Before We Leave the Dump
Casey:
moving on i have a quick hdmi update if you recall you mean a homey update a homey update that's right i have a homey update oh speaking of i don't think i'll remember to put in the show notes but somebody had actually uh put done a a recreation of my god awful diagram on an actual physical newton which was delightful and uh if the chat room can find it i will put in the show notes but i won't be able to dig it up
Marco:
And I would say it looks better than yours, by the way.
Casey:
It probably does.
Casey:
It probably does.
Casey:
So, yeah, my homie update.
Casey:
I had said last episode that I had seemed to kind of thread the needle and ride the line on doing a slower frame rate.
Casey:
yet still having 4K, I think Dolby Vision, if I'm not mistaken, because if you recall, I have old HDMI cables in the walls and the Apple TV was not happy with whatever situation I had going on.
Casey:
And I was able to get 4K Dolby Vision, but at like 30 Hertz or something like that.
Casey:
I don't remember the details, doesn't matter.
Casey:
Well,
Casey:
As it turns out, over time, or no, I think I had it at 50 hertz.
Casey:
And over the next few days, as we continue to use the Apple TV, which all in all, I really, really like, as it turns out, the 50 hertz Dolby Vision wasn't good enough, and I had to keep cranking it back and cranking it back.
Casey:
And I think I ended up at either Dolby Vision or maybe just HDR at 30 hertz.
Casey:
until I finally got my fancy new 8K certified, as John had a very good chuckle about, 8K certified HDMI cable from Monoprice.
Casey:
And sure enough, I've had that plugged in for a couple days now and everything is better.
Casey:
Now, I've only done it by draping it over the TV and draping it down the side of the mantle above which the TV sits.
Casey:
Please, I know it's too high.
Casey:
Leave me alone.
Casey:
So it's not installed properly yet, but at least at this point, I'm not getting flashes of blackness and disappearing audio.
Casey:
So I know you are all very concerned about it, and I'm happy to say that a new HDMI cable did indeed fix the problem.
Casey:
I understand how we got here and why we're here.
Casey:
But I almost want to go back to a time where if something changed about the cable, well, guess what?
Casey:
You've got to change the cable.
Casey:
It's a whole different connector.
Casey:
It's a whole different situation.
Casey:
Now that we have 34 different versions of it, not literally, but it feels like 34 versions of HDMI and 307 versions of USB-C,
Casey:
That's frustrating.
Casey:
I kind of I kind of miss the old days when when it was simpler and you would just have to throw all your cables away every two minutes.
Marco:
Yeah, there was downsides to that as well.
Marco:
Indeed.
Marco:
I feel like I feel like before stuff is even out, it's so complex.
Marco:
Like I had I had to I had to order a new Wi-Fi router or not Wi-Fi access point today.
Marco:
It turns out if you go under your deck to try to boost your Wi-Fi range outside and you mount under your deck, well, mount is generous, you rest on a beam under your deck, an indoor access point that is not rated for outdoor use.
Casey:
Oh, that does not end well, does it?
Marco:
And if it then rains heavily for four days in a row, apparently it doesn't survive that.
Marco:
So I had to order a new access point today.
Marco:
But I was – long story short, I had to figure out what Wi-Fi 6 means.
Marco:
is something that has Wi-Fi 6 on its name, does it support all of the parts of it or not?
Marco:
How many of the different parts matter?
Marco:
How many of them are going to be backwards compatible if I have a multi-access point situation?
Marco:
There's all sorts of complexity there.
Marco:
I heard two earlier, I was listening to Back to Work with Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin, and Merlin was mentioning that apparently there's, as part of the new Thread radio standard, which...
Marco:
I'm not entirely sure if Thread is actually out and finished yet.
Marco:
I know it's in the new stage, but I don't know if it's done.
Marco:
But apparently there's Thread radios in certain little gadgets and stuff.
Marco:
But there's also HomeKit-compatible versions of Thread.
Marco:
And not all Thread radios are even HomeKit-compatible.
Marco:
I'm just...
Marco:
There's so much of these asterisks and exceptions to all of our new tech recently.
Marco:
A port can't just be a port.
Marco:
A cable can't just be a cable.
Marco:
There's all these... Okay, you got an HDMI cable.
Marco:
Great.
Marco:
Well, what kind of HDMI cable?
Marco:
What version port are you plugging it into on one end or the other end?
Marco:
What spec does the cable have?
Marco:
We've seen all this too with USB-C, with Thunderbolt.
Marco:
There's just...
Marco:
There's so many little nitpicky, crappy little details and gotchas and checkboxes and exceptions to so much of our tech now.
Marco:
I'm with you, Casey.
Marco:
Maybe the world of throwing away our SCSI 1 cables to upgrade to SCSI 2 or whatever, maybe that wasn't that bad.
Marco:
Because at least you knew what you had.
Marco:
You knew what would work.
Marco:
And if it didn't physically fit, it wouldn't physically work.
Marco:
And that was roughly it.
John:
That wasn't it at all.
John:
You have SCSI cables that fit perfectly and still nothing works because you didn't turn your devices on in the right order.
John:
Yeah, maybe SCSI was a bad example.
John:
SCSI is definitely a bad example.
Casey:
All right, John, tell me about raised blacks in the Apple TV and Dolby Vision and all that jazz.
John:
Yeah, Kai Contillo wrote in to say that the raised blacks in Dolby Vision on Apple TV that are fixed in the latest Apple TV are apparently fixed in the latest Apple TV hardware.
John:
because he checked with the old Apple TV 4K, but with the new tvOS, and it did not fix the issue of raised black.
John:
So somehow the raised black fix is part of the hardware.
John:
This is just one testimonial from one listener.
John:
But that seems really weird to me that there was some kind of problem that can only be fixed by a new revision of the hardware and wasn't fixed by tvOS.
John:
But there you have it.
John:
If anyone else has different results, feel free to write in.
John:
But we were wondering and we got an answer.
Casey:
Well, now we know.
Casey:
Tell me about one in two fan iMacs, please.
John:
This is a YouTube video.
John:
We talked about this last week, I think, of like the low-end iMac has just one fan, or maybe two weeks ago, and the higher-end ones have two fans.
John:
So someone did a test, say, what kind of difference does that make?
John:
And it turns out it makes a much bigger difference than it would have thought, so much so that it's all the more baffling why Apple only put one fan in the low-end one.
John:
So what happens in the low-end one is that one fan...
John:
turns on a lot more, spins a lot faster, and is generally more annoying and noisier.
John:
And even despite all that, the thing runs hotter.
John:
So take a look at the video to see the results.
John:
I mean, obviously they're running like sort of torture test benchmarks to really just, you know, maximize the CPU or maximize the GPU.
John:
not representative of normal usage i'm certain sure normal usage one of these new iMacs whether it has one fan or two is generally pretty quiet but pushed to the limit that one with one fan it seems to me they would be better if it had two so word to the wise if you're considering one of the fancy colored new iMacs among all the other reasons to consider the higher end one like having the extra ports and everything uh consider it for this reason too apparently it's quieter and cooler
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And this is your time to shine.
Casey:
Tell me about, if you don't mind, Jonathan Dietz's Apple Silicon cost estimate spreadsheet.
John:
Yep.
John:
So this is all Jonathan's work, not mine.
John:
He is knowledgeable at the industry and tried based on what we know from these rumors, right?
John:
What the rumors say, try to come up with some monetary amounts for the various options for Jade
John:
c die and the 4c one and all the different approaches there's lots of detail in here i pulled out a few we'll put a link in the show notes this is a public google sheet that anyone can look at um in the left hand column there are a bunch of uh you know labels some of them i added a note to to explain what they are after talking to jonathan so like for example one of the things uh like
John:
row 15 is die cost and that is according to jonathan an estimate of how much apple would pay tsmc for each good working die right so if you're wondering like what you know what does apple pay to just get the thing sort of off off the printer so to speak um and then there are things like the chip cost which is the die cost plus all the other expenses uh except the on package memory and then finally there is
John:
the package cost which is the chip all the other stuff plus the memory on the thing and of course the package cost changes based on how much memory you put on the package right um so just to give a few numbers thrown out of this spreadsheet uh jade c die which uh the rumor according to the rumors uh is sort of like the building block of all of the higher end uh apple silicon chips uh jonathan's estimate uh of how much does that cost apple for each jade c die that comes out of tsmc is 128 dollars
John:
Uh, and then the RAM, the memory costs, this is LPDDR4.
John:
The RAM costs are, if you get eight gigabytes of RAM, it's like 34 bucks.
John:
And if you get 32 gigabytes of RAM, it's 136 bucks.
John:
So if you get 32 gigs of RAM already, the RAM is more expensive to Apple.
John:
Again, they're, you know, buying this from the suppliers.
John:
The RAM is more expensive than the chip.
John:
Uh, and then if you try to do the package cost, which is the Ram, the, the, you know, the, the main system on a chip, all the packaging, all the other parts combined there.
John:
If you had an eight gigabyte, one of these, this is basically like, you know, the thing that goes on the motherboard and eight gigabyte, uh, Jade C die would be 162 bucks.
John:
16 gigabyte would be 196 bucks and 32 gigabyte would be 264 bucks.
John:
So this is the MacBook pro ish.
John:
chip, right?
John:
So those are pretty low numbers.
John:
Obviously, Apple's cost is not the same, but when Apple was buying these chips from Intel, they were more expensive than this.
John:
And then at the other extreme, Jade 4C die, which is the big honking one in theory for the Mac Pro, this using the
John:
HBM2E, the high bandwidth memory, instead of using the LPDDR.
John:
There's some nuances about memory that we'll get to in a second.
John:
But anyway, for a 32 gigabyte version of those, actually, let's do the chip cost.
John:
So the chip cost is $606.
John:
And remember, that is roughly comparable to what we were talking about before, like the Xeon.
John:
Because remember, the Xeon doesn't have any memory on it.
John:
The Xeon doesn't have, you know, GPU on it, right?
John:
Or if it does, it doesn't have like a good GPU.
John:
I have the same question and I never looked up the answer.
John:
Does the Xeons have any integrated GPU on them or nothing?
Marco:
I'm not sure.
Marco:
I mean, there's a lot of different Xeons.
Marco:
There's a lot of different families.
Marco:
The ones that Apple uses like in the iMac Pro and the Mac Pro, they don't have GPUs.
John:
So this is like, how much does Apple pay TSMC to get something roughly like the Jade 4C die hot off the press?
John:
$606, which is a far cry from what they're probably paying Intel for that Xeon.
John:
And then, of course, you had the memory costs.
John:
And again, the memory, if you get 64 gigs of HBM2E, that's $560.
John:
So now the memory, even at 64 gigs, is similar to the price of the chip.
John:
And then the packaging costs are even more here because it's a more complicated package.
John:
So the package costs for a J4C system on a chip with 32 gigs of RAM is $886.
John:
And with 64 gigs of RAM is $1,166.
John:
Again, these are all estimates, guesses based on rumors.
John:
So take this with all the grain of salt.
John:
But let's say this thing really does cost, say, $1,200 when Apple buys it.
John:
They get a thing that they can put on a motherboard on a Mac Pro.
John:
It's hard for me to believe that they're going to mark that up to...
John:
you know add seven thousand dollars to the price of your mac pro because that would be a heck of a mark is it that hard to believe it is though because intel if you buy if you buy the like highest core count xeon plus 64 gigs of ram intel is not selling you that or no one is selling you that for 1200 total
John:
Um, so we'll see, we'll see what the markup is.
John:
Um, here's a couple of paragraphs about the Ram that I thought were interesting.
John:
Just laying it out there.
John:
Just, this is not our predictions.
John:
This is Jonathan's predictions just to see, uh, how right he ends up being, or if this is all just way off.
John:
Cause again, this is just based on rumors.
John:
So Jonathan says, one thing that the sheet, meaning the Google sheet, doesn't fully explain is the memory situation.
John:
I'm pretty sure there will only be a single Jade C die floor plan.
John:
The Jade C chop will only have 16 GPU cores enabled.
John:
This is like what Marco said.
John:
Not due to yields on TSMC 5 nanometers, which are apparently fantastic, but because without GDDR or HBM memory, there is no way to feed more execution units than that.
John:
Sticking with LPDDR memory and an organic interposer will make that variant way less expensive and help keep it within the thermal envelope.
John:
The single-tile Jade C die for the 16-inch MacBook Pro will get up to 64 gigs of unified memory, but it will be tiered two stacks or up to 32 gigs of HBM2E, along with two packages, or up to 32 gigs of LPDDR5.
John:
Each tile will also include dual-channel DDR5 memory controller, which will support ECC RAM for the Pro Max, which would then enable up to 1 terabyte of DRAM for the Jade 2C die and 2 terabytes for the Jade 4C die variant.
John:
So there's a lot of predictions about different kinds of RAM for different Macs and support for ECC, RDIMMs, and using HBME or LPDDR5, depending on the machine.
John:
I have a hard time believing that Apple would have that kind of variety, even in the Pro Macs that we know about, like a Pro iMac.
John:
a big mac pro thing maybe a smaller mac pro thing like that's a lot of variety like because you know again look at the entire low to mid range of their line there is no variation it's the same thing in every single one and to think that they're going to mix three different kinds of ram and like all these different kinds of chips on the high end i find it hard to believe but uh jonathan has planted his flag and you can check out his spreadsheet and we'll see what how things turn out
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Hullo Pillow.
Marco:
Have you ever tried a buckwheat pillow?
Marco:
This is totally different than the pillows most of us are used to.
Marco:
Instead of being like a squishy bag of fluff or duck feathers or whatever, which tends to collapse under the weight of your head and make your neck bend in weird places, the Hullo Buckwheat Pillow is more like a bean bag.
Marco:
This allows you to adjust its shape and thickness, and so you can support your head and neck however you want to.
Marco:
You just move the fill around, and it stays where you put it.
Marco:
Also, Holo stays cooler and drier compared to typical pillows.
Marco:
The air just flows right through it, so it tends to breathe a lot better.
Marco:
You don't have to keep flipping your pillow over.
Marco:
And I've tried this.
Marco:
I love it.
Marco:
My wife loves it.
Marco:
She actually stole mine.
Marco:
It's an incredible thing.
Marco:
It's really cool.
Marco:
If you want a nice, supportive,
Marco:
cool sleeping beanbag pillow.
Marco:
And you can adjust it however you want.
Marco:
You can unzip the side.
Marco:
You can add or remove fill.
Marco:
You can buy more from the website if you need some later on.
Marco:
It's amazing.
Marco:
People have been sleeping on these things for centuries.
Marco:
They've actually been used extensively in Japan.
Marco:
You might even see them on the pillow menu at fancy hotels that are fancy enough to have pillow menus, I guess.
Marco:
And this is all made in the USA with quality construction and materials, a certified organic case, and buckwheat is grown and milled right here in the US.
Marco:
So see for yourself, you can sleep on it for 60 nights.
Marco:
If hello isn't right for you, just send it back and they'll give you a full refund.
Marco:
No questions asked.
Marco:
Go to hello pillow.com slash ATP.
Marco:
That's H U L L O P I L L O W.com slash ATP.
Marco:
And if you try more than one, you get a discount of $20 per pillow, depending on the size.
Marco:
All orders are fast free shipping and 1% of all profits are donated to the nature conservancy.
Marco:
So once again, hullopillow.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Check out a buckwheat pillow.
Marco:
It's great in the summer.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Hullo for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Moving right along.
Casey:
Apple Podcasts app and show notes.
Casey:
Apparently they're broken again.
John:
Cool.
John:
I wanted to put this in here because I wanted to ask Marco about it.
John:
Do you know what the deal is for this?
John:
People complain to us a lot about like, hey, I tried to go to your show notes in the Apple Podcasts app and they either don't appear or they appear but they're totally unformatted and there's no links.
John:
And for those who don't know, as the song that plays on our podcast describes, you can find the show notes at ATP.FM, which is a website.
John:
And there...
John:
in your web browser you can then click on the links but in any decent podcast app while you're listening to the podcast you can also look at the show notes somehow within your podcast app in overcast you swipe to the left and you'll see the show notes and in the show notes we put links like for example there'll be a link to jonathan's spreadsheet so you while you're listening to the show you can look at the spreadsheet that we're talking about
John:
apple podcast the brand new fancy version apparently shows our show notes but ignores all the html and formatting so it's just a bunch of text so you can't you can't click any links because it removes all the links and also all the indenting and the formatting so it just looks like a bunch of you know just randomly spaced text lines and i'm wondering is this like is this intended behavior as apple said by the way we will refuse to render html in your show notes um
John:
I don't see the point of show notes if you can't include links because that's kind of... I mean, I guess you could put a summary or description or something, but for shows like ours and for the tradition of many shows, things you talk about on the show, it's great to give people links to them.
John:
And I know we have a website that you can go to and do the same thing, but it's nice to be able to do it from within the podcast app.
John:
So, Marco, do you have any insight into this or is this just...
Marco:
Oh, plenty.
Marco:
I'm just going to try to limit myself for time.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Yeah, because this is not going to be a major topic tonight.
Marco:
But Apple Podcasts has been going through a lot of changes, some more of which I think we're about to get to.
Marco:
But just for the show notes thing –
Marco:
the apple podcast app i don't think has ever supported actual rendered html show notes or at least it hasn't supported them for a while um what it's doing here is like the dumbest simplest like you know calling strip tags from php like it's like it's not it's literally just stripping away the html tags it's not even fixing the white space problems that result from doing that
Marco:
It's like somebody's CS101 project of how to use a regex to strip HTML.
Marco:
It's the worst possible way to do it.
Marco:
If they actually wanted to not support HTML in this field that is very clearly supposed to be HTML-inclusive in almost any other app, I would hope they would put some effort into making it at least look more reasonable than it does.
Marco:
But anyway...
Marco:
I think the real reason for this is that the design of Apple's podcast app is increasingly diverging from the way podcast listeners expect things to be who have listened to podcasts for more than a year.
Marco:
There's these multiple worlds of podcasting.
Marco:
The world of big professional podcasts and mass market appeal...
Marco:
largely doesn't use show notes like if you look at the show notes for a big name podcast that that you know that that people in your life you as the podcast nerd that somebody in your life would come to you and be like oh i just started listening to podcasts i love blank
Marco:
Whatever podcast would be in that name, in that blank spot, look up that podcast, look up its episodes and see if it uses show notes well, if at all.
Marco:
See if there's any HTML anywhere in them or any attempt to provide useful information or links or anything.
Marco:
And the answer is going to be no almost every time.
Marco:
Because show notes like chapters or not running reruns in your own feed or not running crappy ads, this is the kind of thing that's increasingly being relegated to
Casey:
Germany.
Marco:
Yeah, Germany, and the nerdy areas of podcasting, where we live.
Marco:
Nerdy podcasts that care about details like this and try to put production effort into that, as opposed to the mass market podcasts that barely even have links half the time for each episode.
Marco:
You're lucky if there is a permalink to an episode.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
The Apple Podcasts app being used mostly by the mass market people, and most of the nerds don't use the Apple Podcasts app anymore.
Marco:
It has driven them away if they were there to begin with.
Marco:
The Apple Podcasts app is serving its audience in the sense that it has lowered its standards dramatically for the metadata production level of podcasts.
Marco:
And so this doesn't really impact...
Marco:
most nerdy podcasts like us because most people listening to our podcasts who would care about such things as show notes mostly aren't using Apple Podcasts.
Marco:
That being said, this is not good enough and they should fix this because one of the weird downside of this is
Marco:
um apple podcasts for i i don't know if the current version does but most of the recent versions of apple podcasts have supported the technique of you like pasting in links like urls as text and then it like auto links the bare url that's in the text and turns it into a link but then you have the giant ugly like you know http you know big url raw text showing to the user um it has supported that for a while
Marco:
So unfortunately, what this means is that if people want their links to show up in Apple Podcasts, show notes, they really should just enter them as bare links like that.
Marco:
The downside is that makes them giant and ugly in every single other app as well.
Marco:
That's not a great situation.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
We're going to hopefully be able to just be stubborn here and not do that and continue producing our show notes the way they look good in the apps that all of you actually use, which is mostly Overcast, Pocket Cast, Castro.
Marco:
It's the nerdy apps because those apps are much more appealing to nerds like us and nerds like you.
Marco:
In the meantime, Apple is going to keep doing whatever they're doing with Apple Podcasts and best of luck to them.
Marco:
It's turning out great for me.
Marco:
I've had...
Marco:
A lot of new users to Overcast in the last couple of weeks, thanks to Apple Podcasts.
Marco:
So they can keep doing what they're doing.
Marco:
I wish they would do a little bit better just for their own sake and for the sake of the business.
Marco:
But the path they're on, I don't fully understand.
Marco:
And I think it has diverged quite a lot from the world of podcasts and the way we expect podcast apps to work that we live in.
Casey:
fun.
John:
It's kind of weird to me that the premium podcasting services that have Spotify-exclusive podcasts and all these other ones with their own apps and everything don't seem to do anything to take advantage of their proprietary nature and make their podcasts better in terms of the interface.
John:
Having...
John:
uh deep support for chapters and show notes like that's just like basic stuff that we can do on open rss but if we if some company controlled the entire stack like you can only play this in our app and we control our app you can do all sorts of fancy things with podcasts you know you don't have to wait for some kind of industry-wide consensus for you know additions to the rss feed that are supported by a reader you can just do whatever you want it's your own thing and you can make the listening experience even better i mean we do like chapter images and links to chapter images but like
John:
They don't even support functionality equivalent to what you can do in a real podcast client.
John:
It just seems like they're sort of maybe they think that's not important.
John:
Maybe for these mass market podcasts, people just hit play and that's it.
John:
And only, like you said, nerdy podcasts that have all these additional features.
John:
But.
John:
i maybe it's because i'm nerdy i listen to like a mass market big podcast like this american life and they're talking about something maybe they'll be talking about a website and i will instinctively go to try to find the link to the website i'm like oh this podcast doesn't ever link to anything they talk about no right and it's just like when you're listening like i guess you just go to google and you type in words that you heard on the podcast but like they know the link to you know this website or this author's book or whatever like
John:
Anyway, I find it disappointing.
Marco:
I don't understand.
Marco:
The big podcasts out there have substantial production staffs.
Marco:
We make this show as three people.
Marco:
Most podcasts out there that have a lot of listeners have way more than that.
Marco:
you know on this on their shows like they have a staff they have a process they have you know larger budgets and big companies backing them often i don't understand why they don't put in the basic effort to make their metadata you know the the titles the show notes like why don't and you know chapters like they could do that the big dynamic ad insertion platforms don't
Marco:
don't support chapters not because it's hard it's actually trivially easy it's easier to you know alter the duration of of chapter markers than it is to alter the duration of the mp3 um but they don't support it because none of their clients have ever asked for that because none of them use chapters because i don't know why because they couldn't be bothered meanwhile these companies go around investing in platforms and and trying to get these big efforts together that are like
Marco:
Oh, we want to be able to show timed metadata and pop up links and promos during certain timestamps of shows.
Marco:
Wouldn't that be great?
Marco:
And it's like, yeah, we can already do that.
Marco:
Like, that's literally what chapters are.
Marco:
The standard has existed for like 15 years.
Marco:
Like, this is not – you don't need to create some giant new platform to do this.
Marco:
today's platforms can do it you're just not doing it because i i don't know why i i assume it's mostly just you know ignorance that these things exist um but even once they learn that these things exist through people like us in germany yelling at them they still don't do it i don't understand but i i think a lot of a lot of the the flaws in apple podcast specifically i think can can be traced to you know
Marco:
You can often tell when an app has had its design taken over by the business people.
Marco:
You can see this in so many apps, so many services.
Marco:
When you look at the way Apple Podcasts has, the direction they've taken recently, and I can tell you this is a widely held opinion based on the emails and tweets and reviews I'm getting from my app as people flee Apple Podcasts over the last few weeks.
Marco:
It sure seems to me, and a lot of those people who tell me, the new Apple Podcasts app seems to be designed by people who don't listen to podcasts.
Ha ha ha.
Marco:
And I don't think that's unreasonable of an assumption.
Marco:
I think it's very clear when the business people take over an app's design, it starts to prioritize the goals of the company that makes the app over the goals of what the users might actually want.
Marco:
And it starts to treat the users more like sheep to extract more money from rather than like, let's make the best app we can to attract more users.
Marco:
That is, I think, where Apple Podcasts is going, unfortunately.
Marco:
Again, while this is kind of good for apps like me in the sense that it drives listeners away from them and towards me, I also don't love that they're kind of poisoning the ecosystem with mediocrity and
Marco:
and just really frustrating a lot of podcast listeners out there.
Marco:
Because some portion of those podcast listeners who get frustrated by the Apple Podcasts app will go and find apps like mine.
Marco:
But I think a bigger portion of them will just be frustrated with podcasts and never realize they even can go look for some other app and just kind of be upset with it and maybe listen to fewer podcasts in the future.
Marco:
And I don't want that.
Marco:
I'd rather have Apple Podcasts be good and compete with them based on them being good rather than
Marco:
except they're fleeing disturbed fans who are upset about the terrible things that they're doing.
Marco:
So I hope they get better.
Marco:
I hope they work through their issues they're having because ultimately it's not good for the business if the biggest app in the business is not doing so well with quality.
Casey:
Yeah, 99% Invisible is a podcast that I really enjoy.
Casey:
And their show notes are like the summary blurb and a link to the web where they have like a blog post for each episode.
Casey:
And that's where like all the useful information is, which is in contrast to what we do, which is put all of the useful information in the show notes.
Casey:
Imagine that right where you can see them.
Casey:
Wouldn't that be convenient?
Casey:
It's very frustrating.
Casey:
Well, you know what else might be frustrating if we were participating in it, but we are not, is that Apple Podcast subscriptions have been delayed to this month.
Casey:
I don't remember when they were originally slated to come out, but they're apparently coming out sometime in June.
Marco:
Yeah, I think it was late May originally, but I mean, honestly, this is not surprising.
Marco:
I don't think it's that big of a deal.
Marco:
I think it's going to be a few weeks of a delay, but they've had a lot of issues with the rollout of this.
Marco:
They've had a lot of backend issues, a lot of issues with people's logins, server issues.
Marco:
There was a period last week where
Marco:
This show just disappeared from Apple Podcasts for a day.
Marco:
And this has been happening to many people's podcasts.
Marco:
Honestly, what it feels like as a podcast service administrator, it feels like they're doing some kind of large migration or rollout across a bunch of servers and podcast accounts and stuff like that.
Marco:
And it seems like part of this migration or update process that they're doing on the back end
Marco:
pulls every show out of Apple Podcasts for a little while as it is migrated to something.
Marco:
Because it's happened to almost everyone I know who has a podcast.
Marco:
But at different times, like on a rolling basis across the last few weeks, there's been all sorts of problems with Apple Podcasts.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Again, this is something that I don't take a lot of joy in.
Marco:
I want them to be better because they represent such a big part of the ecosystem that if anything about Apple Podcasts is bad, it affects the entire ecosystem in a pretty big way.
Marco:
So I hope they get their crap together here.
Marco:
And I think what this shows... And I don't intend here to...
Marco:
insult the apple podcast team specifically because the impression i always have gotten from from that and not not from the actual people because they don't they don't tend to talk um but the feeling i've gotten little things i've heard here and there little things i've picked up here and there i think the apple podcast team is is fine it seems like they've always been really under resourced for for the the problems that they have to deal with
Marco:
I think this lands right at management.
Marco:
Whoever is above them and responsible for things like resource allocation and timing and release timing, I think all this lands on them.
Marco:
That it seems like this team has been just totally underwater currently
Marco:
after this launch that feels to have been maybe a little bit rushed.
Marco:
And that's to a team that normally doesn't have a ton of resources to do a lot and move very quickly to begin with.
Marco:
So I hope management has learned from this a little bit, and I hope they clean up this mess quickly.
Marco:
We'll be right back.
Marco:
And they take care of all the really hard stuff for you.
Marco:
There's no coding required.
Marco:
You don't have to know HTML and JavaScript and CSS, any of that stuff.
Marco:
There's no servers to maintain.
Marco:
They do all that for you.
Marco:
There's no software upgrades or patches to apply to your system.
Marco:
They do that too.
Marco:
You don't have to worry about keeping everything up and running.
Marco:
They do that too.
Marco:
None of that is on your plate.
Marco:
So you can focus on your business or your podcast or your storefront or your portfolio.
Marco:
Whatever you're building a website for, you can focus on that.
Marco:
And you can use their intuitive experience
Marco:
Easy to use visual previewing tools so that you don't ever have to see a line of code.
Marco:
You do everything with drag and drop and visual effects and live previewing and everything.
Marco:
It's amazing to make websites on Squarespace.
Marco:
You can also see for yourself without giving them a dime.
Marco:
Next time you want to make a website for something, whether it's something simple like a few pages of information for your business or something that's traditionally pretty hard to host yourself like a store or a podcast, you can do all that on Squarespace.
Marco:
Next time you have an idea for one of these, start a free trial at Squarespace.
Marco:
And you don't have to give them a credit card.
Marco:
So in case you forget about it, don't worry about it.
Marco:
Start a free trial with no credit card required and build the site.
Marco:
And you will see how incredibly easy it is, how far you get in like an hour.
Marco:
It's really incredible.
Marco:
See for yourself at squarespace.com slash ATP.
Marco:
When you decide to sign up, make sure to head back there to squarespace.com slash ATP and use offer code ATP at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.
Marco:
That's squarespace.com slash ATP, offer code ATP for 10% off your first purchase.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show.
Marco:
Make your next move with Squarespace.
Casey:
May I be grumpy just for a moment, and then we'll talk about fun things?
Casey:
Sure.
Casey:
Did you see this thing that Apple posted today?
Marco:
Oh, God, the disgusting, like, study they commissioned about how awesome they are?
Oh.
Casey:
Can I just, I really just need to get this off my chest.
Casey:
I promise I'll make it quick.
Casey:
So Apple today posted meeting pandemic challenges.
Casey:
Apple developers grow total billings.
Casey:
First of all, what the hell does that even mean?
Casey:
And sales in the app store ecosystem by 24% to 643 billion in 2020.
Casey:
New study details how small businesses innovate on the app store, reach customers around the world.
Casey:
This is the most nauseating deal.
Casey:
disgusting, although very cute animations in it, disgusting puff piece about how they don't need to be sued into oblivion for antitrust.
Casey:
I'm sure that's not the right vernacular, but you know what I mean?
Casey:
God, it feels so gross.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
I'm sure since Apple has been a big company for a long time that they've done things like this for a long time.
Casey:
But I feel like, golly, this is a far cry from, what was it, Thoughts on Flash or whatever, which was in some ways a similarly self-serving puff piece, but was executed in so much less, in just an incredibly less gross way.
Casey:
And I don't know.
Casey:
I just, I see this and I understand what they're doing.
Casey:
And it just...
Casey:
It's just so gross, man.
Casey:
I just – I don't like it.
Casey:
Am I being unfair?
Marco:
I don't think so.
Marco:
I mean I feel like in – and part of this is just the time and the scale of the company.
Marco:
But I definitely feel like in the Steve Jobs era –
Marco:
When Steve was going to be a jerk to you, he would just come right out and tell you.
Marco:
He didn't try too hard to BS us when he was being a real jerk about something.
Marco:
It was much more honest about the jerkitude that he was conducting.
Marco:
We're in a very different time now.
Marco:
We have a very different company, a much larger company, a much later time.
Marco:
I mean he's been gone now for almost 10 years.
Marco:
So this is a very different context here.
Marco:
But I have a very low opinion of Apple's leadership right now.
Marco:
Very, very low opinion.
Marco:
And it's not because of the products.
Marco:
The products are pretty good.
Marco:
You know, I'm still excited about the products.
Marco:
We'll get to that later.
Marco:
Like, I'm still excited.
Marco:
I'm going to be excited next week about the products.
Marco:
But wow, do I have a low opinion of Apple's, you know, political moves recently.
Marco:
And I have very low respect for Tim Cook.
Marco:
My respect for Phil Schiller has decreased significantly since the Epic trial and the stuff that's gone on there.
Marco:
Apple is trying to defend a fairly indefensible position with their app store politics and all the commission BS and all the requirements and all the anti-competitive stuff.
Marco:
What they're doing is very transparent.
Marco:
They're playing the politics game and they're trying to really BS the world into their point of view that their current practices with the app store cut and everything are okay.
Marco:
And it's just so blatant.
Marco:
It's almost insulting to our intelligence.
Marco:
They continue to have all these self-serving puff pieces.
Marco:
Oh, look, we commissioned another study about how awesome we are.
Marco:
It's just gross.
Marco:
And
Marco:
You know, it's a big company.
Marco:
There's a lot of people in the company.
Marco:
I really respect a lot of people in the company.
Marco:
And I really respect a lot of the stuff that comes out of the company.
Marco:
And it's hard for me.
Marco:
I have very conflicting feelings because I love the stuff they make.
Marco:
I love a lot of the stuff they do.
Marco:
And I know that there's a lot of really good people in that company that are not bullshit artists the way their executives have been recently.
Marco:
And I know there's a lot of people in that company that are not trying to insult our intelligence and value the things that we do as developers and things like that and are not super supportive of all the BS that the company has been spouting in this area.
Marco:
And I want to continue to be a fan of all of those people and all the things they make.
Marco:
but the people at the top are making it so hard because they're so completely full of shit and they're insulting to our intelligence over and over again.
Marco:
And I, I just, I hope that the regulation comes and the court battles work themselves out over the next couple of years of appeals.
Marco:
Most likely, like I hope this just, this gets flushed out over a couple of years and then we can be done with this stupid issue and we can go back to enjoying the rest of the products.
Marco:
Cause like,
Marco:
It's a shame that the people at the top are throwing away so much reputation and goodwill to try to defend a tiny part of the business that they don't even need.
Marco:
And it's tarnishing the reputation of the entire rest of the company's output.
Marco:
That a lot of people who are really good and making good stuff, their stuff is getting tarnished and people are having a sour taste about the company because the couple of execs at the top are really defending this little garbage part of the business that's mostly about extracting rents from casino games for children.
Marco:
Like, is that really worth it?
Marco:
Like, it's, it's, it's such a sour taste in my mouth.
Marco:
And it's, it's yet another, like, just, I don't, I don't like this side of the company.
Marco:
And I hope that we, I hope that this, this era of this app store drama ends soon so we can move on to something else.
Casey:
I couldn't agree more.
Casey:
And it's so frustrating because, like you had said, there's so much about this company and the products that they make.
Casey:
And all of us know a bunch of people that work there.
Casey:
And so much about it is admirable and is so great and deserves our praise.
Casey:
And then the direction it's gone lately...
Casey:
Particularly with regard to legal issues.
Casey:
It's so frustrating.
Casey:
It makes it hard for me to enjoy the totality of what is Apple Inc.
Casey:
I'm probably getting unreasonably worked up about what is ultimately a company made to
Casey:
remove my money from my wallet, but I don't know.
Casey:
It's, it's our, as we've talked about in the past, it's our team.
Casey:
We like our team.
Casey:
We want our team to do well.
Casey:
And right.
Casey:
And I feel like it's, it's not even that our team is in a slump to just absolutely beat this metaphor to death, but it's that we're willfully, our team is willfully getting rid of all of its like star players so that it can get these untested and unproven people that are a lot cheaper.
Right.
Casey:
Okay, that's a strategy, and it may pay off, but it's not a really good strategy.
Casey:
And I like the people we were already rooting for.
Casey:
Why do we got to go this other direction?
Casey:
And I don't know.
Casey:
It's just so frustrating.
Casey:
It makes it hard to be a fan of the totality of what is Apple.
Casey:
And again, I'm probably being unreasonably...
Casey:
I don't know if emotional is a word or worked up or whatever, but there's so much about Apple stuff that makes me so happy and so much that it enables me to do that makes me happy.
Casey:
It's because of Apple stuff that over the last year and a half I've been able to keep up friendships and family relationships and see people from far away.
Casey:
I mean, I remember...
Casey:
As silly as it sounds, I remember going to Singleton with you, Marco, in, I don't remember what year it was, like 2011, 2012, something like that.
Casey:
Maybe it was after that.
Casey:
I don't remember if ATP was a thing or not.
Casey:
But anyways, we went to Singleton, you and I. You had been a couple times.
Casey:
I only went once.
Casey:
And this was right after FaceTime and FaceTime audio were a thing.
Casey:
And I remember I was in Montreal.
Casey:
And I could call Aaron on Wi-Fi for free, which sounds kind of dumb.
Casey:
But at the time, that was monumental.
Casey:
If I had gone just a few months before to Singleton, like if it was hypothetically in spring instead of fall, the only way I could have spoken to Aaron was using something awful like Skype or like doing an international call.
Casey:
Or at least that's the way I remember.
Casey:
Maybe that's not factually true, but that's the way I remember it.
Casey:
And all I had to do to call Aaron was do a FaceTime audio call.
Casey:
It was easy peasy.
Casey:
And you know what?
Casey:
It just freaking worked.
Casey:
And I just, it's stuff like that that I don't want to lose sight of all the incredible things that Apple has done for people and for me.
Casey:
I mean, God, my living is made through Apple, either talking about Apple or building stuff for Apple platforms.
Casey:
But nevertheless, it's just, it's so frustrating.
Casey:
It makes me feel gross by association when I read these puff pieces, these absolutely disgusting puff pieces that you would expect to see come out of like, I don't know, Adobe or Sun or, I don't know, some big gross business.
Casey:
Sun?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Like, I don't know.
Casey:
That was a poor example.
Casey:
But just some big gross, Facebook maybe, like some big gross business that none of us like would do this sort of self-indulgent puff piece.
Casey:
And now Apple's doing it.
Casey:
And it's just, it's gross.
Casey:
I don't like it.
Marco:
I want nothing more than to just be purely excited for WBDC next week.
Marco:
Like our next show is going to be the WBDC show.
Marco:
And I want nothing more than just to be happy and excited about that and to be looking forward to it in a more pure way.
Marco:
And this year I can't do that.
Marco:
I'm like less excited than ever this year.
Marco:
And I hate that.
Marco:
I hate that they've put me in this position to feel any kind of toxic feeling towards them as a company.
Marco:
Because they've just been so gross recently with the court case and all this stuff.
Marco:
The things that they've said on the stand, the positions they've held, they've just been so gross.
Marco:
And then they go put out these self-serving studies that are just very thinly veiled political BS things.
Marco:
It's just like I don't like feeling this way about this company that I otherwise like so much.
John:
Well, I think I am considerably less upset about this than both of you.
John:
I mean, obviously, the context of this press release doesn't exist in a vacuum, right?
John:
Part of the thing that you were both complaining about this press release isn't just the content of the press release, but the fact that, you know, that there is a counterpart.
John:
Oh, I see what this is about.
John:
It's about the court case and the government action and all the other stuff.
John:
And that's what kind of that combination makes us look different.
John:
But in general, Apple has always done
John:
stuff like this and they have always bragged about the revenue they generate in the app store and how big of a check they give to developers and this is just an elaboration on an established strategy of them saying here's what we think is good and if you actually read the press release unlike the court testimony which uh you know many developers are rightfully upset about because again i think because apple has to sort of present
John:
uh the information and the the legal argument that will win them the case or well whether or not they have to that seems to be what they're doing and that is necessarily uh it cares less about your feelings but this press release is more or less you know yes it's a puffy thing of saying apple you know saying here's how great we are but the things they say in it are
John:
not really wrong and not particularly objectionable, and at no point do they do the things they did in the trial and in the various internal emails that we've seen where they, you know, act in nefarious ways or claim ownership of things that developers feel like are not theirs to claim ownership of or make disingenuous claims about the nature of the market and all this other stuff.
John:
It's generally just a straightforward press release.
John:
I know where you're both coming from, emotionally speaking, but I have a hard time getting worked up about this press release.
John:
I mean, like...
John:
I think I was more worked up the first 17 times they put up a slide that said how many billions of dollars they paid to developers.
John:
And even that, through repetition, I have become sort of used to or whatever.
John:
So I'm with you on the – and we'll get to this maybe later in the show.
John:
I'm with you on the sort of reputational damage that Apple has to deal with in terms of its –
John:
its relationship with its developer base.
John:
And that is surely a big focus of WWDC because this is their conference where they ostensibly talk to developers.
John:
But I'm mostly, you know, not bothered by this press release and mostly able to just look forward to the announcements of WWDC and see what it is that Apple does, if anything, to try to repair this relationship.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by ExpressVPN.
Marco:
Have you ever been using Chrome and used their incognito mode?
Marco:
It's probably not as incognito as you think, because like the Chrome browser itself, this is a Google product, and Google has made its fortune by tracking your movements online.
Marco:
There's even a $5 billion class action lawsuit against them in California, where it's accused of secretly collecting user data.
Marco:
Google's defense was, quote, incognito does not mean invisible.
Marco:
So how do you actually make yourself as invisible as possible online?
Marco:
ExpressVPN.
Marco:
Because it turns out that even in incognito mode, your online activity still gets tracked and data brokers still get to buy and sell your data.
Marco:
Because one of the main points they base the tracking on is your IP address.
Marco:
Data harvesters use your IP to uniquely identify you and your approximate location.
Marco:
But with ExpressVPN, your connection gets rerouted through an encrypted server, and your actual IP address is masked from the sites you visit.
Marco:
So every time you connect to ExpressVPN, you get a random IP address shared by many other ExpressVPN customers.
Marco:
That makes it harder for third parties to identify you or harvest your data.
Marco:
And best of all, ExpressVPN is super easy to use.
Marco:
No matter what device you're on, phone, laptop, even your smart TV, all you have to do is tap one button for instant protection with ExpressVPN.
Marco:
So if you really want to go incognito and protect your privacy, secure yourself with a number one rated VPN.
Marco:
Visit expressvpn.com slash ATP to get three extra months for free.
Marco:
That's expressvpn.com slash ATP to get that three extra months with a one-year package.
Marco:
expressvpn.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thank you so much to ExpressVPN for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Alright, so let's be happy.
Casey:
Let's get excited about WWDC.
Casey:
And we can talk about predictions in any which way, shape, or form.
Casey:
I don't know if we want to do it by subject matter.
Casey:
But I guess broadly, as much as I'm down in the dumps about some of the stuff Apple's doing right now, broadly, I'm really excited for this WWDC.
Casey:
I really... This is not an original thought, but I feel like there's a lot of smoke coming from Cupertino.
Casey:
And it's looking like there might be some fire behind it.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
I feel like this should be a pretty good one in terms of, you know, the consumer side of things.
Casey:
I'm not terribly convinced it's going to be particularly remarkable from the developer side of things.
Casey:
But from the consumer side of things, I'm really looking forward to it.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
Is this the year that we get vastly improved iPad software?
Casey:
Is iPadOS really going to come into its own this year?
Marco:
before we leave the dump real quick a lot of let me re-enter the dump briefly oh i tried a lot of a lot of people um think that apple will some will announce something at wbdc that will help repair the developer relationship in some way whether it's you know a change to app store policies or or whatever and i just want to go on record as saying i don't think there's going to be anything of the sort because
Marco:
I think if they're going to do that, it would be a totally separate thing that would not be held for WBDC.
Marco:
That's a whole separate thing, and I don't expect anything like that.
Marco:
I think this is going to be, if anything, it's going to be intentionally a diversion away from all of that to focus on the new tech stuff and hopefully get all of us to temporarily forget how much they've angered us over the last year or two.
John:
Now that we want to go into that immediately about how they can repair the relationship, but I feel like one category of thing there that is a tech thing but also would help repair the relationship in a strange way is one of Casey's favorite things.
John:
If they announce vastly improved documentation, no, it's not like, oh, we're taking a smaller cut of the apps or now you're allowed to use your own payment.
John:
It's not that.
John:
I know what you're getting at.
John:
But if they do say, oh, and by the way, here is the culmination of our secret year-long
John:
let's fix all the documentation project.
John:
That would help.
John:
I mean, I know it's a different thing.
John:
It's like, oh, how does that help me?
John:
It doesn't help me anything with my, like, your app that you rejected or the fact that you won't let me use the payment method.
John:
But it does help, like, make developers happier.
John:
Like, just giving them a good thing over here doesn't make the bad thing go away, but it does make you feel a little bit better.
John:
So I think that category of stuff where it's, like, developer tools, developer experience falls into the category of, and I'm mostly with Marco, of, like,
John:
Apple's going to show us all the new things they have and try to get developers excited about it.
John:
New hardware, new software, and new tools for you to get your job done.
John:
And part of that is potentially vastly improved documentation.
John:
Not that I'm predicting that at this point, but I think that is a plausible thing that they could announce.
John:
As opposed to what Marco was getting at, saying, oh, and by the way, today we're announcing you're allowed to use any payment method, because that seems...
Marco:
highly unlikely yeah that's yeah i the documentation that would be amazing like that i mean talk about what would get like uh you know a massive applause in the room but i i just think it's unlikely i i think that's the kind of thing that if they're gonna do it they might do it more quietly uh and just over time and honestly even if they announced some kind of new documentation effort i'm not sure i would believe it unless i saw it you know like it might be like oh we're gonna we're gonna document all this stuff really will you like how how far back have you gone is it done yet you know
Marco:
That being said, before I forget, I don't know, I would probably never have an opportunity to bring this up otherwise, but I recently had to relook up some documentation for some of my favorite functions, the VDSP functions in the Accelerate library.
Marco:
And they have amazing documentation.
Marco:
oh yeah because these are these are mostly functions that do like math operations on large arrays of numbers and they like so they have things like they have graphs that show like if you apply this function it'll apply it'll like the results will look like this graph on your numbers like
Marco:
It's actually really well-documented, which is kind of funny because the functions themselves are comically unintuitive if you've never seen them before.
Marco:
The names of the functions and the parameter names, it looks like just garbage soup of letters that mean nothing if you're new to it.
Marco:
But documentation is really good.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
clearly some of the teams in apple have the ability to make good documentation so that's why like i i don't think the company is somehow opposed to it i just think they're just not allocating the resources i mean this is yet another i mean this is kind of the story of apple but like they have infinite money but they don't have infinite engineering resources or time or technical writing resources or like whatever you know whatever combination of resources required to make good documentation um
Marco:
And I think it's just a matter of like management needs to allocate more resources to this problem.
Marco:
And that might mean expanding certain departments in a big way that might be harder to do than just throw money at it.
Marco:
But like they can do it.
Marco:
There's nothing stopping them from having the best documentation in the world.
Marco:
They could do it if they wanted to.
Marco:
And I hope that someday management will want to because that's what that's all it would take.
Marco:
You know, it's not it's not going to be super easy.
Marco:
I'm sure there's hard, you know, there's hard challenges involved in expanding certain things.
Marco:
But if they want to make great documentation, they can.
Marco:
They if anybody can do it, it's them.
Marco:
And I swear I hope they I hope they start valuing that at some point.
Casey:
A man can dream.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I got some interesting feedback after I wrote that post in November about their piss poor documentation.
Casey:
And it sounds to me like there are some pretty systemic issues within Apple that is preventing any sort of real honest to goodness improvement happening.
Casey:
Unless, you know, since I spoke with some of these people, maybe things have changed since then.
Casey:
Certainly, I wrote this blog post in hope that it would get passed around and something would happen because gosh knows that anything we say on this podcast, nobody ever hears it that matters.
Marco:
But nevertheless, we try.
Marco:
No, no, no.
Marco:
You'd be surprised.
Marco:
They hear it.
Marco:
But, you know, like as some podcaster once said, I forget who it was, success hides problems.
Casey:
Yeah, I have heard that somewhere.
Casey:
Wish I knew who it was.
John:
I didn't make that up.
John:
It's from a book.
Yeah.
Casey:
It was a Pixar one, wasn't it?
Casey:
By Catmull?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Ed Catmull's book, yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Can we please, I'm the one who brought us to the dumps.
Casey:
Let me bring us back out.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Let's talk about happy things.
Casey:
Is this the year, John Syracuse, is this the year for iPadOS to really shine?
John:
I actually, I prefer to start with hardware.
John:
Good talk.
John:
All right.
Marco:
I'm picturing the artwork for this episode just being a bunch of trains just derailing.
John:
We're hovering around the topic.
John:
It's about WWDC and predictions.
John:
The reason I want to talk about hardware is this is always the debate of how much does Apple want to talk about hardware at WWDC?
John:
Because really...
John:
unless the hardware has some new feature that they want developers to support like say they're putting out a bunch of vr glasses like that's hardware that is clearly has a developer focus but if the answer is oh it's just like a new laptop or something there's probably not much for people to do development wise that they differently to support the new macbook pros than the old macbook pros right or we assume based on the rumors but apple does choose to do that because as it often says like developers are their biggest pro customers or whatever they say and
John:
you know most developers use laptops because most people use laptops and developers are people you know so it like macbook pros at wwc makes sense but beyond that the times like i think didn't they do the mac pro wwc yeah like like oh we're gonna do the mac pro wwc just because it's been so freaking long and it's done and we have to announce it right it's not a huge developer angle it's not good but anyway if they have pro hardware and
John:
And it happens to be around WWDC.
John:
It seems like they want to announce it, but they also want to leave time for potentially software stuff.
John:
So we'll talk about software in a bit, but I want to start by saying, what do you think hardware-wise makes sense for them to announce at this event?
John:
We still don't know because, again, it's not like these have Intel chips in them, so we have no timelines.
John:
We have no idea if the chips that we keep talking about, those rumors, maybe they've been done for months.
John:
Maybe they're not going to be done for six months.
John:
That really determines whether they can launch any hardware because I don't think they're going to launch another crop of M1-based Macs.
John:
I think they've put the M1 in every Mac they could think of.
John:
So it's either the new better-than-M1 thing is ready in some reasonable time frame or it's not.
John:
i and we don't i don't think we have any information i certainly don't personally have information on whether the new better than m1 thing is ready so i'm just going to assume that it is and say assuming it is ready what do we think they would announce and the only prediction that i feel comfortable with is macbook pros i don't think there's going to be a mac pro i don't even i can't even feel confident there would be the non you know the pro iMac or a bigger you know iMac i feel like macbook pros is the one and only thing that i have any
John:
reasonable feelings about appearing on stage in this thing and then and then beyond that everything would be gravy what do you what do you think about hardware for the show
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I think you're right that if it's anything, it's going to be MacBook Pro, preferably the new 16 or what have you.
Casey:
But when's the last time they did a MacBook Pro or really any Apple laptop at WWDC?
Casey:
Has that happened?
John:
I mean, when they're ready.
John:
The original Retina 15-inch is WWDC, right?
John:
It's like when they're ready.
John:
And that is probably the most popular machine for developers who have a quote-unquote Pro machine.
John:
Oh, totally.
John:
Yeah.
John:
right and so i i think it fits perfectly in the show even though again there's not like anything you have to do to it's like it's introducing a tool like if you think of your audience as developers oh here developers you were looking for a new tool to do your job this one is way better than the previous 16 inch macbook pro you know and assuming the rumors are true it's got all the ports and it's got mag save and it's got sd and it's got a great screen and it's got an arm processor like it's a perfect product to announce at this time
John:
And again, assuming the chip is ready, I feel like that is a shoo-in and it makes perfect sense.
John:
But beyond that, like, is it important for them to announce the iMac that uses the same chip as that?
John:
Probably not.
John:
And they just announced the other iMac.
John:
So that doesn't seem like it would work.
John:
I don't think the super duper pro ones are ready yet.
John:
You know, again, what am I basing that on?
John:
Nothing really.
John:
Just...
John:
just the you know tradition that the mac pro size thing always takes longer and is less important and they wouldn't waste time with it at this show unless you know even with the m1 it's not like they released all those m1 macs at the same time and you can say well what were they waiting for maybe they were waiting for more m1 system on a chips to be ready maybe they just weren't done designing those macs like but just because the sort of the heart of the machine is ready doesn't mean they're ready to release the macs so i just feel like it's macbook pro
John:
If anything, MacBook Pro and then nothing else.
Marco:
I'm guessing that's mostly right.
Marco:
The only thing I would add, so yeah, I think you're right, that probably not the big iMac, because they just did iMacs, and I think if they were going to do the big one, they would have done it at the same time.
Marco:
I think the only thing we're likely to see beyond the MacBook Pro might be the higher-end Mac Mini that uses the same CPU as the MacBook Pro.
Marco:
That is rumored to be a product that exists in their lineup.
Marco:
We'll see if it actually is.
Marco:
I think it makes sense to have that.
Marco:
And then that could tie developers over for their high-end desktop needs for a little while longer until maybe iMac or iMac Pro, whatever the big iMac is called, I assume iMac Pro, and then hopefully someday the mini Mac Pro that uses the 2C and 4C jade dies.
John:
That ties into the potential for a non-ridiculously priced Apple monitor to connect to your MacBook Pro or a new Mac Mini.
John:
If that thing exists at all and it's remotely ready, yeah, sure, introduce it with the MacBook Pros and potentially the Mini, right?
John:
That would be amazing, but I don't think it's going to be ready yet.
Casey:
No, certainly not.
Casey:
But to that end, John, what would happen first, do you reckon?
Casey:
Do you think that we will get a standalone non-$35,000 monitor, or do you think that I'll actually get documentation that doesn't suck?
John:
Monitor.
John:
The problem with the monitor question is I'm not sure that that product exists at all, like will ever be released.
John:
So it's hard for me.
John:
I'm not sure that good documentation will ever be released.
John:
That's facts.
John:
The thing about documentation is, like you just noted, Marco...
John:
There are islands of good documentation.
John:
It's just a matter of spreading them.
John:
If they don't have some sort of universal company-wide effort, it's not like all the documentation is going to go from bad to good in one day.
John:
It would just be like documentation was previously 50% acceptable and 50% unacceptable, and it changes to 60-40.
John:
At what point do you say, yay, Apple has fixed their documentation?
John:
I hope the trend is positive and that it's getting better and not worse after a long slide in the other direction, but...
John:
It's hard to say, like Casey trying to say it as a point in time.
John:
Releasing of a monitor is a thing that either happens or it doesn't as an event.
John:
Good documentation is a journey.
Casey:
Oh, my gosh.
Casey:
I have regrets.
Casey:
No, I think you're right that a MacBook Pro would make the most sense.
Casey:
Certainly, I have been itching to get myself an M1 or equivalent Mac recently.
Casey:
I don't have any real complaints about either my iMac Pro or my 13-inch MacBook Pro, but as I've said many times, I don't want to upgrade the laptop until I can get a four-port Apple Silicon chip, and I probably won't upgrade the iMac until I get said laptop and realize how unbelievably slow my iMac feels by comparison.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
So I've been kind of bracing myself for this to be a very expensive year for me with Apple products.
Casey:
And thus far, the only thing I've bought is one AirTag and an Apple TV.
Casey:
So Apple, remember when I said to you a few minutes ago that you used to be really good at taking money from me?
Casey:
Let's get back to that.
Casey:
Let's take some money from you.
John:
You're supposed to get a new remote, too.
John:
So there's 60 more bucks.
Casey:
Well, I'm too cheap.
Casey:
Just get it.
Casey:
The old one was good enough.
John:
Oh, it's terrible.
Casey:
I'm going to get so many emails.
Casey:
Anyway, yeah, so I don't see any other hardware happening, although, honestly, my hope, and this is going to sound a little weird, my hope is that we don't get any hardware because I think that if we don't get any hardware, that means we were so jam-packed with incredible software updates and improvements and so on that they just didn't have the time for the hardware and they'd have to do it at a different time.
Casey:
Whoa.
John:
Well, none of us talked about the VR glasses, so I guess we're just all in agreement that this is not the year for that.
John:
The problem with the VR stuff is they're doing so much work internally.
John:
They release all the software, all the AR kit, all the things, all the spatial audio, like the software we get to see.
John:
And sometimes we accidentally get to see the software that works with whatever their internal goggles are.
John:
Remember, there's various leaks about that over the years.
John:
But it seems like they never released the hardware.
John:
And I'm not sure why, because unless the plan is we're not going to release any hardware until it's like a James Bond style, like just look like a normal pair of glasses, like that's going to be a long wait, right?
John:
They have apparently internally things that look like VR goggles.
John:
You know, it's a big thing that goes in your head.
John:
And yes, Apple-y and it's nice and so on and so forth.
John:
But that's what they're working on.
John:
It's like, well, are you ever going to ship a product like that or not?
John:
Because if you were going to, it seems like...
John:
WWC would be the time to do it because it requires developer support because writing software for VR is considerably different than writing software for a Mac or your phone or whatever.
John:
Now would be the time.
John:
But if this isn't the year, do we just keep waiting?
John:
Because all the rumors of their VR stuff have not been like, it's totally different than any VR you've ever... It's a VR thing, like VR or AR.
John:
It's a big thing that goes in your head.
John:
It's not something that looks like a simple pair of glasses with hidden screens in it.
John:
We're not at that stage yet, so...
John:
I haven't heard any rumors.
John:
You figure we would know more about it.
John:
But the problem is, I think we kind of get bored of like, yeah, that's the thing Apple's working on internally, kind of like the car or whatever the hell they're doing there.
John:
But, you know, it's not like, you know, if they release it, it's like, oh, what a surprise.
John:
They shocked everybody.
John:
We've known for years this is a thing they're working on.
John:
It's just at any point they could decide, is this a shippable product or is it not?
John:
And thus far they've said not.
John:
But if we just stop paying attention to it and they suddenly release it, I don't, you know, I think we have to keep that in the back of our minds as a thing that Apple can do at any time without any huge secret effort because it's no longer a secret.
John:
They're really, I mean, not that they're not trying to keep it, but like everybody knows they're working on this.
John:
Just like everyone knows they're working on a car thing.
John:
So that secret is out.
John:
The only question is,
John:
What exactly is it?
John:
How much does it cost?
John:
Is it a product?
John:
Are you going to release it?
John:
And they can make that decision at any time.
John:
I also think this is probably not the year for that, but it's kind of like the Mac Pro.
John:
Any year could be Apple VR year at this point.
John:
They just have to decide, like they did with the car, whether you're going to ship it or not.
John:
Again, with the car, they decided not.
John:
not many times over, but presumably that will change eventually too.
John:
So assuming it's not a VR year for hardware, which would itself take up a huge amount of the software thing, then we get to Casey's thing is like, okay, well, if it's just MacBook Pros or maybe no hardware at all,
John:
And this is a big year for software.
John:
What is the big software?
John:
Casey mentioned iPadOS.
John:
And my problem with the iPadOS rumor is this is what everyone says every year.
John:
The iPad hardware gets a lot better.
John:
They're like, boy, I can't wait until this OS take advantage of this.
John:
But most people do not have any concrete ideas of what that would be, except for the people who say, I just want macOS on my iPad, which is not really something that Apple seems like they're in favor of.
John:
We all just want something about iPadOS to be worthy of the hardware that it's on, to let users be more productive, to give them more flexibility.
John:
I did say more like a Mac, but I don't mean more like a Mac in terms of the interface.
John:
I mean more like a Mac in terms of
John:
the way that someone who is familiar with the platform can do lots of different things with it.
John:
On iPadOS, lots of limitations in the US make it trickier to do things that the hardware is capable of, but the software kind of gets in your way, right?
John:
And so aside from the iPadOS gurus who themselves have, you know, like Vitici or whatever, have very specific ideas of exactly what kind of changes they want to iPadOS, I think most people, including me,
John:
understand that ipad hardware is as powerful as a mac like it's got the same chip at this point but that ipad os is not as quote-unquote powerful as mac os in terms of letting you take advantage of uh of that hardware in all the ways you can on the mac i mentioned this on a past episode
John:
It's not as if iPadOS stops you from using all of that hardware within a single application, with the caveat that people have discovered that apparently you can't use more than five gigs of RAM within each app.
John:
But that just seems like a software limit that will probably lift in the new version of iPadOS.
John:
But you can certainly do like a render or just eat up all your CPU and GPU time on your iPad, and you'll be using the full power of the system on a chip to do that thing, plus or minus, I suppose, thermal throttling or whatever.
John:
Um, but that's not what people are talking about.
John:
What people are talking about is on the Mac, I can have 17 different things open and seamlessly move between them and the flexibility of downloading apps that aren't from the app store.
John:
And, you know, I can use Apple script and I can use command line stuff.
John:
Like there's so much more flexibility for literally the same hardware.
John:
If you take like a MacBook air with no fan and an iPad with no fan.
John:
um and so i personally when i think about ipad os you know getting way better to to finally take advantage of the hardware i don't know what that would look like i don't have a vision in my mind of because my you know like it's lack of imagination it's lack of me using ipad os in this way mostly i use my ipad for very simple things um
John:
So I don't know, like, say iPadOS 15 fulfills everyone's dream.
John:
What the heck does that look like?
John:
What are people expecting?
John:
We keep just talking about it in vague terms, but I can't picture sort of how that would change other than something really radical like, guess what?
John:
iPadOS has Windows now, not the Microsoft product, but like...
John:
literal movable windows no more splitting your screen no more of this no more of that and you can use command line scripting and there's a terminal and like you know the fantasy of like essentially a an ipad os that gains a bunch of features that only the mac had previously without becoming mac os but i don't see that happening so i just to me i think it's going to be another year where people
John:
are happy about the things they get in ipad os oh we can use widgets on the home screen now and all the features that were only on the phone are now on the ipad plus there's some cool new ipad stuff but in the end it's like ipad you know a month after wwc people are still saying ipad os needs to go further
Marco:
Yeah, I'm not expecting a lot on the iPad front.
Marco:
It does seem... I mentioned this before, but it does seem like Apple has kind of taken their foot off the gas in the iPad arena recently, software-wise, as they've been so focused on Apple Silicon, on the Mac, and everything else.
Marco:
But I don't know.
Marco:
Because I'm not an iPad power user, honestly, I think I'm going to stop talking about it right here so I don't anger all the iPad power users.
Marco:
But yeah, it doesn't seem like they're...
Marco:
pace of development on iPadOS is aggressive enough to expect really big things to happen this year.
Casey:
You know, I hear what you're saying and I don't disagree, but I could swear that wasn't it last year we didn't really get much on the iPad, but the year before we got a whole ton.
Casey:
My memory is so bad these days.
Casey:
I can't remember what's what.
Marco:
We've all lost a year.
Casey:
Well, there's that too.
Casey:
But I feel like it was WWDC 19 where we got something on iPad or several somethings on iPad.
Casey:
We got a whole bunch of new iPad stuff.
Casey:
And actually, cursor support was not a WWDC thing, but that's happened since then.
Casey:
uh i i feel like apple seems to have been and i can't cite my source it's all just gut feeling at the moment i apologize but apple seems to have been in a two-year tiktok sort of thing so like you know in 2019 we got a lot 2020 we didn't get squat in 2021 we getting a lot i feel like we may be
Casey:
I don't disagree with your pessimism, Marco, but I personally am optimistic that I think this might be the year that we probably will not get everything we want.
Casey:
And all of us, including me, will probably grumble about how we didn't get this or didn't get that.
Casey:
But I think we will be getting a lot on the iPad more than just, oh, here's your stupid widgets.
Casey:
Leave us alone.
Casey:
I think we're going to get something more significant.
Casey:
I don't know if that's going to be a revamp of multitasking.
Casey:
I don't know if it's going to be windowing.
Casey:
I don't know if it's going to be a terminal or something more robust with shortcuts.
Casey:
I don't even know what.
Casey:
Like John was saying a moment ago, what does this even look like?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
But this is why I don't work at Apple because I'm not smart enough.
Casey:
So I'm very curious to see what happens with iPad.
Casey:
And I will put my hat in the ring and I will put my vote in the box that says it's going to be a big year for iPad.
Marco:
Well, and ultimately, like, what iPadOS seems to really need is follow-through.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marco:
This is something that Apple's been really bad at.
Marco:
Like, you know, they have this kind of, you know, you mentioned the TikTok cycle, and I think it might actually be having the fate of Intel's TikTok cycle of TikTok, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.
Marco:
You know, we're going to keep adding more talks.
Marco:
But, like,
Marco:
They try out ideas.
Marco:
We're going to really put some effort into iPadOS and we're going to really make it more powerful and address power user needs and really make things easier slash better slash more capable.
Marco:
And they do like 75% of it and then they leave it alone for two years.
Marco:
And then they go a different direction and do 75% of that and then leave that alone for two more years and then go a different direction and do 75% of that and then leave that alone for two more years.
Marco:
And it seemed like they're never really reaching – like they're never following through with the plan they seem to have at any given moment.
Marco:
And really seeing it through to be really good and to mature the other apps on the system, to use all the new stuff, and to really make sure all the new stuff is rock solid and reliable and works.
Marco:
That's what we're missing there.
Marco:
In addition to just fundamental basics of multitasking that they still struggle with, there are still so many aspects of iPad multitasking that are incredibly unintuitive to those of us who are not experts with it.
Marco:
or incredibly clunky and hindersome, if that's a word, to people who are experts with it.
Marco:
I still don't even think they've nailed some of the basics of multitasking yet, but whatever direction they want to go, whether it's multitasking UI stuff or whether it's down to other more boring things like file provider APIs, drag and drop mechanics, stuff like that, a lot of that stuff they just haven't followed through to make it good and reliable yet, even years later.
Marco:
So I hope that whatever direction they want to take with the iPad, I hope they figure it out pretty soon because it seems like they haven't quite figured it out yet.
Marco:
And then once they do figure it out, I hope they actually follow through and instead of doing a two-thirds job of it, go all the way, finish it, make it work well, make it work reliably.
Marco:
if the mac worked as inconsistently and and oddly as the ipad does the mac would not be as popular among people like us as it is uh the the reason why we have so much affinity for apple's platforms as you know old time mac users well not we aren't as old time as john but you know i can't believe i cannot believe john didn't jump all over us for that 2004 yeah you guys have been around the block
Marco:
But the reason why we have so much affinity for this is because there's so many little details that they got right early on and that have been right the whole time and that are mostly reliable and aren't constantly shifting.
Marco:
And the things they set forth to do on the Mac mostly work most of the time.
Marco:
And I feel like on iPadOS, I can't say that.
Marco:
Not only do the things keep changing, but...
Marco:
so many of the basics just like fail in weird ways or are broken and random point updates.
Marco:
And some of them just never get fixed or never work all the way.
Marco:
Or I don't know.
Marco:
It just, it seems like it's in a constant state of like, all right, we did something two thirds of the way and now the team is going to not touch it for two years.
Marco:
And then we're going to just do something different two more years from now.
John:
I feel like the bright spot in that, as was already mentioned, it didn't come in a WDC update, is the keyboard, trackpad, and cursor support.
John:
If they had saved that for a WDC, it would be quite a wow announcement.
John:
But I think that direction of the iPad platform, that it will become a platform that has pervasive and yet a very iPad-specific support for cursors and trackpads and keyboards, and will keep iterating on that, try to make a better and better keyboard.
John:
I think they've done well with that.
John:
We've had a couple of years of...
John:
trying to do keyboards on the iPad and then adding cursor support and then putting in the trackpads.
John:
And I think they are fairly committed to that direction.
John:
The problem is those are sort of input methods, and I think those are spread pretty well throughout Apple's apps and the interface in an admirable way.
John:
What you were getting at, Marco, is that the fundamental interface paradigm of the iPad has problems, right?
John:
It's not sort of a modular, composable, understandable system that gives you flexibility.
John:
I'm not saying it has to be like the Mac, but we talked about this before.
John:
The interface of the WIMP interface, Windows input menu pointer.
John:
Intel, probably.
John:
No, it's not Intel.
John:
Someone look up Wimp in the chat room and we'll get it.
Casey:
Window icon menu pointer.
John:
Icon.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So it's so old that icons were a novel concept.
John:
Icons.
John:
Wow.
John:
Little pictures.
John:
What are they?
Casey:
Whoa.
John:
Anyway, overlapping windows in a menu bar and even like basics is like the dock, you know, dialogue boxes, like the way the keyboard and the mouse interact with windows.
John:
Like it's a very flexible interface.
John:
You can do a lot of things on a Mac just with that simple paradigm.
John:
And once you learn how that paradigm works, and generally you have standard Windows, and you learn how the menu bar works, and you learn how the dock works, there's a lot of flexibility there.
John:
Flexibility for people to make their own workflows, flexibility for app developers to do their own thing, and flexibility for the users to combine them all to do their thing.
John:
And same thing with multitasking.
John:
command tab using the dock to switch apps clicking on a window to bring an app forward the variations that you can do there it's an extremely flexible interface which is why it has survived so long doesn't mean the ipad needs to do that but the ipad has its own sort of version of that and the ipad's version of that is not as obvious not as generic not as flexible and not just you know like you said marco for the for the experts who know how to use it has tons of frustrations like limitations
John:
I think part of that is the inability to sort of expand the system in iOS, like to do even something as simple as my dinky Mac apps, which would be impossible in iPadOS because you can't do things like observe when, you know, apps come to the front and take actions.
John:
It's just not possible for historic reasons on iPadOS, right?
John:
So it's up to Apple to sort of rethink, like, what are we doing on iPadOS?
John:
Because you don't want to give up, and I think iPad experts don't want them to give up and say, well, just forget it.
John:
It's just going to be like macOS on a tablet.
John:
I know some people do want that, but the people who love the iPad love it for a lot of reasons that make it different from the Mac, that it's not as complicated, that there's fewer things to worry about, that it is simple.
John:
It's just that I feel like Apple has not found that
John:
happy medium and that's part of what i was getting out of like oh well ipad os to be more powerful but also don't make it like a mac but also make it better than it is now but also don't make it weird and complicated it's it's a tall order like i don't i don't fault apple for having not figured this out because a nobody has figured it out in the entire industry as far as i'm concerned and b apple keeps trying and i think cursor and keyboard support is a great move in that direction but there's still the fundamental question of
John:
how do you have to change the interface paradigm of ipad os in some way if you ever want it to be anything approaching as flexible generic and understandable as the mac again doesn't have to be the same as the mac but needs to have those qualities about it so that someone who learns ipad os is not constantly frustrated by the limitations and can also use it to do complicated things we'll see so john do you think this is the year of ipad os then
John:
I mean, I agree with you, Casey, that I think there will be more on iPadOS this year than there was in last, but I'm not even sure there'll be anything as significant as cursor and trackpad support was, because I think that was very significant and done very well and had hardware to go with it.
John:
It just didn't happen to neatly coincide with the WWDC announcement.
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
All right, what are we getting for iOS?
Marco:
I'm hoping we get an expansion to the widget system, which is funny.
Marco:
I'm actually making overcast widgets right now.
Marco:
Not right the second, but I was doing it earlier today.
Marco:
Trying to figure out what they should even be.
Marco:
Because I feel like the widget system in iOS 14 was a really good first step.
Marco:
really good 1.0 of that system, but I want better than a 1.0 now.
Marco:
It's a year later.
Marco:
It proved to be pretty popular, pretty capable amongst users, so I hope they took it further.
Marco:
What I'm mostly hoping to see is a, first of all, a better flow for placing them on your home screen that doesn't make you inadvertently blow up your entire icon arrangement while moving them around.
Marco:
That might be too much to ask, but what I want to see is a smaller size
Marco:
because right now the smallest size is basically two by two icons i'd like to see one that's maybe like one by two like you know two wide one tall um so you could fit more widgets on on certain screens without having them take up so much space
Marco:
I agree with that.
Marco:
And for at least the larger sizes, I would like to see, ideally, some improved interactivity capabilities.
Marco:
Right now, the way widgets work in iOS 14 is that the smallest size, the only interactivity is you tap it and it launches the app.
Marco:
And the bigger size is you can define tap zones within the widget.
Marco:
And then it still just opens the app, but then it tells you which tap zone was hit.
Marco:
And then your app can respond accordingly.
Casey:
It's like an image map.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
Wow, good reference.
Marco:
Yeah, so I would like to see maybe more interactivity there.
Marco:
But otherwise, outside of the widget system, for the rest of iOS, I'm generally pretty happy with what Apple tends to do with iOS updates, which is we usually get...
Marco:
A couple of new capabilities, usually nothing really major, but, you know, a couple of things we couldn't do before.
Marco:
Maybe new app types that become possible to make, new, like, hooks in the system that we can now hook into as third-party apps that previously were only accessible to Apple's apps, you know, stuff like that.
Marco:
So, you know, new types of apps that might be able to exist, and otherwise just general improvements to the APIs in lots of...
Marco:
mostly boring ways, some big, some small.
Marco:
I want to see SwiftUI move forward.
Marco:
I'd love to see advances in UIKit still, because SwiftUI still can't replace UIKit in many ways.
Marco:
Stuff like that.
Marco:
I want to see stuff like collection view and table view improvements, all that stuff.
Marco:
Otherwise, for feature-wise, I just sit back and see what Apple gives us, and usually I'm pretty happy with it.
Casey:
Yeah, I agree with you there.
Casey:
I don't feel like there's anything that I want to come out of iOS super badly.
Casey:
I agree with the ones that you cited, like slightly more interactive widgets would be good.
Casey:
I very much agree with you saying there should be a smaller size widget.
Casey:
I completely agree with that.
Casey:
But I feel like the things I'm most looking forward to from an iOS perspective is actually the developer side.
Casey:
And we don't necessarily need to go into it now or belabor it if we do.
Casey:
But
Casey:
You know, Async Await is seemingly about to land.
Casey:
SwiftUI improvements, I think, would be extremely welcome on this new thing that maybe I'll ship sometime before I die.
Casey:
I'm 100% SwiftUI as I sit here now.
Casey:
And I tell you, writing new stuff in SwiftUI is extremely, extremely fun and extremely fast, for me anyway.
Casey:
You know, I'm not good at it yet, but I can cobble together something that looks reasonably good all
Casey:
Way faster than I could with UI kit.
Casey:
And, and I feel like I love Swift UI for that and how quick it is to iterate, you know, in, in so much about it.
Casey:
I really enjoy, but the second you want to do anything that even smells like it's custom, well, good fricking luck.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
It's just, you're not going to have a good day.
Casey:
This is where your day takes a turn, right here.
Casey:
Though that one little teeny tiny thing you want to do with an animation, well, you just cost yourself three days and, you know, 50 working hours or something like that.
Casey:
And that's where it's frustrating.
Casey:
And so I really hope to get...
Casey:
improvements in SwiftUI.
Casey:
I would love to see UIKit bindings for Combine, which is never going to happen.
Casey:
I'm really, really scared.
Casey:
I wrote a blog post about this a little while ago.
Casey:
I'm really scared that Combine is basically going to fade into the ether because I could see how politically that would be a logical conclusion, especially for the people who are really trying to ram SwiftUI through.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
Isn't SwiftUI built on Combine?
Casey:
Kind of.
Casey:
There are combined components within SwiftUI.
Casey:
I would not personally say that SwiftUI is in its entirety built upon it.
Casey:
But things like observed object and whatnot, that definitely is Combine.
Casey:
But I feel like you could, if you wanted to, you could jettison Combine while keeping SwiftUI built.
Casey:
And I really hope that's not the case.
Casey:
I'd love to see an expansion of Combine rather than it being kind of just fading into the ether, which is what I'm really fearful might be happening.
Marco:
I had to look up what sync meant today.
Marco:
Combine, because I have no background in this functional reactive programming world that this is, I guess, all based on, or your prescription Swift, I have...
Marco:
absolutely no idea what any of the terms mean and ostensibly they are english words but they don't make any sense to people who have not like been you know exposed to them before and so i'm like all right i have this object that i've made to be compatible with swift ui and it has all these like you know at published properties whatever yep
Marco:
So and I wanted to see like, OK, I have this other class that I want to react to changes in those properties.
Marco:
Maybe I can use those wrappers.
Marco:
How do I do that?
Marco:
OK, so I learned from, I believe, a Swift by Sundell post that I found Googling.
Marco:
I learned that I have to do, you know, publisher name dot sync.
Marco:
And that means respond to changes.
Marco:
Okay, that makes total sense.
Marco:
And then it said, okay, well, I need to store the object that it returns.
Marco:
And the object that it returns is of type anyCancellable.
Marco:
mm-hmm okay so i had to look up what any cancelable means a type erasing cancelable object that executes a provided closure when canceled you got to learn about what type erasure is yeah the the amount of crap that you have to understand to understand what this means is
Casey:
I love you so much, but this is when you stop Googling and—I almost said a bad word.
Casey:
This is when you stop Googling and call me.
Casey:
For the love of all that is good and holy, there is nothing I would love more that—well, there's nothing that you would hate more, but there's nothing that I would love more than to try to tell you—
Casey:
How to do these basic things and combine.
Casey:
Because everything you're saying is 100% accurate.
Casey:
You are correct.
Casey:
It sounds like you at least slightly know what you're talking about.
Casey:
There are other things that you might want to know about, which we can talk about another time if you're so interested and so inclined.
Casey:
But seriously, I should be saying this to you privately after the show, but I'm saying it publicly, so hopefully other people will shame you into compliance.
Casey:
Just call me.
Casey:
Just send me a text, a Slack DM, whatever.
Casey:
We can walk through this and save yourself so much time.
Casey:
Excellent.
John:
Some people like to learn on their own.
John:
I think Marco understands that Combine or RxSwift or whatever are specific implementations of a thing.
John:
And Marco just needs to understand the concepts behind the thing, kind of like you understand the concepts of objects and methods or whatever concept you want to talk about, concepts of functional programming.
John:
Once you learn them, then you can say, okay, well, in this framework,
John:
this is what we call this thing.
John:
And this is what we call that thing.
John:
And this is what we call this other thing.
John:
Right.
John:
And so he, I think he's just trying to get over the conceptual hurdle and not everyone learns best by having someone explain to them.
John:
Uh, Mark, maybe Marco learns best by doing it on his own or whatever.
John:
But, but yeah, like I, I think we've talked about this in the past, like,
John:
How combined fits in with SwiftUI and how committed Apple is to this particular concept of, I don't know, what do you call this?
John:
Marco called it functional reactive.
John:
Is there a generic term for this?
Casey:
No, I think that's about as generic as you get as functional reactive.
John:
That's why it's called RxSwift.
John:
It's for functional reactive.
John:
i don't know anyway why is it called combined because i understand because it's like you know anyway that's because they were trying to do a uh half-life reference and missed the pronunciation a little bit right that's combine i get that one i finally got a reference video games um but like i think i think the fact that we have wandered into dev tools here is kind of a comment on ios and that it has reached a level of maturity unlike ipad os but like mac os where
John:
the super obvious things that ios was missing have mostly been knocked down starting with copy and paste all the way up to like you know keyboards and better notification system i think there is room in ios for like end user features every year to like let's make the notification stuff a little bit better let's you know adding flexibility refining things there's even room for you know like there are some paradigms that could be rethought on i on ios
John:
like the settings app, um, that have just sort of never been rethought.
John:
And just, you know, we allow developers like, well, developers can put setting their apps if they want, but some settings can be in the settings app and we'll just leave that that way forever.
John:
That could be rationalized at some point if Apple really cared.
John:
But in general, I feel like most of the improvements to iOS, uh,
John:
probably have to do with os support for services like so for example you can imagine a new feature having to do with maps but that's like a combination of like okay there's a part of that's an ios and part of that is on apple server side with their map service right and then combine they make this new feature that i don't know it has you know
John:
works with air tags or you know some sort of feature that spans the entire stack and that is demoed as a feature of the new ios but really it's a feature that is the os the services you know the maybe the hardware all combined into one thing you know new stuff with the u1 how the phone might interact with vr glasses like all sorts of other stuff that's potentially out there but i
John:
Beyond that, what we're mostly looking for is how can I make iOS apps with less fuss?
John:
And that gets into, okay, SwiftUI is new, but it needs to improve.
John:
How will that get improved?
John:
How does a combined fit into that?
John:
What about enhancements to UIKit?
John:
What about better integration between UIKit and SwiftUI?
John:
There should be fewer things that I have to go to UIKit to do if SwiftUI is maturing.
John:
And then on top of all that is Swift.
John:
which um because it's open like if you're wondering what's new in swift just go to like uh you know what is it uh hacking with swift paul hudson's website anyway swift is out in the open you know guesses about what's coming in swift if you want to know you can know right now like it's not a secret it's open source you can see the new version of swift you can see lots of blog posts explaining what's in it there's tons of new stuff that's really cool and apple will announce that on stage for the people who don't follow the swift community but
John:
It's the kind of, you know, the bright spot slash oddball.
John:
And, you know, because even though WebKit is open source, Apple tends to, like, hold a lot of those changes back.
John:
And a lot of it has to do with Safari, which itself is built on WebKit.
John:
So when they say, oh, the new iOS has a new browser that supports X, Y, and Z, they can keep that a secret.
John:
But the new stuff that's coming in Swift, for the most part, isn't a secret.
John:
Even, I suppose, like when SwiftUI came out, we didn't know about SwiftUI initially, but I think it was possible to know about function builders before...
Marco:
Yeah, it's like kind of like snuck out right beforehand.
John:
Right.
John:
But like seeing function builders doesn't tell you, oh, and by the way, Swift UI is coming.
John:
Like that's the kind of secret they can keep.
John:
But if you're wondering what's new in Swift, there's a bunch of stuff that's new.
John:
Apple should rightfully sort of promote it.
John:
And, you know, like...
John:
like casey mentioned async await i think actors is coming this year as well and just general like quality of life things like the thing i mentioned a couple shows back about removing an error about not being able to do a thing because the some class has self-reference you know like there's lots of sort of quality of life improvements to swift itself that they will probably tout at wwdc that are material and in the context of ios it's like okay i'm not looking as an ios developer for some major deficit that ios has what i just want is
John:
help me make iOS apps, help me make new, better iOS apps, help me add features to my iOS app, help me to make iOS apps more quickly with fewer bugs.
John:
And I think that's a perfectly valid thing to do at WWDC.
John:
And, you know, we're not going to get something on the level of SwiftUI this year, probably.
John:
But I think we just hope to sort of see iterations on everything involved in making an iOS app.
Casey:
Yeah, I hope so.
Casey:
And one of the things that I think I'm a little worried about is, you know, show me how it makes this better.
Casey:
So as an example, I've done a little bit of work with actors or not even work like dabbling with actors.
Casey:
And that was in the context of Scala, which I only barely knew at the time.
Casey:
And I kind of sort of understand the purpose they serve, but I don't want someone to get on stage and say, hey, here's actors.
Casey:
Aren't these cool?
Casey:
Well, no, no, no.
Casey:
Show me.
Casey:
Show me why these are cool and where this will help me and where this will make things better.
Casey:
And I don't know if that's what we're going to get.
Casey:
Async await, I think it's easier to understand why it's cool and why it would be useful.
Casey:
But again, show me an example of where this makes things better.
Casey:
And don't rely on Paul Hudson or John Sundell to do it.
Casey:
Apple, you do that.
Casey:
That's what you're there for.
John:
You do that.
John:
The thing about actors is they might not have something.
John:
Like SwiftUI, they had a thing, right?
John:
And yeah, there's a bunch of underlying technology that made that possible, but they didn't tout the technology.
John:
They said, here's SwiftUI.
John:
They didn't explain technology at all.
John:
It just looked like magic, right?
John:
If you didn't know about function builders, like that doesn't even look like valid syntax, right?
John:
So I think they mostly lean in that direction.
John:
Async await is an exception just because...
John:
Answer to what should I do for concurrency besides Grand Central Dispatch has been like that's been an open question for a while.
John:
And async await is the thing that is an answer.
John:
And I think a lot of people in the audience would be familiar with it from other languages if they have any experience.
John:
So I think that is a thing that they can say, hey, we have async await.
John:
Here's a slide on what it gets you come to the session if you want to know more, even if they don't have any particular new API related to that.
John:
And actors, if there's no new framework, like to your point, to demo it, to show me why it's in there, it might just be a word on a slide and you'd have to go to the follow-up session of what's new in Swift to hear about actors.
John:
Because without...
John:
Without a like if you don't if you don't understand what actors are you shouldn't just like dive in and start using them everywhere in your code and if you do understand what they are you probably have a very specific use case.
John:
You know unlike lots of other features like Swift UI is like this is a whole new way to write applications actors is not a whole new way to write applications please do not change everything in your application to an actor.
John:
You will be sad.
John:
Similarly, don't start using async and wait everywhere in your application because you'll quickly learn how async sort of infects your code like a virus and travels upwards in the call stack until everything is async and you don't know what's going on, right?
John:
So there's a lot of new technologies.
John:
Like there's a reason these are the technologies that Apple waited a long time to roll out.
John:
Like on day one, you didn't have all this stuff because it's important to get to the fundamentals right.
John:
And then you can maybe do a Swift UI.
John:
And then and then maybe you can do async.
John:
And I think that's the appropriate prioritization of, like, what's the most important, so on and so forth.
John:
So, like, as time goes on, these more specialized, I don't know, more potentially dangerous features, they're there because there's very important use cases where you absolutely need them and there's no better tool for it.
John:
But they're not sort of like, I'm going to build my entire application where every single function is going to be asynchronous.
John:
Please don't do that.
John:
Like, you know, if you want to do that, go use Node or something.
John:
Like, please don't.
John:
Like...
John:
it's not that you know you can still basically build your applications the same way but if there is you know and i hope that's what they do with actors if they have any session on actors at all the whole session should be about in what context would i ever want to use an actor and then show you a concrete one and say here's how it was before we use an actor and it was a pain in the butt and i had to do all the synchronization i had to be careful and oops i forgot to do this on the right thread and now i have a crasher but if i use actor is this one thing this one object in my code is an actor and that makes a big difference right and
John:
um but i like actors are so early like i just saw the proposal for global actors going by and i feel like you can't even have a complete actor story until you can talk about how you can use it to protect global data as well and it seems like that proposal is not going to be accepted in time for wwdc so maybe actors won't be heavily featured but surely async await will at least have a session
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So back to things that people actually care about.
Casey:
What about Mac OS?
Casey:
Oh, I'm sorry.
Casey:
Before I get to Mac OS, there's one thing I did want to say, and I forget which one of you just mentioned it, but services and things like that.
Casey:
I would love, and it's not going to happen, but I would love to see improvements to things like photos.
Casey:
I'm still not on iCloud Photo Library.
Casey:
You can shame me about that next episode.
Casey:
That's fine.
Casey:
Or maybe two episodes from now.
Casey:
But I would love to see the thing that we're all hoping for, like the idea and concept of a family in the context of photos.
Casey:
That would be amazing.
Casey:
And I would probably switch to iCloud Photo Library that day.
Casey:
But I feel like there's a lot of cases, and that's the only one I can think of off the top of my head.
Casey:
Oh, actually, Fitness Plus.
Casey:
Fitness Plus is another example.
Casey:
Again, this is somewhat a self-created problem because I'm not on a family plan or anything like that with Erin.
Casey:
But there are times that she would like to do a Fitness Plus workout, and that's only associated with my Apple ID, not hers.
Casey:
And so she can't without me doing it with her, which we do do from time to time, and it is lovely.
Casey:
But there are times that I want to do one thing, she wants to do another, and it's just tough noogies for us.
Casey:
And again, to some degree, that's a self-created problem.
Casey:
But
Casey:
Just stuff, things like that, like being able to share a workout or even even if we both have rights to use Apple Fitness Plus, only one person's stuff can be shown on screen at a time, you know, and just little improvements to their services.
Casey:
As much as I kind of bemoan that they're so bent on services these days, if they're going to if you're going to go down that path and let's go and let's do it right.
Casey:
And I feel like some improvements in that regard would be really, really welcome.
John:
Yeah, Fitness Plus is a young service, so you would expect, like, this is the year.
John:
I mean, here's the question about things like Fitness Plus.
John:
Yeah, Casey, this would be the year that you'd get enhancements if Fitness Plus is doing okay.
John:
It's not doing okay.
John:
Maybe this is not the year to expect, like, version two of Fitness Plus.
John:
Like, SwiftUI, I think, you know, SwiftUI, I think, is doing pretty well, and there's going to be enhancements.
John:
But for anything like a service like that, the question is,
John:
How much does Apple care about this?
John:
How successful is it?
John:
Is it going gangbusters?
John:
And it's like, yeah, we'll get that version two out there.
John:
Or is it kind of like, well, maybe let's just wait and see on this one.
Marco:
One other thing I would like to see, this is a little tiny thing, but Apple bought Dark Sky and they're shutting down the API.
Marco:
Like I think it's this fall.
Marco:
it's sometime fairly soon like in the next year and dark sky was the best weather API for so many apps so many so many good apps that like good weather apps so many of them used it and I and it was you know
Marco:
speculated like why apple bought it and it shut down the api um i think the most direct reason they bought it is because they started using those like you know immediate rain forecasts in their own weather app but they're also shutting down the api and it's like okay well
Marco:
That's kind of crappy because there's other weather APIs, but they're not as good for a lot of people out there.
Marco:
And so one thing I would hope to see is maybe a system-wide weather API available, weather kit available to apps.
Marco:
That being said, I'm not expecting this.
Marco:
I don't think they're actually going to do that.
Marco:
I think they're just going to shut it down because it's something they own.
Marco:
They don't want to deal with it anymore.
Marco:
but I bet that's not why they bought it but just like a little like ray of hope I hope that they're actually going to have like weather kit that you just have weather data without having to get the user's location and send your own API request to some other third party service and pay for it like ideally that would be part of the system but yeah I honestly I'm not holding my breath on that one
John:
I mean, that is a service play.
John:
Like if you think about what they do with CloudKit, where like, you know, it's a play to say, it's very specific because it's weather apps, but like things like CloudKit are like, okay, so you want to make an app in iOS and you have some data you want to store and you want it to be cloud synced.
John:
And if we ask every single individual developer to figure that out on their own, it's really actually a hard problem.
John:
So instead, we'll give you CloudKit, which is like one way that you can do that.
John:
If you don't want to be like Marco and write your own servers, you don't have that skill set.
John:
Maybe you're a lone developer or a small team and you don't have server-side expertise.
John:
use cloud kit and we'll do a bunch of stuff for you and the model is you can get a bunch of stuff in a small amount of data essentially for free which is actually a pretty good deal you don't have to run the servers assuming the api works and everything and is reliable apple will run it for you but they do charge money beyond a certain point and a weather api would be similar where that's a potential money maker for apple right you know it's it's a they bought a company that already had an api and you know i can i understand that by the getting rid of the existing one but
John:
You could say, oh, here's WeatherKit, and it's a way for someone to more easily make a weather app to give sort of more innovation in the weather app space without having to worry about the weather stuff.
John:
And then on top of that, we'll charge you money for it.
John:
If your weather app becomes successful, we'll start taking a cut of your profits because, hey, we run the service.
John:
That's how all the other weather things work anyway.
John:
That's why all the iOS weather apps are subscription-based because they have to pay somebody for the weather info.
John:
I think that makes perfect sense.
John:
Please don't give Apple ideas for new ways to extract money out of developers.
John:
But here's the thing.
John:
It's just for weather apps, so that's a limited space, right?
John:
And I'm not sure how much money weather apps make in the grand scheme of things, so maybe it's just too small potatoes for them.
John:
But with or without Apple, every single weather app that gets weather info is paying somebody for that weather info.
John:
I don't think there are many sources of free weather info that are good these days.
John:
So...
John:
It's not a change to that market at all.
John:
But I see what you're hoping for.
John:
My more realistic expectation is, oh, they bought Dark Sky.
John:
Now would be the year that you show off enhancements to weather functionality and iOS built on Dark Sky, like Apple's first party stuff.
John:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
Yeah, I think that's the most likely end.
Casey:
But I agree with Marco that it would be fun if there was, I guess you can't have CloudKit for weather stuff.
Casey:
Hey, but you could do, you know, WeatherKit or something like that, where, you know, developers could tap into that for either free or low cost.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I think it would be funny.
Casey:
I don't really have any desire to run or write a weather app today, especially since I love Carrot Weather so darn much.
Casey:
But if there was an API right there on the device, I would at least consider it.
Casey:
Maybe Marco would, too.
Casey:
We would have competing weather apps, you and I, Marco.
Marco:
I'll tell you one thing.
Marco:
When Weatherline shuts down in, I think, about another year or whenever that is, I'm going to have the urge to write a weather app.
Marco:
I'll tell you that.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I shouldn't do it.
Marco:
I hope someone else does.
Marco:
But I'm definitely going to be motivated.
Casey:
Well, you can get very, very similar functionality from what I know.
Casey:
And I don't know Weatherline particularly well, but I think you can get pretty similar functionality on the newest version of Carrot Weather.
Casey:
But I don't know Weatherline very well, and maybe I'm underselling it.
Casey:
Nevertheless, all right, anything else for iPad, iOS, anything like that, or shall we talk Mac?
Marco:
Before we jump into the Mac, very quick diversion here into Watchland.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, that's a thing too, isn't it?
Marco:
Yeah, watchOS.
Marco:
I want custom watch faces, and I think now's the time.
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
Oh, it is the time, but yeah, right.
John:
You've been so against this for so long.
John:
Every time I bring it up, you're like, it's never going to happen.
John:
I'm glad you finally come around because custom watch faces absolutely have to happen.
John:
I don't know if this is the year, so I'm not as optimistic as you, but it has to happen.
John:
Like talk about iOS of like the obvious features that, you know, that everyone wants.
John:
It has to happen.
John:
It just has to.
John:
Like eventually they will get around to it.
John:
I really hope this is the year, but if this is not the year, it's going to happen in the next, you know, five years.
John:
And if it doesn't, everyone on WatchOS should be fired.
Marco:
Well, I think... Well, is there anybody I want to trust?
Marco:
I think the reason why this feels like the right year for it is because the way they built widgets on iOS shows a pretty clear path on how they could do it in a way that would be compatible with their power and control needs.
Marco:
The way widgets work on iOS is...
Marco:
you like your process of your app is not always running and is not checked very often to refresh that which contents you as the app you basically vend to the system upon request on a certain timeline like a swift ui view and then the system chooses how to render that and and like it basically like stores that view and just renders it you give it a timeline very similar to how watch complications work you get a timeline and say all right
Marco:
At this time, show this version of this view.
Marco:
And then in two hours, either ask me for another one, or show this version of this view, whatever.
Marco:
You give it that timeline of how it shows stuff.
Marco:
And the point is, your process has never woken up to do that.
Marco:
And it's all built on SwiftUI.
Marco:
The way they can make custom watch faces...
Marco:
is you give them a SwiftUI view that includes variables in the view that are bound to things like the rotation of an hour hand, the rotation of a minute hand, the exact hour, minute, and second.
Marco:
You could have a SwiftUI view that is bound to those values.
Marco:
And then the system could update that view over time for you, whatever it is, like once a second if it's showing on screen, maybe once a minute if it's on the sleep version of the face.
Marco:
And your process doesn't have to be running at all for that.
Marco:
The system could do all of that right within ClockKit and only wake you up on the kind of schedule they would wake up a complication for data updates.
Marco:
And that would be an incredibly power-efficient way to build watch faces that would let watchOS maintain almost complete control over what's going on.
Marco:
But you as the app would still have a ton of creative freedom to do whatever you want with that.
Marco:
You could even have things like placeholders that you could place in your watch faces for standard complication types and sizes.
Marco:
So there's lots of different things they could do with this.
Marco:
I really hope they do it because what we saw with widgets and combined with SwiftUI's native capabilities...
Marco:
That shows a really good path on how to do this in a way that is compatible with their technical priorities and goals.
Marco:
So they have all the tools to do it now.
Marco:
It is totally in Apple's hands to do this.
Marco:
There are no more excuses.
Marco:
That is like it's 100% ready.
Marco:
They don't have to wait for like massive jumps in battery power or anything like that.
Marco:
They're ready to do this now if they want to.
Marco:
So I hope they do.
John:
that was the rumor when you know the widget stuff came out like there was even like a clock rotation function call or something like oh this was originally designed as a clock as a watch face api but like it's just a perfect fit right like you said and then the other good thing about it that you didn't mention but that apple loves you know what else you can do you can make a watch face store and rolex can make a watch face and charge a huge amount of money so everyone can say they have the rolex like
John:
hey i i know they do this with everything they mean i was like an iMessage store let's make a tvOS app store like some app stores work better than other but and maybe watch face app store wouldn't be that big a deal but you know i think there because there are established brands in watch i think rolex would be dumb not to make a rolex a set of rolex watch faces in the apple watch face store rolex would never do it
John:
I don't know, but whoever.
John:
There are brands that would want to sell it.
John:
I think it would be more successful than the iMessage store, but maybe less successful than tvOS.
John:
Either way, they should just do it.
John:
Apple knows how to make app stores.
John:
Apple loves having another platform for you to develop.
John:
It's just another part of developing for the watch.
John:
I have a feeling that watch apps, we saw from part of the court leak documents, that the watch store is... It's not a ghost town, but...
John:
It's nothing compared to the iOS store, the one that counts, right?
John:
And it's kind of depressingly not great.
John:
And just because how many people want apps on their watch?
John:
It's mostly you just want to use the built-in apps and use it as a fitness device and have some cool complications and maybe get a cool weather app.
John:
It's not that big a deal.
John:
But I feel like watch faces are similar.
John:
There is a market for there to be a watch face store, so Apple should totally do it.
John:
Even if it's not super popular, it's not a big deal.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
maybe this is the year i'm feeling slightly more optimistic uh based on your enthusiasm but yeah by the way there's there's no way like the the really high-end brands like you know rolex and like you know patek long like they're not gonna do it but i don't know they see dollar signs i mean first of all you'd probably see it from places like hermes but i think you'd also see it from like the big fashion brands it has some collaborations with like fossil and stuff like that like a swatch
Marco:
yeah maybe that's they're a big brand look i mean they also swatch group owns a whole bunch of different sub brands but yeah it's like regardless of the big brand influence that would just be an incredible place for like it that would be a new marketplace for developers and designers to make cool stuff and and i think it would really breathe some life into the apple watch software scene which needs life breathed into it it
John:
It could have been like MP3 player skins where, say you make the overcast watch face that integrates with the overcast widget in a way that you can't see the borders between them.
John:
If you could actually make them butt up against each other and sort of make it like a complication blends into the watch face because you get to control both of them, that's a little bit un-Apple-like.
John:
But it reminds me of MP3 player skins where you could...
John:
you have control over the whole palette you can really make something that is an integrated hole that you know is as ugly as you want it to be as branded the frito-lay watch face yeah that'll that'll be the big uh big popular ones it's a giant dorito rotating i mean that first of all that would be amazing and i bet people would use it but but no i mean i even just beyond the big brand stuff again i i think this would be a wonderful thing for you know app makers and app designers to to play with because
Marco:
The Apple Watch face game needs that level of individualism added to it.
Marco:
Now that so many people use the Apple Watch, you need more individuality than whatever Apple's half-assed attempt at making three new watch faces a year can add to it.
Marco:
You need more than that.
Marco:
You need...
Marco:
a richer set of influences and perspectives and ideas than just whatever five people in Cupertino can come up with.
Casey:
yeah i definitely agree but i don't know i i really i'd like to go on record that i do not want there to be custom watch faces because then underscore will do nothing for the rest of his life but make custom watch faces and i like his app that's all he does now anyway what are you talking about now he just can't ship them i know i like his apps too he's probably got 75 watch faces ready to ship right now so true uh it's funny all right mac os john what do you want
John:
I feel like this year for macOS, the obvious thing is that we have all this ARM Mac hardware, and yeah, we have a macOS that runs on them already, but kind of the same way that the new iMacs are an example of hardware made with Apple Silicon in mind, in a way that the Mac Mini and the MacBook Air were not, because they were just kind of like, oh, it's the old one with the guts ripped out.
John:
You can do a similar thing for macOS.
John:
Like, what kind of things can you do in macOS knowing that our Mac exists?
John:
And that OS is this one that's going to be announced at WWDC because, you know, what the hell is the...
John:
Big Sur was, you know, they knew Big Sur was going to be released before RMAX were out, right?
John:
But this OS, they know this is the one that's going to be released when RMAX exists.
John:
So, for example, if there are going to be cellular Macs at some point, now would be the time to have the OS, the underpinnings of that in the OS.
John:
So if there's any framework changes you're going to do, if there's any sort of thing that you want to tell developers at with a hint, you know, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, here's a way that you can...
John:
you know because like there's a lot of apis exist for that already but they could enhance them and people like huh why are they enhancing that api doesn't make sense right cellular is just one thing i'm thinking of but even just like apis that take advantage of the upcoming 128 core integrated gpu and whatever features that might have like this is the mac os that can really sort of leverage apple silicon max it's complicated by the fact that if there's no hardware associated with it you kind of have to read between the lines
John:
But I just feel like this is the OS that could be optimized for ARM Macs in terms of all the features they can possibly support.
John:
And if there are any kind of frameworks or things that needed to be recompiled or made better for the ARM Macs in a way that might have disrupted compatibility, this is the OS to do it in.
John:
And then besides that, I feel like it's just the usual complaints about ARM
John:
reliability performance like all sorts of stuff that came out in big sur that is not fully baked like there's lots of complaints lately about the update system i just read uh jason snell's big thing about enterprise mac users complaining that you know every time there's a security update i have to get a three gig download like the mobile whatever it's called mobile update like the update system that our macs inherited from ios essentially
John:
is not up to snuff for the mac we shouldn't have three gig downloads for a small security patch right so hey this is the os where you can enhance that similarly the time machine enhancements that they've done those are great it would be nice if there was some kind of interface to snapshots or some enhancements like there are features that already exist that mac os needs to take advantage of and then just general reliability and performance type stuff right i think like
John:
Normally you would say, oh, I just want macOS to be reliable.
John:
Everything about it is good.
John:
But I think now we have enough sort of immature systems in macOS that they need to take that.
John:
It's similar to SwiftUI.
John:
It exists.
John:
It's there.
John:
It's a cool thing.
John:
But there needs to be a version, too.
John:
And there are lots of parts of macOS that are like that.
John:
That's what I want to see, and I think that's what we will see.
John:
I don't think there's anything, again, like iOS, anything major that macOS lacks that everyone is just dying to see.
John:
It's just like, take what's there, make it more reliable, take the things that are immature, make them more mature, and really take advantage of the hardware that both exists now and the hardware that we're going to see in the next year.
Casey:
To that end, did you see somebody tweeted earlier, and I think Steve Trout and Smith retweeted it, that it looks like there's going to be branch prediction in Objective-C message send?
John:
I looked at that.
John:
It was a thing about the hardware having support for a feature that helps with the Objective-C message send.
John:
I totally believe that.
John:
There's tons of stuff that's been in every ARM chip that Apple has ever made for all its devices that are...
John:
specifically tailored to make apple's frameworks and languages run quickly i didn't understand enough of the technical details like how does this one particular feature of the cpu help with objective c message send but like i that's that's nothing new and obviously objective c is the past we all know that they should be adding features that make swift faster at this point but uh
John:
but yeah that's you know sure that's part of part of being apple silicon right oh and speaking of making things faster like if they want to talk about swift compilation times but unfortunately because so because swift is so open i mean i'm sure they'll brag about it and say they improved it because they have improved it but they've improved it in ways that are visible because the lvm is developed in the open clang is developed in the open swift's compiler is developed in the open like there's not a lot of surprises there but they'll probably be bar charts yeah
Casey:
Now, in terms of macOS, I most definitely just want – I know we say this every year, but I want my Snow Leopard year where they say, what was it?
Casey:
No new features, just improvements.
Casey:
Just make everything better, please.
Casey:
Please and thank you.
John:
But they need to like –
John:
like notification center and the today view and what they've done with the menu bar there's some things that need attention i guess you could call that a zero new feature but they added a bunch of ui stuff in big sir that is that's not fully baked and i would like to take see them take a second refinement run at a lot of those things yeah that's that's like my only wish list item and like i i feel like big sir is again it's like what i was saying with ipad stuff earlier it's like they got 75 of the way done with the design and just stopped
Marco:
and like i i would love to see the notifications ui is ridiculously bad it's like the touch targets are way out of whack or the click targets excuse me way out of whack uh the the whole thing where you have to hover over the notification to see that little tiny x or the little options thing like it's so bad and there's a pop a pop-up menu because they can't put two buttons on there before there was room for two buttons now sorry there's only room for one like
John:
Take a second run at all of that, and I would call that a new feature.
John:
Hey, we've improved notifications.
John:
We've improved that little sidebar thing.
John:
Even the menu bar, which they did a bunch of quote-unquote improvements to in Big Sur to make it sort of more flexible so you can have control center, which control center is cool, and you can drag things off of it and everything, but it's needlessly inflexible in terms of the order things are in the menu bar.
John:
I really don't expect them to address.
John:
This is the type of thing they never address.
John:
But in the next five years, someone should think...
John:
hey, what if I want the little magnifying glass for Spotlight Search to be the right most item on the menu bar?
John:
I don't like them saying the date has to be in the upper right and I can't change that.
John:
I used to be able to change it and now I can't and I don't understand why.
John:
So that's more of a five-year plan.
John:
But a one-year plan is like you're saying, Margo, take all those features you added in Big Sur, maybe take a second look at some of them.
Marco:
Yeah, I would say as a general goal, nothing should appear on hover.
Marco:
I know that's hard.
Marco:
I know I just killed Alan Dye with that statement.
Marco:
But nothing should appear on hover.
Marco:
If the UI has important functionality, it should be visible.
Marco:
Period.
Marco:
Hover is good when you're in like a full screen view of a video player.
Marco:
Okay?
Marco:
The rest of the UI doesn't need that kind of treatment.
John:
I was going to say, well, what if you just wiggle your mouse and like the closed box would glint slightly?
Yeah.
John:
Like you could turn on high contrast notification dismissal.
Marco:
It'll put a white outline around the little X. No, like seriously, like almost all of the problems I have with pictures UI come down to that one thing of like something that I need to use is hidden behind a delay that appears on a hover.
Marco:
So it's either the proxy icon on a folder window or a document window, which again, there's no... I just...
Marco:
put it on there just leave it on it's fine i'm hovering over one right now it looks great as it is with it showing all the time just leave it there so that's step one and then yeah step two is like the notification just like you have this stupid hover over thing with the x like that should always be visible and the design should be designed to
Marco:
to accommodate the things people actually need all the time.
John:
Like the top two or three options they want to do instead of burying them under a pop-up menu, put them in the dialogue.
John:
Imagine.
John:
And the close button, which is a thing that people want to do, put that there.
John:
And the totally non-obvious ability to grab the thing and check it off the right edge of the screen, nobody knows about that except for nerds.
John:
And it's a useful thing that you can do sometimes.
John:
They have better affordances for things you can do with notifications because you can still do them.
John:
They're just all harder.
Marco:
Not a day goes by when I don't misclick either the X button or the clear button or the options to go do something like that.
John:
The thing expands into clear all.
John:
I forgot about that.
John:
Like the little X sometimes gets wider and becomes a clear all button.
Marco:
Yes, which is different in both dimensions in size.
Marco:
There's so much about the notification design.
Marco:
It just encompasses everything that is terrible about the Alan Dye era of software design.
Marco:
And I really hope that they take a second pass at this.
Marco:
Even, for God's sakes, finish your first pass because this is not finished.
Marco:
We've been using it for a year, but this is not finished because it doesn't work.
Marco:
So please, for the love of God, do something about this design and fix the most glaring problems.
Marco:
And for me, that's notifications and document proxy icons.
John:
We're going long here, but I want to throw in home OS before we go.
John:
That's the rumor of, you know.
John:
They have an OS that runs on their HomePods and they have an OS that runs on their TV.
John:
There's some leaks about HomeOS or whatever.
John:
But hey, if they're going to rename something to be... Because I think the HomePod now does run a variant of tvOS.
John:
Am I correct in that?
Marco:
I think that the big one runs something that was called AudioOS behind the scenes.
Marco:
And I think the HomePod mini runs tvOS, but I'm not positive on that.
John:
Runs a tvOS variant, yeah.
John:
I mean, like, anyway, assuming that leak is remotely true, sort of unifying their home...
John:
devices the tv the little speakers and whatever else they roll out under a thing called home os makes some sense to me if not then just because no one ever knew what the os was called in the home pods anyway they're not an app platform it's not that big of a deal but that kind of unification can make sense
John:
There's no rumors about we have in our we've had in our document here for a long time, this rumor about future home Apple devices with screens or whatever.
John:
This doesn't seem like the event where they would roll that out.
John:
But if they're going to say, hey, kind of like the iPadOS announcement, like here's a branding change that tells you, in theory, our intentions for this platform.
John:
And there is I forget the name.
John:
This was another topic we had.
John:
Whatever that that cross industry effort to make all their their home automation stuff compatible.
John:
It got rebranded at our new name.
John:
It was called like Matter or something.
John:
Anyway, that seems to be coming to fruition of like the industry getting together and saying it hurts us all when all our devices don't work with each other and everyone has to buy all these weird home bridge applications.
John:
Let's all sort of agree on some kind of standard because it'll be better for everybody who makes home automation devices.
John:
if and when that comes to fruition i feel like apple is a participant in that process and they will you know have a sort of a second coming out for their home devices oh here's a new line of uh you know stuff in your home but it may be a bigger a better big home pod that marco was predicting or maybe the home pod mini gets better and the thread radios we're suddenly going to start to use them and it works with all the things integrate with airtag and apple tv and
John:
All this works under this new standard that means you can buy all these peripherals that work together.
John:
I don't think this is the year for that, but it might be the year where Apple preemptively rebrands its in-home efforts under the umbrella of HomeOS and then talk about potential future stuff.
John:
This is based on seeing a couple tweets go by mentioning HomeOS.
John:
If that turns out to be totally BS and not a real thing, I apologize for even talking about it.
John:
Either way, I think...
John:
I'm not predicting huge things from tvOS and HomePod.
John:
I expect them to be mentioned and discussed in the context of their other devices and services and how they integrate.
John:
But I don't think this is the year that Apple is going to come out with their new home device with the screen and a new big HomePod and a rebranding of HomeOS.
John:
Because they just did the new Apple TV thing.
John:
And unlike the iPad,
John:
When they put up the new Apple TV, we weren't all like, boy, I can't wait for the new tvOS to take advantage of this.
John:
Like, no, it's already doing it.
John:
It does the thing.
John:
We got a new remote.
John:
That was the big problem.
John:
It's still ridiculously expensive.
John:
tvOS, despite Casey's problems with HDMI cables, already has pretty much all the features.
John:
It supports all the HDMI standards.
John:
It does frame rate matching.
John:
It has a calibration app built in.
John:
Like, I feel like that...
John:
is not a product that's in desperate need of some obvious feature other than a price cut.
John:
So I don't think this is going to be a big year for tvOS slash homeOS, but I think they will mention it as it integrates with their other products.
Casey:
Oh, very quick aside.
Casey:
I think you might already know this, but I realized I'd never done that calibration thing within the TV, the Apple TV.
Casey:
And I went to do that when I plugged in my fancy schmancy HDMI cable and it said, oh, you're using Dolby Vision.
Casey:
There's nothing to calibrate.
Casey:
Go away.
John:
yep that's what it usually says oh and speaking of this stuff people have uh mentioned in the chat uh the home app right so how where does the home app fit into all this no one likes the home app so bad the the the mac version is even more hilarious uh that's part of like your home strategy if you name it if you rename the thing home os and you say and there's a new home app now the home app doesn't run home os it runs on your ipad or on your iphone or on your mac or whatever
John:
That's a great time to enhance that because as a version one, it was reasonable, but now it's just really kind of limiting.
John:
So I'm not sure if they'll save the new redesign home app for their big rolling out of Apple as part of the matter network or whatever the hell the thing.
John:
I hope I'm getting that name right.
John:
Did chat remote correct me?
Casey:
No, you're right.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So, you know, if they want to take a second cut at the home app, this is a great time to do it.
John:
If not, they might save it for the big coming out party.
John:
Is that it?
John:
I mean, I'm sure we're forgetting something.
John:
We've gone so long.
John:
There's tons of things Apple could announce.
John:
I mean, hey, are they going to announce the car?
John:
I don't know.
Casey:
Can you imagine?
Casey:
That would be so wild.
John:
It just rolls out on stage.
John:
Honestly, I just haven't been keeping up with the rumors.
John:
My focus is so narrow these days.
John:
I just want to see that MacBook Pro.
John:
I care so much about Mac hardware and
John:
And so much less about other things.
John:
But my priorities are now Apple's priorities, so don't take that as any prediction about what's going to be emphasized at this show.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, ExpressVPN, and HelloPillow.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thanks, everybody, and we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C, USA Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Casey:
They didn't.
Casey:
So long.
Marco:
for our wwdc extravaganza yeah second consecutive time i'm not doing it next to you two i'm very sad about that i know you i know john isn't but i am yeah i'm kind of not either i kind of i as much as i love doing the live shows in person like i i love a lot about that but it's so much work and it's and i get so stressed out about just the logistics all working out okay not for me
John:
Well, you got a two-year break from being stressed out.
John:
I feel like I got a two-year break from being stressed out about travel.
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
Oh, so you're ready to go now, John?
John:
Recharge to endure the badness if and when it ever happens again.
Casey:
Mm-hmm.
Marco:
Mm-hmm.
Marco:
At least there's one more year where we don't have to worry about, like, so do we just sit here during the theme song?
John:
oh god that's so true what do we do during the theme song do we sing along you you look at the audience and appreciate the people who are singing that's what you do no no you just stare at them awkwardly i i filmed them the first year yeah but that works the first year but then like you know what do you do the rest of the time like it's too short for us to like you know the rock band move just leave the stage and come back you
John:
you do like what the newscasters do you know like like when the lights dim like when we were kids when the news would be over the lights would dim the newscasters would always talk to each other like as the the studio lights are dimming oh yeah they always had to look like they had like a side conversation really they were probably just like you know either they hated each other and were cursing each other under their breath they were complaining about like the director or whoever i don't know but i whatever they're talking about it certainly wasn't let's discuss the latest news stories
Casey:
All right, well, let me tell you, if we are not in person next year, then I am committing all three of us, and I have not spoken to either of you two about it, I'm committing all three of us to do one video episode next year.
John:
No one wants to see that.
Casey:
Come on!
Casey:
Just for funsies.
John:
Nobody needs to see video episodes.
John:
That's not why they go to the live shows.
John:
The live shows are kind of like the version of the bootleg, is that you get to hear the sort of raw, uncut thing, and I suppose sometimes you get to see toasters, but, you know.
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, I suppose if we had to do one of those two things, either a full-blown live show in person in a venue that we have to set up all the logistics for and everything, or just record our video one day, I guess I could record the video.
Marco:
I guess that's not that big of an ask.
John:
I think I would prefer the live show.
Ha ha!
John:
really i'll do the damn video edit i don't even i'll this will be the first time i've edited at atp no it's just like what is the i just at least in a live show i feel like there's a live audience that in theory is being entertained and it's like yeah i went to a thing and i saw a thing this is a thing that can only happen when we're here in person whereas a video thing that can happen at any time and no one actually wants to see us maybe we did it in a hot tub that's a twitch joke you don't get correct ask adam about it okay