You Go to Squircle Jail
We should dive right in and we should cover something really important.
John, how do you like your new Switch 2?
Oh, it's nice.
That's all you have to say for it is it's nice?
Well, interestingly, I had a little bit of excitement on the delivery that I was supposed to.
I think I was supposed to get a day of, but I didn't because Target is bad.
And they felt bad about it and then refunded all of my shipping.
So it was nice.
Oh, that's good.
Anyway, yeah.
I mean, the only thing I've done with it is fiddled around in the updated versions of the Zelda games and then, of course, played Mario Kart World.
And I don't know, jury's still out of Maricard World.
I'm not sure about the new jumping on stuff and grinding mechanics, but maybe just because I'm bad at it so far.
Yeah, I had the exact same reaction on both counts.
Like, I don't know about this, but I bet it's because I suck at it.
And that's the real issue.
Yeah, I'm very much used to the much more traditional, like Maricard 8...
courses that are much more like the the earlier 3d mario courses whereas these the it's not the fact that it's open world i just feel like the courses are designed a little bit differently like there shouldn't be water on rainbow road i'm gonna go out and say that no water on rainbow road why it's like what's why because it's supposed rainbow road is supposed to be a rainbow road and it's like okay but every but in mario kart world every track has a water section like no rainbow road should not have a water section right
okay why i saw like i don't know tradition somebody had noted that it's not rainbow road anymore or something like that i haven't seen this myself is this is this a political kowtowing because if so i'm not here no like i just think everything said like everything's different in this one or whatever anyway i mostly like it but uh yeah the hardware is nice um i actually have a we should we'll talk about switch too at some point in a future show because i have a lot of things to say about the hardware and setup experience and i'm sure you do too but we don't have time for that today
That's fine.
I will say, so we got ours on launch day and the Switch 2 entered the house and then it was basically, Declan basically said, well, this is mine now and ran away.
Did you expect otherwise?
No, I didn't.
And I'm exaggerating.
He didn't actually say that, but that was kind of the net effect of what happened.
And I can tell you when I was 10 years old and I saw a new Nintendo enter the house, I did the exact same thing to Marco's point.
Um, but anyways, my, I've only had maybe half an hour, an hour of playtime with it.
I, I love the hardware.
I feel like it fixed pretty much any wrong with our original switch.
I have not, we had never upgraded past the original 2017 switch.
So I never had an OLED switch or anything like that.
We never had any of the ones that doesn't, um, mount in the dock.
What is that?
A switch light or something like that.
Um,
So this is quite an upgrade.
I feel like the graphics fidelity, again, as someone who only has a Switch in the house, is great.
I am really digging that.
Everything looks awesome on Mario Kart World, and that's basically the only thing I've played.
And then this is the first time that anyone in the house, including me, has done gameplay with online and live chat.
And so...
the switch to has game chat where you can connect with a friend and play with a friend and so on and so forth and i've been listening to declan doing mario kart world with a friend of his who's also a rising fifth grader and hearing if nothing else this switch was worth the cost to hear the ridiculous vocabulary that he uses i don't mean like colorful expletives or anything like that but and i can't even think of a specific example but there's i've never heard declan say the word bro more times oh god yeah welcome welcome to that era
Right?
And so it is hilarious witnessing this happen.
But no, so far, so very, very good.
I am really, really impressed with it.
Really, really dig it.
And I am excited that we should talk about it more another time.
So then we start with the cheesy Apple video that leads us into WWDC.
So I was setting myself up.
I was bracing myself for this.
I thought it was going to be an utter disaster.
And oftentimes they're cutesy and silly, and they win me over just barely.
The parachuting out of the plane example, which I believe was last year, that won me over more than just barely, but not by a lot.
This one starts with Hair Force One, Craig Federighi driving an F1 car around the top of Apple Park, and I was sold from frame three.
I was all in.
I was loving every second of it, which really pains me to admit, because I know I should be all, but I loved it.
And when he took off the helmet at the end, and his ridiculous hair, well, his hair isn't normally ridiculous, but in this context, his hair was like a foot and a half tall, and it was
so stupid and I loved every second of it I thought it was hilarious I'm guessing though that I am the only one that felt that way well I mean I think it was so okay going into this I did feel a little you know a little conflicted you know because like part of me going into this is all of my angst about Apple's relationship with developers right now part of it was you know my kind of disappointment as an Apple commentator in the state of Apple intelligence leading into this but also
I am a developer, and WBC is exciting because there's always stuff that allows me to make my app better or makes my life as a developer easier or opens up new markets or whatever.
So it's always exciting.
And by the end of this, I was very excited.
But at the beginning, I still was kind of like, oh, I don't know how this is going to go today.
No, I'm sorry.
At the beginning of the whole event or the beginning of the video?
Yes, the beginning of the whole event.
when this video played.
Just making sure.
And so it was... I feel like they had to set the tone.
And one thing we said last week is we did not expect them to set the tone with anything but projecting 100% confidence.
So they were not going to set the tone by addressing court cases or the developer relationship or Apple intelligence being delayed from last year.
They were not going to set the tone from any of that
They were going to set the tone the way they always do.
And that's what this video did.
They set the tone with a cheesy, like ridiculously over the top, insanely overproduced and probably very expensive video showing off Craig and Tim doing something kind of dumb and kind of funny.
And that's what they always do.
They succeeded.
I liked it as much as I always like it, which is...
I guess that was a good opportunity to set up my notes window and resize windows on my desktop before I actually had to start paying attention more closely.
But they had fun with it.
It's almost like, oh, how cute.
Good for you.
You guys had fun.
It was well executed, but I feel like I was kind of in the same place.
Not that I was expecting anything conciliatory or any recognition whatsoever that there's any problem with the relationship between Apple and developers.
But
Uh, they could have gone in another direction to at least do something developer focused.
And I think the thing that bothered me the most about this, it certainly isn't the execution, which is really good.
It was clever and it was well done.
Uh, and I liked how they integrated their products with the loud noise and stuff.
It was the fact that it was a ad, essentially a side door ad for their new movie.
And there's just, there's so much Apple TV media promotion in WWDC already.
Uh,
for the opening video to be like advertising their f1 movie that has nothing to do with i give it you can put it in the keynote you can put it in the keynote in the apple tv section but the intro movie basically about if there was no f1 movie i think i wouldn't have wouldn't have had this complaint because i've been like oh a fun thing where imagine driving a car on top of a park isn't that funny but it's it's a movie tie-in so anyway i wasn't too grumpy about it but that's the one the one thing that bothered me about it surprisingly is that it was an ad for a movie yeah
And we'll see more ads later, but that's all right.
So we start with Apple Intelligence, where they say we are looking forward to sharing more about high-quality Siri.
That's not how they said it, but whatever they meant.
You know, the new Siri in the coming year.
And they quickly announced they're opening up access for any app to tap directly into the on-device LLM that's core to Apple Intelligence.
Actually, before we move on from that first part, this is the one thing that I did have time to grab down.
This is as close as they got to acknowledging that a lot of the stuff they announced at last year's WWDC, they did not ship.
A fact that we all know.
So it's not like, you know, they need to say, we all know, they know, we know, we know, whatever, right?
But this is as close as they got to acknowledging that.
And this is a direct quote from, I believe it was Federighi saying this.
Uh, he said, and as we've shared, there's that, as we've shared part to say, we've already told you this.
So you already know this.
So this is not new information, but we are actually going to remind you, which I think this is the, the one concession to reality that Apple is going to remind you of a thing you already know just because not to say anything out of it would be weird.
So anyway,
And as we've shared, we're continuing our work to deliver the features that make Siri even more personal.
This work needed more time to reach our high quality bar.
And we look forward to sharing more about it in the coming year.
That's it.
That's as close as you're going to get this whole presentation to acknowledging the fact that last year's the Apple intelligence announcement on those features, in particular, the ones that everybody wanted, like making Siri better, did not ship.
That's as close as you get in the whole presentation.
Even later, when they start talking about Swift Assist and everything, I don't think you get any closer than that to saying, yeah, isn't it a shame that we talked about this last year and just couldn't ship it?
Well, anyway, here we are again.
So for the rest of the presentation, the reality that they didn't ship all that stuff is no longer acknowledged or relevant.
But I do give them props for...
you know putting apple intelligence at the front kind of getting it over with with their enhancements that we're going to talk about in a second and adding two sentences of reality recognition to say we both know that we screwed up but we also know that we're not going to say that to you so anyway let's go
All right.
So then we quickly launch into design and they had a brief cover flow.
Oh, wait, that's it for Apple intelligence.
You're not going to talk about the things we're going to get there.
I'm trying to go chronologically.
Have you ever been on the show before?
No, but that was the Apple intelligence part.
Okay, so obviously, like John mentioned earlier, there was a lot more elaboration in State of the Union about what the Foundation Models API is.
But it is, you know, first of all, it is exactly what was rumored, and it was exactly what we expected.
However, that is not a bad thing, and that is not an underwhelming thing.
Because what was rumored and what we expected was also what me and many other developers were also hoping for.
Mm-hmm.
It looks really good.
So what they have announced is direct access to the Foundation model on the device, the Foundation LLM or multiple models.
For all sorts of different tasks, you know, text manipulation, things like summarization, recommendations.
There's also what I was hoping for, which was the speech transcription model that also appears.
I haven't had time to play with it yet to really confirm its abilities, but that also appears to be.
Very promising.
They basically opened up all of their local AI processing to developers to use locally for free.
There is not seemingly a way to use private cloud compute, although it's too early to know a lot of the details yet because this literally just was announced and we haven't had time to build stuff and dive too much into the examples and code yet.
And also most of the sessions hadn't happened yet, so...
We will probably have a bunch of follow-up maybe correcting some of these things, but basically it looks very much like an awesome opening up of the foundation models that are on the device for developers to use for free.
That is incredible.
We focus a lot on the...
the flashier features here and there, but, like, what will actually make a day-to-day difference in a lot of apps is underlying tech getting better.
And this piece is incredibly powerful.
Because this is, like, what... The story of Apple and, you know, being a developer platform, if you ignore or set aside all of the financial BS that they pull, if you just look at, like, the story of being an Apple developer...
The reason we're all here, oh, there's two.
Number one, we use Apple devices ourselves, and developers tend to want to develop software for the devices they use themselves.
Also, though, Apple gives really good APIs to do really complex things easily in your apps.
They've done this for the entire history.
This is what good developer platforms do.
They aren't the only people in the universe to do this, but I think Apple tends to be pretty class-leading in a lot of the APIs they offer in terms of the capabilities and how good they are and how well they perform versus how little effort it takes to use a lot of them.
And so what they've done here, it sounds fast in a keynote.
Now you can access our models locally.
That sounds like a single-sentence thing.
That's a very big thing because so many apps will now be able to do basic AI type stuff in what seems like a fairly unrestricted local fashion to just make the apps a little bit nicer or a little bit more capable or maybe a lot more capable, depending on what they are like.
For instance, various things I could do with this in my app.
If the Speak Transcription API is as good as I hope it is, and I don't know yet, but it looks promising, I can offer transcriptions for podcasts.
Now, there's a lot of hoops to jump through to do that.
For instance, every podcast copy that is downloaded can be different because of dynamic ad insertion.
So there's a bunch of hoops to jump through or technical realities to overcome.
But I can have transcriptions if I use that transcription API.
Obviously, again, asterisk, asterisk, complications, but that could be the thing.
If I'm given a transcription, I can maybe offer summaries, or I can maybe try to detect where do topics change in the podcast, and maybe insert automatic chapter marks.
There's all sorts of things that you can do.
Once you have access locally to cool AI features like this,
Because then you don't need to worry about your costs or network connectivity or network speed or running your own servers because it's happening locally on the device.
The same way I don't pay to access AirPlay because it's just something that the devices do.
I can just offer AirPlay and it's free to me to offer that.
For AI features to be built in and local and free unlocks a lot of potential.
As I mentioned last episode, any app that offers a list of things that you drill into, which is, I don't know if you've noticed, a lot of apps.
Maybe they can offer text summaries of the things in that list.
I don't know how fast the API is yet, but maybe certain things they can do offline or they can do in advance or whatever.
So maybe they can offer text summaries of things you drill into in a list.
Basic usability improvement there.
Yeah, they're not always perfect.
We see it in mail.
It's not always perfect, but it's pretty useful a lot of the time.
And in a lot of contexts, that will provide value.
So I think we are not fully appreciating yet
What a difference this is going to make to have access to local AI for free.
I think in retrospect, a year or two from now, we're going to look back on this as a very, very big deal.
And we'll talk about the technology behind it probably next week's episode when we talk about State of the Union because it actually is interesting the way they're exposing this, not just the individual APIs, but just in general how you can talk to models and get results back from them with a little Apple-flavored, Swift-flavored twist to it.
Yeah.
And also like looking at some of the stuff in State of the Union about the way the APIs are, it's not just a very, very simple like you provide text and it gives you back an answer.
It's way more powerful than that.
There's all these like, you know, structured data responses.
You can like hook in intermediate steps that it can like it can ask your app for more information in certain ways or to provide certain data sources.
Like there's a lot in this API that looks incredibly promising.
Yeah.
With guardrail features to try to make it not be awful.
You can add your own guardrails because they know theirs won't be enough.
Yeah, we'll dive into more detail next week probably.
Yeah, but again, the foundation models thing, that alone, if there was no redesign, if there was nothing else, no fancy iPad app windowing, if there was none of the other stuff we saw today, that alone is such a big deal that that could keep a lot of developers busy for the whole year.
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So we moved on to the design, and we start with a CoverFlow rendition of the processors, I think A6 or A18 or thereabouts.
And they seem to be hinting that they used their own office for a lot of the inspiration.
inspiration for this like apple park itself yeah that was that was the theme of look at all this glass in apple park you think we could be inspired by all this glass that's that's a choice but here we are uh then they brought out marco's best friend forever alan dies this is his first appearance no when is he when has he been in stuff before third or fourth yeah it's like three or four something maybe just maybe just the new glasses are throwing me but anyway there he is so anyway so he says
There's going to be a more harmonious experience.
Yeah, they use that word a lot.
Right?
And inspired by the physicality and richness of Vision OS.
And I don't know what to make of this.
Because, like, on the one side, if those are the words that make the most sense, then use the words that make the most sense.
But I don't know.
They have this, like, air of, like, hoity-toityness and...
They just seem... Apple design?
I know, right?
What a surprise.
I mean, I think them trying to explain their inspiration makes sense.
Like, the most interesting thing to me in all these videos that they've done a couple times now is the... So, this is... He's standing... Someone told me he's standing in, like, a cafeteria or something.
He's not standing in a design studio.
But anyway, they have some tables set up, and on the tables are...
It's hard to tell.
Are these objects that the design team created when exploring the sort of idea space, as they would say, to think of the next design?
Or are these sort of after the fact objects that they created after they decided on the design to try?
Let's make physical objects to convey to the public.
This is the feeling that we want the design to give you.
And the objects are various rectangular solids of colored glass and also a bunch of clear glass or clear plastic things that have semicircular rounded edges on them.
So you've got kind of hockey puck discs with rounded edges and lozenges with rounded edges.
And those things are sitting on top of flat things that are like, that have pictures on them or whatever.
So if you watch the video, they showed them a couple of times.
My guess is that these are sort of finished products to say these these convey the spirit of the interface that we made.
Maybe they made objects like that when they were exploring it, but they look so finished.
And I think this is like a sensible way for designers to try to tell people.
The thing you say in your screen should evoke the same feelings as this stuff.
And also they go through later trying to explain how like these things are supposed to be like on top of your UI.
So here is a thing on a table where there's like a placemat that is like your content.
And then there are these clear plastic things that is our UI we're putting on top of it.
That's what we're trying to make.
I like that.
I like the idea of physical objects to introduce what is a non-physical interface because it's pixels on a screen.
But now we get into, OK, so that is that a good inspiration?
Is that a good goal?
Should an interface be inspired by those things that are on the table?
And I think that is maybe up in the air.
Yeah, I'm guessing this was all just created for the video.
And like after the fact, like not while they were developing it.
Yes, this is design marketing, not design.
Not design design, yeah.
And I'm guessing there's no way those are all glass.
I'm guessing that's acrylic because glass would like chip and be heavy.
Well, you'd never know with Apple.
You're right.
It should absolutely be like, you know, Lexan or acrylic.
Acrylic is actually hard to make without bubbles and everything.
I honestly don't even know.
Maybe those are all made of diamond, don't you?
It's just...
A gigantic man-made flawless diamond the size of a sub sandwich.
The idea that they're showing, and you just have to watch the video to see this, but think about if you had a hockey puck with semicircular rounded edges made entirely of clear glass.
and you put that hockey puck on top i'm so old on top of a newspaper what's a newspaper anyway put it on top of a piece of paper with text you've probably done this if you ever had like a big chunky like charlotte holmes magnifying glass when you were a kid right like the big one with the handle it's just a big sort of lens of glass and if you lay that on the table on top of a piece of print and then you move that magnifying glass around or move that clear hockey puck around what you see is
the thing that's right underneath it being magnified, racing by the lens and sort of distorting around the edges, that is their inspiration for a lot of the UI.
Oh, a clear thing.
And when either it moves on top of a surface or the thing that's underneath it moves underneath the thing, you see the details of the thing that is whirring by underneath, distorted and warped and rapidly moving somewhat magnified through the clear thing, which is a cool, interesting effect for like an art gallery.
But in terms of user interface,
The most interesting thing to me, and I think the thing I didn't expect from the rumors and the thing I think everyone who was doing mock-ups, including like Sebastian DeWitt's that we talked about last time, didn't think about was that Apple has spent years and years making translucent things like, you know, just look at your dock right now if you're not on Tahoe or like any other sort of clear thing on your iPhone or whatever, making things that
reflect not reflect that convey what is behind them without causing the details of that thing behind them to impair legibility they don't just mean legibility in terms of text but legibility in terms of like can i see the shape of the button or the icon or whatever so you want the thing behind
to quote unquote show through or influence it, but it should look really smeared and frosted.
And even Sebastian's things last week with the physicality thing, very frosted, very frosted over, very smoothed out.
Um, because that's what Apple has always done.
And that is a sensible choice when you need to be able to see the stuff that is
in that clear thing.
And Apple was like, actually, we really want a lot more of the contrasty details of the things below to show through, including the motion.
So if you scroll something behind like a current generation frosted glass thing, yeah, the frosted glass will change based on the average brightness and color space of the thing that's behind it.
But if you scroll something behind one of these clear lozenges, either the physical things on the table or the interface elements,
Boy, it's like moving that Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass over a magazine page.
You see lots of stuff flying by.
Lots of contrasting edges, lots of details, lots of motion back there.
A lot, shows through a lot more, and with a lot more, I'm not going to say animation, but with a lot more of the motion visible.
It's like, you know, shower glass.
OK, so if you have a shower, there have been over over my lifetime, at least many different generations of fads for how do we make shower glass that is somewhat privacy preserving?
When I was a kid in the 70s, you probably remember this, the kind of like scalloped things that have like these little scalloped things.
It was like it would make everything wavy and distorted.
So it's like, well, light goes through it, but you can't really see anything because it just becomes like a, you know, an impressionist painting.
There's also frosted glass that's flat.
There is just the trend of like 100% clear glass where you can see everything and there is no privacy except for the soap scum that you're supposed to scrape off each time, but nobody ever does.
Apple has gone through a bunch of those in its UI.
And in this generation, they're saying, we mostly want to see the person in the shower.
Like,
We want to see a lot more of the person in the shower than we have in the past.
So their shower door is not leaving as much to the imagination as their past ones.
It's worth, if you are able to, it's worth installing this on a test device to actually see how it works in practice.
Can I interrupt you right there, please?
Don't put this on your carry phone.
For the love of everything that is good and holy, do not put this on your carry phone.
Or your main Mac, please.
Or your main Mac.
An iPad or something expendable, whatever, that's different.
And I actually have put it on my iPad because I don't need my iPad to get work done.
But...
In order to survive, I need a functional phone and a functional Mac.
And anything that you think you need to survive, don't even start sniffing around at betas until, at the very least, the public betas.
And even then, I wouldn't do it.
We have to go through this every year.
It's probably too late for all of you.
But I'm telling you.
Do not put the beta on any device that you consider important.
Don't do it.
Learn from Marco and Mai's mistake from iOS 5.
Learn from probably both of our mistakes in iOS 7, especially when it comes to a redesign because everything tends to look a little wonky.
Don't do it.
Don't do it.
Do it.
Sorry, Marco.
Please continue.
That being said, I did it.
It's really rough, by the way.
Right?
There are a lot of little UI glitches throughout the system apps, and it's rough.
I will say, though, if you are a developer, you might want to do it.
So, okay, don't do it, but you might want to do it because...
So using this UI on the phone is, first of all, very informative.
When you compare to the videos and everything we saw, you know, the videos, everything is like zoomed way in and it shows everything in slow motion.
Look at how amazing this is.
And it's all about content, which, oh my God, I have so much to say about that.
But your content, we're getting out of the way for your content.
You need to see more of your content.
It's like, what if the app's functionality is the app's content?
Okay, anyway.
a lot of zooming in and looking at the things you really should see it on the way it works on a real phone and you should actually use it to get to get a sense of what this design is like what things look and feel correct what things look and feel you know wrong or old my entire app with a one year old design looks ancient in this system
Just wait till you see what they did on macOS, because I made an app last year, too, that requires the current version of macOS.
It literally requires the very latest version of macOS, and the buttons don't even look right.
The buttons.
We have a lot of work to do.
But, you know, so...
A couple of things.
So first of all, John was right about the glass and everything and the way it kind of warps things around it.
And I think some of that hopefully will be tuned down a little bit throughout the summer as they get feedback.
The same way iOS 7, Beta 1, the fonts were way thinner than what ended up shipping, which was still thin, but it was less crazy thin.
Because the very first beta, which was the design department's baby,
it just like it was so illegible in so many ways because the fonts were so thin everywhere um that you know they they before it chipped they they kind of increased the helvetica weight there a little bit although on that topic which has come up a few times in the past we've gotten questions about it the idea that they come up with a new design and they go too far and then they scale it back which is what happened with ios 7 and it's happened with a couple other things they've done as well um
Sometimes it's frustrating.
Some listeners have expressed this to say, well, why do they have to overshoot and fix it?
Why don't they overshoot and fix it themselves before they show it to us?
And sometimes I think of that as well.
It's like, don't ship something that you obviously know has problems just hoping you can get away with it or something because you think it's cool and then scale it back.
Why not do that yourself before you show it to us?
But there is actually one reason to...
Like you want one reason to actually try to overshoot by a tiny bit.
You shouldn't try to overshoot by a lot.
And I think a lot of in a lot of the cases they have overshot by a lot and they shouldn't have done that.
But the reason you want to overshoot by a little bit is because if you under if you go to don't go far enough.
if you're not as daring as you thought, you'll end up, it's pretty easy to do that.
Let's ship something that doesn't go so far.
All right.
Is there any place where we're hurting legibility?
Is there any place where we think someone might find this objectionable?
Let's turn it down, turn it down, turn it down, turn it down.
What you end up shipping is something that doesn't actually look that different than what you had before because you're afraid to be too different because the current thing that's out there is the status quo.
And anytime you deviate from that, you're afraid people won't like it.
Um,
So if you overshoot, but just a tiny bit and then turn it back, you can sort of dial it in.
But if you undershoot, you have no idea how much to turn it up.
And it's very difficult to turn it up and say like, well, let's make it more extreme and more extreme.
And then you're like waiting for people to yell about it.
And by the time you get close to it, maybe it's the last beta.
and then people start yelling so do you back it off a notch from there or are you just hearing residual yelling so like that i i have some sympathy for the idea that it's easier to overshoot slightly and tile it back than it is to undershoot because you could undershoot by a huge amount and then not know how to how much turned up and it will it will basically make you timid you'll end up coming out with something that's like this looks exactly the same as the current thing because you already had translucency that showed through the background that was very frosted over and you've continued to do that
That said, I think if you ship something that you know makes a legible text in a bunch of places in your UI and you're like, oh, don't worry, we'll turn it down.
Turn it down before you ship it.
Stuff like that where it's like, this is obviously legible.
We cannot ship this.
I don't need to see that.
You don't need to put that out and say, oh, we're just going to back it off a little bit now.
back that off internally because illegible text or too low contrast and stuff are things that you should be able to detect behind the scenes.
And I think a lot of this, a lot of this redesign suffers from that.
I would argue that maybe even the thin text is like, well, maybe this will be okay because it's not as obvious as some of the worst appearances in this.
If I was still doing Mac OS 10 reviews and we haven't gotten to Mac OS yet, but if I was doing Mac OS 10 reviews or whatever the hell it's called these days, Mac OS reviews, I, for this OS, I,
I would just be lining up screenshot after screenshot of areas where this design falls on its face where the old design did not.
And those are easy to find everywhere.
Obviously, in the first beta, it's going to be easy to find.
But I think they've got a lot of work to do to shape this up.
Yeah.
I think in particular, like, so some of the super clear glass, like, so they're...
There are actually multiple glass translucency effects in play here, which is similar.
By the way, the last few OS releases have had translucent material APIs that you could use that did a similar thing of the way stuff could scroll under navigation bars and toolbars, and you get those kind of blurred colors.
They do that now.
They have multiple materials in the new design, and some of them appear to be basically the maybe slightly evolved version of that, and it looks kind of like thin, frosted glass.
When stuff goes under it, it gets a little bit blurred and a little bit smeary, but it doesn't jump out at you, and it maintains pretty low contrast under it.
So the text on top of the surface doesn't need super bold contrast to be legible.
Then they have what looks like the clear gumdrop of acrylic moving over something where it warps like crazy on the edges of it with whatever's behind it.
What goes behind it gets so bright with vibrancy, what they call the effect.
The vibrancy is cranked way up.
So as you scroll something colorful behind one of these –
It almost looks like there's an LED behind it lighting it up into the blob of material.
Those look kind of nuts.
And that – where this shows up the most in the UI so far is tab controllers, previously known as tab bars.
they look like unhinged.
Like when you move around a tab, like you pick a tab and like the, it like moves it over like the blob of liquid.
And it's like, it wiggles the whole, the whole thing wiggles and shakes and scales.
Like it's like, you thought that the dynamic island was goopy.
Now just picking a different item on a bottom bar.
Forget about like the, even just like the, you know, the clear piece of water that you're moving from the left to the right.
That's there.
And that's ridiculous.
And it warps everything.
But then after you pick the new thing, the whole thing goes, wong, wong, wong.
yeah it's it's nuts or like you know like in the mail app for instance you open up a message so it push it you know you have you have a navigation stack it pushes something in from the right you go back to the root to the list and the list bounces a little bit yeah they did this with messages like in the current version messages does that have you noticed when you scroll and messages all the little bubbles shake around like they're loosely attached to the background i
Oh, that was added since iOS 7, I think, because that was part of the like the springs kind of gravity.
Maybe I'm just noticing more because it's on macOS now and it really bothers me when things shake around like that.
But it's just, yeah, they love for things to look like they're loosely attached to whatever they're attached to.
And I'm not sure that's the look they want to go for because it reminds me of shoddy workmanship.
There are places where that's a good thing.
Like, it can be used well.
Like the Dynamic Island.
Yeah.
And I think, you know, or things like scroll bouncing, which is great.
But with scroll bouncing, though, the thing, the pain, the virtual paper scroll that you are scrolling, that springs well.
What doesn't happen and what shouldn't happen is, oh, all the text on the page also slides within the container of the page to go back and forth to get closer and farther from the edge of the paper.
So the paper, the thing you're scrolling feels solid.
It just shakes as if it's on a spring, but the stuff inside it is firmly attached to the background.
And that adds an air of solidity to pull and refresh and spring scrolling.
That is not the case when you have things like your interface elements shaking around on their background, like the tab bar or the...
the bubbles and messages yeah like the the tab bar here is so over the top and it's kind of it's annoying because the animation is also it also just takes a while like you have to wait for it to stop jiggling why like it just and i mean yeah maybe i'm sure you can keep using the app but i'm sure it'll register your touches and respond before it's done animating that but like why is animation so long for something that is literally like switching tabs in an app but that's it's such a common thing so it just the tab controller it just it looks totally
Totally ridiculous.
It's also completely illegible.
When you have anything behind it, that uses the super clear glass effect.
It is comically illegible.
So this is exactly the kind of thing they are likely to dial back a little bit over the summer.
We'll see if they do.
I hope they do.
Because if this design ships the way it is in 1.0, like in this...
We're going to have a lot of people using whatever the accessibility settings are to reduce motion, reduce transparency.
And I feel like if many people use those settings just because the new design dropped legibility so much that they have to, that is a design failure.
People who use the accessibility tweaks to the design should do so for accessibility reasons.
Not because the new design goes so far that way more people all of a sudden need those accommodations.
And so I was hoping this design – I was hoping they would take the opportunity here with this new design to make a design that works better for more people without using special flags to turn stuff off.
And they definitely did not do that.
In fact, they've gone the opposite direction.
I think more people will have to use the flags to turn stuff off with this new design.
And that just – I mean this design is not about legibility at all.
And maybe it doesn't matter.
But certainly –
Legibility is not what they were going for, or unless they really don't know how to do it, but I think they just don't care.
I think what we've seen, we've seen Alan Dye's style over time.
His style is all about minimizing and hiding controls as much as possible to make room for content to bleed through behind stuff.
I don't think that's super effective, but it does look nice in certain marketing shots.
That's obviously what he knows how to design for.
That's obviously what he cares about the most.
Way more above actual usability.
And there's nothing inherently wrong with trying to make stuff that looks really cool.
I just think it is, of course, a balance.
And there are parts of this that do look really cool and parts of it that are perfectly usable.
And there's also a lot of parts that really sacrificed legibility and usability for looks.
That is Alan Dye's style.
So congratulations, he succeeded.
And to be clear, I am...
Overall, I am excited to get into this design and to start wrapping my app around it, basically.
But it is... It's certainly very opinionated.
And I also wonder, like, the outgoing design of iOS 7 through 18 is...
Largely defined by its lack of personality, like it had all the personality stripped out of it.
And what that created was basically a blank slate for all the app developers and big companies and everything out there to define their own styles in apps pretty effectively.
And so you go to different apps now, you know, on the outgoing era, the outgoing design.
You go through different apps and you can figure out how to use them just fine, but they do have their own styles and companies have their own visual language and branding.
And it mostly works and it's mostly fine because the system does not impose a strong opinion.
Now, with this new design, the system is suddenly imposing a very strong opinion.
So in this environment, though, again, this is not iOS 6 anymore.
This is not 2007 or whatever anymore.
This is now an environment where we have this entire ecosystem built up from a decade of...
the system being fairly neutral and bland, which let the apps develop their own visual vocabularies.
Now, the new system UI design is going to much more significantly clash with everyone else's visual vocabularies they've built up.
And so what you're going to see, I think, is a pretty big...
Maybe a bifurcation of like you're going to have a lot of like indie developers like us who try to use the new design, but then you're going to have all the big company apps that just totally snub it and basically disable all of it or fight against it or re-implement stuff from scratch, which is terrible for lots of reasons, including accessibility.
So I think there's...
What Apple did here was they took a really big, bold stance to kind of grab back design authority from their ecosystem.
But I don't know if the ecosystem is going to follow suit, and I don't know if they have the position to do that from.
Additionally, the super roughness of Beta 1 has me a little bit concerned about Apple's own UI quality here.
Are they going to be able to polish this up and ship it to a finished, relatively bug-free state in their own apps, in their own system by September?
Maybe, but it's a tall order.
It's a very aggressive move.
So we've kind of shaded into the iOS section of this.
When you're talking about this design, you're mostly talking about in the context of iOS, and we'll get to that in a second.
But two things.
First, on the accessibility front, which you just mentioned again, I saw, again, some people debating this as the keynote was going by, and they're like, oh, how is this accessible?
You can't read any of the text, blah, blah.
It's terrible with accessibility.
And people are like, oh, actually, Apple's really good with accessibility.
Look at all the options they have to...
Reduce transparency, uh, increase contrast, uh, you know, like, uh, reduced animations.
They have like tons and tons of accessibility options and all their OS is in there.
They're one of the best companies in the world about accessibility.
Um, but Marco, you made the point that like, well, if everybody needs to enable certain accessibility options for it to be legible or almost everybody, uh, maybe you're like, who is using your default design.
And the way I like to think about it as coming from the other angle, um, uh,
if you turn on a bunch of the accessibility options, which I've experimented with turning on, for example, on Mac OS, I think it makes everything uglier.
And why should the accessibility, if you need accessibility options, why should you sacrifice beauty?
Why should beauty only be for young people with perfect eyes who can tolerate low contrast and can pick out text?
Like, why do you have to give that up?
I think that a good design would be both accessible and beautiful.
Why do you not get to have that if you need literally any accessibility options?
Because, yeah, the accessibility options, if you enable them, do the things they say.
They do reduce transparency.
They do reduce motion.
They do increase contrast.
But they do so in an extremely strong way.
Some of them have adjustability, but not all of them have adjustability.
And it's so clear that the designers design it the way they want it to work and then design accessibility options to, like, look okay.
Yeah.
No one is sitting there saying, let's sweat over the 75 possible combinations of these accessibility settings, making sure every combination of these settings, you need A and C, but not B, you need B and C, you need B and D, whichever combination of accessibility settings you like or need.
No one is sitting there saying, well, we need every combination of these accessibility segments to also look beautiful.
They do not look beautiful.
Turning on even a one of these usually makes everything uglier.
And you get the feeling that nobody cares what it looks like when any of those accessibility options are turned on, other than measuring, is the contrast better now?
Okay, good job done, right?
Is the transparency reduced?
Okay, job done.
But no one cares what it looks like.
Why should I have to give up beauty for accessibility?
I feel like that's, I mean, I don't,
Maybe I've picked up like this animosity towards Alan Dye from Marco over the years.
But like I look at him in this thing, I'm like, can't you make an OS that is beautiful and accessible and as accessible as possible out of the box?
Obviously, you're still going to need to have options.
Like you're not going to make it so it's perfect for everyone.
But like that's the lesson of like OXO Good Grips, that if you design something for accessibility, if you do a really good job, you don't have to change anything about it to sell it to people who don't need any accessibility options.
We're like, oh, this is just a better peeler.
They don't know it was designed for people with arthritis.
This is just the best peeler that I've ever used.
That's success.
Success is not, I've made this peeler that young people with perfect skin and amazing dexterity can use, but anyone else, you need to buy the accessibility handle and stick it on.
And by the way, the accessibility handle is big and ugly and loose and doesn't come on the color you want and doesn't match your kitchen and doesn't fit in your drawers.
That's kind of how I feel about the accessibility options in this thing.
I think they are too far away from...
legibility, accessibility, readability, um, like their, their default is to, is not good enough.
And the options, the accessibility options that you turn on, uh,
make everything just look so much worse and that that's a shame um and then the second thing is we're shading into ios stuff you mentioned the floating toolbars at the bottom i i don't know if i need to draw diagrams about this for future shows or something i've complained about it before but it's hard to explain visually um but one of the things that they're doing across all their os's but including on on ios's and they showed it in the keynote uh a thing that used to be just the bottom centimeter of the screen with a bunch of options on it
um like the tab bar or whatever that thing will now be a floating lozenge that floats over your content that's the whole thing on the tables you got like a clear plastic acrylic or plastic it floats over your stuff but what that means and they talk about in the keynote is now you can see your content behind and around that it doesn't go edge to edge but it's like oh our devices have curved edges now so now this lozenge correctly matches the curved edge so this floating lozenge is floating it's not touching the bottom of your screen
It's like, I don't know, a few millimeters up from the bottom of your screen.
It's a few millimeters from the left of your screen.
It's a few millimeters from the right of your screen.
It is floating with margins around it.
that like i don't know why they're so in love with that because like now you can see more of your content well first of all no i can't if if i have a web page and there's a footer with links in it now that footer with links is behind the toolbar and yes there is a safari option that they added back when they tried to redesign a safari in this way a few os ago that's like oh your your web cage can sense how much of the bottom of it we're covering up and you could essentially set safe area insets for your web page so you draw your footer above that bar
Well, if I'm drawing my footer above the bar, what the hell good is the rest of the quote unquote content down there?
Because I can't put anything there.
I can't put anything for people to read because the bar is covering it.
Can I put something in the two millimeter sliver at the bottom?
Maybe.
Can I put something in the two millimeter sliver on the right and the left?
Maybe, but probably not.
Like, that space is not mine.
My content cannot go there, even if I'm displaying a photo.
Even if I'm displaying a photo, what this photo has some text at the bottom, or I want to see what's at the bottom of the picture.
I have to like yank the picture up so it springs like I'm, oh, I gotta hold up.
Can I get it?
Can I get it?
Can I get the photo entirely out from behind that thing?
Or will the thing shrink out of the way and get a little bit smaller?
That's not my content area.
You're putting your floating glass thing over and I know you love it when like my content shows through your floating glass thing and makes it look cool or whatever.
But what if I want to see what's there?
What if I want to draw on what's there?
Do I have to move your little thing out of the way so I can draw on that section in my drawing app?
That is not my content area.
It is much better when it's just a bar because then you know your content begins at the top of that bar.
So not only does my content...
actually begin at the top of that bar because that area is useless to me but it doesn't really begin there because it's going to display it there by default and if I try to yank my content up so I can see the actual bottom of my content obscured then what goes behind your floating toolbar what gets put there
This interface, I find maddening because I can't think of a single situation in which it benefits me as the user in any way.
There are only situations where I'm lucky enough that I don't care what's in that bottom centimeter.
And so I can sacrifice all of that content and I don't have to try to stretch it up so I can see it.
i'm very angry about this because there's a they tried this with safari and backed off and now they're like nope we decided we're just going to force it on everybody and i mean i haven't seen the wdc sessions yet but i don't think there's a solution to this all of these sort of safe area ends that's another crap that you can do is just ways for you to try to work around this but as soon as you work around it you're left with two problems one what the hell do you put behind that clear bar and two how is this any better than what came before which is when you had a clean separation between content and bar
rant over but like this is this is my least favorite feature of this entire redesign it's not the glassy stuff it's this floating bar concept because i think it is just like bankrupt from a user interface perspective yeah because like what happens is you know you're right like what are you gaining like they they talk all about they they kept saying over and over again in this design by the way this design doesn't seem to have a name it's referred to in a lot of different ways with generic terms like apple's new universal design language
Like liquid glass.
No, it's liquid glass.
No, liquid glass is the material.
The actual design does not have a name.
But I think people will just call it liquid glass because what else are you going to call it?
Right.
But everything... So, you know, they constantly talk about freeing up space for your content.
Even more focus on your content.
And these are terms that have been around since Johnny Ive was there.
Like, this is not, you know, a new design vocabulary.
It's all about, like, get out of the way for your content.
But the problem is...
How much of your content are you actually gaining by this?
And again, John's right.
You look at the new tab bar area or bottom bar area for most apps, and what you're getting, first of all, you're not getting usable content.
You're getting a blurred background version of the content.
It's actually blurred with the way most of these toolbars are designed.
So you go to something like Mail.
It's blurred and distorted.
It's not just blurred.
It's like warped.
Yes.
It's blurred and warped, yeah.
But it's mostly just blurred.
So you're not actually able to use that space.
It's just a visual design.
But the problem is, and this is one thing I think we're going to see, iOS 7 and the resulting iterations of that design language were fairly easy to design for.
But translucency is very difficult to design for because it's easy to come up with, again, marketing shots.
It's easy to come up with like ideal, you know, hand hand selected example content or example designs that show up nicely and you can scroll them to the right position.
You can have like all these like big, beautiful, full bleed images as your quote content that, you know, images where you don't care what is being obscured because you are obscuring the bottom of it.
Right.
Yeah.
Images where you've shot them way wider than you actually needed them.
There's nothing down there in grass.
Don't worry about it.
I'll never show you a picture where someone has a T-shirt on that you want to read.
It's under there.
Right.
Exactly.
But like so when when these designs hit the real world, though, it's very, very hard to design using translucency.
Windows Vista tried this a thousand years ago.
This is why the computer industry is obsessed with designing with translucency, because it looks really cool in demos and marketing.
But then you actually get to trying to use it in a software design, and it's very difficult, and it's not very versatile.
It does not adapt itself well to a lot of different circumstances.
And by the way, I will add to this that even if these floating bars were 100% opaque, you'd still have the content problem.
Like you're forcing my content to go behind a thing that obscures it.
So even if it was 100% opaque, what you're getting to is they're not.
So on top of it not being 100% opaque, now there's this problem of the translucency destroying the legibility of the actual controls that are floating.
But the content itself...
The root problem is that you are forcing my content to go to the bottom of the phone screen and then you're laying those acrylic things or whatever they are.
You're laying them on top of my content that I can no longer see.
The bottom of my content is the bottom of the phone, but you just lay your crap on top of it.
And I can't if there's no more place for me to scroll, I can't ever see that part unless I stretch it up.
So what ends up happening in the designs when you design the stuff, first of all, it's so hard to design legible text areas this way.
And so you end up basically having two different worlds of design on the phone.
You have the idealized version of the design, which seems to be...
only designed to look good with scrolling lists of full of large full bleed photos which admittedly that is a lot of apps people use that is a lot of Apple's apps but that's not all apps and when you when you define a new system design language you have to accommodate all apps so again there's a question of like you know
How does this work with maybe more boring apps?
So again, you look at something like Mail.
I always love looking at Mail because Mail is the average app.
It's a table view or a list of text entries, and you tap them, and you go in.
What is the content in Mail?
It's text.
It's lists of text.
So it's like it's kind of like marketing proof in a way.
Like you kind of you can see how a design works and doesn't work by opening up mail.
And you can see that.
Here's here's like how this hits the real world.
The apps that many of us have to use on a regular basis or design on a regular basis.
Like how how does mail work?
And Safari is also a great example, because in Safari.
You have to accommodate for not having any control over the content that's being displayed.
Because if you're going to say, we're going to make room for all your content, have spotlight your content.
Okay, what content?
Example content designed by Apple designers or real world content for this actually out there and uncontrolled and uncontrollable?
And so, and mail and Safari are these perfect examples of like, they're, they're stress tests for designs because in Safari, you have like, again, when John was saying like, you know, when they tried years ago, that weird floating bar, well, guess what?
The new bar is way worse.
Also closing a tab is now an extra tap.
Hope, hope you enjoy that.
Yeah.
Then the Safari thing, by the way, their solution back then was, oh, we'll just add some new properties that, you know, new web kit Safari on iOS specific properties and just the whole world will just update their web pages.
It's like, no, they won't.
They won't.
You just won't be able to see the links that are at the bottom of a page.
So many pages, when you scroll them, the links are close enough to the bottom of the webpage that they will be obscured by the bar.
And what are people supposed to do?
They might not even know they're there.
Maybe with a translucent thing, they'll see some blurry thing behind there, but they'll be saying, how do I tap on that?
It's being blocked.
Do I stretch it up with one finger and then tap on it?
What if I can only, you can only like pull the page up so far before it's, before it like stops moving.
It's just a bad idea.
That's why they didn't do it.
And here we are.
We're back here again.
We really should move on from the design, and I know we're not going to be successful in it, but I'm going to try to make us move on, and I'm going to offer my two cents, which is, and I need you to hear me out.
I hate it right now, but, but, but.
I genuinely think I'm going to love it by the time they get themselves under control.
And I know we just talked about this, so I'm not going to belabor it, but I really think they way overkicked, you know, overindulged themselves.
But I really do think that a lot of this in principle does work.
I don't particularly disagree with anything that you two said.
to be honest with you.
But that being said, I think that there's a lot of potential here.
And I feel like when it presents well, which admittedly is on Apple Slides and Apple Demos and not as much anywhere else, or at least not today anyway, when it presents well, it presents really well.
And I really, really dig the direction they're going.
I think the magnitude is way too much right now, and I think they need to dial it back.
But I'm enthusiastic about it in principle.
I think it's going to be really great.
I ran call sheet against iOS 26 and immediately wondered if I'm going to be able to get anything done this summer because, oh man, there's a lot to do.
But yes.
That being said, I think modernizing the OSs is good.
I think bringing them together tastefully, in principle, is good.
I think we could definitely go on a three-hour rant between the three of us as to where they went too far, where they didn't go far enough, mostly where they went too far.
But in general, I like the direction where all this is going.
I think I'm probably most enthusiastic about the three of us, and that's fine.
And I'm really excited to see how this turns out.
And I hope by the end of the summer, I will be standing on top of your two carcasses laughing, saying, ha ha, I was right, even though I'm not so confident that's what's going to happen.
But I'm hopeful that I will be the one that is right with you two slain beneath me as you thought that this was going to be a wreck and they would never fix it.
And it turns out they did.
So we'll see what happens.
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Let's carry on with the keynote.
iOS 26.
Actually, on the topic of iOS 26 and actually touching on design, we were all scared they were going to make the icon circles.
They didn't.
Yay.
Yeah, that is very good, actually.
Thumbs up for that.
We were all scared they were going to change the squircle.
I don't think they did.
Casey, can you confirm the squircle is the same?
I think it's the same, but I don't have a discerning enough eye to be able to tell you with certainty, but I believe you're correct.
Well, it doesn't matter.
We all have to make new icons anyway.
Right.
And so the thing they did do is they have an app for making icons, which is nice.
It's part of Xcode now, Icon Composer.
And their idea for icons, which I think they've done with all of their icons, but it's not mandatory, but it seems like the direction they want to go is conceptual, again, with their little physical toys.
Yeah.
conceptualize the icon as a layer of frosted glass pieces each of which is essentially a solid color solid filled vector image and then it's just like photoshop layers you take three vector images or like i think the one they showed was like for the weather app blue background white cloud yellow sun
And you just have dials.
How frosted do you want them to be?
How translucent do you want to be?
They put on little edges and glows, all the things that you would do in Photoshop layers.
But your icon is essentially three vector, three vector template images that you combine or four or five or six.
However many layers you want to put an icon composer will turn them into a frosted glass looking icon.
Apple's on it with a bunch of their icons.
And I think those icons look pretty cool.
They look like little pieces of frosted glass.
To Marco's point earlier,
It's a very opinionated style.
They say, this is what we think icons should look like.
It's like, well, if you decided your icon should look like a bunch of stacked pieces of frosted glass, that's cool.
There is a functional component to it because iOS and all the other iOS is essentially let you say, oh, but now that your icons are essentially a stack of template images that we're applying effects to,
we can really easily make you a dark mode version and we can make you a clear version for our 20th anniversary phone.
That's going to be a clear sheet of glass.
Like, because there's nothing inherent, like it's just data.
It's like vector shape, color component.
And for the clear one, we just desaturate all the color component and make them very transparent.
Like it's a flexible way to make variants of your icon because they are structured icons.
It's not just a grid of pixels that you uploaded various sizes.
Um,
that is clever it's interesting it does give you the ability to do a lot of new things with your icons and also every single icon that exists that is not apple icons is not one of those icons right now so how many how many apps are there on the app store how many icons quote unquote need to be converted to this or what you know because we saw before we have tinted icons today we have dark mode light mode icons not everybody did it and not everyone's going to do this and i feel like what they're doing is producing this sort of
sedimentary layers of icon design eras as they keep introducing new and different ways to make icons i'm glad they didn't change the shape i'm glad they're still squircles i think the style is actually cool and interesting but now it's going to be like oh i can see that is an icon from this era in history it's a taylor swift era store but it's the ios icon era store
It's just like all these different icons made over the years with different styles and only the very newest ones will be made of a bunch of layers of stuff.
Like Casey, your thing is the, uh, the clapper board for call sheet.
Yeah.
You could make that out of a bunch of pieces of translucent things, but like how many layers is it?
Is the clapper board just one layer?
Do you make a bunch of the little stripes individual pieces or like, do you like, do you deconstruct and then reconstruct your icon for frosted glass?
Or you just say, screw it.
I'm keeping my icon the way it is.
It's fine.
Yeah, I don't know.
And that's the thing is that there's how many apps and then in any app that's worth its salt, weight in gold, I don't know what euphemism I'm looking for.
Any app that's any good is going to have a bunch of alternative icons.
And so, yeah, this is a lot of work for icon designers.
And again, a lot of big companies are just not... I'd say most big companies are just not going to do this.
The thing is, iOS app development for most companies is not the main thing they do.
They have a whole... If they're a big company, they have a mobile team.
And the specific... Making a perfect...
that you know icon that fits into ios is low on their priority list because they want the same icon to be used everywhere across all of their properties and all of their apps and all of their platforms and everything else and then for small companies usually they can't afford full-time ios developers they might contract out the building of an app
And then it's like, well, you know, we had this app made for us three years ago.
We have to call them back in now and spend even more money to now remake this app for the new theme and the new icon.
So a bunch of them will never update or will take years to do it because they can't afford to.
And so then it's like, I think what we're going to have is a very like split.
We have the same thing with iOS 7, the exact same problem with iOS 7.
Or dark mode icons or, you know, like the current version of iOS, it'll tint your icons.
You have no choice.
Like whatever your icon is, they're going to try to tint it and they'll do something.
And if you don't like how your icon looks, then change it.
Tough luck.
Dark mode icons that are custom, you'll do if you care about it.
And now it's like one more thing.
It's like, oh, well, if you really care, you'd make these layered frosted glass template icons that can look that will look good in clear and tinted and light mode and in dark mode.
All right.
So speaking of, they also are offering all clear app icons.
I'm trying to be positive on this episode, so I'm not going to talk about those anymore.
They're going to go great with a 20th anniversary complete sheet of glass phone.
I guess so.
The camera app did get simplified as we expected.
I like this in principle.
I don't love that in order to get to, say, Pano or anything like that, you just need to know where to swipe, which is not great.
But I mean, I don't really know what the alternative is.
Again, this is Allen Dye design.
The previous camera app was a huge amount of complexity, much of which was buried behind gestures.
The new camera app is a huge amount of complexity, much of which is buried behind gestures.
It didn't really get easier.
It just got different.
I got a glass here.
Yeah.
Like, OK, fine.
But like that's, you know, again, he is the junk drawer theory of design.
Just sweep all the complexity into the junk drawer and it's easy.
It's well designed now.
It's like, well, no, we know good design can can adapt to and reduce complexity, not just hide it under the rug.
But this is hiding under the rug.
So, OK, I mean, it looks nice.
I think they added some hierarchy.
Like it seems like they're surfacing more controls that used to be more buried based on usage.
So I give a thumbs up to that.
Either way, I'm really mixed about this because I think the good news is unsophisticated users are going to have a better time with it until they want to do anything but the norm.
If they want to do anything but a photo or a video, then they're going to be very confused very quickly.
That's actually one of the things that argues for hiding everything in junk drawers in the camera app because so many people use it and them accidentally tapping something and not realizing it is probably half the problems that they get.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Uh, we talked about, excuse me, photos where they said many of you missed using tabs in the photos app, which unfortunately we've totally ruined tabs from this point on.
So sorry about that.
Oh, calm down.
We already covered it.
So, um, so anyway, so that's the thing that looked good to me.
Safari is the tab bar thing we already discussed.
Um, the FaceTime, they talked about FaceTime a bit and then they talked about CarPlay and I got to tell you,
I'm really excited about the look of new CarPlay and perhaps the best couple of features.
Number one, tap backs in CarPlay.
I don't know what the UI affordances for that.
They showed it for a flash.
So I don't know how I could do a tap back.
Give that a thumbs up.
Maybe.
I don't know.
Uh, pin conversations and messages is really nice because there's occasions.
I mean, obviously Aaron and I send texts back and forth all day long, even though we're in the same house together, but there's occasions I'll be in the car and she has fallen off the most recent, like 10 conversations or whatever.
And it's much more burdensome to say, Hey dingus, you know, send a message to my wife and what do you want it to say?
Well, tell her blah, blah, blah.
And so anyways, having her always at the top is excellent and
Uh, widgets and live activities are, I am in full support of this, although I don't know that that's a need I, that I have in the car specifically, but I dig it.
iPhone widgets work in CarPlay, which is cool.
Um, they, they also plugged CarPlay Ultra.
Um, they said the first vehicles with CarPlay Ultra just launched last month.
I presume they're more than one Aston Martin SUV.
I think they just mean that there's more than one copy of the Aston Martin that has been sold, I genuinely think.
They have sold three of them.
Right, exactly.
So weird, but yeah.
Anyway, and when they showed the interior with the new look with CarPlay, I think it has a better chance of matching more cars' interiors.
We talked about that when we talked about CarPlay Ultra, like this sort of Fisher-Price candy-colored iOS 7 CarPlay next to the...
uh you know the punch through of the seat adjustment and the acid martin they didn't match styles this kind of glassy translucency the the companies that design their own car interfaces love this stuff they love gradients they love translucency so maybe this will be a better match for uh more other manufacturers ui
Yeah, and it's funny because they said, and this should be an almost verbatim quote, this is just the start of the CarPlay Ultra journey with many more brands around the world looking to bring this experience to market.
Combining the marquees or the manufacturers, unique look and feel with the power of iPhone, which here again, I think what they're nodding in the direction of, you don't have to make it look 100% like Apple.
You can do your own thing.
Just 50%.
Just 50%.
And before we move on, I just wanted to point out that they did say, and I didn't get a chance to write down the quote, but they said that when a call comes in, for example, it doesn't take over the entire frigging screen because that's the most annoying thing in the world is when you're driving and you have the map view up and you're trying to navigate and then somebody calls you and you can't see your map anymore.
It's infuriating.
And now they have like a little toast style thing that pops up.
I am here for that.
Then Darren Adler came in to discuss communication and whatnot.
They talked about how they did change the look of the phone app.
There's now call screening, which I presume is opt-in, but it can automatically answer calls from unknown numbers, and it'll triage that, and it will ring through to your phone.
The phone won't actually ring until the caller has identified themselves and tells the phone why they're calling, which I'll believe that if I see it, but in principle, I dig it.
I mean, don't you all kind of do that today when I'm curious?
I'll do the thing where you let it pick up the voicemail and you see the little text going.
This is just more like automating that process even further for you.
Hold assist, which again, tentatively very excited.
We'll see what it's like in reality.
But the theory here is that if you're on hold, the iPhone will detect the Muzak that's playing and it will let you do other things and even effectively hang up the phone.
Not literally hang up the phone, but effectively hang up the phone.
And then once a lot, and this is now a quote, once a live agent becomes available, we'll ring you to return to the call and let the agent know you'll return shortly.
This is kind of really obnoxious.
And I'm so here for it because, oh my gosh, when you have to wait on hold for an hour, it's infuriating.
And you know what?
I think this is a pretty great idea.
So now, I mean, this is, this is maybe a wonderful moment in time where we'll have this tool that will help us, but you realize this is an arms race because now, so what this is doing is like, there'll be a computer voice saying just a moment, Casey Liss,
We'll be back here in a moment.
We're ringing him now because you've left him on hold for an hour.
It'd be great if they said that to the person.
But anyway, those people can also deploy a system that's like, well, we're not going to bother our operators until we know that we have a live person.
So it's their robot talking to your robot about who's going to be back when and who's going to be called when.
You're hoping at some point both of them will agree to ring the actual humans and connect them on the call.
Oh, it's not.
Yeah, this is.
But anyway, I endorse this because this is a tool for the world that we live in.
The world that we live in, sometimes you got to be in hope for a long time and you can't just be sitting there listening to their terrible, like overdriven clipping music from whatever decade interspersed with a message that says your calls are important to them, blah, blah, blah.
Yeah.
Messages get some new treats.
I'm an old, so I don't care.
They get backgrounds.
They get group chats, including polls, which actually could be kind of cool.
Yeah, polls will be useful.
That's cool.
Requests send and receive cash.
Again, that could be useful.
What I'm really digging is typing indicators for group chats, including who is typing.
I'm here for that.
You could also screen unknown senders when it comes to messages, which is cool.
Uh, then we've got, uh, Leslie Okamoto who comes out, who talks about images and how you can mix emoji and make images using chat GPT within the image playgrounds app.
Yeah.
This, this is a theme of, uh, the sort of sprinkled throughout the rest of the thing is we have a feature that we introduced last year.
That's not that great.
We've slightly improved it.
Hopefully it's better, but by the way, we know we suck.
So just let chat GPT do this.
because honestly image generation like if you've tried to use their image playgrounds or genmoji and tried to get it to do something you either luck out and it's one of the easy things that it can do or it it's hopeless you will never get it to do what you want but chat gpt image generation is amazing and hopefully they're exposing the latest and greatest version of that uh don't even bother asking image playgrounds to make your image for you if you want uh
a studio ghibli-ified version of a picture of yourself just as chat gpt it'll do it in two seconds uh setting aside all of the intellectual property and artistic concerns uh which are besides the point uh in terms of just the quality chat gpt can do this better and apple everywhere in their os is like we will not be able to get better enough to do at doing this to announce this is wwc25 so please add a
backdoor side hatch escape hatch so that they can use chat gpt and i hope they do this in a way where you're not getting some babyified ancient version of chat gp that's not really good at it or there are tons of guardrails or whatever because we've seen that before where asking chat gpt correctly produces an amazing result but asking through apple's intermediary does not um and i think what they said on this and all the other features is like yeah when you do this
we're sending your query to chat GPT.
And if you upload an image, we're sending that image to them.
And like, they didn't make as strong a privacy thing.
They just said, look, you have to opt into this.
So you are choosing to do this, but there's kind of no getting around the fact that you will be sending your data to open AI.
And if you don't want to do that, don't use this feature.
yep they made uh mention of the fact that you can do different image styles like oil painting realistic image etc which they did not explicitly did not allow in the prior version of the image playgrounds uh and additionally there's an image playground api which i thought there was at least a modicum of it in the past but apparently there's either more or new api this year uh live translation which i really dig you can translate conversations on the fly this is integrated into messages facetime phone etc it's 100 on device and
Uh, the words are translated as you talk and they're spoken out loud for the call recipient.
Uh, they did some demos of this and to their credit, it did not appear to be sped up because the latency looked like crap, if I'm honest with you, but I respect that to their credit.
Yeah.
Cause like they, the, if they were going to speed it up, they would have sped it up from that.
They would have.
Yeah.
It looks like, well, here's the thing about this.
I love this.
I love this being like a system level thing that's everywhere.
Um,
And being on device, you know, like the latency is not network latency.
It is just like, look, this is how long it takes.
But the thing about, uh, live translation models is the gigantic ones that you can't run on your phone are just better.
And so, and this is the type of like natural language, a real time translation is the type of thing that I really wish I would actually love to, um,
year after year get just the most monstrous model to do the translation for me that's not running on my phone because the data you're sending back and forth it's low volume of data it's latency sensitive so that's true but you're sending text like the only thing you care about is like the round trip time but there's not going to be any upload or download time
Seems to me that Google is way ahead on this in terms of the sophistication of the translation.
We've already seen a couple of people posting online about how like if they people who spoke both of the languages saying this translation isn't that great.
But like the fact that it's there at all is the important thing.
If you need it in a pinch, if you're in a foreign country, if you're talking to somebody who you don't understand their language, you want them to understand you, you'll take anything that kind of gets the point across.
And so I love that this is there, but like doing it all on device.
Really feels like one of the things I would look for from Apple is like, I want the best translation in the world.
And if I have a good network connection, do that.
Fall back to your local model if you have to, but just give me the best.
Like I would even consider paying for that because of the gap between like not particularly sophisticated auto translation and the world's best is pretty big at this point.
Nevertheless, I respect that they're doing it.
I respect that they didn't speed it up, etc.
Then we get Kathy Lynn to talk about Apple Music.
There's lyrics translation, lyrics pronunciation, which is cool if you're listening to something in a foreign language.
There's automix, which also sounded pretty cool, where it'll seamlessly go from one song to the next, similar to what a DJ would do, including using time stretching and beat matching.
I think that's neat.
Music pins for things you want to listen to frequently.
I like that.
Maps gets to learn your preferred routes and it'll let you also search visited places.
That sounds really useful to me.
Like, oh, where did I get a bagel a few weeks ago?
And I don't remember the name of that place was, but I know I went there.
If this works, then I think that would be really great.
Both of these things, by the way, music pins and visited places.
It amazes me how long it has taken to Apple to get around to these things, but I'm so glad they have.
Like most third-party apps are much better about this.
So recognizing kind of like you recognize that not every button on the face of a controller is used with equal frequency.
Recognizing when you're in an app, like you're probably going to use one of your top two or three playlists way more often than the others.
You're probably in messages going to message the same handful of people way more than all the other words.
The UI should reflect that.
Same with them with visited places.
Yes, there's a search field.
You can search for stuff.
But what you're probably interested in is someplace you might have been before.
So privilege that in the UI.
Allow someone to pin the things that they use frequently.
Give a special place of privilege to places that people have been before because they're highly likely to go there again, more likely than, say, every other place on the earth that they haven't been.
And that's just basic, obvious information hierarchy and customization.
And yet it's taken 26 versions of iOS.
Not really.
to get to that point uh so kudos for them to finally adding it but it's like oh geez i'd i'd forgotten even i'd almost given up even wanting to and there is a way it's up to pin playlists now but like more prominently have a giant button up there it's like yes this is the playlist i use all the time top left love it add it to every app please
Uh, then we've got wallet where they talked about car keys, driver's licenses, et cetera.
Apparently boarding passes are getting better, uh, which I'm excited about.
They, this was the first Sherlocking that I saw.
They said they're going to be live, uh, shareable live flight statuses.
Um, I joked in the show, in our internal show notes, the RIP flighty, uh, flighty is an amazing app that does a lot more than just this, but it is a shot across the bow.
Nevertheless,
What it is, it's raising the bar for the, like Friday is for people who really care about it and either fly a lot or really care about the details because it is just best in class.
But what this does is someone who is never going to pay for flighty, it gives them a baseline level of functionality and
that people aren't getting now like live activities for your flight shareable flight status like every flight tracking app has that in it but now this is something just comes with the os and i think that's appropriate like what comes with the os should be baseline level of pretty good and if you are a quote-unquote pro user of flying or whatever like
Then you step up to a third party app.
And so I don't think it's a Sherlocking at all.
And like, I honestly, for people who like fly very rarely, it's almost impossible to convince them to pay for something like flighty because it is kind of like a premium expert level product.
They just want the basics.
And now it's built into their phone.
I think I give this a big thumbs up.
Yep.
And then they talked about Apple pay where you can use like point redemption, not only or installments.
And I guess you could already do that online, which I've been doing when you pay, but now you can do it in person.
Additionally, they're getting order tracking beyond just Apple pay orders.
And I got to tell you,
I have only seen this myself like once or twice so far, but with stuff that I've ordered with Apple Pay where you get the order tracking information in the wallet app.
I almost never see this personally, but apparently this is going to go beyond just Apple Pay orders and they're going to sniff through your email and try to find that sort of information, which I think is cool.
So again, jokingly, I said RIP parcel in our internal show notes.
And here again, I don't think it's quite that simple, but it's still quasi Sherlocking to a small
degree and the complication here with any of these things is like okay we'll go through your email to figure this out where do you think my email is apple it's not an apple mail oh well never mind then you know like it really it like all these things like the google google's been deploying this feature for years but they want your mail to be in gmail otherwise they can't see your mail as easily or at all and so yeah this is kind of these sort of context aware things i wish they weren't so siloed but just just the nature of the beast these days
Yeah, there's a whole bunch of features like this that Apple adds every year that are like, you know, kind of boil the ocean problems of like, well, if we can get a whole bunch of different people and companies and sometimes governments and some of these features on board with our system, this will be great.
And they have, you know, a mixed track record of actually doing that.
Sometimes the things they do that way do work out.
Usually there has to be a decent incentive for the other party or parties to to do it.
And a lot of the things are like we have a new a brand like you were saying earlier, John, about the web stuff like, you know, we're going to declare a new CSS property to fix this layout bug on the iPhone.
Every web page will update.
Right.
We've declared a new standard.
It's superior to all the other standards because it's private and it's secure and it only works on our devices.
But it's going to be great as long as we get all these different companies or whatever to participate.
those have a much higher miss rate so it's great when they hit or it's great like if they hit in a way that like the app or service or whatever that you use happens to work with it great um but a lot of these features we kind of have to view through the lens of like well that might be great like in 10 years when it gets adoption if ever um but you know maybe not necessarily anytime soon
My impression with the order tracking is they're doing what Google does, which is we will look at your entirely unstructured, probably HTML email, and we will rummage through it and try to find things that we think are information about orders.
And then we will extract that information from totally unstructured text data and turn it into a parcel alert type thing.
Google's been doing, again, for years.
Google does a pretty good job of looking at any old email.
And these companies that are sending you messages about your orders aren't in cooperation with Google.
In fact, many of them, like Amazon, intentionally started omitting information from their email so they didn't want Google to know what you were ordering because they used that to sell ads against and there was this whole battle and blah, blah, blah.
I'm assuming that's what Apple is doing, that there is no standard that anyone needs to comply to.
Apple will just rummage through your email, which is totally unstructured and they'll figure it out.
And
I trust Google much more than Apple to successfully extract order information from unstructured emails just because they've been doing it for years and years.
And it's not Apple strength, but it does.
I think it does rely on you using Apple mail because otherwise Apple doesn't have access to your mail.
So there's that.
And then we move on to gaming with Anne Tai.
Apparently over half a billion people play games on the iPhone, and they've announced a new games app, which is the new destination to help you get more out of your games.
Apparently the app itself works with a controller, if I understood the keynote right, which is kind of cool.
And they talked a lot about how you can play games together, including first-player games, but I kind of zoned out during this portion, so I didn't catch the specifics.
I don't know if either of you did.
but uh in principle it sounds good so this is a boil the oceans thing like marco was talking about as long as game developers use our new apis and it's like you can't even get them to get make games for your platform that aren't just ports like to use the custom phone platform apis to do things like challenges and leaderboards if there's any kind of game that has that that wasn't it's not ios only they already have their own system for that they're
not going to incorporate your thing like it's just it's more so on the mac that it's like pulling teeth to get them to port the game at all but in ios even though a lot of games are made for ios so many games they're made for the very least ios and android and some of them are just across every platform and those games are never going to use these apple apis because if they want this feature it has to work on pc on game consoles on ios on android and they're never going to port to the mac i mean some of this so okay the games app like
So one thing that struck me about it is that it actually is useful.
I just launched it on my beta phone, which is full of games that don't support it because it just came out.
And these games haven't updated yet, of course, because they can't yet.
And it actually does have value in the sense that it is basically like a games launcher and games promotion area.
The question for me – so, okay, it's designed a lot like the TV app.
Where, okay, here's the latest games.
You can continue playing the games you played most recently.
Is that buried three screens down to continue playing the game you played?
But here's some new games you might want to play instead.
Yeah, it is.
I mean, you know they're going to do that.
But no, right now it is above the fold, but it's near the bottom of the fold.
And there's a huge promo slot above.
Again, it's just like the TV app, the same kind of design.
So it's like, oh, I'm ready to sit down and play a game.
Let me go into the games app.
Who's going to do that?
That's my question.
Not that they didn't make a totally decent looking app here that looks just like all of their other content browsing apps, but are phone users going to open up the games app to get to their games?
They're going to launch the app that launches the app.
I don't understand who's going to open this.
It's nice that they basically have... It's basically GameCenter.
They basically took GameCenter, made it nicer, made it modern.
You have leaderboards with your friends.
I did like the idea of the score challenges with friends, even in single-player games.
I think that's a cool little thing.
I think all that stuff existed previously in GameCenter as well.
It's probably the same APIs, right?
I don't know.
At least some of it did.
But the new app, again, it's nice.
It's polished.
Again, it looks exactly like the TV app, but not that different from the App Store.
At least it doesn't look like green felt.
Right.
But I don't understand who is going to keep this on their front page of their phone and launch this before launching Candy Crush or whatever.
I think people who play iPhone games...
dedicate space on their home screen to to put the game icons directly there instead of adding a different tap to open up another kind of heavy slow app by the way like if you navigate the bottom of the games app right now it's so rough it has the new tab bar it's really sluggish the animations are again unhinged like so over the top like ridiculous navigating on this tab bar it's super like it's it lights up when you tap it like you get it anybody out there rgbs
Yeah, if you have this beta installed on a device, open up the games app and just navigate between those tabs.
It shows you right there like, oh, this tab bar design could use some editing.
But anyway, yeah, it's a fine app.
I just don't think people are going to actually use it.
Kind of disappointed that the long shot rumor that they were going to bifurcate the app store into games versus non-games, and this would be the games app store, like basically end up being like Steam, where this is the place where you go to find the games, buy the games, download the games, install, you know, like, but they didn't do that bifurcation.
So instead, it's just like Game Center, but not as embarrassing looking.
If they actually did that, if they actually took games out of the app store and put them only in games.app, I could maybe see that.
But even that, I have this NFC app that's showing up in my... I think it's not... Someone miscategorized their own app.
Yeah, like, it kind of depends on, like, the categorization in the App Store, too.
Like, it raises the question, like, what is a game?
And there are a lot of apps that are kind of, like, in between or kind of, like, vague as to is this a game or is this an app?
So it raises a bunch of weird little challenges like that.
But, again, I think it's a totally fine set of Game Center evolved functionality.
I just don't think people are going to actually use it.
We got some discussions about visual intelligence from Billy Sorrentino.
I didn't really get this, to be honest with you, but the idea is the same thing with visual intelligence, if I'm not mistaken, is where you could mash down on the camera control on the newer phones.
and take a picture of something in front of you in the real world and basically ask, what is this?
And now you can do that using the screenshot button gesture thing.
So you can take a screenshot and you can basically ask your phone, where can I buy this great jacket?
Or you can scribble over the little part of the image that you're interested in and say, search for similar images online.
And
I guess that's useful, but that's not something I can imagine ever doing.
However, they did point out that if you take a picture of a poster that has event information, it will suggest that you add that event to your calendar, which that I am very here for.
And there's also ChatGPT integration.
And this is where the first time I recall them saying, AppIntense, baby, AppIntense, AppIntense.
You should look into AppIntense.
Did I tell you the good word about AppIntense?
Do you know what I am doing right now?
I am intending to tell you about AppIntense.
It's all about AppIntense, as we all expected.
This is like kind of a half another one of these half measure features.
They're not what we want is the thing that they showed last year, which is why should I have to take a screenshot and feed it to the thing and go into this modal thing?
Shouldn't it be able to just say, hey, dingus, like.
find this thing for me or where can I buy this lamp?
And it will find the lamp in the image.
It knows what's on my screen.
Like the whole thing of manually making you take a screenshot and going into a mode and scribbling over the thing you want and then potentially firing out the chat GPT because Apple's own stuff can't do what you want.
It's a very manual process.
It's like on the slope from what we just talk about with chatbots, like you could do your own web searches, open a bunch of pages and tabs, read all those pages, synthesize the information in your head and come up with the result.
Or you can have an LLM do all of that for you and just go to ChatDBT and say, give me the X, Y, and Z, and it tries to do it and hopefully does something similar to what you did by saving your time or whatever, right?
This is like, we can't yet do that on the phone.
Android does a much better job of this.
It is closer to this than we are.
We would like to be able to say, activate our voice assistant and say whatever it wants.
It knows what's on your screen.
It knows what app you're in.
It knows all the app intents that are exposed.
It knows all this stuff.
You can just talk to it and it will do it.
They don't have that.
So they said, well...
You used to be able to do it with the camera and say, here's an image, do this.
Now you can do what's on the screen.
But first you have to take a screenshot and then you might need to annotate that screenshot.
And then you might decide what thing do you want to do?
Do you want to ask a question about it?
Or do you want to do an image search?
And do you want to do it with the Apple thing?
Or do you want to do chat?
That's a lot of taps.
But I'm glad they give the chat GPT backdoor.
I hope again that that backdoor is at least as useful as launching the chat GPT app, feeding it the screenshot you just took and asking it the same question there.
But we shall see.
Honestly, I'm more optimistic about the two of you on this feature.
I think the simple version of what they showed I think is very powerful right there.
The simple thing of like, oh, here's a text about an event.
Screenshot it and make this a calendar thing.
It's basically a really advanced what used to be called data detectors.
So we have that.
That sounds great.
And then also...
the the kind of you know pluggable system made by the app intents of like well you can like have if somebody screenshots you know a photo of i don't know a podcast you can find this on ebay for me like specifically don't just search the web for it but like i want to buy this on ebay specifically an ebay exposes an app intent that will launch you into the native app with the search and blah blah
Yeah, I can see this becoming something over time that we use all the time and that actually ends up being incredibly valuable in little ways throughout the rest of our lives using iOS devices.
Yeah, but it's just halfway there.
Like, why do I have to initiate the screenshot?
It's already on the screen.
You're the phone.
Like, just do it.
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All right, and then we moved on to watchOS, which wasn't that much there, although what was there I thought was really good.
This was presented by Stephanie Postlewhite.
They said they're going to have a workout buddy, which I believe I thought was Anya from Fitness Plus, but I think it's actually Sam.
But anyways, this is a dynamic generative voice that's using voice data from one of the Fitness Plus trainers, like I said, that will give you just the right encouragement.
I dig this as an idea.
I'm not sure.
Sure, the execution is there, but I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.
They did say you get to pick from voice assistants or from the voice things.
What they didn't say is you can pick from the one that's really perky that you want to kill and the one that's more chill.
But again, some people want the most enthusiastic thing possible and some people don't.
And so I bet kind of like Carrot Weather where you can turn up and down the snark
yeah best case scenario they give you choices of things i think it's a good feature i think it's a good feature as long as it's optional and as long as you get to pick because some people will really benefit from having someone encourage them in their ear but you just did your fastest mile you're blah blah keep going and some people will want something much more tame but they do actually want to know like uh you know good job like that that's the you know that was your third workout this week that would be like the carrot weather turn dial all the way down it said a fact
You ran three times this week.
That was your third run.
That may be the level people want.
They want to hear somebody tell them that was your third run this week.
They don't want to hear.
That's so great.
That's your third run.
And, you know, like, but, you know, let the person pick.
So I give this feature a tentative thumbs up, not knowing what any of the voices sound like, except for the one that they did in the picture.
But sure.
And in the video.
But I think the one in the video will definitely work for some people.
Yep, I agree.
There's better smart stack stuff.
They said something about volume, which I totally missed.
There's a wrist flick gesture.
So if you're looking at the face of the watch and flick your wrist away, that does something.
It was unclear to me what specifically it does.
So the volume thing is they're going to dynamically adjust the volume of dings and audible alerts on the watch based on your surrounding voice.
So not embarrass you quite as much when you're in like a quiet room and it goes ding.
Right.
For the people who have sound on their phone on their watch, which boggles my mind.
But, you know, different strokes.
Yeah.
And the wrist flick gesture was to dismiss notifications, silence alarms and dismiss the smart stack.
Which is not that different.
So the double tap gesture is more of a like, yes, confirm open thing.
And so the wrist flick is more of a canceler.
Yeah, exactly.
And then they're apparently doing a pretty good job across all the platforms.
I mean this genuinely.
I'm not trying to snark.
They're doing a good job of keeping parity with at least some of the features, like messages, for example.
So you're getting live translations, conversation backgrounds, new actions are being offered, like share my location on Find My.
Also, Notes is coming to the Apple Watch, which sounds silly, but I actually am here for.
I dig that.
Yeah, it's kind of fun.
Yeah.
I mean, I have probably way too many notes, so I don't know how the search affordance is going to be, or maybe it's just going to be the few most recent notes.
But either way, I'm excited about that.
Then we got tvOS, which basically amounts to, hey, let me tell you about all the good Apple TV Plus stuff that's coming.
Oh, and we did some things.
Moving on.
See, again, if you're going to have an ad for your TV shows, put it in the Apple TV Plus.
That's all I'm saying.
I allow them to say we have a bunch of new shows coming out.
Here they are.
At least it didn't last that long.
Well, and again, you know, tvOS, like there actually are some, there's one massive great new feature, the automatic sign-in API.
But how many years have we heard that Apple is going to fix the sign-in problem on Apple TV?
This could be the year.
Every year could be the year.
But man, we've been burned before because this is the main problem with tvOS, especially if you are suckers like we are and buy a new one every single year when they, or not every single year.
every time they come out with a new one we buy them which means we have probably more experience than most people with setting up new apple tvs and re-signing into all your streaming apps is just like pulling teeth it's not like watching paint dry because it's painful like pulling teeth uh and every every five or so years they say we've solved it you're not going to have to do that again we're centralizing the sign in and we'll just get everyone to work and it'll just it'll sign you in everything will be synced and we're like this will be great and
And then we try it and it turns out two apps adopted and they're not the two apps that you use and you have to spend an hour signing in.
So try number three, four, automatic sign in API.
This time for sure.
I hope they do it because I hate signing in and I wish they would fix this.
And it has gotten better over time, mostly through them allowing you to use your phone and your own iCloud key chain to do it from your phone.
But still, that's so painful.
Please, please let this be the year that it really, really solves the problem because this is a big problem that needs to be solved.
Yeah.
But again, it depends on all the apps buying in and updating to use it.
And how, you know, how if you look around at the group of streaming service apps on the Apple TV.
And how much they love Apple.
Yeah.
How many of them seem like they care a lot about like fine details of user interface design.
And user experience.
Or like doing anything to help Apple, which competes with them with its own streaming service.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Like this is part of, you know, part of Apple's problem of basically declaring war on the entire world at various times is that like these companies don't want to help Apple out.
And so like something like this, like, yeah, it would be great if they all adopt this.
But I think odds are low.
Yeah.
I agree.
However, I disagree with you saying this was the one good feature.
This is good if you're someone who uses profiles.
We are not yet that family.
Maybe we will be.
You will be.
But the thing that really got me excited, even though this is not a need that I actually have myself, is permanently connect to any speakers.
So my understanding is if you had AirPods, if you had HomePods, you could say to the Apple TV some way, somehow, the particulars don't really matter.
I always want the Apple TV to play through this one or two HomePods.
And that was the only way you could do it.
If you had an AirPlay speaker, you could selectively, every time you start the Apple TV, go in and say, please use this AirPlay speaker for the purposes of playback.
But then as soon as the Apple TV suspends, it would disconnect or forget that.
And now, if we're to believe the keynote, you can say some way, somehow, always, always, always, when I'm playing something on the Apple TV, airplay the audio to such and such speaker.
And that's really exciting for the three people that need it.
I'm not even one of them, but I'm excited for all three of you.
All right.
If you'll permit me, which you won't, but I'm going to try, let's skip Mac OS, do Vision OS, and then let's come back to Mac OS and iPad OS, because those are the big ones.
So since you haven't interrupted me yet, Vision OS was done by Mike Rockwell.
We got some new experiences.
Happy birthday to Underscore.
There's a widgets app in Widgets Kit, so I'm sure Underscore is going to be very happy about that.
Additionally, it will remember where your apps are, including widgets, even across restarts.
And I think if I understood the implication here, I think what they're saying is if you have a room in the house where you're typically using Vision Pro or typically doing work or what have you, the way it works today is you can arrange where everything is and put a Slack window over to your left and Safari in front of you and pages to the right or what have you.
But...
The moment you take the Vision Pro off, that's largely forgotten.
Or at best, if you put it back on, they will appear relative to your head in roughly the same spots, but that may or may not be what you want.
And if I understand them right...
I think what this is saying is Safari will always be, or what did I say?
Pages will always be to the right of you about five feet away from that specific wall.
In other words, they are going to stay stationary.
I cannot talk.
They're going to stay stationary in 3D space, and that will be persistent across restarts, I think is what they're saying.
Yeah, at least the widgets are.
I don't know if the apps are doing that too.
I thought they said that, but maybe I misunderstood.
Yeah, I think they said the apps as well.
Although it's got to be like somewhat like constrained because if you're sitting at your desk, everything will be in the same place.
But if you're in the same room, but say at a different desk across the room, will that remember a second set of things?
Yeah, I'm not sure.
Like, because if you sat down at that desk, you turned it on all your windows are behind you at the other side of the room.
That's not useful.
Yeah.
But I mean, in principle, I like this in theory anyway.
Then we got Haley Allen to come up and talk about spatial stuff, including you can have spatial scene, spatial browsing in your web browser.
And apparently personas are dramatically better.
I believe the term they used was that the enhancements were striking.
Yeah, they look a lot better.
And they did look a lot better to me.
Uh, I haven't put the beta on my vision pro yet, but I will at some point we'll, I'll take a look.
Uh, also you can do shared movies or games for people in the same space, which is super cool for the one.
For all the families that has $35 headsets for every member of the family.
Exactly.
Exactly.
But that being said, I still think it's very neat.
They talked about some enterprise stuff, which for the three of us doesn't really matter.
But the short of it is that you can get a common pool of Vision Pro devices and you can kind of share them amongst team members.
I guess what Light Shield, whatever it's called and all that stuff, notwithstanding and, you know, the inserts, like I'm not sure how they're going to manage that.
But still, I dig it.
Yeah, I think what they said, too, it was very clear that you wonder, who is using the Vision Pro?
Because it doesn't seem like it's that many people.
And what we heard, we heard Mike Rockwell say, quote, hundreds of companies worldwide use Vision Pro for something.
Now, that could be that they've sold 200 of them.
That could be that they've sold them to 201 companies worldwide.
But there are – and we saw the same thing with Microsoft and HoloLens over the years.
There are –
interesting theoretical uses for specialized industries and stuff like that we just don't know like how many of them are actually doing it and in the case of hololens the answer was not many and then they shut it down because not enough people are doing it but you know a lot of these features are very clearly made for like okay a team has like one or two visions pro to test something on and they have 10 engineers who occasionally might have to use one or something you know so let's let's make it easier to share them between people
And that's great because this is still a very, very niche kind of specialized, extraordinarily expensive device.
So, you know, the launched version of the Vision Pro was atrocious at being shared between multiple people.
Now, they do still have the hardware problem, as Casey said, about like the light shield size, the straps, the lenses inside.
If you have prescription lens inserts, like they do still have all those problems of sharing those needs between people.
But at least...
they have made what appear to be substantial improvements in the realities and convenience of having multiple people share one or at least trade off or temporarily share one Vision Pro.
So, you know, they're finding some kind of market maybe for it.
It still seems like...
It's very optimistic, but they are adding stuff.
This is more than I expected to see in this release.
I kind of expected there to be almost nothing, like a TV OS level feature improvement to Vision OS.
And no, it's something.
They're still working on it.
There is stuff in here like the VR controller support and the 3D model viewing from Safari.
There's stuff like that that, like, I don't know why they couldn't have gotten that for the launch, but I'm glad it's here now.
I thought the 3D thing in Safari was there at launch.
What am I thinking of, Casey?
I'm not sure.
I think the difference is that you can do the 3D stuff within the web page, whereas previously you had to, like, download a USDZ or whatever the heck it is.
I might have those details wrong.
Yeah, because that kind of thing, that's huge.
One of the great things that is possible in the Vision Pro is basically online shopping for things like, how big is this lamp I want to put on my table over there that I'm seeing on some shopping website?
Will it actually be too big?
And you can take measurements, you can try.
But before, since basically nothing supports the Vision Pro out there in the content world,
you would see the web page and a lot of web pages now will have like, you know, view in 3D AR on your phone.
But those things never work on the Vision Pro.
So you have to like, even if you own a Vision Pro, you have to take it off, take your phone out and look in the little, you know, six inch AR view on your phone.
And so hopefully this kind of thing will broaden the compatibility of that kind of thing.
And maybe those like AR views that are in every web page now, maybe those will just work on Vision Pro now.
But if true, that'd be great.
That was their strategy with the GoPro and Insta360 thing.
It's like there is existing content out there that in theory should be useful on the Vision Pro, like all those webpages you just talked about that you have to use the phone AR.
Can we just change Vision OS so that stuff works?
I hope that's what they did with the 3D page stuff and not some new API because no one's going to do new API for just Vision Pro users.
It's not enough of them.
But surely for the GoPro and Insta360 and Canon video, these are existing video files made by existing cameras that are just out there that previously, because they weren't the super special Apple format, the Vision Pro just ignored them.
But now it's like, we'll take whatever data files you have.
You took these videos.
They exist in the world.
We should be able to show them to you, quote unquote, correctly, like in the 3D way that they're supposed to be shown in Vision Pro.
And now they can.
That's that's what they need to be doing with the Vision Pro.
Not telling everybody you should shoot all your video in the special format that looks best in Vision Pro, but just saying, what have you got?
What have you got out there that we think would look good in a headset?
We will learn how to read it.
And so it becomes useful.
Yeah, and then going back a half step to enterprise stuff, one of the things they said is that you can save all your settings to an iPhone.
And if I understand this right, what this means is, and I think this is applicable outside the enterprise, let's say that John comes to my house and puts on My Vision Pro and sets himself up as a guest user or what have you.
I think by some magic, you can or John can save that information either to my phone or presumably to his phone.
And then the next time he puts on My Vision Pro, it can beam that information, slurp that information up from his phone or wherever such that he doesn't have to do the whole...
eye calibration and all that.
Because if you're not familiar, if Erin uses My Vision Pro, which she does only under protest because she finds it very painful to use, like physically painful to use.
But nevertheless, if she puts it on, she does the thing where you look at the different dots and you pinch your fingers to kind of figure out where your eyes are and so you can get all that calibrated.
If she pulls the Vision Pro off at all,
and puts it right back on, guess what?
She has to do that whole dance over again.
And it's a pain in the butt.
And so hopefully this will work a lot better such that I can have her save her profile to somebody's phone and then it'll just load right up the next time.
Imagine if the Vision Pro had the smarts in it of a $10 smart scale that when you step on figures out who you are based on your weight.
Imagine if we had that.
How about just a giant menu of huge blurry images that you can't see correctly yet because it hasn't converged to just say, Casey, Aaron.
And you just look to the left for Casey and look to the right for Aaron.
Anyway, someday maybe we'll even get a setting syncing across macOS.
Can you imagine?
We don't have the technology for that today, but someday.
Well, they don't even, they have the iris ID or iID or whatever.
Yeah, I know, yeah.
Just use that.
They know who you are.
They did.
I think in Vision OS 2, they added like some kind of guest awareness and we talked about it on the show, but this seems like a step up and like to Casey's point, like it being portable on your phone is kind of,
great for an environment where it's like, okay, well maybe there's like a limit on the actual device, but if you have a bunch of employees in a company and they all have their phones, they just bring their settings with them, you know?
So they could go to like some other random headset that they've never worn before, but because the settings are on their phone that they carry with them, it will sync, you know, again, the enterprise type sort of,
vision os hoteling if you know what hoteling means i'm sorry yep yep yep yep i sure do all right uh i think we should probably now backtrack to tahoe because i certainly have plenty to say about ipad but if you'd rather reverse that gentleman i'm happy to do that in reverse order please let's do mac os because i think there'll be many future shows about mac os but i'll try to go semi quickly here i've had this is the one thing i wanted to get installed and it was slightly painful but i did get uh tahoe installed and i have tried it because i needed a lot of questions answers that were not answered in
thing so they said tahoe they're like oh it's beautiful the glassy water blah it's like glassy yes yes wait whatever there's tahoe for you um and they kind of glossed over a lot of stuff like and of course it's got the new design and before they started talking about some features most of which are cool but what do they mean that it has new design so number one item i just got done talking about how they didn't change the icons to be round in ios or anything else they're not all round they're all looks like the same squircle type shape um
Since, I believe, Big Sur on macOS, they've said, you know, you should make all your Mac icons be squircles.
But the squircle was actually like the standard Apple squircle was like inset within the square area that you're allowed to make an icon.
So you have like, you make icons of many different sizes in macOS.
Let's just say like 128 by 128.
That's your square.
And the Big Sur design was make a squircle inside the 128 by 128, but leave space all around it.
So your squircle is not 128 by 128.
Your squircle is substantially smaller than that because there's a significant white border around the entire thing.
But that was the standard.
Everyone gets squircle icons.
All those squircle icons are smaller than the full area of the thing.
And so when I saw that they hadn't changed the icon shape, I'm like, oh, well, that's good for macOS because they've already been on this Squircle standard.
But of course, not every app adopted Squircle shaped icons.
If you just had an old school icon, yours is 128 by 128, you can fill that whole 128 by 128 with content or you can make a little thing in the middle or you can make your icon shaped like a frog or whatever you wanted to do.
It was entirely up to you.
You can make any shape you want.
They recommended Squircle.
In Tahoe, they insist on Squircle.
Every Mac icon in Tahoe is in a round rec jail.
Doesn't matter what the icon is.
Pick any icon you want.
For example, Script Editor, the editor app for Apple Scripts.
I don't know if you can visualize that icon because no one probably uses it anymore because AppleScript is somewhat defunct, but not really.
But it is a squircle.
It's a white squircle with a little AppleScript scroll icon on it.
But like many past Apple icons, it has a tool leaning over the squircle.
And the tool is a pen.
And the pen is floating over the squircle on an angle and it breaks the bounds of the squircle.
The end of the pen goes up past the edge of the squircle.
What Tahoe does with that icon, it says, your icon's not a squircle.
You go to squircle jail.
So it takes the script editor icon and it shrinks it and it draws a round rect around the existing round rect and it makes the background gray.
So it's like the script editor icon on a round rect shrinks.
They insist that not only is your icon a squircle, but it is only a squircle.
You must not break the bounds of the squircle.
You go to round rec jail.
That's what it will do to your icons.
I have icons for two of my three Mac apps that are not squircles.
They're going to round rec jail.
which is not great.
Not great at all.
And to be clear, this is even if the app is not recompiled with the new SDK?
Oh, yeah.
No, this is the Finder doing this, remember?
Yeah, so all apps that don't get updated are going to have these gray jails around them?
Well, no, so here's the thing.
It's like, okay, but like I said...
If your app is following the Big Sur guidelines and it is a quote unquote a squircle, it's just a bitmap.
It's just like for the 128 by 128 size of your icon, it's a 128 by 128 bitmap.
It just so happens that there's a transparent background and your squircle is embedded in it or whatever.
But I put my non-recompiled straight off the app store squircle hyperspace app and I launched it.
And in the doc, it showed just like it does today.
It did not put a jail around it.
So somehow it knows that my icon is a legit non-boundary broken squircle.
And that's all I can tell right now is that it didn't it didn't put it in the jail.
So I'm not sure what what it's using to determine that.
But I know that my Mac App Store version of my app knows nothing about Tahoe.
But on Tahoe, it was not in jail.
So this is going to be a problem area.
And your icons that are put in this jail, they look terrible.
Apple's icons look terrible.
Your icons will look terrible.
It's not you don't want it.
I don't actually know the answer to this question.
We'll find out in future episodes.
But like, if I want to get out of this jail, what can I do?
Do I have to make my eye kind of squircle or can I preemptively squircle myself?
Can I make and I put myself in my own background and say, because then you at least get to pick your margins and like how you're centered in the squircle.
And then will you just allow me to display myself that way?
Setting aside the third thing, which is I still don't know the answer to this.
on mac os can i use icon composer to make an icon out of a series of layers that it will put the translucent glass treatment on blah blah blah can i do that or can i not do that and if i do do that can i say on all previous os's use the the my existing icon but when you're on the new os use this new one the icon perhaps surprisingly the icon situation is the most fraught on mac os
It's really annoying and absurd and one of many things in Tahoe that turns out to be way uglier than you think it's going to be, at least in this first beta.
All right, so we got icons covered.
Then the menu bar is now completely transparent, and I expected to absolutely grab and clutch my pearls when I saw this.
I actually don't think it's bad.
I think it's fine.
So we've been here before and past OSes where they tried to make it super-duper transparent, but something happens.
When you make it not there, like there is no background.
It is just it is like there's no border.
There's no nothing.
It's just like the word file edit.
Those are just sitting there.
There's no line underneath them.
There's no background behind them.
It is gone.
And what that is essentially is the naked robotic menu bar, because they're saying, what's the minimum we can ship?
Because if you don't like this, you could just do a desktop background that has a white stripe on the top of it.
Now, it's annoying if you change resolution a lot because that white stripe won't be the right thickness all the time.
But if you don't change resolution a lot, you could put a desktop background on that gives you a menu bar that is 100% white, which is the thing that was much more difficult to do back when they were like, oh, well, the menu bar will incorporate colors from your whole desktop background and pull them up into it and smear them across.
Like you couldn't, you could try to influence that by putting a white thing behind it, but it would pull colors from elsewhere on your background and still kind of make it weird.
But with this, with 100% clear,
Make the menu bar however you want.
And by the way, if you really can't stand this, if you turn on reduced transparency in Mac OS Tahoe, at least in the first beta, it will just give you a white menu bar again.
So I'm not a super big fan of this.
I think it's kind of dumb because it's not as dumb as the floating toolbar.
That is the winner of the worst decision that they've made in this redesign.
Um, but it does mean that the menu bar text now has to display legibly over whatever your background is, because remember, it's not doing anything to what's behind the text.
So you can, it's real easy.
And I would have done this if I was doing review to come up with a background that makes your menu bar a hundred percent illegible.
It's real easy.
Just put something in there with a bunch of words, for example.
I can put zebra stripes or dots.
And I don't know, I haven't actually tried it, so maybe they detect that and try to do something about it.
But to what end?
What is the benefit that I get from this?
Why do I need to see my desktop background behind the word file for the file menu?
And by the way, when you mount over it, a lozenge appears and smears it.
And so you actually, when you're mousing over it, it becomes more legible.
I guess it lets you see more of your desktop picture if you really want to see that top sliver.
Of course, they could also accomplish that by having a normal menu bar and having a desktop picture start at the bottom of the menu bar.
But then, of course, they have auto hiding menu bar that so they need to move the image up like this just seems like a change because they felt like doing it.
You've got the notch up there to taking some of the real estate.
But I don't know.
It doesn't bother me that much.
Like, honestly, completely gone.
And is, in my opinion, better than all of the almost completely gone things that they've done before.
I'd prefer it if it was just white or black because I don't think it is valuable to see my desktop image behind the words in the menu bar.
But because it is 100% clear, I have the option to not do that if I really care that much.
All right.
There's allegedly more menu bar and control center layout customizations.
They did a lot with changing the color of folders in Finder.
And additionally, you can add symbols.
That's a throwback, by the way.
Yeah, so the colors is a throwback.
When they introduced labels in macOS, or I believe it was System 6 for the Mac 2, I believe that the original implementation of labels, well, I'm not entirely sure.
I'm old and I remember.
I think they might have just changed the color behind the text.
But anyway, at some point in classic macOS, when you apply the label to a folder, it would color tint the folder icon itself.
And at some point in the Mac OS X history, they said, oh, we'll put that little circle next to it, you know, in the finder, like in list view or like it doesn't like tint the whole icon.
And coloring the icon is better.
It just it makes the folder stand out more.
It's easy to pick out.
It looks nicer.
So I heavily endorse this change because I think labels are a great feature.
And I think they're being minimized in recent years has really hurt them.
Um, I, and also I like adding the symbols to folders because this is the thing that there's apps that do this for you.
It will make a folder for you with an icon on it.
But like, because Apple changes the folder icon, like in every OS in subtle ways, you'd end up with this hodgepodge of icons.
If they, if they were made by like past versions of some app.
they all don't match each other now i hope what it's doing it's all just like programmatic and structured saying here's the symbol here's the label and whatever os you're using we'll take the color we'll composite them together uh i think this is one of the better changes in mac os i look forward to having colored folders with cool icons on them
cool oh and by the way on the menu bar and control center customization it's very much like um when you try to customize control center on ios or ipad os where you get that like the little widgets and the you know the dragging out the things only they've extended that they've significantly changed this portion of system setting so if you think system settings haven't changed at all it has
This one lets you like find things like what the search feature is enhanced to find the widget you want and then drag it from there to the menu bar, or at least hit a plus button in the menu bar and select from a thing of widgets.
It's, it's very janky and broken in the first beta, but you can see that they're doing something very different here.
And I think it will probably be better than the existing system of just scrolling through that giant list and trying to find places where things are.
But, uh,
It's hard to say in its current janky state, but it seemed to me that the search worked better and this is all new UI for dealing with the stuff in the menu bar.
I couldn't figure out how it worked at first glance, which is not a great endorsement of its usability and obviousness, but I'll give them some benefit of the doubt that they'll get this straightened out before it's released.
There's now more continuity with other devices.
You get live activities on macOS in the menu bar, which I am here for.
If they can make that work and it doesn't look dumb, I dig it.
Additionally, there's now a phone app in macOS, so you can place calls and whatnot.
They also spent a surprising amount of time talking shortcuts, including that you can run shortcuts automatically based on time of day, saving a file to a folder, connecting a display...
Uh, this reminds me of what was it control plane or something like that from many years ago, which may even still be a thing for all I know, uh, which was, I think the, the tagline, and we've talked about this on the show before, context, context aware computing, uh, which basically based on what wifi you're connected to and what displays you have connected, it would let you run different things.
This was many, many, many years ago now, but it was a great app.
There are intelligent actions where you can have it do things using their language model.
Additionally, Spotlight has gotten a serious overhaul.
You can do all sorts of different things.
You can browse your content, including most relevant files, and that also includes intelligent suggestions.
Recent apps, system actions, including PlayPodcasts.
Uh, you can send an email with parameters and they did a demo of how this works in app with, uh, our friend, uh, Gus Mueller's acorn, which was super cool to see.
Uh, so congratulations to Gus.
Uh, then they also have a clipboard history, which I never thought I'd see the day, but that's pretty cool too.
So I think they undersold that because it's like, Oh, and by the way, we have clipboard history built in the way it's implemented is weird.
Like it's, so it's in spotlight, which may not be where you expect it.
If you, uh,
figure out all the shortcuts it's like command space command four down arrow return like it's not that different than most of the clipboard managers you have i do like that it's built in but it's pretty hidden like i do wonder if people are going to discover i kind of wish that clip a clipboard manager was built in i don't know i guess you have to make it part of spotlight because where else would it be but
Yeah, so this is the biggest upgrade Spotlight has gotten in years.
It's not, it hasn't suddenly become Raycast or even Quicksilver, but it has gotten way more features than it used to have.
Like in that world of things like, you know, Alfred, Quicksilver, Raycast, what's the other one?
There's a bunch of... Launch bar.
Launch bar, yeah.
Yeah.
Some of those things just have a tremendous number of features are incredibly extensive.
Again, those are third party apps.
Those are for like the pro users.
Spotlight is what most people use.
It's an okay app launcher.
Now it's also an okay clipboard manager and okay action thingy.
Like it's like, I, this is even just using it for two seconds.
Like, oh, this is better.
Like they've, they've made it better because I,
There's obvious prior art that they should copy from, and they did.
And they made simplified versions of that stuff without as many features and tweaks or whatever.
But I'm so glad this year.
It's so good that I'm actually debating whether I'm going to stop using Quicksilver and start using that instead for most of my things.
I think I'll still stick to Pacebot because I'm a little bit more sophisticated user of clipboard history.
But having just gone through the years-long effort to get almost everyone else in my family to use clipboard managers almost all the time because they're so useful, it'll be so great that I'll be like, look, don't even worry about if you have PaySpot on your new Mac.
It's just built in.
Yeah, and keep in mind that's also – having all this functionality built into the Spotlight UI and the Mac, some of it appears to be available on iPadOS as well.
I don't know if we know any details about how much of it yet.
But that's like step one to getting on the iPad as well.
And then you have clipboard history on the iPad, which was never possible in a good way before.
It should be on the phone too, is it?
Do you know?
Maybe.
You have the phone OS called.
Did you pull down Spotlight?
Is there anything that looks like clipboard history in there?
No.
I'm looking at an iPad.
I don't see squat, but I probably am not understanding how to activate it.
I don't know what to tell you.
Yeah, I mean, this might be a Casey issue, and maybe it's there, and I just don't realize it.
No, the UI and the iPhone look exactly like it did before, just now everything's slower and glossy.
Yeah, I mean, this is the thing.
We've talked about this before.
Clipboard history should be across all their platforms.
It should be a baseline feature across all their platforms, and I'm glad they added to some places, but it's kind of weird in the year where they're unifying everything that it's not everywhere.
But hey, but that's step one.
Step one is get it on any of their platforms, and then slowly maybe they'll add it to the other ones.
all right and then we continue on there's a games app there's some stuff about metal 4 which i could not possibly care less about so john unless you care although on the metal 4 thing two things on that one i've briefly seen people go by saying that this is a change on the level of direct x10 or open gl3 and that it actually is a breaking change from the previous versions of metal presumably for good reasons not a big deal unless you're a game developer or someone working on a game engine but there's that and the frame interpolation we talked about that when we were talking about dlss um
I think in the context of the switch or whatever, um, for years and years, gaming cards have all had their own alphabet soup technology that would first upscale your image intelligently to make it look better.
And that eventually upscale that and also add frames that didn't exist like synthesized frames.
And we talked about that on past shows metal is a little bit behind here and that they're, they already has some kind of smart upscaling.
And I think this is their first frame interpolation thing where it will generate frames for you.
Um,
surely it is not state-of-the-art surely it is not best in class but it is a thing that apple needs to have so every time i look at anything having to do with metal i'm like apple's pretty good at this it's a shame they don't do anything else with games but like metal is actually good if somehow they could convince the entire industry to make games based on metal it's got pretty good performance and
And the only thing holding it back is that it doesn't have the world's best game developers pushing and pushing it like all the other, you know, DirectX and Sony's APIs and everything and all those, the video card drivers for Windows.
Like there's that whole ecosystem that is driving the rest of the industry forward.
And Apple's here all by itself, plugging away and all by themselves.
They're doing a pretty good job making a really good API that almost nobody uses and almost nobody cares about.
There's always a little bit behind everybody else.
All right.
And then this is when Vision OS actually happened, which we already spoke about.
And then we get to iPad OS.
And the rumor was that this was the year.
We did it, Joe.
I think that's the second time I've made this joke in as many weeks.
But nevertheless, we finally got functional iPad multitasking, or so they claim.
I was very skeptical.
I was giving my side eye, side eye.
I was so skeptical.
Or my side eye was giving side eye.
I was so skeptical.
But I got to tell you, I think we might have done it.
I think this might be it.
And I immediately put iPadOS 26 on my iPad because I'm a fool and I don't listen to my own advice.
But also because the iPad, like I said earlier, is not a critical device for me.
This is great.
There are a lot of problems with this beta in a general sense, especially animations and the whole liquid glass stuff is not great, or whatever they're calling the design system.
A lot of that is not squared away yet, but multitasking is excellent.
I am loving the little bit of time I've spent with it.
I don't know why it took...
10 years, whatever it's been, 15 years to finally just say to us, you know what?
Maybe we should mimic the Mac.
And I'm stealing some of your thunder here, John.
You know, what they really did was the Bono thing that we just talked about.
This is like stories of surrender.
Finally, they just said, give up windows that you can resize and move around.
Guess what, Casey?
You are the janitor.
Yeah.
Steve Jobs derisively said, oh, you got to manage your own windows, making you the janitor.
Sometimes you just want to move and resize the stuff on your screen in a series of windows.
And they tried for so long to come up with something better.
And I think they did come up with a whole bunch of better things.
with limited functionality but the moment you want to do something that doesn't fit within of the one of those paradigms you're into this weird world of like playing this game of figuring out okay within these constraints and within the things that it's possible to do now i have to bargain okay i can have two apps side by side i can have one slide over and i can have this image here like it's like just at a certain point it's like give up and use windows stories of surrender
like like let us have windows with window widgets and it's so funny to me how they you know we talked about this last time of like that they did not want to to have any kind of sort of always visible window control because that's against the ipad paradigm and people are like well but they've got those three dots in the in the top center of the thing i'm like oh but that's like the three dot menu uh you know and that is sort of like overlaying your content but it's so tiny and it's not the same as having like always visible things and ability to arbitrarily resize and move and you know what apple did with this thing like okay
We're going to take three dots.
We're going to move them to the upper left corner, which already is a big change because having them dead center in the top is like, it's saying, oh, this is just a little, just a little thing at the top of your window.
Just ignore it.
It's not, it's overlaying your corner, but it's not a big deal.
Moving it to the top left.
It's like, okay, now there's a dedicated spot for this.
and make the three dots a little bit bigger and put them in a capsule which is a trend by the way that i do like with this new design system that basically everything in the title bar area is has a capsule outlined around it everything everywhere has a capsule yeah it's not a high contrast capsule but it's they're not just like like ios 7 just like line art floating in space and good luck to you figuring out what's a button and what's not but anyway they put the three dots in the upper left hand corner and now when you go over the three dots you know what they turn into freaking mac os stoplight widgets
It's like, yes, there you go.
You did it.
You did it.
There's essentially a title bar.
I mean, at the same time, Mac OS has slowly been losing its title bars.
Now iPad OS has half a title bar.
You can drag windows around.
You can close, minimize, and expand them with the stoplight widgets.
You can resize them from the edges.
You can put them wherever the hell you want.
The very first demo they did, the very first demo the person did who was doing this, is she took a window.
She dragged it halfway off the screen.
She's like, you know what?
There's a thing you can do with windows.
You drag the window so it's halfway, but you can't see half the window.
It's like sometimes, sometimes that's what you want to do.
Maybe for two seconds.
Maybe you just care about things in the left edge.
I do it all the time on macOS.
It's a thing you can do when you have control over the windows.
You can literally put them anywhere you want, make them any size you want.
Hallelujah.
Now, I don't know how good this is going to be because people are saying like, oh, you just made a worse Mac.
Like, why not just use a Mac at that point?
Like, but they didn't like, because from my understanding,
all the other modes are still there.
They demoed one of them.
They're like, look, you just want everything to be a full screen.
Everything's full screen.
You don't have to deal with any of this stuff and you can still do splits.
And I think stage manager is also still there.
So if you like that, you can do that.
But also there's this mode, which is take a bunch of windows, put them wherever the hell you want.
Now, maybe there's still limits.
Casey, can you tell me if you like 10 windows, does it start yelling at you?
What's the limit?
I haven't gotten that.
I mean, I can futz around while we're talking here.
Um, how does it behave with a hundred windows open?
Um,
Yeah, all it said, the phrase used in the presentation was, even more Windows.
It doesn't say how many.
I'm sure it varies by model and by how much RAM it has, too.
Because keep in mind, one of the things that has kept iPadOS until recently from having more advanced multitasking is, as we've discussed long ago, iOS has no swap file for the virtual memory system.
And so...
But iPadOS does now.
Right.
Well, it does, but I think it's only for certain apps like Photoshop to try to use.
I don't think they actually try to use it for apps in general.
I don't remember where that was lying.
But anyway, the technology is there.
I would be surprised if they just don't start using it for the whole.
Look at this.
I believe the iPad Pro now has more than 8 gigs, right?
Doesn't it?
But they have certain models where it's, like, if you get the one terabyte iPad, then you have more RAM.
Then you get, like, 16 or whatever.
Yeah, but whatever it is.
So, like, there is enough resources now to run a bunch of iPads.
I mean, the funny thing is that, like, you know, you were saying how, like, hallelujah, you can move a window partly off screen.
Like, for me, my, like, oh, my God moment was when they showed live window resizing of an iPad app.
And it's, like, it's so funny.
Like, we're celebrating these...
Yeah, things that happened in macOS in 2001.
Yeah, or, like, you know, 30... Yeah, like, these, like, 30-year-old things in computing that, you know, that happened on desktop and laptops.
Like, we're celebrating them on the iPad finally coming in 2025.
Because it evolved from a...
It evolved from a fixed resolution device that became a one or two different fixed resolution devices that became a single fixed resolution iPad that became one or two different resolution iPads that became, well, size classes that are just like creeping up slowly on.
Look, just let people resize Windows.
And like on macOS, you can't arbitrarily resize windows.
Some windows can't get any smaller than a certain size because it will look bad.
So the developer said, no, you can't make this window any smaller because then it won't work layout wise.
Like you have control over it and you have control over how the space is used when you resize it.
But...
It's kind of been like growing pains of the historical baggage of iPad OS is that it didn't start as a thing where people could take your window and make it any size they want within your constraints.
It was the other way, which is like there's only one there's one iPad and it comes in one resolution and that's what you designed for.
And they're kind of paying for that now with all the apps that are going to have to that are probably going to be pretty janky arbitrarily resized until or unless the developers update them.
Well, because that's the other thing, like because iPadOS didn't start out having resizable windows, most of the multitasking versions so far, if you had like an older app that wasn't updated for the for whatever the current system was, it just wouldn't be resizable or it wouldn't be split screenable or whatever.
So we don't know yet how many of them are still left.
Is it going to try to wedge those into the system or not?
What's going to happen if an app was designed for full screen on an iPad that doesn't have that big of a screen like an iPad mini?
And you try to resize it there because they said this works on the mini.
So how is that going to be handled?
One of the challenges that iPadOS has always had is that as they implement these different multitasking things,
iPad apps just aren't updated that often by a lot of companies or not supported at all or barely supported or they ship one once and then Google Docs style, they take forever to update to the latest stuff like two years later or whatever.
And again, that's partly because of Apple declaring war on everybody ever, but also just the economics of maintaining a really good iPad app are difficult for most companies to justify.
So
Of all this stuff, I hope it works.
I hope people support it enough to make this stuff work.
That being said, I'm glad that they are going in the direction of just make multitasking work like it does in the Mac.
Because there seems to be this...
almost like this condescending view of what users can and can't understand about computing.
And they've tried over years, you know, the iPad has been a huge success in usability for computing novices.
That, you know, you have this simple device, you can't fill it up with malware, it's easy, you just go into an app, when you're done, you hit the home button or whatever now, and you go back and, you know, nice and easy.
And then they've always tried to keep that simplicity over there while then adding special hidden gestures or things to enter multitasking modes.
And they've tried to make those multitasking modes really simple over time, but they haven't really succeeded.
They've been very difficult to use, actually.
They've been both hard for novices to figure out how they look and work and how to close windows and stuff.
And they've been limiting to power users who always want a more Mac-like windowing experience.
Now they're saying, you know what?
For the users who want it to be simple and full screen, that's still going to work that way.
Great.
That was always an option.
And then for people who want to have multiple things on screen...
We're just going to make it work like Macs and PCs have worked for decades.
Because you know what?
It turns out no one needs anything in the middle.
You don't need like the people who are novices who don't know how to use multitasking windowing systems.
They'll use it the regular way, the full screen way.
And for everyone else, just give them the version of this that exists everywhere else in the computing world.
So I'm glad they finally got rid of that terrible middle that just sucked for all sides of this equation.
I think some people still do like the middle.
I think the middle should still exist.
But I think the reason the middle got so much flack is because there was nothing above it.
And now that there is something above it, I think it's like, well, if people like stage manager or people like split view,
Let them use it because above that is the thing that gives you much more flexibility.
So I don't I think the middle is perfectly fine now that there's something above it.
Yeah.
I mean, the other thing to consider, too, is like how different of an experience is it when using it with a trackpad versus when you're using it by by touch?
Yeah, they have the new cursor that looks like an arrow, not a Mac arrow because it doesn't have a stem, but it's an arrow for more precise control.
Basically, it's recognizing, look, you have an M4 iPad Pro and you have an M4 MacBook Air.
Well, you can't get them with the same amount of RAM unless you get maybe the one terabyte one, but they're basically the same hardware.
And the MacBook Air is so much more capable.
You could have so many things on the screen, do so many things at once.
It's a Mac, right?
Yeah.
But hardware-wise, why shouldn't the iPad be able to do a bunch of that stuff?
So now a bunch of the limitations have been removed.
I mean, we can get to the next one, which is background tests.
Oh, you're exporting from Final Cut Pro?
Hold on, hold on.
So first of all, you asked me how many apps can I get open.
Now, I have an 11-inch iPad Pro from 2022, I think.
uh it was before they got super duper thin um and i got like seven apps open at once but given that it's an 11 inch screen it's useless at that many like not because of speed but because i just don't have the real estate to really support that many now people can make like apps that are useful as like a widget size experience you know what i mean like an app that is just like a mini player for music for example
Right.
I mean, and the other thing that was interesting was during installation or upgrade or whatever, it asked me in so many words, I didn't have the presence of mind to take a screenshot, but it's also in settings.
If you go into settings and multitasking and gestures, it asked me roughly the same thing during setup.
And what it says now in settings is at the very top of the screen, you have three different options, each of which has a thumbnail and whichever one you choose then animates.
Your choices are full screen apps.
Always use full screen app.
Let me try that again.
Always use apps full screen and swipe home to switch between them.
The middle option is windowed apps, which is what I have selected.
Resize and arrange multiple windows in a single space to multitask with ease.
Learn more, which is a link.
And then finally, stage manager, arrange windows across multiple groups for a focused multitasking experience.
Learn more.
And so you do have all three modes for sure.
I suspect that stage manager is just like a limitation or an alternate version of the windowed apps thing.
Do you still have slide over?
Uh, let me see.
no not now as far as i can tell i'm gonna miss that because i use that a lot that's one of the middle modes that i use which is full screen video but with a slide over uh thing that i pull out from the side that is extremely useful to me and i'll be sad if i can't still do that but you probably can it's probably just buried in there somewhere maybe i'm not sure um
again, just very briefly, super digging it, super duper digging it.
And it still doesn't, I mean, there's still plenty of things that I can't do on my iPad that I can do on my Mac, but this makes doing a lot of things much, much easier because so often I wanted to have either two windows or, which I could do, you know, with like a split screen or whatever and,
But oftentimes three windows, which was effectively impossible.
You could do like a slide over dance on top of split screen, which was not fun.
And granted, it's been an hour that I've actually had to play with this.
But so far, I am super into it.
And I am overjoyed that they finally just threw their hands up and said, you know what, if you want to have window management, then have freaking window management and shut up about it.
And I am so excited.
So that being said, I think I interrupted you earlier.
You were starting to try to talk about long-running stuff.
So do you want to tell us about that?
Yeah, that was the limitation of people who complained about that you get this pro-level app and when you're exporting your Final Cut project, you have to leave Final Cut in the foreground or the export will end.
So they added background tasks that aren't immediately killed and aren't super limited.
And they incorporated it into the live activities.
It's still kind of limited.
It's like, look, every app on the Mac, if you make it do a thing and then leave that app to go to another app and make that app do a thing and leave that app to go.
All those apps just keep doing their stuff.
There are various process controls and determinations from the developer and the OS about what cores they run on and so on and so forth.
But the Mac way is not that, oh, when I clicked away from an app, the thing that it's doing like stops or isn't allowed to run.
That's not the Mac way.
But the iPad way was like,
Oh, if you want to do anything in the background, beginning because of the history that came from a phone type device and a phone type OS with extremely limited resources.
But here we are today with incredibly powerful iPad pros.
And it's ridiculous that they couldn't do an export of Final Cut Pro in the background or something.
So now they can, but they expose it through live activities as essentially it's kind of like the download list in Safari.
Here are the things that are running in the background because previously there's been zero of those.
And now apps can put them there.
I'm not sure that's a scalable solution.
There's no place in macOS where you get a pull-down menu of all the things all the apps are doing.
It's like, those are the apps.
They're all doing stuff.
Any app can do anything.
It's a Mac app.
And an iPadOS is like, if an app wants to do a thing and not be killed when it's not in the foreground, it needs to do this special thing and will put you in this special list, it's a step in the right direction.
Put it that way.
I still think it's kind of like a baby step.
I still think it's weird and awkward to...
coalesce the the it's it's almost like a miniature version of activity monitor that they only expect there to be four things but like have you ever looked at activity monitor on your rack on your mac and see how many things are running and there's that many things running in your iPad too they just don't show them to you but from your apps like they can elevate something important they're doing if they're doing an export and you know and Final Cut Pro this app is now rendering this thing and that will appear in live activity so I think it is a
It's a good start.
I worry a little bit that the interface is not scalable if that list gets very large.
But it's one more limitation knocked down.
And by the way, we fault iPadOS for taking so long to do the obvious dumb thing.
I give them some grace to have tried to find a better way.
They just did not succeed.
And so it took a long time.
They took a long time to recognize we don't have any better ideas than Windows and, you know, moving them around in Windows or whatever.
I mean, they can have a better idea about how to implement those Windows, and we'll see if they did that.
But they took a long time to finally surrender.
And they have, and we'll see how it works.
I haven't actually tried it.
I think there may be some awkwardness to the way they've implemented the things, but their heart is in the right place.
I think this will satisfy a lot of people who are frustrated by the limitations of iPadOS.
Not all of them, because there's still tons of stuff that a Mac can do better.
And it is a little bit weird that you can buy an iPad for more than a Mac and it is less capable.
But, you know, one WDC at a time.
Indeed.
But nevertheless, I am super excited about all this.
The Files app got updated.
I never use the Files app, probably because it's a pile of crap.
Maybe it's less of a pile of crap now.
It's more Finder-like.
Colored folders, you've got a list view with disclosure triangles.
I snarkily tweeted that
Turns out the Mac has some good ideas when it comes to multitasking.
Then they showed the files app, and I was like, turns out the Mac has some good ideas about file management too.
List view with folders with disclosure triangles and labels.
Imagine!
It's still a little bit Fisher-Price-y with the big icons and the preview things or whatever, but the files app getting some love is endorsed.
And open with, just basic functionality we take for granted on the Mac, finally coming in dribs and drabs to the iPad, I think is just a thumbs up.
This is the cleanest win of all of the...
sections of the keynote, in my opinion, is the iPad section.
Yeah, I mean, all the iPad stuff was a complete win.
And then additionally, apparently this was the get podcasters like us to stop whining portion of the show because they also said, hey, you know, occasionally people want to record content creators want to do stuff on the iPad.
So you know what we should do?
We should allow for you to have local capture of microphones and video and then be able to share that using our fancy new files app.
So hypothetically, I could and maybe I'll do this one day just to mess with Marco and
I could take my setup and connect it to my iPad, and we could record ATP, or I could record ATP on my iPad.
Imagine that.
It would be incredible, except maybe for Marco, especially if it failed.
Please, for the love of God, don't do this.
We will see.
But anyways, it is a theoretical possibility, and I am really, really excited about that.
Because again, as we've all said so many times,
These are such incredibly powerful devices that have been neutered by software for so long.
And now there are still problems here and there, but in so many ways, this seems like it is so, so much better now.
And I am really, really excited for it.
Again, in my very brief experience, it's been excellent so far.
Granted, it's first beta, so everything is slightly broken, but that's the way first betas always are.
I am so incredibly excited for all of this.
iPad, two extraordinarily enthusiastic thumbs up.
Oh, rewinding slightly, I forgot to mention this in the macOS section, although I think applies to more than just macOS.
Another thing that is baffling to me about this, the new redesign across all their OSs is...
their their decision on how to handle sidebars um i think it's on ipad os as well for the past i don't know probably the past decade if you've looked at any of the apple platforms they have in their in their drive to add more to to leave more room for your content they've been shoving everything out to the side so like the the title bar on the mac used to be a place that was controlled by the os and apps didn't draw anything there and suddenly like well but what if that's not true
What if the three window widgets draw, but there actually is no title bar and actually the app can draw stuff up there all the way to the edge of the window.
And same thing with sidebar.
So like, well, why don't we just let the sidebar, like everything runs full bleed to the edge.
And there's a thin dividing line between the sidebar and the content.
And if the window has rounded corners, guess what?
Your sidebar also has rounded corners because your sidebar runs full bleed edge to edge.
In this new design, they've decided what the sidebar is.
is a rounded rectangle that is inset with a margin around it, with a border around it.
And that rounded rectangle sidebar is floating on top of and within the larger window.
And the window widgets themselves are like part of the floating sidebar thing.
Like, like what I'm saying is there, there's a border there.
Like they left space between the inner rounded rectangle and the outer rounded rectangle.
I'm like,
What's that space good for?
It looks visually awkward.
Nothing can draw there.
Like your content doesn't appear there.
Not that it would be useful even if it did, but it doesn't.
And it adds this little extra ring around all sidebars of slightly different texture, slightly different color background, because again, the contrast between them is very low, but it's there, it's visible.
I'm not sure I dig this look on any of the OSs, but especially not on macOS, because I feel like you're taking away pixels from content
for no reason kind of like the floating toolbar but like literally there's nothing there maybe maybe if you had like a full bleed image and like preview and you had this sidebar anyway you all see it in xcode because xcode's got a sidebar and guess what it's a floating around rectangle that floats on top of the window that incorporates the window where it is and it looks real weird so you should fire up xcode when you get this and see how you feel about it and then the second thing is
The new design on macOS in particular, you know, rounded corners and everything heavily rounded corners that in various places is not harmonious with the placement of the window widgets because they got to work on that.
But here's the thing.
Not all Macs have rounded corner screens.
In fact, most Macs, well, most desktop Macs do not have rounded corners.
Who uses those?
Many.
I mean, on an M4 MacBook Air, I think not all the corners are round.
I have it next to me, but it's not open right now.
Like, some screens have square corners.
The Pro Display XDR has square corners.
But the rounding of the corners in Tahoe is so rounded that it makes me wonder, like, if there's a Pro Display XDR successor, is it going to have, like, one-inch radius rounded corners, like, in the hardware?
Classic macOS, and the original Mac, they would just black out the pixels that are there in the corner, and maybe they'll do that in future OSs.
But it is weird on macOS to see such heavily rounded corners and it's unharmonious with the sharp squared edges that are on some edges of Mac screens, especially a third party screen, of course.
But some first party screens are still like that as well.
So I'm not entire.
I mean, I know why they did it.
It's trying to everything is rounded.
Everything has to be harmonious, but it makes me fear that they're going to take away those corner pixels because it's a lot of them.
It's not like Mac windows already rounded.
Right.
And, you know, the Mac menu bar used to be rounded with blacking out the pixels and stuff.
But but this is a much bigger radius than it was.
I have some concern about that.
Then we briefly got a little bit of talk about developers, Foundation Models Framework, like we had said.
You can get from it plain text or structured Swift data, which we saw a little bit about in State of the Union, which we're not going to get to today.
App Intense with Visual Intelligence.
We've got Swift and Swift UI that's allegedly getting better.
The aforementioned Icon Composer app, Xcode.
They talked about how it's got built-in support for ChatGPT.
And other models of our choosing, which sounds really great.
The developer betas did come out earlier today.
And then we had the ending song, which, again, I really wanted to hate, but I actually thought was kind of amusing.
So this is actually the ending song, I think, is a good example of how they can walk the line.
They're not actually doing anything to improve their relationship with developers and stuff, to be clear, right?
They're not actually changing any policies.
They're certainly not having a dialogue, reaching out.
They're not doing any of those things.
So let's be clear about that.
But is there something they can do
to be nice to developers that is not, I'm not going to say not substantive, but like is not one of like, no, they're not actually solving the problem.
And the choice to do this song at the end was a good example because here's what it is.
But like the lyrics in the song were singing positive reviews as written on the app store.
They just pulled positive reviews from the app store about apps and put them to music and put them in a song.
I presume these are real app store reviews.
The apps themselves are real.
So I recognized a whole bunch of them.
Okay.
Here's why this was a good choice, at the very least.
It was positive things about apps.
They were third party apps.
So Apple is essentially has someone singing the praises of third party apps and does not center Apple in any way.
It wasn't singing about how great Apple is for having an app store, how great Apple is for giving you this opportunity.
It was 100% customer, third party developer, love fest.
These customers love these apps and Apple is nowhere to be seen.
That sentiment is an example of them doing something that is potentially beneficial to the relationship between Apple's developers.
Not something important or big like, you know, actually speaking with their mouth words and reaching out and saying we understand you and changing policies.
None of that.
But if they had made this the opening instead of the F1 ad, I think it would have put me in a better mood for the whole rest of the thing.
So I give the ending song a big thumbs up, not because it was just an amazing song or amazingly fun or whatever, but because it showed happy customers and happy developers and did not center Apple.
I enjoyed it, even though I didn't want to, but I did.
Yeah, I'm with you, Casey.
I'm like, oh no, this is going to be stupid.
But you know what?
It was fine.
It was fun.
I enjoyed it.
Imagine if one of your apps was one of those apps that got shown.
My reviews are not that kind.
I think they pick ones that didn't have a lot of words because they had to fit into lyrics.
Anyway, it was nice.
Slightly rewinding a bit for the Xcode stuff.
I know we're not talking about State of the Union now, but like...
it's worth mentioning that basically the swift assist feature that didn't ship last year now has come back with a vengeance and is even better if the demos are to be believed so didn't want to leave you hanging on that but uh that's a thing and they saved it towards the end and i know that's mostly state of the union stuff we'll talk about it next week but i give a thumbs up to them not giving up on swift assist but instead sort of essentially regrouping and coming up with
will ship for real i installed xcode and have launched it and i maybe i just didn't activate that part or don't know how it works or actually i think i tried it and had some kind of error so i guess the jury's still out of whether it works because it's we're only hours in here and i haven't actually tried it but um if their demos are to be believed swift assess lives and it seems like uh even better than what they announced last year
Yeah, I'm really excited to play with it, but it appears, as far as I can tell, to only be on Tahoe, which I don't plan to install anywhere for any reason anytime soon.
So I probably won't be able to play with it for a while, unfortunately.
But in principle, it looked great.
Yeah, the phrase they used was, quote, we've expanded our vision for Swift Assist.
which is okay great i mean it's so far that yeah they did it does it does more stuff than it used to and you know just like the other ones a little help from my friends get the apple gets by with a little help from its friends because you know if their models can't do code stuff hey chat gpt can you help out here anthropic can you can we want to use you have good coding models
I think that's a smart move.
I think it's like, stop.
That's an example of, I mean, either desperation or humility to say, we do not have the best coding model.
When we're going to add this feature to Xcode, let's just have a pop-up menu and say, use Claude, use Sonnet, use ChatGPT, or use Apples, and then let people pick which one they want.
Yeah, I mean I wonder if maybe this is – I mean I kind of expected the timeline to be longer on this.
But I wonder – we heard six months ago or whatever that like Craig Federighi was making everybody open to the idea of using other people's third-party models when they can make the best product with those.
This seems like doing exactly that.
And I think given Apple's position in AI right now, which is –
pretty weak still and not super competitive with any of the you know frontier models for almost anything that's the right move like for things like that you know obviously like for on device local processing Apple's great at that
They probably will remain class leading for the foreseeable future at that because that does everything Apple's really good at.
They're really good at power efficiency.
They're really good at like single computing device excellence.
Like how can we make the best computer, the best phone, the best tablet?
Like they're really good at that.
They're not so good at like these giant big data problems where you need like cutting edge AI researchers doing, you know, the making the most smart things on these huge servers like that's much less their style, you know, and things like that have been less their style forever.
So I can see Apple always being really good at local models.
And so in the time that may be forever, but in the current time where they're not good at the really big frontier size models that run on big servers, partnering with other companies and creating a platform for the other companies to run their stuff in a way that helps Apple's apps and Apple's customers' apps, that's the right move.
This could be the way they do things forever.
Maybe they will never lead in big AI models.
That might be okay if they do a good enough job being the platform.
We'll see how it goes over time.
But for now, this was the right move.
And I'm glad they finally are really doing what appears to be a pretty big job of finally embracing that strategy.
I feel like Google and OpenAI are also ahead in small models that run on device because they're just models are better at everything, including their little models.
Google especially is always touting how small they can get their model.
I mean, that's been Apple's whole thing, too, about Apple intelligence.
It's been a struggle for them to get their models down to the point where they can fit on their phones, which is part of why they expanded the RAM.
And even with the expanded RAM, it's been a struggle to get the models down to that level.
um but yeah google and open ai have been also working on that for their small models especially google for the little models they can run on device so apple is not even in the lead on small models but they have great hardware and if they can expose that great hardware to other people's models i think in this the swift assist thing i think these are all server models like they're going out to the server for for claude and and uh chat gpt they're not they don't have like the local well i don't know i haven't looked at it that much but um
i don't know if those companies have optimized their models to run on on the phone or whatever or on locally on a mac we'll see but the fact that you have that option at all is like now it just comes down to like how good is the interface and jury's still out on that i tried to use it and like i said it failed and the demos i've seen in state of the union that we'll talk about i'm not entirely sure they've nailed the interface but i don't think anybody has at this point with these kind of like help me code along type of things uh what i can say is they put in a lot of work
they've, they've added a lot of UI for this and it's fairly sophisticated UI.
So that extra, essentially the extra year working on Swift assist seems to have paid dividends, assuming you can get it to work.
I did open up, uh, I did open up hyperspace on Tahoe in the Xcode beta.
It would not build.
So that doesn't bode well, but I'll figure it out.
Overall impressions, though.
I mean, for me, the iPad stuff was the star of the show for me.
I am really, really, really excited about it.
As stated earlier, I'm tentatively excited about the new design changes.
I don't love it at all right now, but I really do think they're heading in the right direction.
Uh, everything else was, it was good.
I mean, there were no particular surprises, but it was good.
And I'm looking forward to the, to, to getting to work on it, even though I'm also kind of dreading it.
And, uh, I'm very excited to see what WWDC brings, which by the way, I think, and I haven't looked into this, but it sounds like they may have dropped all the videos already.
Is that right?
Do we know?
Couldn't tell.
I know why people are saying that because I saw it in the developer app too, but I didn't try downloading like one of the later ones.
All right.
Well, no worries.
Either way, overall, I think this was certainly not my favorite WWDC, but it was decent.
It was especially good given how in the doldrums all of us felt and kind of still feel.
But I thought this was pretty good.
Let's start with Marco and then end with John.
Overall impressions and or final thoughts.
I mean, yeah, I wasn't expecting any changes to the developer relationship and we didn't get any.
But we got what we hoped we would get, which is a huge upgrade to the on-device AI APIs and a system redesign.
The system redesign, I think we were all going into it like a little bit like, you know, I don't know about this.
And I think it has proven to be warranted that the system redesign,
really goes very far in a certain very opinionated direction.
It's going to hopefully have some revision over the course of the summer, and we are indeed going to have to do a ton of work in our apps to adopt it.
It's going to be an incredibly busy summer just to keep up with the redesign, not even considering all the new APIs and stuff like that, just getting our apps to...
you know fit in not look broken and not look old with the new system design is going to take the entire summer and that's all we're going to be able to do for most of us if we if we care about design at least so that that's going to be a lot and there's going to be a lot of drama over the summer as the design is hopefully tweaked if it's not god help us all but if it is hope if it is tweaked uh or you know maybe
Maybe things like tab bars might become usable.
Right now, they're definitely not.
Please don't use the new tab bar in your apps unless it really changes.
But anyway, it's going to be a very busy summer.
They delivered what appears to be very, very strong technical advancements in ways that will give a lot of us a lot to do even after we fix the design.
So we're going to be busy.
And I think I'm very much looking forward to what I'm going to be able to do with these new APIs.
They look, again, very promising.
I think I can do some really cool features with them once I finish all my design work.
john i think uh wwc keynotes at least maybe not all the sessions but keynotes are kind of at the point where uh the same point that iphones are where basically everything leaks like you got all this information ahead of time uh it's almost i think in past years they've said basically like oh someone who had access to the deck here's all the things they're going to talk about so there's not so many surprises these days but it's in the details to see what they're going to be like um
I was most pleasantly surprised by iPadOS.
I like the direction it's going.
All the minor details, not minor details, but all the nitty gritty about the technical stuff that's in the sessions, that's always fun.
I always enjoy that.
Everything just always gets better.
We'll talk about that in future episodes, I'm sure.
But for the keynote stuff, the redesign, which was sort of the star of the show as far as I was concerned,
With the exception of the terrible tab bars, which I think are terrible for additional reasons above and beyond the animation and the appearance, just like conceptually, I think it's a bad idea.
I think I'm okay with the redesign on iPhone and iPad.
Granted, I haven't installed there, but in all the things that I've seen, I'm like, yeah, it could have been worse.
Like, you know, again, tab bar aside, everything else I think will be fine.
On macOS, first of all, I would say, again, if I were writing a review, this is the most significant redesign of macOS since Aqua.
i don't think it's even close i they it is so like if you look at for example from 10.15 to 10.2 you're like oh this is a big change but they did it in little steps we didn't really have this big discontinuity of like
totally new thing like they slowly they got rid of the pinstripes they got rid of the translucency they got rid of the color they darkened it up they added a little bit leather they removed the leather they lightened it up they darkened it up they smoothed it out they had a little bit of vibrancy like small steps over years and years this is a break this is we have a totally new idea everything is up for grab everything changes
I don't like how it looks.
I think it's too bright.
I think the contrast is too low.
I think it's ugly.
I don't like how it works in certain areas.
I don't like the way the things like the dock show windows that are going behind them.
It looks busier than it used to be.
I don't like the new menu bar.
The new Finder icon is here.
hideous and they need to fix it um i don't like the round rack jail that they're putting all the stuff in um it is clear to me now playing with it for you in just an hour that eventually all the old mac os will look ancient and this will look new because whenever you have a big break that's true but of all the os's i mean i don't know if this surprises me or it just fills my worst expectations but
I like the new design the least on Mac OS.
Like you guys haven't explored it yet, but let me tell you, there's things, there's tons of stuff in there.
They've changed so many things.
And also apps that are on your Mac right now that are not built against the Tahoe SDA, like pre-existing apps, just everything in them is different.
And I understand they do that for compatibility, which is good, but like all my apps have pop-up menus, like the buttons pop-up menus, like every, even the, like every control,
looks different in old apps and new apps even in places where they don't seem like to do because like the button metrics haven't changed but the button appearance is different so you're faced with am i going to fully liquid metal my app and put conditional code in because by the way the metrics have changed on a bunch of stuff too like i just launched a bunch of my apps and like the metrics have changed enough that things that used to not scroll do scroll and things that were pixel aligned or no longer pixel aligned it's
it's worst case scenario and like i would be happier to do that if i really like the end result boy once i get my app updated for a liquid metal whatever it's going to look awesome but i don't think it does uh it doesn't mean that in 10 years that i won't be perfectly happy with how the mac looks but this is going to take some getting used to and i'm not really excited i'm it's make what it's making me do is making me appreciate how my mac looks now
Because after so many years, things are boring, but like consistent and better in almost every functional way than the new thing they're introducing.
Yes, the new thing looks newer and the old things will look old and it will look dated, but that's just because it's a change.
I'm not sure there's any place in the new look that I think is functionally better than the old way.
yet i haven't dug into all of it yet and that's disappointing to me because the mac is my favorite platform and i really wish i really wish i liked what they had done with the mac more and i have little faith that they're going to change much of anything i do hold out some hope that they'll fix the finer icon because hey it's not just an icon and they can fix it and the new one is hideous um but everything else i'm like there's no time they don't care about mac os they're not going to change this so in that respect i'm a little bit down because my favorite platform is bad but everything else i think is a thumbs up
well wait till you use the iphone version i mean again in the screenshots it looked fine to me but we'll see a lot of it is fine it needs a lot of work um and it's very early and rough oh yeah and everything's broken like when you turn off like if you turn on reduced transparency on the mac os i i tried to take a screenshot of it but it's one of those drawing glitches that you can't screenshot things blink on your screen at like 30 frames per second like flashing regions of posterization it looks like your computer is about to explode like
it is grim like it's just the first beta who cares like i'm but i'm just saying like there are bugs in this beta that i have never seen before like like visual it's almost like your graphics card is overheating you think somebody think that the os is gonna try it we saw tahoe and something open accessibility have a bunch of windows open and start toggling those switches and dragging windows around it is madness but those are just bugs but i'm saying like even when everything's working perfectly i don't like it so it's a it's a contest
Will I be ranting on this show for the next five years about the tab bars in iOS, or will I be ranting about everything in macOS?
We'll see which will win.
Oh, no.
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Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
And if you're into mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-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-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T
Briefly, before we get to the after show, or maybe this is the after show, I want to read you the message that Xcode put out when it refused to compile my unmodified application.
Oh, gosh.
And I want to tell you, I want to ask you if you've ever seen this message before, because for all I know, it's an existing message and I just don't know what it means, but it's one of those.
So please help me.
Conditional conformance of type blah to protocol layout does not imply conformance to inherited protocol sendable.
That is an error that it won't compile.
And this is not in my code.
It's in third-party code.
So I can't even change it.
But I've never seen that message before.
I mean, I feel like we could parse out what they're saying, but I don't think I've ever seen it before.
So the conditional conformance is like, you know, layout where content equals empty view.
Conditional conformance to protocol.
So the layout protocol, right?
So that all makes sense.
But it's saying that does not imply conformance to the inherited protocol sendable.
Like, OK, is that a problem that means you won't compile my code?
Like, or again, this is third party codes.
I hope this I hope this library updates because I literally can't build my app.
And I didn't touch anything.
I didn't change to Swift 6.2.
Like I had maybe I have to change it.
Maybe it defaults.
Anyway, I haven't had time to look at this, but that is slightly distressing to me because I just assumed it would build out of the box if I just
mine did a call sheet did uh we we can explore that if you want but honestly i don't care because we didn't get a chance to talk about the one thing that i want to talk to you about john they and this was in the state of the union to be fair and i know we're not really talking the state of the union but i cannot resist this is the last release for intel apparently tahoe is all you get then your cheese grater will float up to the attic in the sky and by that i mean the attic above your head
So we don't need to belabor it too much since we were running very long already.
But in short, what's the plan, man?
I'm perfectly happy with that.
Like I was, we talked about this on the last episode.
I was pleasantly surprised that Tahoe will support my Mac.
That's all.
I mean, I, they were already, they've already gone longer than I thought they would have.
Uh, you know, again, if they had, if they had followed the past procedure, they should have ended support in 2024 and they didn't, they didn't end in 2025.
They're not going to end it until next year.
So I'm,
Perfectly fine with that.
And it's nice.
I really appreciate this is not sorry.
Every time I say this, I think people think I'm being sarcastic.
I appreciate the fact that they announced this year that next year they're going to do this thing, which is not something they usually do.
They don't have roadmaps and like and honestly, they don't even usually make that decision.
Like they could make that decision, but they've made the decision already that they made the decision that Tahoe will support my Mac.
love it great all the things aside about me not liking tahoe but you know anyway and the next one won't so now you can make your now you can plan now you can be like okay i can start thinking about what i'm going to replace this if i care if i need the you know like it lets people plan it's the thing that people always complain about apple that you know microsoft other pc companies would give you a roadmap they would say we're
This year we're doing this.
Next year we're doing that.
Here's when we're going to drop support for this.
Even with deprecations, Apple's like, oh, this thing is deprecated and it might go away sometime in the future and it might last a decade or next year it might be gone.
Right.
And they never tell you because they don't know.
Like they put off the decision like a teenager and just like procrastinate and say, oh, no.
And then the last second they decide.
But here they made a decision a year early.
And I really appreciate that.
It would have been nice if they tell me what the deal is with the Mac Pro sometime before this year ends.
But again, hardware WWC is not really a thing.
So here I am patiently waiting for them to do something, anything with the Mac Pro.
Even if they cancel the Mac Pro, that would give me some information.
And I'd be like, I just need, I need a little bit more information before I can make the decision about what my next Mac will be.
That's all.
Well, I'm glad you're this chipper about it.
And I think you should be.
I don't think there's any reason to be impressed.
Yeah, I mean, don't you think it was nice of them?
Yes, yes.
And I think it's, you know, I'm just so excited that if it didn't support DAHA, I'd be like, well, great.
The new OS isn't going to support my Mac and I have no idea what to buy because they haven't told me about the Mac Pro, what the deal is with that.
But I don't have that problem, so I'm happy.