
But, you know, the advantage of being able to link out to the web for payments is that.
Marco:
a lot of types of businesses just become possible that weren't really possible before.
Marco:
It isn't just that developers want to pay less.
Marco:
We do, of course, but also entire business models or payment structures or types of products and services offered, entire things that weren't possible under Apple's system can now be possible.
Marco:
But again...
Marco:
I wouldn't build a business depending on this.
Marco:
So everyone out there, enjoy the party while it lasts.
Marco:
But keep in mind, if you go in, there are potential risks and downsides.
Casey:
We have important follow-up from Nathaniel.
Casey:
Nathaniel writes, in the after show of episode 641, Marco was recommending a DeWalt LED work light, and John was recommending headlamps as a concept.
Casey:
I would like to add to this list LED flashlight gloves.
Casey:
They're cheap as anything, look dumb, and would probably die or break with any level of frequent use.
Casey:
But they are a game changer when working in weird spaces where your arms or hands are going to cast shadows from any headlamp or stationary light.
Casey:
I've used them while working in awkward parts of my car, messing with cables behind TVs and various other places where other lights just haven't done it for me.
Casey:
Nathaniel has provided a representative example.
Casey:
I don't think that Nathaniel is claiming that the particular example that he cited, which will be in the show notes, is the be all end all.
Casey:
It is simply an illustrative or illustrative whatever example for you to check out.
Casey:
And we will put it in the show notes.
John:
I'm tempted by these things.
Casey:
They do look absolutely dumb and ridiculous, but I get it.
Marco:
Yeah, I definitely took a look and I'm like, I would only wear these in jobs where nobody would ever see me.
Marco:
But also, like, part of the reason why headlamps are amazing and part of the reason headlamps are terrible is that headlamps track your head.
Marco:
No matter what, you know, wherever you're aiming your head, the headlamp points.
Marco:
That's great in a lot of cases, but a lot of times it's not what you want.
Marco:
Like, if you turn your head for a second, maybe you don't want the light source to change.
Marco:
I think I would have a similar minor paper coat annoyance with these, but maybe even a more major version of it of, like,
Marco:
If I move my hands at all, the angle of the light will change.
Marco:
That's not necessarily what I always want.
Marco:
But I don't know.
Marco:
I never use them.
Marco:
Maybe I'll give them a try.
John:
Got to have the headlamp and these on at the same time and your work light.
John:
You see how it's working here?
John:
Every orifice of your body should emit light.
John:
the use case that got me here was like the messing around with stuff behind tvs because it's very often in my particular situation hard to get my head even back around there or like it's like the the av receiver it's on the bottom shelf my you know i can't get my head down to being two inches off the ground to shine my headlamp directly on it so it's always coming down at an angle and then it's hitting the other shelves but my hands are down there you know messing around with the cables or even if you're just trying to look down there
John:
uh sometimes yeah shadows shadows are the problem so i would love to have these lights you put a work light on the floor you got your headlamp on your head and you got these things on your gloves and the ones in the picture are it's like one light on your thumb one light on your pointer finger in each hand and that would probably do it so i am actually interested in these things i mean again they look ridiculous but i get it these are not one device these are three devices gloves and headlamp just might as well just put on a tron suit at that point
Marco:
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Marco:
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John:
mac os 26 has a name mark german writes i'm told that the company is homed in is it home h o m e or h o n e it's h o m e d thank you the other one is uh in common usage because it sounds similar but it is not the original and it is less correct wait is the idea that like is homing like a missile and honing is like sharpening something yeah you got it homing pigeon honing is sharpening and you can see how sharpening can also like it kind of works which is why it's come into fashion but
John:
Homed is the earlier one, and the other one is derived from it because it sounds similar, and people mix it up.
Casey:
So there you have it.
Casey:
Well, like I said, today I learned.
Casey:
Let me try this all over again, though.
Casey:
Mark Gurman writes, I'm told that the company has Homed, with an M, in on Lake Tahoe as its next moniker, making it macOS Tahoe.
Casey:
It's a famous resort area and a vacation destination and second home site for many Apple employees.
Casey:
Let me read that last part one more time.
Casey:
And second home site for many Apple employees.
Casey:
The most West Coast thing I think I've heard, a really Silicon Valley thing I've heard in a while.
Marco:
Well, as we know, homes in California are very affordable.
Marco:
Right?
Casey:
To have their problems, am I right?
Casey:
Anyways, Mac OS 26 Tahoe.
Casey:
I think I'm good with that.
Marco:
Yeah, that was my kind of random guess looking at the map last week during overtime.
Marco:
So I will take full credit despite it being pure luck.
Marco:
It just so happens.
John:
You had the right logic too, which I think I agreed with, which is like, oh, rich people like this place.
John:
Who's picking the name?
John:
Yeah.
John:
The logic was sound and here you have it.
Casey:
all right mac os 26 hardware support we're reading from mac rumors mac os 26's compatibility list is expected to be as follows these are the ones that are compatible macbook pro 2019 and up imac 2020 and up uh mac pro 2019 and later just by the hair on your chinny chin chin you made it john we did it joe uh mac mini m1 and later mac studio all models macbook air m1 and later
Marco:
So most Intel models are no longer supported, only the very last of a couple of them, basically.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So continuing from Mac rumors, according to individuals familiar with the matter cited by Apple Insider, the following Macs will not be supported by the next version of Mac OS.
Casey:
Again, not supported.
Casey:
The MacBook Pro 2018, the iMac 2019, beloved, dear, dear departed friend from Marco and myself, iMac Pro 2017.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Let's pour one out.
Marco:
That was a great computer a very long time ago when it came out.
Casey:
God, it was so good.
Casey:
Mac Mini 2018, MacBook Air 2020, Intel-based.
Casey:
So those are not supported anymore.
John:
Yeah, I went back and reviewed our many past discussions about the moment we thought a macOS would drop Intel support, and I think Apple is past all of our predictions at this point, because if you just did the straight math about comparing PowerPC to Intel and...
John:
uh 68k to power pc they're past that date for sure i think that was like 2024 or something and i think maybe the latest date that any of us had picked was like 2027 and if they do it it seems like they're not going to do it this year's wwc so maybe at next year's and then you've got that that one year to run out until 2027 when it's not supported anymore but anyway
John:
i'm just glad my mac pro is still supported which lets me potentially continue to delay my new mac decision depending on what is announced but again my goal as discussed in the and a couple episodes ago my goal is in 2025 to make a decision and purchase a new mac but uh my mac pro continuing to be supported uh is nice
John:
I'm so happy for you, John.
John:
Truly, I am.
John:
And not just my Mac Pro, but like what this means is Intel is supported.
John:
Like, yes, it's great that my Mac Pro is supported and lots of Intel Macs aren't supported, but it means that Tahoe is not going to be, you know, ARM only.
John:
It will support Intel.
John:
Indeed.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
There's been an interview with Johnny Ive and Laureen Powell Jobs.
Casey:
This was in the Financial Times, which is very, very aggressively paywalled.
Casey:
So I'm going to read from a couple of different sources, beginning with Mac Rumors.
Casey:
Johnny Ive and Laureen Powell Jobs have given a rare joint interview to the Financial Times addressing their collaboration, their concerns about technology, social impact, and OpenAI's mysterious hardware device.
Casey:
The interview follows the recent acquisition of Ives' AI startup, IO, by OpenAI.
Casey:
Laureen Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs, was an early investor in IO.
Casey:
She has been closely involved with Ives' work since his departure from Apple in 2019.
Casey:
Then this is a summary by Matthew Garahan.
John:
That's not a summary.
John:
That's who the interview is by.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
What I meant was this is from the interview, which was done by Matthew Garahan.
Casey:
Ivan Altman have been tight-lipped about the AI-enabled device they are developing.
Casey:
I've deftly dodges my attempts to get him to tell me what it is, but hints that he was motivated by a disillusionment with how our relationship with devices has evolved.
Casey:
Many of us would say we have an uneasy relationship with technology at the moment, he says.
Casey:
Whatever the device is driving its design is, quote, a sense of we deserve better.
Casey:
Humanity deserves better.
John:
Nice of him to avoid saying humane in there, but you know he wanted to.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Again, from the article, Ive says the collaboration with Altman and OpenAI has revived his optimism in technology.
Casey:
Quote, when I first moved here in 1992, I came because it was characterized by people who genuinely saw that their purpose was in service to humanity, to inspire people and to help people create.
Casey:
I don't feel that way about this place right now.
Casey:
Powell Jobs agrees Silicon Valley has changed and not necessarily for the better.
Casey:
Quote, we now know unambiguously that there are dark uses for certain types of technology.
Casey:
You can only look at the studies being done on teenage girls, non-anxiety and young people and the rise of mental health needs to understand that we've gone sideways.
Casey:
Certainly technology wasn't designed to have that result, but that is the sideways results.
John:
So both of these things is like, oh, technology used to be better and people were optimistically trying to help people.
John:
I just don't feel that today.
John:
And a lot of people have that feeling, including us.
John:
We've talked about on the show various angles.
John:
And I said, that sounds like you guys, too.
John:
But very often in the larger technology community, I feel like that feeling is centered.
John:
a lot on the AILM stuff, don't you?
John:
Maybe I'm wrong about that, but my impression is that a lot of people who are grumpy about technology are grumpy about quote-unquote AI stuff because they feel like it is taking away creativity from people.
John:
Instead of you doing it yourself, you just get the computer to do it.
John:
uh, all the whole, uh, issues over, you know, using other people's work to make these things or whatever, but like get, like getting it, John, he's done a bunch of interviews and we've quoted a few of them here when he always says like, I'm disillusioned with technology and the thing that I made, like I'm disillusioned with what I made and the ill effects and so on and so forth.
John:
It's like, okay, I get to see that people on their phones too much or whatever, but like,
John:
that i he always tries to connect that to and that's why i'm doing this new thing and i'm like i make that please make that connection for me better because i don't quite see especially since you're not going to say exactly what you're doing but it's not as if it's like well of course now i don't need to mention that what we're doing now will not fall into that trap like why won't it fall into that crap and uh
John:
pal jobs saying specifically about like teenage girls and mental health and anxiety is, you know, they're on their phones all the time and Instagram or wherever we've gone sideways.
John:
Technology wasn't designed to have their result, but it's what happened just coincidentally that very day.
John:
I had read something about open AI, a company involved in this thing that had one of the chatbots that they put on their open AI is GPT's page.
John:
It was like the number six chat box on this like leaderboard or whatever of chatbots people are using is some looks maxing GPT.
John:
Um, and then Molly White has a story in her citation needed newsletter about this thing.
John:
And guess what?
John:
It's telling people to feel bad about yourself and to have, uh, you know, surgery to make yourself look better and saying mean things to people.
John:
This is open.
John:
Like it's not open AI specific thing, but this is open AI's own page that they're promoting this chat bot, which is based on LM technology, which is doing almost exactly the thing.
John:
that lorraine pal jobs was complaining about so again i ask okay technology has some ill effects and you feel that therefore johnny ive io acquisition ai egg like i don't i'm not seeing the dots connect
Casey:
Yeah, I do agree with you there.
Casey:
I think that people are disillusioned with tech because of more than just AI.
Casey:
I think AI is the crypto of today in that a lot of people are like, what the what is this about?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I have very complicated thoughts with AI.
Casey:
And I actually had another Vibe Coding session, which is not worth talking about today.
Casey:
We have too much to cover, but it ended well.
Casey:
And so on the one side, I'm like, I'm
Casey:
like this.
Casey:
This is useful.
Casey:
But the flip side is plagiarism and some of the awful things it's used for.
John:
I'm not saying those people are right.
John:
They're disillusionment.
John:
I'm just saying I feel I feel that pushback a lot in a lot of circles that people don't like the AI stuff.
John:
I'm I am
John:
Not on one strongly on one side of the other, because as you know, like we've all said that we found it very useful.
John:
And I don't think it's like crypto because AILMs have tons of obvious uses that people are using it for and are willing to pay for it.
John:
But there are also lots of downsides.
John:
And one of the like there are many avenues of downsides.
John:
And one of them is the thing of like, let's just make a chatbot and let people talk to it.
John:
And that.
John:
pretty much has always gone wrong, even when, like, Fortnite added the Darth Vader thing with the James Earl Jones licensed voice or whatever, and it started cursing at people.
John:
Like, there is no... It's so cool that you can make this.
John:
Look, we made a chatbot.
John:
But, like, sometimes this looks-maxing thing looks like it's maliciously made to begin with is trying to make people feel bad about themselves, which is terrible, which is why it shouldn't be on OpenAI's page.
John:
But even when you're not trying to do that, the Fortnite people were trying to have a fun Darth Vader in a game.
John:
it's fun to play with like that's their goal surely they don't want it to start saying bad things but it does because this technology is immature and not entirely under the control of the people that make it and so it ends up going wrong and so when i see like oh i'm disillusioned with technology and these unintended ill side effects it's like well if you want unintended ill side effects have i got a technology for you apparently it's going to be the basis for this great new product that you're working together on
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
There's a couple of quick points of clarification on my own part, because I don't think I was being clear at all.
Casey:
I don't think AI is the same as crypto insofar as, you know, it's equally useless.
Casey:
I think to your point, there are definitely good things that come from it.
Casey:
It's just the pearl clutching cause du jour of the moment.
Casey:
And then secondly, I think I distracted myself earlier, but
Casey:
I think other than AI, a lot of people have been saying that, look, our relationship with our phones and, you know, we never look up anymore.
Casey:
That's not healthy.
Casey:
We're all addicted to social media to some way, to some degree.
Casey:
Generally speaking, that's probably not healthy.
Casey:
Certainly my understanding of, you know, teenage and young-ish women, my understanding is they are in particular, as was mentioned earlier, in a real bad spot because of the peer and societal pressure that's put on them.
Casey:
even more than normal for women, which is saying something.
Casey:
So there's a lot to be grumbly about with regards to technology.
Casey:
But I think, nevertheless, I agree with you wholeheartedly that I am not getting from A to B here.
Marco:
The more we hear from Johnny Ive about what he's doing,
Marco:
It keeps sounding more and more like betting against the smartphone.
Marco:
And I always say, never bet against the smartphone.
Marco:
You know, we've had a number of attempts over the last few years, people like, you hate your phone, right?
Marco:
Well, do we have the product for you?
Marco:
And the problem is most people don't hate their phones, or at least they don't only hate their phones.
Marco:
They might hate part of what their phones do or mean to them, but need other parts or love other parts or both.
Marco:
Overall, people love their phones.
Marco:
That's why it's such a popular category that everybody wants and uses constantly.
Marco:
It's not that we're being forced to look at our phones all the time.
Marco:
No, we're choosing to.
Marco:
And there's a lot of modern life and modern utility in life that has been built with the assumption that everybody will have a smartphone and now requires a smartphone or is best with a smartphone.
Marco:
So people who are like, I hate my phone.
Marco:
I'm just going to carry this like, you know, this weird e-ink nothing phone or whatever.
Marco:
It's like, yeah, those no one actually buys those and no one actually uses those as a gadget reviewers because the actual experience of living life is everyone loves their phones and wants them constantly.
Marco:
And so when people try to make a product saying we need to make it so you don't use your phone as much.
Marco:
I don't see there being that much real demand for that.
Marco:
Like what people might say is very different from what they do.
Marco:
And I don't see a lot of real demand for that.
Marco:
And for the most part, if people want to use their phone less or if you want to avoid things like, you know, social media toxicity and stuff.
Marco:
That's generally a problem with specific apps that you use and participate in, not the phone itself.
Marco:
Like the ones who do say, oh, I want to use my phone less or I'm spending too much time on my phone.
Marco:
That can almost always be dramatically improved by things like delete your account on Instagram and then delete the app.
Marco:
Delete your account on the social networks and then delete those apps like any social network app.
Marco:
Delete it and delete your account.
Marco:
If that's really what you want, if you want to get away from that, that is really what you want.
Marco:
And then you have a phone still that can do things like look up GPS directions to where you're going for your doctor or whatever.
Marco:
You still need all that other stuff.
Marco:
This is all possible with our phones.
Marco:
When I think about the idea of Johnny Ive making some kind of Washington Monument that sits on your desk and listens to your AI... How many times?
Marco:
I just think, what is this doing that wouldn't be better done on my phone?
Marco:
If my phone had this ability, and obviously maybe we'll hear some stuff next week, who knows, but if my phone had the ability of things like the Humane Pen or Johnny Ive's Pyramid, whatever it is...
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
Well, Apple can, it seems like.
Marco:
Well, yeah.
Marco:
Well, Apple can.
Marco:
They just won't.
John:
They haven't yet.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
The ways they would do it would be ways that they probably won't do.
Marco:
The ways they could do it, rather.
Marco:
Anyway, all this is to say, so when I initially was excited about what Johnny I was saying, and I thought it might be a cool smartwatch, in part that's because I think the smartwatch has a better chance of success because people can swap out their watch pretty easily, but they're still wearing a watch and it's fine.
Marco:
The more he talks, the more it seems like he wants to make some blob you put on your desk that you also have along with your phone and your watch and your laptop and maybe an iPad.
Marco:
How many devices do we need here?
Marco:
We actually like the ones we have.
Marco:
We're not trying to use them less.
Marco:
I'm having less and less faith in this idea the more I hear about it from Johnny Hive.
John:
It's starting to sound more like kind of like the modern version of those.
John:
Remember the star phones?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Casey might remember them.
John:
But whatever that company is that first made a kind of like starfish shaped black plastic phone that you put in the middle of conference tables for work.
Casey:
Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes.
John:
And I forgot the name of the company.
John:
And, of course, everyone copied them after that or whatever.
John:
Anyway, when you go to a meeting room, it's sitting in the middle of the table.
John:
And when you used to call people on regular landline phones, that's how you did business.
John:
But you could have meetings with multiple people.
John:
And it was a speakerphone with mics and speakers facing in all directions.
John:
And the people on the other end had another one.
John:
And this was before FaceTime and before you could do video over the internet, before Google Meet, before Hangouts, before any of that stuff.
John:
These starphone things exist.
John:
And the whole idea was...
John:
You can have a meeting without these.
John:
I guess everyone could be on their desk on their phone, or you could put one phone on someone's desk on speakerphone, but here was a purpose-built device that was a hardware thing that it's like, it's not doing anything new, but boy, isn't it way better than all the alternatives using the same technology?
Marco:
Also, no.
Marco:
That was better than nothing ever.
Marco:
I hated those so, so much because all it produced was a bunch of really distant, terrible conference calls.
Marco:
Hey, Bob, what do you think?
Marco:
Oh...
Marco:
They got a lot better over.
Marco:
No, they didn't.
Marco:
And then you had both ends.
Marco:
You had double talk.
Marco:
You had people on both ends who couldn't hear each other.
Marco:
Bob, can you come closer to the mic?
Marco:
I know.
John:
Like I said, the early ones were bad, but they got better real fast.
John:
And eventually it was vastly superior.
Marco:
It was the worst communication mechanism humans have ever devised.
John:
Eventually, it was vastly superior to the to the alternatives because it did have multiple microphones for noise canceling eventually and multiple speakers pointing in multiple directions.
John:
And it was just vastly preferable to people being at their individual desks or around around an old style speakerphone where it was just a part of the handset thing.
John:
So.
John:
That is like a, like what role does hardware have in a device like this?
John:
Because I think of it with the egg thing of being like, can't your phone, can't you just put your phone down on the table and can it just listen to everything you're saying and see everything that's on all your screens and put it, throw it on to chat GPT so that it has all the context.
John:
So that when you ask it a question, it has, it knows everything that went on during this meeting, especially since I would imagine Johnny Ive,
John:
Like his career and life pretty rapidly became being a very important person in a very important meeting with a small number of people.
John:
And wouldn't it be nice if something was there, like taking notes and processing it all when you had a question, you could just say something that.
John:
the egg is starting to feel to me a little bit like that.
John:
Um, and I, who knows, it may end up being around people's neck as well, but I, I see their disillusionment they're talking about and how humanity deserves better.
John:
But I'm like, what role Johnny do you have specifically in making this product better for humanity?
John:
Because you're sure as hell not working on the LM, right?
John:
Like that's not your thing.
John:
Somebody else is doing that.
John:
So I don't know.
John:
I don't know what he's going to be doing other than making a really, really nice looking egg.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't know.
Marco:
It's starting to feel a lot like one of those rich people problem devices.
Marco:
It's like, I have too many phones and I have too many people trying to set up meetings with me.
Marco:
I just want to be able to speak to a thing and say, book me a trip to Tahoe.
Marco:
It's starting to sound like it might be more in that direction.
Marco:
And I really hope it's not because that doesn't work in the world.
Casey:
We'll see what happens.
Casey:
But I agree that this seems like it's rich people solving rich people problems, but whatever.
Casey:
But anyway, coming back to the article, I've acknowledged his own role in the products that have changed our relationship with technology.
Casey:
Quote,
Casey:
Powell Jobs describes the current moment as, quote, the era of the great unknown.
Casey:
AI, she adds, will, quote, to transform how we live, work, relate, communicate.
Casey:
It's not clear what direction the world is headed.
John:
I agree.
John:
It's not clear.
John:
That's why I think it's just such a slam dunk that, like, oh, there's this problem, disillusionment, and unintended consequences, and Johnny feels responsible.
John:
And that's why we're working on a thing that is totally unknown, and we're not clear which direction it's headed.
John:
I mean, she said the world, not clear what direction the world is headed.
John:
It's like, I'm not clear either.
John:
I'm also not clear whether the thing you're doing will nudge us in further in the right direction or further away from it.
John:
So we'll see.
John:
It's hard to judge this when it's all mysterious.
John:
But if they're going to do these interviews filled with vague and mysterious statements about regret and disillusionment with technology, I really feel like I was looking for them to better connect.
John:
And that's why I'm doing this thing, which will help in these ways.
John:
And that's not there so far.
Marco:
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Casey:
All right, let's talk topics.
Casey:
And we have the crossover event that everyone's been waiting for.
Casey:
The combination of Vision Pro Corner and John Syracuse Corner.
Casey:
Who knew?
Casey:
No, John didn't buy a Vision Pro.
Casey:
That would make too much sense.
John:
Too much sense?
John:
Oh, please.
John:
That would make no sense, especially now.
John:
No.
John:
Also, like, you would get motion sick in the first 30 seconds.
John:
I did the whole 30-minute thing at the Apple Store without getting motion sick.
John:
But yeah, my motion sickness is a problem for me.
John:
And so that is certainly a barrier to entry for any product like this, not just the Vision Pro.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
If there's nothing for me to do with the Vision Pro next week, I'm mailing mine for the summer.
Marco:
What am I going to do with it all summer?
John:
It can sit on your floor.
John:
It's too hot to put it on your face during the summer.
Casey:
So anyway, so the reason this is the Vision Pro and John Syracuse Corner is because the Bono film Stories of Surrender was released on Apple TV+.
Casey:
It is available in both 2D and immersive formats.
Casey:
It runs about 90 minutes long, which is far and away the longest immersive video that Apple's produced.
Casey:
The next longest, I think, was the 15-minute submarine thing.
Marco:
Are they automatically putting it on every Vision Pro?
Casey:
Reference acknowledged.
Casey:
I don't think so, but we certainly can find out.
Marco:
We'll hear from tens of people about it.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Uh, so anyway, this is, uh, actually let me back up.
Casey:
So I am not a particular fan of you too.
Casey:
I wouldn't say I actively dislike them, but I don't, I, I would self-describe as someone who will listen and not be grumbly about it, but I never, ever, ever seek out you too, which is in contrast to John and jump in and interrupt whenever you're ready.
Casey:
But I would say this is, or was at least your favorite band.
Casey:
Is that fair to say?
John:
I would say I listen as my all time favorite band.
John:
That encompasses the fact that right now I'm probably more excited by like the new Church's album or something, but my all-time favorite band is U2.
Casey:
And John, you cut your teeth on, what was the name of the lyrics site?
Casey:
What was the official name of it?
John:
The U2 Lyrics Archive.
John:
Very imaginative.
Casey:
Yeah, well, there you go.
Casey:
It's like the Accidental Tech Podcast, am I right?
John:
There's no the.
John:
There's no the on our show.
John:
How many times?
John:
I need to get like a PR, a brand marketing person to just follow Casey around, smacking the the out of his mouth.
John:
It's just accidental tech podcast.
John:
It's three words.
John:
It begins with the letter A. There's no the.
Casey:
Are we really doing this?
John:
I just want to be clear.
John:
I want to get it on the record on the show, kind of like the what do the markings mean on the bootleg artwork, just for the record, as seen on the website.
John:
The show is accidental tech podcast.
John:
Three words.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
Here in Apple podcast commentary, we don't use definite article.
Casey:
I was about to say, every time I hear you say the iPhone, John, I'm going to correct you from now on.
John:
That's, you know, I'm just saying what it is.
John:
Apple can say what their thing is.
John:
I don't have to listen to that.
John:
But I feel like you as a member of the show should be on board with what the name is.
John:
You're kind of like the people who you're like the people who work at Apple who say we believe iPhone is whatever.
John:
That's you.
John:
You have to do that.
Casey:
I see moving along.
Casey:
So I am not a particular fan of you too.
Casey:
Uh, I have no particular opinion about Bono as an individual.
Casey:
Like he seems like a decent guy, certainly donated a pile of money and worked hard for charity.
Casey:
So I respect that.
Casey:
Uh, in this hour and a half long thing was a just, well, it was a single person situation.
Casey:
stage show, I guess, where it's him telling stories of his childhood that he thinks are relevant with occasional performances of stripped down U2 songs.
Casey:
And I went into it being like, I don't know about this at all.
Casey:
And the first few minutes I was like, wow, I really don't know about this at all.
Casey:
I get that Bono is influential and whatever, but really an hour and a half about listen to me in my life says the man with like 500 podcast episodes, but that's neither here nor there.
John:
And the opening of this thing was actually him acknowledging that exact fact.
John:
It was like, who here wants to hear this guy talk about himself?
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And I was not in at all in the beginning of it.
Casey:
But I have to concede.
Casey:
I found it surprisingly moving.
Casey:
And I really enjoyed it.
Casey:
And I was not expecting that whatsoever.
Casey:
I really came in with as open a mind as I could, given my priors, but I was expecting to be like, well, that was interesting, but a waste of my time.
Casey:
And I don't think it was a waste of my time.
Casey:
I actually enjoyed it.
Casey:
However, you and I did not watch the same movie because you watched the 2D version and I watched the immersive version.
Casey:
So before I talk about the differences, I'd like to hear your perspective on just the movie itself and I presume how much you enjoyed it.
John:
Well, you mentioned this is the longest like immersive thing that Apple's put out, but this was kind of like, you know, a Nolan Batman movie.
John:
It wasn't all immersive, right?
John:
Like some parts were IMAX and some parts weren't.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
And I want to explore that more later.
Casey:
But first, I'd prefer if you don't mind to get a feel of what you thought of it in general.
John:
Yeah, I always plan to watch this eventually.
John:
But here's the thing.
John:
As a extremely big U2 fan, I suspected that there would be nothing in this.
John:
This is based on a one man show, which is based on a book, which is based on the person, which is based on the history of the band.
John:
I suspected there would be nothing in this thing that I have not heard before.
John:
I am kind of an obsessive person.
John:
When I first got into YouTube, I was in middle school.
John:
I think I've said this story before.
John:
I, you know, got everything that I could on them.
John:
I went to the school library and took out the microfiches for all the old issues of like Time magazine and newspaper articles.
John:
I read everything.
John:
Everything there is to read about this band.
John:
And that's when I was in school.
John:
And it just continued on with the age of the internet.
John:
So, like, I don't think there's a story Bono could tell that I haven't heard before.
John:
Or, like, you know, I know about everything that was a revelation to you, I had heard seven versions of.
John:
Now, here's the thing.
John:
I went in this hoping maybe, maybe this would be, like, stuff that I hadn't heard before.
John:
Like, that finally he's ready to...
John:
delve into more private detail.
John:
And the example I always pull out is the Andre Agassi autobiography.
John:
I'm a big Andre Agassi fan, and he put out a book called Open.
John:
It was aptly named, not just because of the tennis pun and the open era and all that other stuff, but also because he opened up his life in a way that was extremely unflattering to himself.
John:
That is rare that someone who's rich and famous will write about themselves and say, you'd never heard any of this stuff because it is the worst of me.
John:
Like, you know, only people who ever do that is like someone who, you know, like, I don't know, like Rob Lowe or something, you know, becomes a Robert Downey Jr.
John:
I forget which one of these people has just become like a womanizing drug addicted alcoholic and flames out in the 80s and everybody knows it.
John:
And then they get older and they write a tell all book.
John:
It's like, we already know all this happened to you.
John:
Like, it's not a surprise that you were on drugs and womanizing doing terrible things.
John:
What we don't get is, hey, you think of me as this great famous person and probably haven't heard anything bad about me.
John:
But really, I was in a bad place.
John:
And let me tell you how terrible things were.
John:
That's the book Andre Agassi opened.
John:
He is 100% open in an extremely unflattering way about himself.
John:
And I'm not saying people have any obligation to do that.
John:
Celebrities have their right to keep whatever they want for themselves.
John:
But very often celebrities say, well, I want to write about myself.
John:
But when you're writing about yourself, you're like, maybe I'll leave out the worst things that I've ever done, you know?
John:
Maybe I'll leave out the things that no one knows about.
John:
If there's already a story about me doing this thing, maybe I'll tell that story because everyone kind of knows, but now they get to hear my side of it or whatever.
John:
But if you've never heard about this other thing that I did, I'm not going to make it.
John:
And so Bono's show here is stories that he's told before.
John:
The amount of himself that he's willing to put out there is the same amount he's always been.
John:
And again, there's no reason he needs to put out any of this.
John:
He could have kept it all entirely to himself.
John:
He doesn't owe the public anything about his life.
John:
But he chose to say, I'm going to tell you about myself in this book and in this stage show.
John:
And what he tells you is...
John:
theatrically performed versions of stories and things that he's told before.
John:
I'm very familiar with him as a character and as a performer.
John:
I was impressed with how well the old guy, after all he's gone through, I mean, he mentioned all the surgery and everything, which I think was many years ago now.
John:
But anyway, he's still doing pretty good.
John:
Like in various times on tours, his voice has failed him because he, especially in the beginning, did not sing the quote unquote right way.
John:
And I think he still doesn't.
John:
But he's got pretty good pipes for an old dude.
John:
uh, who was the Rocky, I like how he brags about himself that the, the heart doctor said he had 130% of the expected lung capacity for someone at his age.
John:
I'm like, well, he does sing for a living.
John:
So that tracks, but, um, and then, you know, like you said, the stripped down versions of songs, um,
John:
not really that big of a fan of the stripped down things and theatrically i like how they incorporated them into the show but anyway it was fine like i wasn't super impressed by it maybe if you've never heard all this stuff or didn't know anything about bono it would be much more interesting but i've really read multiple books about the band in addition to all the articles and everything so i feel like there's very little
John:
public information that i don't already know about this band and honestly i did miss the other band members because they balance him out as he tries to talk about in the show my my you know his bandmates are not always on the same page as him and the band is kind of a thing where they all have to agree and so and they don't often always agree and so i feel like that was missing a little bit even though he tried to bring it back in by saying here's what this person would say here's what that person would say um
John:
But I don't know.
John:
I like it.
John:
It's I don't think I would recommend this as somebody who's like, I don't know what U2 is all about and what the music is all about.
John:
Like I would maybe rack around even rattle and hum over this, which is a very narrow slice of time without much perspective.
John:
But it is actually a good concert movie.
Casey:
So that doesn't surprise me that you both knew everything and thought it was fine.
Casey:
Um, but with that said, you and I, as I mentioned earlier, did not watch the same, uh, show movie.
Casey:
Um, for me, it was as described.
Casey:
It was very much like a portions filmed in IMAX movie where for a lot of it, I was in an all black room with a screen in front of me and the, and the film is 99% black and white and
Casey:
And so there's a screen in front of me that's playing a black and white movie, but there were times that immersive things happened.
Casey:
And so I was able to get some, um, press shots that Apple provided because I can't take a screenshot in the vision pro.
Casey:
So you just have to deal with the shots that Apple provided.
Casey:
Uh, there'll be in the show notes and I'm putting them in the chat room for the people that are listening live, but there, as this performing is happening, both, you know, um,
Casey:
The verbal only performances as well as the musical performances.
Casey:
A lot of times, especially the non-music parts were 2D, even for me.
Casey:
But what was fascinating is, and I didn't realize this until I scrubbed through the 2D version of the program.
Casey:
There were illustrations and like adornments and annotations that I think Bono might have done.
Casey:
I'm not 100% sure about that.
John:
I spent a lot of time looking at the writing and going, is that a handwriting font?
John:
Are there three versions of that T and the only three versions?
John:
Or is he handwriting every one or is it not his handwriting?
Right.
Casey:
I read somewhere, which I can't place, so I might be lying to myself and to you, but I thought I read that he used Procreate to draw it all so they could replay the brushstrokes, if you will.
Casey:
So anyways, but what was interesting was, so a lot of the show, because it's just him, he represents other people that he's speaking about and allegedly speaking with as just a chair on stage.
Casey:
So when he talks about the other members of U2, he has three chairs that are on stage, one for Edge, one for the bassist, one for the drummer.
Casey:
Forgive me, I don't remember
Casey:
their names.
John:
Isn't it The Edge?
Casey:
Well done.
John:
Sometimes they just call him Edge, so that Edge is appropriate as short for The Edge.
John:
And there was actually a joke in the show about Pavarotti not remembering the bass player's name, so you're in good company, Casey.
Casey:
See, there you go.
Casey:
But there was a lot of times when he was...
Casey:
describing being in a room in a pub in Dublin, I believe.
Casey:
And he's talking to his father and he has this like kind of cushy chair instead of just like a wooden chair next to him.
Casey:
And you're supposed to imagine the father in the chair next to him.
Casey:
And so he'll lean over and look to the left-hand side of the frame, which is his right, and say something to his dad.
Casey:
And then he'll look the opposite direction to mimic or explain what dad had just said.
Casey:
And what was fascinating was that's all you got, right?
Casey:
You didn't have anything else.
Casey:
He was just looking over and maybe they would reframe the shot, but there was no illustration, no annotation, nothing, right?
John:
There was like I'm looking at these screenshots and some of these things I recognize from the 2D version, but I'm sure there was way less of them.
John:
Obviously, none of them broke the frame or like went outside the TV because it's not a thing you can do.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So when he was talking to his dad, who he had like three different versions of dad, daddy, dad and data or whatever, it was very, very weird.
Casey:
But anyways, when he was talking to his dad, there was an illustrated version of his dad sitting there like he wasn't talking, but you could see Bono.
Casey:
Yeah, no, we didn't get that.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
And you can see the illustrated dad in behind him was an illustrated bar with an illustrated barkeep, like working on like polishing a glass or something like that.
Casey:
This is wildly different from what you saw.
Casey:
And I'm not sure if that's good, bad or indifferent, but or other whatever.
Casey:
But
Casey:
I find that fascinating that these are two very different cuts of the same thing.
Casey:
And the other thing that I thought was fascinating was, in a way that I can't say I've ever experienced before, the transitions between immersive and non-immersive were, I wouldn't go so far as to say seamless, but really, really close.
Casey:
They were incredibly good.
Casey:
And there were times that...
Casey:
I could tell like in the example, it was the middle example.
Casey:
I think it's called Stadium.
Casey:
He's performing at a stadium.
Casey:
And I believe you saw this illustration in the 2D version, if I'm not mistaken, but it's like all immersive and encompassing all around you.
Casey:
And what's interesting is if you look very, very, very closely, not in this image, but as you're watching the movie, you can see the border of
Casey:
of the 2d screen if you will that that's presenting the the hymn portion and then you know all the illustration is around that but then that eventually fades out and the transition between 2d and 3d is so incredibly well done and i was so blown away by how well they handled this whether or not one likes these adornments and annotations and whatnot
Casey:
I thought it added to it.
Casey:
I thought I, I mean, I liked it, but if, if one didn't, if you didn't, John or whoever's watching this didn't, I get that.
Casey:
But I thought it was incredibly fascinating and incredibly cool the way in which they approach this by basically cutting two totally different movies.
Casey:
And all in all, like I said, I really liked it.
Casey:
And by the end of it, I was surprisingly moved by it.
Casey:
And, you know, here I'm, I'm hearing, um,
Casey:
some of these incredibly popular U2 songs whose names I'm now forgetting of because I'm, you know, talking extemporaneously, but you know, some of these songs I'm actually getting like, as I'm watching this, I'm actually getting a little choked up.
Casey:
Like I know this song, this is an incredibly good song, um, in the name of love, which probably isn't the title of the song, but it is not.
Marco:
It's in parentheses though.
Casey:
Well, okay.
Casey:
There you go.
Marco:
Is it stop in the name of love?
Casey:
That's something different entirely, but I actually got like a little choked up by this and that's not usually my style.
Casey:
I don't know if I was just having a very vulnerable moment when I watched it, but yeah,
Casey:
Again, I was really, really impressed because here it was, I went into this thinking, I don't care what this man has to say.
Casey:
And by the end of it, I feel like he leaned Bono leaned into it enough that he, he won me over by, by halfway through.
Casey:
And even though it was pretentious and kind of self-centered and whatever, uh,
Casey:
I actually really, really enjoyed it.
Casey:
And again, as a technical experience, if you happen to have a Vision Pro or if you have the time to go to the Apple Store, I presume they'll let you watch a few minutes of it.
Casey:
I suggest trying it.
Casey:
Marco, I know you're kind of allergic to the Vision Pro at this point, but if you happen to be bored, then I suggest giving it just a few minutes to try because I really think it is very, very, very well done.
Marco:
I haven't been bored in years.
John:
Yeah.
John:
If you've never heard these stories before, it is he does have a moving story and the story of the band and the fact that they're still together and his, you know, his dad dying and his surgery and everything.
John:
It is it's it's a good story.
John:
Well, just because I've heard it before doesn't mean it's not worth hearing for the first time.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And I can't stress enough.
Casey:
I know I've said it two times or three times already, but as an example of how to do immersive, I thought it was really cool and very, very different than anything else Apple has done so far.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Public service announcement.
Casey:
This should hopefully be quick.
Casey:
Plex is apparently turning the money spigot when it comes to selling data.
Casey:
And so I got an email from them, like a marketing email, and I already long since deleted it.
Casey:
But it was like, hey, just FYI, we're going to ask you to opt out of or not even ask you.
Casey:
We're going to offer to you to opt out of some stuff if you're interested in that.
Casey:
And of course, my spidey senses started tingling.
Casey:
And I was like, I'm sorry, what?
Casey:
And so if you go to plex.tv slash vendors hyphen US, or at least that's where I get redirected to, perhaps it's just slash vendors for other locales.
Casey:
You get a mile long list of things that you can opt out of.
Casey:
And they do, once you're logged in, they do have an, I think like an all no button at the very top.
Casey:
but I would still scroll this mile long list just to double check.
Casey:
This is probably not something that any of the listeners of the show would be interested in, insofar as you should go ahead and hit all no and then save it.
Casey:
On the flip side of this, though, my understanding from those in the EU, after I had posted about this on Mastodon, is pretty much everyone in the EU said, oh, I'm already opted out, which I presume is an EU legal thing.
Casey:
And if so,
Casey:
kudos to the eu that's good i mean i was already opted out too and i assumed it's because we've actually talked about this before and i opted out at that time but who knows it's hard to tell but i was i was already opted out as well yeah well i was not and i this is the sort of thing i would have done so either i had forgotten to do it which tracks when it originally happened or uh or maybe not but either way uh maybe i'm attributing to the eu something that wasn't the eu at all but uh one way or another you should go check it out we'll put a link in the show notes
Casey:
Additionally, I have a quick appeal, if you don't mind.
Casey:
I probably should not be shining a light on a bug in my own app, but here I am, everybody.
Casey:
I only started getting reports about this in the last couple of months, but sometimes semi-recently, I noticed that people were starting to report that if you go to a particularly long cast list, or a particularly long person with a long filmography...
Casey:
And if I remember, I'll put a link to one of these in the show notes.
Casey:
If you do this in call sheet and you scroll to the bottom, especially if you do it super duper duper quickly, and then scroll back and go kind of go back and forth a couple of times, what can end up happening is you can get a bunch of empty cells in the table view that represents that view, right?
Casey:
And so instead of seeing the entire filmography or the entire cast list, you just see blanks.
Casey:
I'm not sure.
Casey:
Maybe I'm holding it wrong.
Casey:
This is a Swift UI list behind the scenes, and maybe I'm bending it to the point of breaking it.
Casey:
But I don't know how to fix it, and I did my part.
Casey:
You know, it's that gif, right?
John:
You can go to labs at WWDC.
Casey:
I will go to labs at WWDC, but— Maybe file a DTS ticket.
Casey:
And I thought about filing a DTS ticket, and I'm not against doing that, and I probably will do that after WWDC if I don't get any good answers.
Casey:
But I'm trying to do – I'm doing that thing, which I can do because it's partially my show.
Casey:
That is Accidental Tech Podcast, John, is partially my show.
Casey:
And I'm trying to shine a light on this bug.
Marco:
You mean bug.
Marco:
You're trying to shine a light on bug.
Casey:
On bug.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
I will put feedback.
Casey:
I will put feedback number in the show notes.
Casey:
If, if anyone has seen this and has a workaround, please, please, please go ahead and reach out.
Casey:
But if you happen to be in on the Swift UI team at Apple, which is probably nobody, but you never know.
Casey:
It could happen.
Casey:
I will put a link in the show notes to my toot about this and to the bug that I'm talking about.
Casey:
Now, I will say, if you look at the toots that I posted on Mastodon, what you think I'm complaining about is a bunch of log messages, which is kind of true, but that I actually don't care about that much.
Casey:
In the logs, it says, list failed to visit cell content, returning an empty cell, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
Please file a bug report.
Casey:
which I've done.
Casey:
But what I'm actually complaining about, like, I don't really care that this stuff is in the log.
Casey:
What I actually care about is the fact that my users are seeing blank rows on my app.
Casey:
And again, maybe this is not me.
Casey:
I'm not sure.
Casey:
But help me, Apple people.
Casey:
You're my only hope.
John:
Well, it does say, please file a bug report.
John:
So whoever put this log message in their code didn't expect it to be hit.
John:
And they're saying, look, if the code ever reaches here and I admit this log message, something in my code, meaning Apple's code, has gone wrong.
John:
So at the very least, that is something that someone should look at.
Casey:
Yes, but I would really, really hate if whoever gets this on their desk says, oh, sure, I'll just delete the log message.
Casey:
Problem solved.
Casey:
Like, that's not what I'm asking.
John:
I don't think they'll do that.
John:
Someone who puts this log message in wants to know if it's being hit, and so now they'll get a report that it is.
Casey:
Well, one way or another, please, if you're an Apple person, I beg of you, do what you can to help me.
Casey:
You can do it totally on the down low.
Casey:
You can do it publicly however you want.
Casey:
I will be happy to sing your praises and or send you accidental, not the, but accidental tech podcast stickers.
Casey:
If you're interested in that, help me.
Casey:
You're my only hope.
John:
That's why we make ATP shirts, not TATP shirts.
Marco:
I bet we actually have some relevant people listening to our show.
Marco:
Because the lower and mid-level people at Apple seems like it's just fine.
Marco:
It's the higher level people that maybe we go in and out of favor with.
Casey:
I think that's very fair.
Casey:
We're going to talk about that here in a second.
Casey:
But yeah, if there's anything you could do, I would really, really appreciate it.
Casey:
And yeah, just let me know.
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Casey:
WWDC time as we sit here on Wednesday night, the 4th of June.
Casey:
WWDC keynote is Monday coming up, which is what number is that?
Casey:
The 9th of June.
Casey:
None of us are going to be there.
Casey:
I don't believe any of us got offered to be there.
Casey:
And I know you two definitely said that you couldn't go anyway.
Casey:
I had booked a bunch of refundable travel in this past weekend, refunded myself because it was clear that I was not getting an invite this year.
Casey:
Take that whatever you will.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
But let's talk about hopes and predictions.
Casey:
And it starts, I think, perhaps with this animation and tweet that was put up by Greg Joswiak earlier today, where it has WWDC 25 with an Apple logo, a rainbow, like the rainbow thing and the Swift logo, all reflecting the very colorful WWDC 25 at the bottom of this image.
Casey:
So what are we thinking, gentlemen?
John:
Oh, there was also the thing from their webpage where it says WWDC25, and they added this slogan, I don't know, a couple days ago, it says, Sleek Peak.
John:
And it's kind of weird for them saying there's going to be a peak.
John:
It's like, there's going to be a dev build too, right?
John:
I mean, I hope.
John:
Yeah, it's like, here's just a peak.
John:
Anyway, so this is the EOS redesign thing, and I think that's one of the first obvious predictions and hopes.
John:
The prediction is, as we've discussed in the past, Apple's redesigning all their operating systems with a new look, probably something glassy.
John:
What was the code name?
John:
Solarium or something?
John:
I think that's right, yep.
John:
Solarium, not Solarium, the Mac arcade game.
John:
Um, and so there's artwork and these animations that like, it's basically like looks, I would say like frosted glass, would you say like frosted glass stuff that as Casey pointed out, reflects the colorful logo of WWDC into it.
John:
That that's been the rumors about this.
John:
Um, it's basically Casey's desk, right?
John:
Is your desk frosted?
Casey:
No, not anymore.
Casey:
I got rid of that a long time ago because I have the standing desk now.
John:
Oh, right.
John:
That was clear.
John:
That was clear and not frosted, though.
Casey:
It was also clear and not frosted, but that's neither there.
John:
Yeah, and so, I mean, obviously, my personal hope is that, as I said this before, like, big redesigns are dangerous and tricky, but, like, there's lots of things about the current macOS in particular, the current macOS UI, both the look and the design of it, that I don't like.
John:
And so here now, a week before WWC, is my last chance to...
John:
to have the hope that, hey, maybe those things that I don't like will be made better.
John:
Because, you know, I didn't think the whole OS needs to be redesigned or anything, but you know, if you're gonna redesign everything, you're probably gonna redesign the parts that I don't like.
John:
And maybe I will like the new ones better.
John:
The fear is that all the ones that I like just fine will get worse, but we'll see how it goes.
John:
And as I said when we first discussed this, even if it's not to my personal liking, if it just looks cool, you get a little bit of a high out of that.
John:
Because a lot of things that Apple's put out, maybe they end up being not so practical, not a great idea, but they look really cool.
John:
And that's fun.
John:
And so I am actually looking forward to seeing...
John:
what all the new os's look like and i'm trying to be optimistic about it because it's not like i'm saying everything's perfect and they should never change it now like i do think there should be change i didn't think necessarily this was the year to change all the os's but it's what they're doing uh so i don't know that's how i'm feeling about that there was a good article uh by uh what's his name that i put it in here about um
John:
Lots of people have made predictions.
John:
And of course, talented artists and designers can not just make predictions, but they do mock-ups essentially based on like the artwork that we see from Apple and everything saying, this is what the new UI could look like.
John:
This is what I hope it will look like.
John:
This is the, you know, people have their own pet peeves.
John:
Like I think that flat design has gone too far and we need more dimensionality and physicality.
John:
I think Sebastian made a couple of good points about one of the things that Apple can do that its competitors would find more difficult to copy is make a look that requires tremendous precision and consistency because Apple controls the hardware and the software stacks.
John:
They can...
John:
of all these different platforms, they can very precisely ensure that this particular effect, which anybody could do, but it would be like other designers and other platforms like Android would say, well, we would never do that because it would just be such a pain to try to make that look consistent everywhere and not be ugly across the vast range of Android stuff that's out there.
John:
But Apple can do that because they are targeting a smaller amount of hardware and they control everything.
John:
And so one of their potential advantages is do things that their competitors would essentially find impractical to implement.
John:
Now, that doesn't mean Apple's ideas are going to be good ideas or that people will like them or that they will improve things, but it is an advantage that they can tackle tasks that are just too annoying to implement on other platforms.
John:
So I hope they take advantage of that and do make something that...
John:
looks cooler than we expect because you know like aero glass from windows is what this reminds me of honestly i forget when that was because i'm not a windows expert but there was a time when microsoft many years ago was super heavily into all the windows are going to be clear and glassy because that's what apple did with aqua kind of but we're going to take that to the nth degree and
John:
It was not good and nobody liked it and you could see through too many things and it doesn't really persist to this day.
John:
And that's kind of how I feel about how macOS is as well.
John:
So, you know, cautiously optimistic to see what the new OS looks like.
John:
But at this point, I fully expect it.
John:
Apple is teasing it.
John:
You know, how are you guys feeling about the new look?
Marco:
I am a little excited and a little scared.
Marco:
I'm scared because I really don't know if I trust today's Apple to execute a really sweeping redesign well on multiple levels, on design choices, and on software quality.
Marco:
I think when you look at...
Marco:
Look at the last couple of years of Apple's platforms and like, you know, we've been in a mostly OK place with quality.
Marco:
But like you have a huge, you know, AI revolution going on in the rest of the tech business.
Marco:
You have Apple presumably at least a little bit on fire trying to catch up with that.
Marco:
I hope so.
Marco:
They should be.
Marco:
You have them launching a new platform in Vision Pro that seems to have gone nowhere.
Marco:
But, you know, a lot of resources were put into that.
Marco:
Right now, do I trust them in that state to have delivered a sweeping redesign of all of their platforms in the middle of all that, like in the last couple of years?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
It seems like that's a lot to ask of a company to do that now in this environment, like on that scale.
Marco:
So I don't know...
Marco:
I'm a little scared that they might have just disrupted everything kind of unwisely or at a bad time or as a distraction.
Marco:
And I don't think that was necessarily the goal if they did it, but I think it's going to serve that function, and I'm sure they leaned into it a little bit.
Marco:
But like...
Marco:
I don't know if I trust any company to deliver that sweeping of a redesign in that kind of context, even if it was, you know, somebody else.
Marco:
But, like, I also don't know if I trust Apple to do that and today's Apple.
Marco:
And I also am not sure I trust today's Apple, you know, led by the Allendei design team over there.
Marco:
I don't think I trust them to make great decisions with the UI, like, design-wise either because...
Marco:
Look at what they have done since they have been in charge of software design.
Marco:
They've been in charge for a long time.
Marco:
What we have been using is their designs.
Marco:
The system settings app on the Mac, which still remains both functionally and visually atrocious, that's their design.
Marco:
It's those people doing this design.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I want to be excited because a UI redesign, if done well, can be really invigorating to the entire ecosystem.
Marco:
It can be really cool.
Marco:
But I don't know that I trust those people at this time to have executed well on that.
Marco:
But I hope I am wrong about that.
Marco:
The UI redesign is actually what I am most excited about, even though that one single thing...
Marco:
will keep all of us developers busy for a year.
Marco:
Like, you know, if it's that significant of a redesign, which we don't know how significant it is, but if it's that significant of a redesign, it will be the only thing we can work on for a long time.
Marco:
Like, we will have to adopt our apps to it.
Marco:
And also, that raises the question of, like...
Marco:
What is Apple's position with developers right now?
Marco:
How excited are developers going to be to have to do all this work for Apple?
Marco:
Now, there's always going to be, you know, small developers who are big Apple fans who will do whatever they ask us to do.
Marco:
But there's also, you know, medium and big companies where it's like Apple's relationship with Apple.
Marco:
All developers is a little strained, and with medium and big companies, it's extra strained.
Marco:
Are they going to be willing to put in the effort to adopt this new design?
Marco:
I don't think anyone's going to be jumping at it from medium-sized and large companies.
Marco:
So there's a lot of kind of mixed feelings going on with me about this.
Marco:
It could go a bunch of different ways.
Marco:
It's a huge risk, and it could pay off big.
Marco:
We will see.
Marco:
I hope it does.
Marco:
Because if it doesn't pay off big, it's going to be a huge distraction and pain in the butt for all of us, and it's going to harm our platforms that we love and care about so much.
Marco:
So I hope it's not that.
Marco:
But I am a little bit wary.
Marco:
I am excited about other things.
Casey:
Well, hold on.
Casey:
With regard to the redesign, I think –
Casey:
I feel similarly to Marco, but far more extremely insofar as if you ask me as a user, I'm really excited because I think that, you know, if you take Sebastian's mock-ups, which obviously who knows if they're going to be right or not, but Sebastian's really talented.
Casey:
And as an aside, if you haven't read this post, it's really, really, really worth your time.
Casey:
It was not at all pretentious and it spells out the history and how did we get here?
Casey:
And it's really good.
Casey:
But anyways.
Marco:
Yeah, even I read it.
Casey:
That's saying something, y'all.
Casey:
So anyways, when I put on the Vision Pro, and obviously we were just talking about it a few minutes ago, whatever my or our qualms about whether that thing should exist, whether it has achieved the goals it set out to do, putting all that aside for a second,
Casey:
The hardware, as I've said many times, unquestionably, it's like strapping the future to your face.
Casey:
Granted, it's a heavy future.
Casey:
Granted, it's a little bit of an awkward future, but it's the future.
Casey:
But I actually think, and I've said this in the past, in a lot of ways, the software feels like the future.
Casey:
And I think it's in no small part because it has that new coat of paint.
Casey:
A lot of these same affordances that we're allegedly going to be getting on the other platforms find their roots in Vision OSs.
Casey:
And granted, it's different because Vision OS has a real strong concept of depth that no other platform that Apple has really does, or certainly not to the same degree.
Casey:
But I love using Vision OS from a visual perspective.
Casey:
It just looks cool.
Casey:
and i get that there's not a lot that i feel like i can get done efficiently in vision os but it's just fun to use and if that comes to other platforms as a user i am so here for it and i looked you know i opened up the invites app again for the first time since we talked about it a few months ago and this is a less extreme version of what we're allegedly going to get but i think it looks great i really do so as a user i'm really genuinely quite excited for this
Casey:
I'm sure they will go way too far.
Casey:
They'll swing for the fences.
Casey:
That's baseball, Marco.
Casey:
They'll swing for the fences.
Casey:
They'll swing for fences.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And they may or may not hit a home run, also baseball.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I think it could be a really fun and interesting time to be an Apple fan.
Casey:
And goodness knows, I and I think the three of us would love to have fun nitpicking icons and fonts and whatnot rather than the stuff we've been doing.
Casey:
Putting all that aside and taking off that hat and putting on my developer hat, oh, God, please, no.
Casey:
I do not want to spend all summer figuring this out.
John:
On the optimistic side, don't you think that if they do a good job of this, none of us should have to update our apps too much?
John:
I mean, there's always things you have to do.
John:
If you're not a developer, you've made things so they look correct with the current set of widgets.
John:
And you maybe think, well, if...
John:
Apple will just make those same widgets look different.
John:
The metrics are going to change.
John:
There'll be different appearances for certain things, and you're going to have to revisit every screen and say, does this still look okay in the new OS, or do I have to branch and say, well, when you're on this OS or newer, adjust the metrics so it looks good with this new thing on the old one.
John:
It's a thing we have to do, but if this ends up not being...
John:
If the metrics don't change that much, if the particular options we choose for each controls don't radically change how they look, hopefully we won't have to change that much.
John:
And same deal for big developers, like Marco said, that aren't really going to update their apps.
John:
If we can at least persuade them to build against the new SDK, will they just say like, ah, well, we built against the new SDK, now all the buttons are glass, ship it, it's fine.
John:
um like that will be the more optimistic case of like it won't require huge changes unfortunately especially on the phone if the rumors are to be believed and uh sebastian also like essentially incorporated those rumors like for example uh whatever they called on the phone tab bars the little bottom bar on the bottom uh that being we talked about this in past shows floating again as so it's not stuck against the bottom of the screen but instead it's floating on top of the content that changes it's
John:
your set changes you are in annoying ways it changes how you have to lay out everything it changes what your insets are it changes the metrics it changes the height of the available content but you have to draw the content that's going to be behind it too because you're going to see it there and that's super annoying and not great in an example of a change that will require more attention but there is the possibility especially on the mac i feel like kind of like how they change like dialogues in the mac remember they used to be horizontal for you know all of life of the mac and they just said now their portrait orientation
John:
I still hate those dialogues.
John:
I don't like it either.
Marco:
They still look worse than what they replaced.
John:
But it's a change that they made, and that change didn't require Mac developers to do much of anything, except for, like I said, look at their... How does my dialogue that I carefully designed for the old layout look in the new one?
John:
And if it's horrendous, I'll fix it, but otherwise it's still functional.
John:
So, I don't know.
John:
Like, I just...
John:
I don't want to have to update my app for the new look either, and I'm a little bit afraid of the new look, but I think if they do it in a clever way, the amount of actual work required to update to it shouldn't be that bad.
John:
Now, the real thing they have to deal with is,
John:
hopefully people like this like forget about developers forget about apple right the whole rest of the world who's not apple or developers which is pretty much everybody uh they better think this looks i don't at least interesting or cool or like makes people want to get like in that way like just changing it is an important task because like they went with flat design and basically that was an industry trend and now that trend has spread across the industry so now
John:
all the industry looks very similar to that apple going off in a different direction which is you know seemingly based on their concept art is actually kind of a back to the future type thing of like well actually remember aqua with all the transparency let's go back to that because we went so far away from that maybe we'll bring a little bit of that back what it will do i think is make the iphone look different than android make it look more different than android phones than it does now even though android's going not that they went into frosted glass but they're they're going into mixing colors and stuff with the radios thing as well but
John:
differentiation, right?
John:
Differentiation and hopefully differentiation in a way where we won't be talking about three weeks from now or maybe when the OS comes out, we won't be talking about how everyone is refusing to upgrade to iOS 26, just like they refused to upgrade to iOS 18 because the Photos app changed, right?
John:
That better not be the story from Apple's perspective.
John:
They want people to either be neutral on it or to think it's cool.
John:
And in any case, it has to look different than other phones.
John:
So in that capacity, in differentiation and saying...
John:
android and apple have been too similar to each other for too long apple's going to put a new stake in the ground which is a little bit like their old stake but whatever uh with this glassy thing and now you'll be able to tell oh is that the new iphone is that the new ios because it looks different and now you'll be able to tell oh i know that's an iphone because iphone looks like frosted glass and hopefully the story isn't yeah iphone looks like frosted glass and everybody hates it and there'll be like one mean person on tiktok saying mean things about apple that'll just be the end of their whole os
Casey:
Yeah, I really think that this could be great.
Casey:
And as a developer, again, I'm not looking too forward to this.
Casey:
It's hard to get excited about doing what feels like busy work.
Casey:
Now, if this looks as great as I hope it does, and I think it might, then it won't feel as much like busy work.
Casey:
But it is a big ask.
Casey:
I think it was Marco that said a minute ago that this is asking a lot at this particular time with the vibes the way they are right now.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
hopefully it won't be too bad as john was saying and hey you know john and i and i think marco now is marco you're almost all on swift ui right and john your your latest stuff is swift ui and certainly call sheets pretty much exclusively swift ui and that's why we write swift ui right right that's not right i know it's not why but there's a little it's a tiny bit more abstracted than say apkip but not really
Casey:
No, we're saying the same thing.
Casey:
I was I was snarking, but hopefully it won't be ruinous, as John was saying.
Casey:
And I'm really, really excited to see it.
Casey:
And just if you're new to this, if you're new to caring about Apple as much as the three of us do, just remember that or let me inform you that back when iOS 7 landed, the betas were bad.
Casey:
Not only were they tough to run, but they didn't look great.
Casey:
They really went way too far.
Casey:
What's the little thing on your desk with the line of balls and the balls bounce back and forth?
Casey:
What's this thing called?
Casey:
I forget what it's called, but you know what I'm thinking of.
Casey:
And they kind of like, they swung into the right-hand side ball and the left-hand side ball went wee all the way.
Casey:
Is it a Newton's cradle?
Marco:
Is that what you're talking about?
Casey:
Yes, I think that's it.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
And so anyway, so they way over swung and then the other pendulum, if you will, came back and it kind of eventually settled and then it wasn't so bad.
Casey:
And I mean, whether or not you like the flat look, I do think that where they landed was a.
Casey:
far better place than where they started because where they started was rough.
Casey:
And that's okay.
Casey:
That's part of how this works.
Casey:
So if you see it and you're watching the WWDC keynote or you're trying the beta, which I would not recommend, and you say, oh my goodness, this is way too far and way too much, have faith.
Casey:
It's probably going to be okay.
Marco:
Yeah, I think, I mean, first of all, for the betas, I think this is one that I'm going to install beta one.
Marco:
First of all, I won't be traveling during it, which will help.
Marco:
But also, like, one thing that also happens a lot with a redesign is developers have to figure out over the course of the summer really quickly, first of all, is anything really broken that we need to report?
Marco:
Because Apple only will fix bugs from the first few weeks.
Marco:
And second of all, then we really need to see, like,
Marco:
How does this design work?
Marco:
Because we need to make our apps adopt the design.
Marco:
And if it is merely a re-skinning and everything basically works the same way, that's one thing.
Marco:
That's never the case.
Marco:
Basically, we're never that lucky.
Marco:
You know, frankly, that would be kind of boring.
Marco:
You know, whenever Apple does design tweaks, also like new behaviors are introduced, new standard widgets or standard interaction paradigms are introduced.
Marco:
You know, navigation mechanics like there's going to be a lot that we need to adopt.
Marco:
Beta one for me is like I need to start learning this new design from whatever Apple has done for beta one.
Marco:
So it's going to be a buggy summer with terrible battery life, but I'll get through it.
Marco:
Also, what happened with iOS 7, I think, is instructive.
Marco:
If we have that level of redesign, which maybe we do, maybe we don't, maybe it's somewhere in the middle.
Marco:
But with iOS 7, it was pretty difficult to adopt the new design while maintaining compatibility with iOS 6.
Marco:
it was a lot easier to make your app require iOS 7 and launch it pretty soon after iOS 7 launched.
Marco:
Obviously, we live in a different world now.
Marco:
There's a lot more iPhones.
Marco:
They're in use for a lot longer.
Marco:
Adoption rates probably aren't quite as fast as they were back then.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
If this is really a sweeping redesign, there's going to be a lot of apps that want to launch as close to September as possible that will require iOS apparently 26.
Marco:
So that's going to become a thing like that.
Marco:
There will be a big compatibility break if this if this happens the way that it's rumored to happen.
Marco:
a lot of apps will realize, oh no, we need to adopt the new design in order to stay trendy and relevant to our customers and to avoid one-star reviews for not updating.
Marco:
But that's going to be difficult to do while maintaining the old app.
Marco:
So I think there's going to be a lot of
Marco:
you know, aggressive requirements where you require iOS 26 right, you know, from the start or a lot of apps that basically like fork themselves in their own code and say, all right, this is the iOS 18 and below version.
Marco:
And then on launch, like if you're running iOS 26, launch this entirely separate storyboard or whatever or scene that will be like that code base.
Marco:
So we're going to see a lot, a lot of like hoop jumping by developers and apps to recognize the fact that like we're going to have to basically require this right up front.
John:
So to bridge the gap between this and what I think Marco was going to say earlier about his optimism about being able to use Apple's models, it is interesting that, you know, they're doing this redesign.
John:
I think when we was originally rumored, one of the things I said about it was like, like you just said now, Marco, like, oh, geez, Apple, you're in the middle of this AI thing that you're not doing well on that you're behind.
John:
Is now the time you really want to do some other really big change?
John:
And in many respects, like, no, this is not a good time for this.
John:
Like you have enough problems already while this is of your own choosing.
John:
You can just delay this for a year or two until you get your feet under you with the AI thing or whatever.
John:
But no, this seems like they're going with it, right?
John:
But on the other hand,
John:
All of the rumors have been leaning towards, hey, this is not going to be the year that Apple comes out and says, yeah, you remember all that Apple intelligence stuff we talked about, but we didn't quite get it out.
John:
We're disappointed in that.
John:
But this year we're coming roaring back and we got all these great Apple intelligence features and more that you've never heard of.
John:
And we're going to ship them and they're available today and you can try them out yourself.
John:
That's not going to be this WWDC from the rumors that we've heard.
John:
So if you're going to do like, let's say in sports analogy, this is not sports specific, Marco, a rebuilding year.
Yeah.
John:
Like this is kind of a rebuilding year for Apple and AI, according to the rumors.
John:
We'll see if it really is.
John:
But again, this is our prediction slash hope.
John:
So it seems like it's going to be a rebuilding year.
John:
It seems like they're not ready with this blockbuster bucket of amazing AI powered things that finally fulfill the promise of last year's.
John:
No, they don't.
John:
Doesn't seem like they have that.
John:
So in the absence of that, it's nice to have something big to say.
John:
So is this kind of like a during the rebuilding year?
John:
Here's something fun.
John:
Look over there.
John:
Redesign like, you know, like maybe maybe like in some I used to think the timing was terrible and they were distracting themselves.
John:
But I'm more and more thinking about it.
John:
I was like, this is actually kind of good timing.
John:
If they do a good job on this, it's something they can put out.
John:
Like, I feel like the pressure is on them less to be like, you've got to catch up to AI because the whole AI story with them is negative in a totally different way.
John:
It's like you're not doing it.
John:
Um, so this redesign, like it's a flashy, it'll be in people's faces.
John:
Consumers will hear about it.
John:
Probably hopefully they'll like it.
John:
So if they do a good job of this, it actually is a good thing to occupy everybody.
John:
Uh, unfortunately, including Apple.
John:
while we wait for them to do that rebuilding.
John:
You know, they need to get some new recruits.
John:
They need to... I can't do more sports analogies.
John:
They need to get some good picks in the draft.
John:
They need to just rebuild their team.
John:
They did a bunch of shuffling or whatever, but all that stuff they did is not going to bear fruit this year, it seems like.
John:
So...
Marco:
i bet they will have something to say about ai and the rumor is that marco will finally get his wish and be able to use models that come on the phone that he does not have to ship with his app yeah that i am i'm very much looking forward to you know the rumors are strong enough around that now that it seems like it's probably going to happen um again it remains to be seen what that means what are the limitations how well do these work what
Marco:
What are we allowed to do?
Marco:
What is free?
Marco:
What is throttled for either cost or just phone resources?
Marco:
What are we allowed to do in the background?
Marco:
What are we allowed to do in background refresh and processing tasks?
Marco:
Stuff like that.
Marco:
There's a lot of questions around this that we'll have to just find out.
Marco:
And I think in terms of what we expect for Apple and their AI story next week,
Marco:
I think, first of all, there will be no apology, no negativity whatsoever about the delayed and missing features from last year.
Marco:
They will probably dodge mentioning them at all, or they'll mention them only in a positive light.
Marco:
They'll talk about, like, here's all the cool stuff people are doing with Image Playground and whatever Genmoji.
John:
I feel like I'm almost placing a bet on that.
John:
It's like, please, Apple, show us what cool things people are doing with your terrible image generator.
Marco:
Oh, yeah, no, but you know they're going to show it off.
John:
I feel like what they're going to say is, we're still working real hard on these things, and we can't wait to show them to you when they're ready.
John:
Like, that's as close as they'll come.
Marco:
No, I bet there's going to be just, like, papering over, like, you know, we've always been at Warworth these days.
Marco:
What are you talking about?
Marco:
These are our great features.
Marco:
There's just no mention at all about the delay and missing features.
Marco:
I expect that we will see, you know, they'll talk about a lot of, like,
Marco:
kind of incremental progress on the existing Apple intelligence features that are already out.
Marco:
I don't expect to see, like, major deep progress on them, but, you know, an incremental year on whatever those have been so far.
Marco:
I expect one possibility that they might use to kind of, you know, try to paper over their AI PR problems.
Marco:
If you recall a few years back, they started in it for like one or two years.
Marco:
they started calling machine learning features Siri.
Marco:
Like even things that were not like invoking the Siri assistant.
Marco:
They were using the Siri as a brand name to be like, you know, Siri, organize your photos or whatever.
Marco:
I think we might see that kind of thing for like...
Marco:
Apple intelligence or AI being used as a term to say, look at the new things AI is doing.
Marco:
And it's not actually like Apple intelligence or LLM type models or things like that.
Marco:
It's actually like just ML features that they are maybe going to brand as Apple intelligence.
Marco:
So it sounds like they're making AI progress if you don't follow Apple very closely.
Marco:
So I'm guessing there's going to be a lot of that kind of like, you know, papering over technology.
Marco:
A lot of, you know, let's polish up these, you know, kind of small things into something that sounds like a big overall picture because we don't really have anything bigger to show yet.
Marco:
That's what I'm expecting AI wise.
John:
Are you expecting that segment will be shorter?
John:
I'm expecting it will be like when they do that, it will not be as long a segment as the other segment.
Marco:
I think they're going to lean heavily on it, honestly, because this is what the industry expects from them.
Marco:
This is what the investors and the markets and all the pressures are on them to deliver some kind of a good AI story.
Marco:
And I don't think they're going to have a great AI story yet.
Marco:
And so I think they're going to try to shine up the term that they have as best as they can.
Marco:
And just act like, look at all this amazing stuff we're doing.
Marco:
Only Apple can do all this amazing stuff.
Marco:
We've seen areas like this before where they're a little behind in something, and so they really put a big grin on and talk about how amazing this stuff is that they mostly already had.
John:
So I can see them talking about incremental progress on the features that they've shipped fine.
John:
If they have the Google deal to announce like Gemini being incorporated, I think that will take a lot of time and that will actually be something that like sort of people are interested in seeing because the chat GPT integration for all its problems.
John:
has been a little bit of an escape hatch for people to not deal with Apple's progress, but instead to be able to use one of the industry leaders.
John:
And Apple's been hinting at the Gemini deal since the day of WWDC 2024.
John:
Even that day, they were saying, you know, we might be looking at other people and talking about it.
John:
And there's just rumors for literally an entire year.
John:
Oh, getting close on the Gemini deal.
John:
Apple's going to have it.
John:
And so anyway, the rumors continue.
John:
Now would be the time.
John:
If you finally can strike a deal with Google on the Gemini thing,
John:
Having not just one choice for a thing that Siri delegates do when it can't do the thing, but two choices would be great because I think that I've been playing with the latest Gemini a little bit more heavily now.
John:
And I think it's pretty good.
John:
So I think Apple should incorporate it.
John:
And that would also get some heat off them a little bit because it's kind of like while we fail to do things ourselves.
John:
We should start fulfilling the promise that we were trying to say last time.
John:
And it's like, and for the things that we can't do, we'll work with third parties.
John:
And it was singular last year.
John:
We'll work with third party.
John:
And it was just OpenAI.
John:
Be great if they had two because now you're like, oh, now actually they are doing kind of a platform thing because there's this place where a thing can plug in and you can plug in ChatGPT or OpenAI or maybe you can do them both or Gemini or you can do both the same time.
John:
So I think that could absorb a lot of time in that segment.
John:
But honestly, I don't expect their AI segment to certainly not to be as long as it was last year because that was like the whole thing.
John:
I just I put it this way.
John:
I think they shouldn't spend a long time dwelling on whatever they have to show for AI.
John:
We made this mid writing tools better in this way.
John:
We improved image playground so it doesn't suck as bad, you know, whatever.
John:
Fine.
John:
And then, oh, and announcing our deal with Google Gemini and then move on.
Marco:
What will make or break that is how does this integration look?
Marco:
The problem with the iOS 18 chat GPT integration is not that we need another model to choose from.
Marco:
The problem is the integration is very limited and sucks.
Marco:
And Siri is not good at delegating which requests go to chat GPT.
Marco:
The problem is it isn't that ChatGPT is holding back the iPhone.
Marco:
The iPhone is not letting ChatGPT do enough and is not calling upon it enough or at the right times.
Marco:
So if the Gemini deal is just plugging in Gemini where ChatGPT is now, that's not enough.
Marco:
Hopefully, what Apple has done is some kind of better and or deeper integration that people can choose from if they want to.
John:
They may have to do that because of the EU regulations, right?
Marco:
Probably, yeah.
Marco:
But that would be way better.
Marco:
Right now, you can use the ChatGPT integration with Siri.
Marco:
I mentioned I do it in the car sometimes.
Marco:
I ask, hey, Dingus, ask ChatGPT this question that I know you won't know the answer to.
Marco:
And that's been occasionally very good.
Marco:
But what's better when I'm actually using the phone is just open the ChatGPT app.
Marco:
Because it's just way better in every possible way because the integration from Apple is so limited and kind of bizarre in certain ways.
John:
Yeah, that could be an example of the integration, not so much as like a thing that Siri delegates to, but different or better API access for the Gemini app and the ChatGPT app.
John:
I'm not sure how that would...
John:
form that would take but maybe some kind of privacy preserving context awareness that apple was touting for apple intelligence that basically like apple's whole deal is we have tons of information about you on your phone and we're going to feed that into our ai thing so we can answer intelligence questions without taking all your private information and chucking it to our servers where we can see it all right that was their whole angle
John:
it would be interesting and really cool if they said, and now we have a way for third party things like chat GPT and Gemini to do the thing that we failed to do last year, which is have access to all your local information in a privacy preserving way with these brand new APIs that we control that we can know that they're not, you know, stealing all your info and whatever.
John:
Like,
John:
I don't think they're going to do that.
John:
That hasn't even been rumored, but that's an example of an integration that doesn't require them to replace Siri with something better.
John:
It's merely like APIs created to make it so the ChatGPT app on iOS is really good.
John:
It's better, like maybe not better than it is on Android, but...
John:
that is well integrated with the OS, that it has more access than it currently does.
John:
Because that's kind of the problem.
John:
It's kind of the problem the egg is solving.
John:
It's like, oh, if I launched a GPT app and I wanted to do something, I got to like hit the little plus button and here's a document and here's this thing.
John:
I have to give it all this context first.
John:
And here's what you know is the memory.
John:
Make sure you use the memory feature to let it know about you and what kind of app you're working on and what APIs you use.
John:
And like all this context that you're trying to shove into the app so that when you go and ask it a question, it kind of like has a head start on where you are.
John:
And it's like, man, you're on my phone.
John:
You should already know everything about me.
John:
But that is scary from a privacy perspective.
John:
So Apple should...
John:
find a way to deal with that but i think i think this is more wish casting at this point we'll see how that section of the of the presentation goes but i i really think the uh the big redesign because remember the redesign will probably have like a like a little video about the redesign but then every single os is the rumor is they're doing all of them every single os will be like and of course this has the new look look at this looks look at that looks like it's just a time suck like not in a bad way but like it's i feel like the redesign is going to absorb a lot of time and a lot of screen space in this thing so ai gets pushed down a little bit
Marco:
One of the reasons why I like your idea of making just APIs for the Gemini and ChatGPT apps to hook into and be better is that I want to see the shackles around the iPhone break more often than once a year.
Marco:
I want to see progress here.
Marco:
The AI consumer market is just exploding.
Marco:
These companies are just churning out update after update, massive new product features every month or every few weeks.
Marco:
We're at such an amazing rate of progress in this industry right now.
Marco:
And for Apple to only be able to update its integration once a year is not good enough.
Marco:
They're going to just keep falling behind and being more and more disconnected from this entire world of technological progress that's going on.
Marco:
So if they make it API-based, the apps can update whenever they can, whenever they feel like it, whenever they can get their app review.
Marco:
But whenever they can feel like it, they can update and keep adding stuff over the course of the year without waiting for Apple to move at the glacial pace that they issue software updates with actual features.
Marco:
you know because at this point like issuing anything about ai issuing it once a year is just death in this industry like that's it's like it's like updating a gpu every 10 years in a product line like that's that's not going to work um so hopefully they have hopefully they know this i mean look apple's full of very smart people with you know they're in the same tech business we are it doesn't seem that way all the time but like they're in the same business they can look around they can see hopefully hopefully some of them see the writing on the wall here of like you know
Marco:
ai is a big deal we need to you know really be in this in a bigger way and they have an amazing set of platforms that people like for the most part developing software on and so they can take advantage they can be the platform company they can enable these apps to operate on their platform if they you know just give a little like give some integration um apis like just give
Marco:
give a little bit and they can be an amazing platform for all this stuff to happen on.
Marco:
But right now they just seem like they're getting in the way.
Marco:
So hopefully we see some change in direction there.
John:
Oh, that's the other AI angle I forgot about that we talked about in the past show.
John:
Basically, Swift Assist, which never appeared on the Anthropic deal, basically like Xcode.
John:
There's usually a section in WWDC where they talk about Xcode.
John:
Maybe it's in the State of the Union.
John:
Last year, they touted a bunch of features that would help you code better using LLMs that would be integrated into Xcode.
John:
The big one of those Swift Assist did not ship.
John:
To your point, Marco, in the years since then,
John:
Boy, have there been a lot of tools and IDs and integration with LLM power and Apple has essentially sat that out.
John:
I know they have the whatever that one model that they have in there for like better completion is fine.
John:
But it's a far cry from what is available at the cutting edge of help me write code with LLM based technology.
John:
And so that would be another good AI thing that would actually make that setting actually pretty longer because, you know, they'd just be going around.
John:
Look at this.
John:
Look how amazing this is in Xcode.
John:
You know, that feels like it's within their reach.
John:
I know they're essentially partnering with Anthropic, but whatever you got to do, like, you know, it's it seems like just such a no brainer.
John:
And because of their yearly release cycle, like they they promised it last year and I forget how much of it they showed.
John:
It never shipped.
John:
Maybe it'll ship this year.
John:
Maybe they'll announce a partnership.
John:
But the point is, typing in Xcode should have access to better LLM-based code features.
John:
It doesn't have to be like the, you know, cursor IDE or Replit or all those other fans.
John:
It doesn't have to be like that.
John:
Like, we're not saying just like, oh, I just go to Xcode and I talk to it and it writes the app for me.
John:
Like...
John:
that's the cutting edge and there's a role for that out there but we just want like what you showed last year that seems like it should be within your reach and if it's not i hope you partner with somebody to make that within your reach and i think that would go in the apple intelligence section of the talk even though it is it's kind of weird it's like really would they talk about developer tools at wwc yeah sometimes they do
Marco:
hard to believe but sometimes they do but like you know why why shouldn't apple be cutting edge like why are we not expecting them to like i know because they fell on their face last time or they're they're it's a rebuilding year but i'm saying like you know why are we why are we
Marco:
instantly lowering our expectations like well we know apple won't be the best at this but we hope they do something like that i think that should that should wake people in apple up like why are we grading on a curve here well we're lowering our expectations because we don't think they're going to have it ready they didn't do it last year and it seems they can't i'm not saying that they can never do it i'm saying i don't expect them to have it okay by monday yeah that's yeah i don't either but like yeah i have i have zero faith in apple's ai efforts being remotely competitive with what the rest of the market is doing
Marco:
I think it's very obvious that like Apple's leaders have decided not to be a leader in AI.
Marco:
Again, actions speak louder than words.
Marco:
Apple has decided AI is not that important to them.
Marco:
I hope they change their mind.
Marco:
I don't think they decided that at all.
John:
I think they just rearranged their senior leadership around this because they want to do better.
Marco:
Yeah, like after the entire industry passed them by.
John:
But anyway, well, they failed, but it's not because they don't want to do it.
Marco:
I think they realized very, very late maybe they should get off their butts.
Marco:
But anyway, so, okay, let me go through a little bit of negativity and then we'll get back to positivity because I just, I want to set expectations accordingly.
Marco:
I don't think there will be any acknowledgement of the relationship with developers, courts, ongoing lawsuits, regulations around the world.
Marco:
I don't think there will be any acknowledgement of any of that next week.
John:
You think that's negativity?
John:
I think that's just par for the course in any year.
Marco:
Yeah, but what I expect is they will project pure confidence.
Marco:
They will have some puffy videos showing how amazing the App Store is for customers and how it has enabled all these diverse groups of developers to succeed and do amazing things and save people's lives and cure cancer.
Marco:
That's what we're going to see.
Marco:
We're going to see a video of all these happy developers that just have been enabled by
Marco:
by Apple's generosity.
Marco:
Thank God they let us develop on this platform because we are saving children with our work on this platform.
Marco:
That's the kind of thing we're going to see.
Marco:
And the App Store is so safe and private for our customers.
Marco:
We're not going to see any policy changes.
Marco:
We're not going to see any major opening up of things that were previously locked down.
Marco:
We will see no signs of any kind of change of heart.
Marco:
That's all...
Marco:
out a lot of people like on master on stuff i've been asking like oh do we expect that like i'm sorry don't expect that like that's not going to happen hasn't been rumored either right no of course not about that like we will see a bunch of puffy videos about how the way they have been doing things and have always been doing things is awesome and look at how great it's working for all these people and it's going to be marketing to the world
Marco:
And two regulators and courts saying, look at how great the App Store is.
Marco:
So don't expect any changes on that.
Marco:
What this event will be is showing off what Apple is doing in the tracks they were already on.
Marco:
This is not going to be giving developers everything they want with policies.
Marco:
This is going to be giving us a really cool, hopefully, UI redesign for the platforms that will set the tone of how we do the rest of our work this summer, fall, and probably winter.
Marco:
This will be, hopefully, those on-device AI model APIs.
Marco:
It will be, hopefully, a cool Xcode AI integration, as we were just saying.
Marco:
I'm hoping to see what tends to make the most day-to-day life improvements for developers is
Marco:
is kind of the less flashy but maybe more important progress that happens every year.
Marco:
Stuff like SwiftUI, having certain limitations lifted or having new capabilities or cool... Rich text editor in SwiftUI.
Marco:
Yeah, cool new styles.
Marco:
Maybe a SwiftUI web view has been rumored for a while.
Marco:
Basically, more...
Marco:
expansion and maturation of swift ui also more async apis from apple's apis like you know so so much of ui kit and foundation and you know all these apis that have been built over time so much of those are not quite playing nicely with modern swift in a couple of ways there's you know sendable conformance all like the swift six stuff there's you know especially async apis async apis make so many types of things so much easier to write these days
Marco:
and nothing shows off how great async is then when you run into something that's not async that you have to like convert in or you know work around with some kind of callback or delegate and it's it's you know cumbersome and buggy and the callback's not main thread and you can't make it main thread yeah like there's a lot of a lot of stuff like that but that just like they need to add it continue to annotate and update their apis yeah like like just to give an even more boring example i think has come up in your past conversations about overcast like
John:
the multiple selection support and lists oh my god please so boring it's so boring like no one's gonna that's it's gonna be in one obscure it's not gonna be in the keynote probably maybe it'll be on a bento box thing but it's like it won't that one thing like that's the one of the beautiful things about wwc is you watch some random obscure session somewhere and and they get to a slide you're like oh my god i wanted that for five years and it will make a material difference
John:
to your app in a in a way that is that only you as the developer need to know about but you're like yes finally and like users get the benefit they don't know that it's because of this one session or whatever they just know like oh they finally added that feature why did they add it because it wasn't part of the framework before and now it is yeah exactly like that's that's what i look forward to every year is like i mean i nowadays a little bit more complicated because of the weird way like you know modifiers are added to swift ui but i used to i used to love like going through the api diffs on that first day and just seeing like oh my god
Marco:
they added this method to UI table view oh thank god like you know stuff like that like just finding out like all those little things oh this this one little paper cut that I've had because of some limitation in the API that's now lifted or oh that's a that's a cool new method what does that do and you look into it oh I could I could really use that in my app like that's the kind of stuff that I really benefit from every single day for the whole year like you know when you have some kind of flashy new API that can be great or it or you might not have a use for it
Marco:
But stuff like making more of the foundation APIs, making more of them async and making their callbacks sendable and all this stuff.
Marco:
There's so much stuff like that that we run into every day as developers.
Marco:
And by far, my favorite part of the new software releases every year is that kind of stuff.
Marco:
And it's usually that kind of stuff that makes me want to require the new OS for my app at some point in the future.
Marco:
I was like,
Marco:
Like, I run into something like, oh, man, this one paper cut.
Marco:
Ooh, fixed an iOS 18 with this new modifier.
Marco:
Okay, I'm requiring iOS 18 now.
Marco:
Like, there's all sorts of stuff like that.
Marco:
So, you know, in other areas of the API, I expect to see some improvements here and there.
Marco:
You know, I expect like the...
Marco:
They're probably going to keep pushing app intents pretty heavily because that's how the Apple intelligence features that were delayed and might come soon.
Marco:
That's how they interact with your app.
Marco:
So that's pretty important.
Marco:
Hopefully, like maybe stuff like the widget system, you know, gets a few little improvements here and there.
Marco:
They're using widgets in so many ways now.
Marco:
Like, you know, watch complications.
Marco:
Those are just widgets now.
Marco:
Live activities, those are basically live widgets.
Marco:
There's, you know, the standby mode, that's widgets.
Marco:
What looks to be standby widgets showing up in CarPlay Ultra, that also looks like just widgets to me.
Marco:
CarPlay itself, like, I spent all morning this morning trying to work around a CarPlay animation bug that's just in Apple's frameworks.
Marco:
And CarPlay, like, developers have very little...
Marco:
ability to do much of anything in carplay like it's a very limited api for various like safety and regulatory reasons for what's displayed in cars and so there's only so much you can really do so when you run into like an animation bug in apple's frameworks like well i kind of can't work around this one but they're rumored that the new redesigns are also being applied to carplay
Marco:
Well, am I still going to be using this ancient API that I'm using to write CarPlay apps?
Marco:
Maybe there will be some kind of version of SwiftUI for CarPlay, obviously with a limited set of what you can do.
Marco:
But I kind of felt when I was writing on my CarPlay code over in the last couple weeks, I'm like, should I really be doing this right now?
Marco:
Maybe they're about to change all this.
Marco:
That kind of stuff.
Marco:
I look forward to that kind of stuff because whatever the company does with its politics and its relationship with developers, that's its own thing off to the side.
Marco:
I try to keep it off to the side for most of my life because I don't want to keep focusing too much on stuff I can't control.
Marco:
What I get out of bed for is – well, first of all, my old dog is not sleeping in as well anymore as he used to.
Marco:
But also, I like making great software.
Marco:
And Apple tends to deliver a lot of good improvements every year that are less flashy than the big headlining features usually.
Marco:
But that enable me to make better software or that enable my software to be –
Marco:
It's a little bit nicer or do a few more things than I could do before or make my life a little bit easier as the author of that software.
Marco:
That's the kind of stuff I'm looking forward to most.
Marco:
And that stuff is usually so minor it doesn't even appear on the bento box slides.
Marco:
But it usually is like, oh, thank God they made this one function async or whatever.
Marco:
It's that kind of stuff.
John:
Word cloud slides is really what they usually go with.
John:
Bundle box seems like to be more for hardware.
John:
Word clouds is like for APIs.
John:
In the back, you'll see multiple selections and lists and Swift UI.
John:
Maybe that's too wordy.
John:
But anyway, keep an eagle eye out for that.
John:
And speaking of looking forward to things, time was, it doesn't seem that long ago, where one of the most important...
John:
rumors slash potentially leak things that would happen before wwc was setting expectations for hardware announcements so much so that when when it was a year where it was like somehow it would be made clear by apple through a strategic leak to the wall street journal or something that you shouldn't expect any hardware just so people didn't get disappointed but these days it seemed like the expectation of any hardware wwc is so remote that apple doesn't even need to
John:
set the expectation there's not going to be, because that's the default now.
John:
WRC, that's not a hardware announcement event.
John:
There's not going to be any hardware.
John:
I haven't seen any hardware rumors, even people saying, like, what about the HomePod with the screen thing?
John:
Like, ah, no, probably not.
John:
Despite that, the fact that there is not a strong, like,
John:
somewhat plausibly leaked by apple to some important publication message that says don't expect any hardware wwc this is going to be all software despite the fact that doesn't exist uh i'm allowed to be out here thinking you know
John:
Maybe there'll be a hardware announcement.
John:
No, I don't think so.
John:
They didn't say definitively that there wouldn't.
John:
It's very unlikely.
John:
But you know what I'm thinking.
John:
I'm thinking, you know, you updated the Mac Studio with the M3 Ultra.
John:
Oh, you're thinking Mac Pro.
Marco:
Of course he is.
John:
You updated the Mac Studio with the M3 Ultra.
John:
It's like, look.
John:
if you're gonna update the mac pro with the m3 ultra god knows why you didn't do it when the studio was done but whatever the mac pro moves in mysterious ways just get the disappointment over with and say hey guess what it's the mac pro and it's a it's a mac studio in a giant box just do it and just be like let's rip off the band-aid and so i can set my sights on next year because that would let me know hey this year if you're gonna buy a new mac it's not gonna be a mac pro like just do that for me
John:
Or, you know, if you have, like, an M4 Ultra or an M5, something like, whatever, you know, super secret thing.
John:
Nobody cares about it.
John:
It didn't leak because nobody cares about the Mac Pro.
John:
Like, this is the great thing about the Mac Pro.
John:
It's so obscure that, like, it's plausible that it wouldn't leak because who the hell cares?
John:
Yeah.
John:
I care.
John:
So anyway, Mac Pro, believe.
John:
Like, I don't expect it.
John:
No one expects anything.
John:
Have you heard anybody expecting hardware at WWDC?
John:
No one expects anything.
John:
The M5 isn't ready.
John:
It's going to come on the iPad Pro.
John:
Like, the whole 2025 hardware rumors, they're all out there for the year.
John:
They're all lined up.
John:
You can go read about them, right?
John:
But WWDC?
John:
No.
John:
I mean, how do they even have time?
John:
With the redesign stuff and all of the other stuff, there's certainly not going to be any hardware.
John:
But, you know...
John:
throw me a mac pro shaped bone or a mac pro shaped dagger in the form of an m3 ultra mac pro but whatever do something with it other than canceling the product publicly wow i mean so you got what you're looking forward to like i'm i can't i have to be honest i'm gonna be sitting there going come on one in a million odds for mac pro anything come on come on i'm gonna be i can't help myself that's what i'm gonna be thinking i'm not predicting it i'm just i'm just you know i'm just out there hoping
Casey:
I don't think there's going to be any hardware.
Casey:
I really don't.
Casey:
I can't decide if it would be more funny if they canceled the Mac Pro or if they just said, oh, here's a new Rev with the M3 Ultra.
Casey:
Have fun with that.
Casey:
It's going to be a disaster being around you for months if either of those things happen.
John:
At least that will be clarifying.
John:
It's like, well, now I know.
John:
Now I know what's up.
John:
I should just, you know, go spec out a Mac Studio and see what, like, you know what I mean?
John:
Like, I'd like to have some kind of
John:
Not knowing, like just being like, could be Mac, bro.
John:
There's some vague rumors about it, blah, blah, blah.
John:
Like, I hate that.
John:
I just, let's go.
Casey:
I have a question for you.
Casey:
You said earlier, John, in so many words, why are they doing this big redesign now?
Casey:
And I think a justification for that could be that they're trying to distract from the AI disaster of, you know, the last year.
John:
That's what I said.
Yeah.
Casey:
I agree.
Casey:
I'm trying to move on from that and posit a different answer.
Marco:
I'm trying to move on from this by restating it.
Casey:
I was trying to recap.
Casey:
It was a while ago.
Casey:
Good grief, you two.
Casey:
I just let you two pop off for so long, which was great.
Casey:
And now you're all on my case.
Casey:
All right, so here we go.
Casey:
What I was wondering is, do you think, and there's obviously no way to know right now, but do you think that this is setting up for...
Casey:
future hardware like is this redesigns for some reason setting up for some sort of future hardware especially if we get the the alleged uh ipad like more robust windowing situation is that setting up for the foldable phone or are we in a situation like many years ago now i forget what year it was where all the phones were the exact same size but they were like hey you should be able to support other sizes and
Marco:
So I have one crazy idea that I think we can do it on the current hardware.
Marco:
I don't know if they will do it.
Marco:
I have one crazy idea.
Marco:
What if... So they built with Vision Pro, they built this entire engine to recognize the light in the room and have it affect all the stuff in the UI.
Marco:
What if they use the front camera on the iPhone
Marco:
to figure out what direction light sources are coming from among what it can see, and actually add specular highlights to the glass in the UI based on the lighting in the room and how you move the phone around.
John:
That's kind of like when I was talking about translucency where they use the back camera to allow the desk underneath it to translucently show through the UI.
John:
I'll say the same thing to your crazy idea as I did to my own crazy idea back then.
John:
uh battery killer sorry yeah that's the only problem you have to leave the camera on and be processing that image the whole time yeah or at least at least for your thing you just have to like glance at the camera every once in a while like they could do it like part of the rumor is that there actually will be glints but any kind of glints like that across the ui that try to try to even just have a fake light direction let alone a real one
John:
I'm not sure how far they'll go in that direction because that's problematic to implement in a bunch of ways, even ignoring the whole camera angle.
John:
But I hope they do neither one of those.
John:
I don't want them to show through.
John:
It's like a transparent phone.
John:
Instead of a wallpaper, what you see is what's actually underneath your phone.
John:
It'll see right through your hand.
John:
Please don't do that, Apple.
John:
Not the least of which because it will kill your battery, but...
John:
uh and then for casey's question about reflecting the hardware like it just kind of takes me back to the um the notched uh back books year when they made the menu bar taller we're like oh they're preparing mac os for touch when really they were just preparing it to have a taller menu bar because of the notch on the laptops um you know you should add touch to mac os eventually and if you're just redesigning everything now now would be a good time to set it up for touch not that there's any particular reverse about touch base max or anything but
John:
Like you're in there anyway.
John:
You already made the menu bar real big.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I could just, this may be another one of those things that you'll need a leadership change to make happen.
John:
Only it's not so important that I care about it that much, but touch space max will require, not require, but we'll benefit from some changes to the Mac OS UI.
John:
And so that is one thing I'll be looking for.
John:
I'm glad you brought that up because like,
John:
In the redesign, everyone will be kind of squinting at it and saying, huh, why did they choose to do this thing?
John:
I mean, you could squint it like the vertical dialogues.
John:
One of the consequences of portrait orientation dialogues on macOS is that the buttons got way bigger, like when they become full width and they stack vertically.
John:
Those are huge.
John:
And it's like, wow, that's a much easier touch target than the other button was.
John:
Does that mean touch is coming to macOS?
John:
And the answer was no.
John:
Not now, anyway.
John:
But, you know, it is nice prep for it.
John:
Same thing with the bigger menu bar.
John:
So I'll keep an eye out for that.
John:
I thought we were here to say, also, Casey, is like, you remember when, you know, Aqua came out, the original Aqua?
John:
Well, you don't remember, but the original Aqua had pinstripes, which are an homage to the stripes in the classic macOS windows, right?
John:
But also the hardware, like the iMac, had those same pinstripes.
John:
Do you remember when there was like a synergy between how the OS looked, how macOS 10 looked, and how the iMac looked?
John:
and we just did that remember thing about the patent for all the like the clear glass mac pro and everything i i don't think that's what they're doing i don't think they should do that i think it's a bad idea but it is it did remind me of that like there's a synergy it's like this os is preparing for hardware so the the os is frosted glass and guess what the iphone 20 is also frosted glass front and back i don't think they're gonna do that but uh
John:
that would be another synergy there but yeah it is something to be looking at like with the size classes looking at future we already know the folding phones coming i don't think they need to do anything to ios to make it expand to folding phone proportions but it will be interesting to look in the new apis and like the symbols they forget to strip out to see if you can find ones that are referencing the uh
John:
the alleged in development apple folding phone because even though i think most ios apps will be able to handle it without too much change because they're used to changing size a lot now and they also have the ipad code path for people who really want to take advantage of it surely there will also be new apis and new things to detect whether you're in that mode to make your app apple folding phone savvy uh next year's wwc or whatever the year after that
John:
All right.
John:
Anything else?
John:
Any wild cards?
John:
Anything that's not rumored?
John:
You would like to see that you think is plausible?
John:
Because I always think they have the plausible model.
John:
There's plenty of things we'd like to see, but they're not going to happen.
Marco:
I would love that multi-selection and lists.
Marco:
Especially because the callback is already supporting multiple selections.
Marco:
The modifier with the on drop or on move or whatever, it already gives you an index set.
Marco:
It already supports multiple selections.
Marco:
The UI just doesn't.
Marco:
Like, oh my God, please just make that start working.
John:
Hey, at least you get to use Lists.
John:
In Switchglass, I would love to have used Lists because Lists supports reordering automatically, but no.
John:
Because Switchglass goes back to like 10.12 and SwiftUI and macOS is way behind where it still is way behind where it is in iOS.
John:
I implement all that myself and I didn't do a good job.
John:
So be thankful you have what you have.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thank you to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Masterclass, and Factor.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
One of the perks of membership is ATP Overtime, a weekly bonus topic only for members.
Marco:
You can hear it every week, plus all the other member-exclusive content we've released, like a bunch of specials and everything.
Marco:
By joining this week on Overtime, we've been talking about Sky, a new AI app for macOS from the creators of Shortcuts.
Marco:
So this is pretty cool, I think.
Marco:
So we're going to be talking about that in Overtime.
Marco:
Join us, atw.fm slash join to hear that and everything else.
Marco:
Thank you so much.
Marco:
We'll talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
Marco:
And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, 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:
So I feel like we should talk about the drama of the last week.
Casey:
Well, why not?
Casey:
On the 29th of May, which was this past Thursday as we record, there was a very brief post on Daring Fireball.
Casey:
It was brief enough that I will read the prose portion of it.
Casey:
The title is The Talk Show Live from WWDC 2025, Tuesday, June 10.
Casey:
You know, same location we're used to, same showtime, et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
And John Gruber wrote, ever since I started doing these live shows from WWDC, I've kept the guests secret until showtime.
Casey:
I'm still doing that this year, but in recent years, the guests have seemed a bit predictable, senior executives from Apple.
Casey:
This year, I again extended my usual invitation to Apple, but for the first time since 2015, they declined.
Casey:
I think this will make a fast for a fascinating show, but I want to set everyone's expectations accordingly.
Casey:
I'm invigorated by this.
Casey:
See you at the show.
Casey:
I hope.
Casey:
Well, uh, it's hard.
Casey:
It's hard to,
Casey:
to think of this it's hard for me to think of this as a good look for apple i think it's in a lot of ways a good look for john but it's it's hard for me to see how this is a good look for apple and it's hard you know as as as a person as a human being it's hard for me not to assume that
Casey:
that they're just grumpy with the community right now and and i don't know what to make of this but uh marco you had some thoughts you had enough thoughts that miracle of miracles you actually did this thing you posted to your blog i i don't even know what to do with myself that this happened all the posting i was doing is like mark was like i want to do that too right that's what it was you were at under one per year surely average oh yeah
Marco:
And especially like anything that was not about overcast was even less often.
Marco:
Right.
Casey:
But it was a great, great post.
Casey:
It really was.
Casey:
And actually, since I'm blowing smoke up your butt, I reread the post that you had linked to your own post live with Phil from June of 2015, which was also great and had some really great photography as well.
Casey:
But both of these posts I thought were excellent.
Casey:
But do you want to talk through what you wrote a couple of days, a few days ago now?
Marco:
Yeah, you know, I had a lot of mixed feelings about this.
Marco:
It's hard not to assume a fairly cynical outcome here that like John Gruber published a pretty scathing critique of Apple's handling of the Apple Intelligence debut last fall and the features they didn't ship and the kind of vaporware demos and promises they made, which was very unlike them.
Marco:
And I think rereading his Something is Rotten in the State of Cupertino post, I don't see anything in that that was unfair or untrue.
Marco:
Apple screwed up pretty badly and he called him out on it.
Marco:
And it's hard, you know, it was definitely the most critical he has been of Apple in a long time.
Marco:
And so it's hard not to draw a line between that and say, oh, he publishes that.
Marco:
It lands like it's a bombshell when it lands.
Marco:
And then a short time later, Apple doesn't want to go on stage with him.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
It's possible.
Marco:
They could have other reasons.
Marco:
They're in the midst of all these court cases and disputes with regulators around the world.
Marco:
They're at war with everybody, basically.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
It would be hard to get through an interview like that of anybody senior at Apple without at least some difficult questions.
Marco:
Like it would be weird if there weren't questions about some of these things in an interview context.
Marco:
And so maybe Apple just decided they don't want to face those questions.
Marco:
Now, Gruber was a pro.
Marco:
He would never ask something that they wouldn't be likely to answer.
Marco:
Like, you know, if you when you're when you're doing some kind of interview in this context where you have some Apple people or an Apple person that you're interviewing, you know, like you're not going to ask them like, hey, what's the next iPhone look like?
Marco:
You know, they're not going to tell you that kind of stuff.
Marco:
You know, certain things like certain questions like you you kind of have to ask obliquely at certain topics because you know that if you ask head on, they won't really be able to respond.
Marco:
Or they won't give you a useful response and everybody's time will just be wasted.
Marco:
And John Gruber is really good at navigating those politics.
Marco:
I'm not worried that he would not be able to navigate the difficulty of interviewing Apple at this time.
Marco:
It seems like Apple just didn't want to.
Marco:
And when I read back to – I also read back what I wrote 10 years ago when Phil came on.
Marco:
What a moment that was.
Marco:
That was incredible.
Marco:
And not only because Phil called me out from the stage, but partly because of that.
Marco:
It was such a great moment.
Marco:
And it started this 10-year run of Apple giving executives to Gruber to interview on stage for an hour every year.
Marco:
And it really humanized them and it gave amazing like back of the stage kind of commentary of like here's why we're doing some of the things we're doing.
Marco:
And here's some more detail.
Marco:
Like one of my favorite dynamics that always took place there or that frequently took place there.
Marco:
was you get Craig Federighi up there, and usually he was not... I don't think he was ever there by himself.
Marco:
He was always there either with Phil or later with Greg Joswiak or other people, but he was... So you get Federighi up there, and Federighi is a nerd's nerd.
Marco:
You could always tell...
Marco:
This is not somebody who is just like, he didn't rise through the ranks of just being a manager.
Marco:
He's an engineer.
Marco:
Like he's deep in it.
Marco:
He knows his stuff.
Marco:
He is a programmer.
Marco:
He knows the tech angles.
Marco:
And so you get him on stage and he acts like any nerd acts.
Marco:
He kind of looks down in his lap for a while until you activate his nerd energy by asking a nerdy question.
Yeah.
Marco:
Then he lights up and gives you an enthusiastic, honest, but still PR safe answer to what you asked that always shows in, you know, with with care.
Marco:
Like he was never like, you know, leaking secrets, but always kind of shows with like a little bit of seasoning of like, here's a little bit extra for you.
Marco:
Here's something you didn't know yet about how we do this.
Marco:
Here's a neat little trick of what we're doing that we didn't announce in the keynote because it didn't fit or wasn't the right audience or whatever.
Marco:
Here's a little technical detail or here's why this was hard or here's some of the challenges we face.
Marco:
It was so humanizing and it was such a gift to our community of enthusiasts and fans and nerds and developers.
Marco:
And nothing bad ever came from those.
Marco:
Every time I would go the next day and look on MacRumors or whatever or the New York Times or Wall Street Journal and see, was there any press about this at all?
Marco:
And there almost never was.
Marco:
Maybe there would be one article like a MacRumor saying, hey, this thing happened.
Marco:
Here's the link where you can watch it on YouTube or whatever.
Marco:
But there was never any bad press from it.
Marco:
There was usually only a small amount of good press and it was therefore kind of just like here's a nice thing Apple does for the community and for the nerds who care about some of the details.
Marco:
Here's some answers.
Marco:
Here's a fun thing to watch and have a more human connection.
Marco:
The keynotes and the entire content of modern WBDC is severely lacking in human connection to the developers.
Marco:
Because as Apple has gotten bigger, these things have gotten more corporate, the keynote videos have had all humanity stripped out of them.
Marco:
There is none left.
Marco:
In almost any Apple presentation now, that's pretty much all of it.
Marco:
We're getting all these like produced, sanitized, like polished videos that might as well be AI generated.
Marco:
Like everyone is so on rails.
Marco:
They're so scripted.
Marco:
They're so tight.
Marco:
There is zero humanity in those videos.
Marco:
Except for the parts where they show all the developers who cured cancer.
Marco:
But the actual Apple people, when they speak about their products and whatever, there is just no humanity left.
Marco:
And so I feel like this was a rare outlet to see some of that, to get some of that.
Marco:
Because these are all humans.
Marco:
They're good people trying to do good things.
Marco:
And it's good to see that.
Marco:
For them to stop doing this.
Marco:
I could see maybe a calculation.
Marco:
Maybe they saw what I was saying a minute ago of like, well, never generated that much press.
Marco:
Maybe they saw that as like, well, it's not worth it.
Marco:
But I think it was worth it because, you know, one thing that one of the best compliments that I've ever gotten, and I think the two of you have heard this as well.
Marco:
is that we've heard before that even though our show doesn't have the biggest numbers in the world, like we're not Joe Rogan or anything close, what we've heard though is that it isn't how many people listen, it's who listens.
Marco:
That we have a really good audience.
Marco:
We have a really relevant audience.
Marco:
We have an audience that maybe we are more influential or we reach in influential places more so than average.
Marco:
And that's an amazing compliment.
Marco:
It's an amazing place to be.
Marco:
We've been told that over the years a few times, and it seems, not to toot our own horns, it seems correct based on what we have been able to pick up from our very little information that we have.
Marco:
And I think the talk show, first of all, serves a very similar audience, probably a bigger one.
Marco:
But second of all, I think that the value of the execs doing that every year, it's not so much that they're not reaching as many people as some YouTuber.
Marco:
It's who they're reaching.
Marco:
I think that has a lot of value and it's I'm very disappointed that that era has come to an end for whatever reason whether it's a good reason.
Marco:
I don't quite know what that would be or whether it's a cynical reason like they're mad at Gruber for something as Ron and Cupertino.
Marco:
I don't think this was a wise choice by Apple.
Marco:
I think they're ending something that didn't need to end, that had value that maybe they are not accounting for.
Marco:
And I'm sad to see it go.
Marco:
And we'll see what they replace it with.
Marco:
What I suspect, honestly, based on how trends have been going, I suspect we are not going to see anything where Apple is being asked arbitrary free-form questions by people who are not really soft interviews.
Marco:
What they did last year, they had this weird...
Marco:
um i justine kind of fake talk show that they hosted on campus it was it was like the samsung talk show like it was like let's let's copy the talk no offense to i justine i like her other work but like it was like it looked so much like uncomfortably like the talk show it was really weird and
Marco:
And it was Apple hosted on Apple's campus.
Marco:
And it was basically iJustine being John Gruber, but like with Apple execs on stage before the real talk show.
Marco:
And it was kind of softball.
Marco:
Like there was like no, it was basically like the interview equivalent of like,
Marco:
Hey, everything you just did in the keynote, tell me more about that.
Marco:
And then the interviewees, the Apple executive, well, as a matter of fact, we took privacy very seriously.
Marco:
It was almost as stripped of humanity as their keynote videos are.
Marco:
So there really wasn't any real value to that.
Marco:
It didn't give any additional insight into the people and how they made these decisions and cool stuff we didn't know about like we got from the talk show.
Marco:
It didn't have any of that.
Marco:
It had none of the personality...
Marco:
And again, and I don't blame my Justine for this.
Marco:
It seemed like it was really the format and the situation were responsible for that, not the interviewer in particular.
Marco:
But also, like, John Gruber's a good interviewer, like a really good interviewer.
Marco:
And we see that in how he's handled these situations.
Marco:
We see, like, the people at Apple, you know, again, you can't ask them really, really...
Marco:
you know direct hard questions they won't answer them so you kind of have to dance around you kind of have to work on implication you kind of have to like you know let craig kind of smile at you and not answer the question and everybody in the audience laughs and everyone kind of knows what he's saying like you kind of have to allow for a lot of that you know um and i what i hope apple does is reconsider this and and you know get back next year
Marco:
I don't think they will.
Marco:
I think this is over for good.
Marco:
I think what we will see instead is a whole bunch of softball quick hits on YouTubers, and that's probably going to be it.
Marco:
And it's going to be nothing interesting.
Marco:
There's going to be – nothing will really be said that wasn't already said in the keynote.
Marco:
We will get no meaningful insights, or it will be like little –
Marco:
Little PR hand-selected anecdotes.
Marco:
Well, actually, yes, here is how we thought about customer satisfaction.
Marco:
It's going to be, I think, really bland.
Marco:
And that's a shame because Gruber's talk shows were never bland and they were very humanizing and I'm going to miss them.
John:
I feel like this year, like, it's actually one of the most important years in a long time for Apple to speak to its developers at its developer conference.
John:
I know that sounds dumb.
John:
Like, isn't that what they always do?
John:
But, like, really speak to the developers.
John:
And this is not... I'm not saying they're going to... Say they change nothing.
John:
Like, they're not changing anything.
John:
No policy is changing.
John:
This is not a reconciliation.
John:
This is not a new deal for developers.
John:
Like, it's none of that.
John:
It's just...
John:
They're changing absolutely nothing.
John:
It's like that's our baseline assumption, right?
John:
Even so, it's the most important time for a PR perspective for Apple to get a chance to talk to developers, quote unquote, directly to make their case for whatever their case is.
John:
This is why we're doing what we're doing.
John:
Like, again, you don't have to change a single thing.
John:
Nothing changes.
John:
They're just like when there is dissatisfaction, one of the ways you can mitigate that is let's talk about it.
John:
Let's communicate.
John:
Let's let's make you feel like we see you and recognize you and understand your concerns.
John:
Like, again, we're not announcing anything or whatever, but like, let's talk about it.
John:
The talk show was one of the places where that took place.
John:
It was essentially giving the the most enthusiastic of your developers access to your executives by proxy, by having, quote, one of them up on stage talking to the people about some of the things that you would talk about if you were on stage with them.
John:
And it's a very narrow audience.
John:
It is very, you know, it's very niche.
John:
It is it is literally an audience of people who would go to WWDC in person, which was, you know, a few a few thousand people.
John:
Right.
John:
As opposed to the billions that have Apple's products.
John:
That's one of the reasons the iJustine thing was so ill considered, because like iJustine's audience is a mass audience.
John:
But she did it on stage in front of attendees at WWDC and not just attendees, press attendees at WWDC.
John:
And it's like, well, that is like an audience mismatch a little bit.
John:
Like her audience is millions and millions of regular people.
John:
Millions and millions of regular people are never going to watch it.
John:
her talk to a bunch of Apple executives whose names they don't know we know their names and what they're doing and what their products are or whatever like it's a it's a mismatch so I don't fault her for that but like it's the you know that's the wrong person to pick to talk like if they want to have her interview them by all means do it she'll interview them and put it on her channel and show it to millions of people that's great but why do we have to be there sitting in a theater watching it happen because that's not what we want to see we want to see John Gruber asking questions because we are this weird little narrow slice of people
John:
So choosing this year to not go on John Gruber's show and have him ask you questions can go one of you the two ways.
John:
One, they're managed on Gruber or whatever.
John:
They didn't want to do it, but they plan to do that same thing just with somebody else.
John:
That is an unfortunate reality of dealing with companies and access and blah, blah, blah.
John:
Then maybe, you know, or not even like maybe it was not even maybe they just told John was like, oh, we're going a different direction this year.
John:
And they just pick a different person like you can't get mad about that.
John:
It's like, well, he had it for 10 years.
John:
Maybe someone will give someone else a chance.
John:
But you would hope is that like.
John:
that they would still feel like, all right, we're going to talk to MKBHD.
John:
We're going to talk to CNBC.
John:
We're going to talk to the guy from USA Today.
John:
We're going to talk to Wall Street Journal and New York Times.
John:
Well, like they got their list of like these executives, you know, these people.
John:
And some are way down on the list.
John:
It's like, oh, yeah, and we'll send some people to talk to these super nerds who actually come to WWDC.
John:
And historically, they had done that by letting John Grimber ask them questions for the past 10 years.
John:
But maybe like, oh, instead of John this year, we're going to go with somebody else or whatever.
John:
That is bad for John and it's bad for us because we like John.
John:
But if they still do that, if they still feel the need, like we need to talk directly to our most hardcore developers and to do all the stuff that you just said, Marco, to humanize the people behind the decisions and the things and like...
John:
Maybe there's someone else who fills that role.
John:
That someone else cannot be like MKBHD.
John:
He talks to a mass audience of people who are not Apple developers.
John:
Like that's not his audience.
John:
You're already talking to him to reach his people, which is like the vast majority of customers in the world who buy your products.
John:
You're talking to the Wall Street Journal.
John:
You're talking to New York Times.
John:
They all have their audiences.
John:
And I get that the talk show audience is
John:
the tiniest slice of a tiny little pie of this little obscure corner or whatever.
John:
But I think the reason they did it for 10 years is like you were saying about our show.
John:
It's like, okay, so the audience may be tiny, but it is actually a disproportionately important audience to you.
John:
I would say it's, again, it's the audience of people who show up at WWDC.
John:
Not only just your developers, because they have millions of developers.
John:
But the developers who care so much that they're going to fly from wherever they are in the world to California to, at this point, see you play a video that everyone else can see at the same time, right?
John:
Those are pretty hardcore people.
John:
And sometimes talking to your most hardcore base, especially when that base has some dissatisfaction with you,
John:
is an important thing to do and so if they're not going to do it through john i really hope they're just not going to do it period because of all the audience in the world that like as it relates to apple i think that tiny slice is the most dissatisfied right now yeah maybe people mad about the ios 18 photos app but they'll get over it right like in general most people like apple like their products there are millions and millions of customers like them which group is the most dissatisfied
John:
It's this narrow slice of their most enthusiastic developers.
John:
And like when they get dissatisfied, I would think that if I worked in PR on Apple, I'd be like, this is why you pay me.
John:
This is my job.
John:
I'm going to go out there and I'm going to smooth this over.
John:
I'm going to convince them that all the things that they're grumpy about aren't actually as bad as they are.
John:
And we hear like, again, no policy changes, no like new deal for developers.
John:
Your job is to go out there and sell what you're doing.
John:
Like, oh, people are mad, but I'm going to explain it in a way that makes them less mad.
John:
And it boggles my mind that they would just choose actually this year of all years, we're just not going to talk to those people at all.
John:
Because that is not going to make the relationship better at all, right?
John:
You have to talk to them.
John:
You don't have to talk to them with John Gerber.
John:
Fine.
John:
Find somebody else.
John:
But the somebody else should be
John:
a john gruber ish person right somebody who speaks to like the people who are at the talk show live are an even narrower subset of the people who are at wwc which is a very narrow subset of all the developers you know those people and i'm not saying those are the most important people like obviously it's way more important to talk to the new york times like i get it right but they've been doing it for 10 years it would it just is i cannot believe that they would say we're just not going to do that at all anymore
John:
And so I really hope that, I mean, it's bad for John if they just swap him out for somebody else.
John:
I really hope they do talk to somebody who fills that role.
John:
And because of the circle we travel in, we'd flatter ourselves to say, well, if they do talk to someone like that, wouldn't we know who it is?
John:
Because we kind of know all the people in those circles.
John:
But you know, maybe not.
John:
Like, not every YouTuber is MKBHD or iJustine with like millions and millions of regular people watching.
John:
There are YouTubers that are more narrowly focused on tech enthusiasts and developers.
John:
So maybe they'll pick one of them and have them ask questions.
John:
And it's not even to say that, you know, that MKBHD or iJustine or any of those people couldn't ask more pointed and technical questions.
John:
They just tend to focus their content on a broader audience, which is wise when you have such a big audience.
John:
You know, if they did, oh, you get 10 minutes with Tim Cook and they talk about some really obscure technical thing that millions of people watch and go, why the heck did he ask those questions?
John:
I don't know what he was talking about.
John:
But anyway, I hope, I don't know anything about what is actually happening, but I hope we see...
John:
Some of those same Apple executives that we normally see talking to somebody who is not an anchor on CNBC, who is not the New York Times reporter, who is not even even, you know, Joanna Stern.
John:
Like she could ask amazing questions, too, but she's probably going to focus a little more broadly because The Wall Street Journal is not.
John:
uh you know a technical paper it's you know it's not even like our technical or something right so boy i hope i hope they just don't stop talking to this group entirely because i think that's not tenable like i think that's that's a poor strategy that's a poor pr strategy and maybe it's a rebuilding year for pr too maybe they're like we don't trust ourselves to talk to anybody this year
John:
But man, like put out a statement or something.
John:
We were sad that we couldn't do the talk show this year, but maybe we'll see you next year because it's so like it is so important for this relationship for them to come out and have a chance to.
John:
I guess I explain themselves, but have a chance to.
John:
re-engage like to stay engaged to stay engaged with their most hardcore developers because there's a little bit of bad blood there and one even if nothing even if no one changes their position and no one changes any policies no one does anything you can still make things better by just talking about it and i hope that happens in some form
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
We'll see what happens.
Casey:
I mean, certainly, like you said, we've heard no rumblings or rumors or anything like that, that there's any, you know, stand in or de facto John Gruber that's taking over.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
Just it's it's it's a bummer.
Casey:
I'm really sad that this is no longer a thing because I really obviously John is a friend, but I genuinely believe that
Casey:
he did an impeccable job of riding the line between asking interesting and, to a degree, challenging questions, but not asking the ones, as you said, Marco, that they're never going to answer.
Casey:
It's just never going to happen.
Casey:
And so I miss... I feel like John was...
Casey:
uniquely qualified to interview these executives because he really did strike an incredible balance.
Casey:
And I feel like every single WWDC for the last 10 years, I watched the talk show often lucky enough to do so in person.
Casey:
And I always got a tidbit that I didn't know before and that I found to be genuinely fascinating.
Casey:
And
Casey:
Maybe that's achievable by other people, but I do think that John was just so uniquely good at it, and it really bums me out that it's not a thing, or at least not a thing this year, and hopefully I don't have to say not a thing anymore.
John:
Yeah, the big thing that John had going for him from our perspective is that many of the things that we are interested in and concerned about, he's also interested and concerned about, and so that's what he'll ask about, and that's just not true of people with different audiences.
John:
Like, you want someone up on stage to...
John:
Ask about the thing that I want to know about, even if it's really weird and obscure.
John:
And that would tend to happen with John.
John:
And not to say that we're representative of all developers, because I bet there are a bunch of developers who are like, let's say, game developers who John never asked the questions that they wanted to hear asked.
John:
Right.
John:
So it's it's narrow slices within slices within slices.
John:
But still, it's good to have somebody who I feel like is your proxy who gets to interact with executives who maybe has a chance of asking a thing that you're interested in.
John:
hearing the answer to uh and that repeats that's kind of like a fractal wwc like that's what going to labs means let's back when there was more in-person things and in-person sessions you could find people who worked on the framework that you're interested in and talk to them that used to be one of the beautiful things about wwc but going all the way up to the top it is good to extend that not just to the
John:
rank and file people in labs and stuff but all the way up to the big executives because some questions are the bigger questions that an executive should address and some of the smaller questions like when is multiple selections coming to list in SwiftUI and WC should cover that whole range and
John:
It'll be a shame to see – it'll be a shame for us to see, like, that we can talk to the engineers and stuff in labs, but that the things that we care about will never be asked again to executives because Apple just doesn't see any benefit in answering those questions and doesn't value our relationship enough to –
John:
to uh like the intangibles that marco was talking about to like go up there and appear human and uh show that you know show enthusiasm interest and say we're we're not so uh you know we're actually what's the cliche that i'm blowing here casey i don't know i'm asking you to help me i i have no idea we are the same you and i when like the villain says to the hero we're not so different you and me there yeah we're not so different you and i that's that's what we need from them and it seems like we're not gonna get it this year