Worse Than All of Our Toilets
Casey:
Have you loaded your phone with the appropriate number of Phish concerts to last whatever you might be doing over the next few weeks?
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
They're always there.
Marco:
Phish season was a little bit light so far.
Marco:
Most of their summer touring hasn't happened yet, but it's been very strong goose month.
Marco:
I'm still in goose season now, and then Phish season will resume once their tour resumes in, I believe, a few weeks.
Casey:
It's duck season.
Casey:
No, it's wabbit season.
Casey:
No, it's duck season.
Casey:
No, it's wabbit season.
John:
It's not disappointing that Goose doesn't spell the name wrong like Fish does.
Casey:
That's true.
John:
How would they spell it?
John:
Like G-O-O-C-E?
John:
It would just fit better with Fish, don't you think?
John:
Yeah, I guess.
Casey:
I think I've made the speech to you previously, Marco, but just to let you know, to reiterate how good you have it as a Fish fan, I am overjoyed
Casey:
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
of the recordings as broadcast over SiriusXM, but I actually get soundboard recordings of live concerts.
Casey:
I get one each week, just the Friday night one, and I have to make sure I record it as it's happening for, you know, personal use only.
Casey:
Right, yeah, of course.
Casey:
I get that one concert each week that sounds really good, and then if I cared enough to grab any of the others, I'd be getting, you know, two microphones on a pole in the audience.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
Meanwhile, meanwhile, while I'm doing this like an animal, you pay what is I think you the number doesn't matter.
Casey:
But my recollection is it is not that much money.
Marco:
That's about 10 bucks a show.
Casey:
I mean, that's really not that bad.
Casey:
I mean, obviously, it adds up over the course of summer, but it's not that bad.
Marco:
And you don't have to buy them all.
Marco:
I mean, I do.
Marco:
but it's $10 per three-hour show.
Marco:
It's really not that bad.
Casey:
And then you get a soundboard recording that's presumably mixed or mastered.
Casey:
I don't know the difference, but it sounds pretty darn good, all things told.
Casey:
Sounds great.
Casey:
Meanwhile, I get one pretty decent recording a week for the summertime, and I'm overjoyed by this.
Marco:
the fish live concerts that i buy and by the way goose have been following the same playbook like they put all their concert stuff on band camp for 10 bucks you know it's pay what you want 10 buck minimum and it's and they're also like just as good sounding and these shows like they if you ever if you ever listen to like a released live album by a band like a lot of times bands will release their own live albums of like one really great show they did or they do with compilations like it sounds that good every show sounds that good like they're all properly mastered and mixed it's pretty good
Marco:
So now I have two great bands in my life that do this and you still have kind of half of one at best.
Casey:
I have one seventh of one.
Casey:
I mean, not that they record every night of the week, but you know what I'm saying.
Casey:
It's just, it's not fair, man.
Casey:
It's not fair.
Casey:
And Dave Matthews, Fish was there first, unquestionably, but Dave Matthews Band was one of the first mainstream bands that like allowed taping and so on and so forth.
Casey:
And they were for the time fairly internet forward, but then Fish just was like, oh, really hold my beer.
Casey:
I'll show you how it's actually supposed to work.
Casey:
And
Casey:
Dave Matthews Band is nothing in comparison, which is funny because I thought, and I very well could have this wrong, that Red Light Management, Korn Capshaw and his group, I thought they managed both bands.
Casey:
But again, I could be lying to you.
Marco:
They might.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
But I think what we have now learned here is that you need to listen to better music.
Casey:
All right, so let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
I'm not going to take the bait because we don't have time.
Casey:
We have some anonymous feedback.
Casey:
We actually have a whole section of anonymous feedback, and it starts with anonymous feedback with regard to Apple mail delivery.
Casey:
Deliveries to an Apple building address should work.
Casey:
But the shippers will actually deliver items to a dedicated shipping and receiving warehouse instead of the listed address.
Casey:
Executives have multiple levels of mail processing.
Casey:
Each executive may have different instructions for what to do with deliveries before they even leave the warehouse, including opening the items and doing security screening with chemical testing tools.
Casey:
Then they go to the executive assistant for the recipient.
Casey:
Some executives have multiple levels of assistance.
Casey:
In summary, I'd expect mail to John Ternus addressed to Apple Park to get to his assistant at least, which is pretty exciting.
Casey:
I mean, who knows?
Casey:
But I'm not going to count my chickens, but that's pretty cool.
Casey:
And then a certain somebody put a very cool and very interesting image in the show notes.
Casey:
I don't know that it'll necessarily make it as chapter art or anything like that, but would you mind describing this for me, please, John?
John:
This is the tracking on the shirt that's going to John Ternus.
John:
It was delivered or whatever.
John:
It says delivered to agent for final delivery.
John:
Anyway, whatever that means.
John:
It's U.S.
John:
Postal Service on May 27th.
John:
Today is the 29th.
John:
So I feel like this shirt has an entire work week to somehow make it out of the shipping and receiving warehouse and to the appropriate executive assistant.
John:
And then if that executive assistant decides to pass it on, we'll see.
John:
So there's a dim hope that John Turnis may see the shirt before WWDC.
John:
But it feels kind of slim, especially if there's multiple levels of, you know, assistance in front of him in the mail or whatever.
Marco:
So we did what we could.
Marco:
The real tragedy here is that if there's going to be a Mac Pro announcement of some kind, and if...
Marco:
presumably John Turnus would be involved in such an announcement, they probably would have already filmed it before the shirt arrived to him.
Marco:
Oh, that's true.
Marco:
I really don't think he'd be wearing it in the video.
Marco:
I mean, yeah, it's unlikely, I'll give you that, but at least it could have been possible had we done it maybe a month ago.
Casey:
Can you, I cannot fathom, I agree, it would never happen in a trillion years.
John:
I mean, it's a t-shirt.
John:
He doesn't, oh.
Casey:
I know, but still, can you imagine how amazing that would be?
Casey:
That would be, when the connected boys fell off their chairs, justifiably, when Tim Cook was standing in front of their show art at WWDC a few years ago.
Casey:
Can you imagine him wearing our shirt?
Casey:
Like, again, it would never happen, but how amazing would that be?
Casey:
That would be so freaking cool.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, we had ATP show art in the background of showing the podcast app at a WWDC session.
John:
We had Marco adding his own content to the proceedings by ringing the bell on the file system thing.
John:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
Right?
John:
So I feel like we've had our share of influencing the Apple keynotes.
John:
Yeah, I guess.
John:
Fair enough.
John:
Fair enough.
Casey:
All right, and from an additional anonymous Apple employee, they wanted us to know that they have already spotted someone wearing a Mac Pro Believe shirt at Cafe Max, which is the cafeteria at Apple Park.
Casey:
And additionally, we got feedback.
Casey:
I don't know if it was we or me, got feedback with somebody documenting the fact that they were wearing the Believe shirt in front of the Infinite Loop Visitor Center.
Casey:
I think it was, maybe it wasn't Infinite Loop, one of the Visitor Center's signs.
Casey:
So they were definitely on the Apple campus with the Believe shirt, which made me very happy.
Casey:
Continuing with anonymous stuff, but no longer about the shirts, we have some feedback about feedback.
Casey:
An anonymous Apple engineer with regard to Apple's bug system writes, I wish to express how deeply I feel similarly frustrated with the bug resolution process.
Casey:
On my end, if I get a bug from a developer and want to ask them a question, I can say, please ask the developer technical question XYZ and then assign the radar to a black hole.
Casey:
I have no idea if my technical information will be conveyed the way I wrote it.
Casey:
I can't see what the developer says other than the initial report.
Casey:
Everything else is through an intermediary.
Casey:
Often the response from the developer seems totally unrelated to what I'd hoped to correspond about.
Marco:
It sounds like prison.
Casey:
Right?
Marco:
Isn't this how you write to prisoners?
Marco:
Seriously, it's so, so true.
Marco:
Well, we can at least share your frustration, anonymous person, that it seems like a black hole to us as well.
John:
Right?
John:
Isn't that great?
John:
That's what we said.
John:
We said this last episode, but just to reemphasize it, that the system doesn't work for us outside of Apple and doesn't work for the people inside Apple either.
John:
Like, the thing about frustrating is they can't see anything we write except for the initial report, and they're not allowed to converse directly.
John:
So they have to throw their information over the wall to an intermediary and cross their fingers and hope that it's a game of telephone that it all went through.
John:
And then they get a response back.
John:
It's like, what?
John:
What does this response mean?
John:
But they didn't see what we sent.
John:
It's just...
John:
This is not a way to run a bug tracking system.
John:
It doesn't like there are better ways.
John:
And, you know, I know secrecy is like, well, we can't have these people talking to each other because once you get someone inside Apple talking to someone outside Apple, inevitably there'll be leaks and blah, blah, blah.
John:
And it's like, just figure it out.
John:
Like there are ways to do this to allow people to communicate effectively without everybody leaking secrets.
John:
I believe it.
John:
Because, you know, in the end, the people in the middle could also accidentally leak things because they see what the person on the inside said.
John:
So putting one more layer there doesn't necessarily make it so that leaks are impossible anymore.
John:
It's just that they would become more vague sort of game of telephone leaks that are mangled a little bit in transition.
Casey:
Matthew Fensilow writes with regard to bug reporting, and I refuse to read this feedback because even though I understand his point, I refuse to acknowledge it.
John:
No, I put it in there.
John:
I think there's an answer to this.
John:
I'll read it.
John:
As an outsider, it seems crazy to me that Apple would spend any time responding to non-security-related bug reports from developers who don't have on the order of at least hundreds or thousands of sales in the App Store.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So this might be what it seems like, but there's a few unstated assumptions that are not true.
John:
One of them is that large developers are going to find the bugs that they're most likely to find because they sell lots of copies or something.
John:
I'm not even sure what the logic is, but I have to tell you that
John:
The first people to use a new API are not going to be the biggest developers.
John:
Microsoft Office is not leaping on that API that they introduced to WWC on day one.
John:
It's individual developers who have the sort of agility and flexibility to try out the new API.
John:
Or someone writing a brand new app from scratch on that day, they can jump on the new API.
John:
So big developers are not going to find the bugs first.
John:
And the second thing is...
John:
Just because a small developer who sells no apps finds a bug doesn't mean that bug doesn't also exist in Microsoft Office, in Adobe Photoshop, in the big applications, right?
John:
It's not like there's a separate set of APIs written for apps that don't sell a lot.
John:
I use the same APIs as the apps that sell, you know, millions and millions of copies, right?
John:
So it doesn't really matter where the bug comes from.
John:
It's not like they're like, oh, we wouldn't bother servicing their needs because I'm a dinky developer and I don't matter.
John:
Yeah, I am a dinky developer and I don't matter to Apple, but the bug I found...
John:
has really no relation to how many apps I sell or anything like that.
John:
It's like this bug, this bug could be in Apple's apps.
John:
This bug could be in the, like if there's a bug in some framework, I'm not using obscure frameworks, right?
John:
This bug could potentially affect everybody.
John:
And as for secure related versus non-secure related, any bug could potentially be secure related depending on how bad it is, right?
John:
So, even though it seems like it's a waste of Apple's resources to pay attention to, you know, bug reports from dinky developers, the correct take on that is like, it's a waste of Apple's time to, you know,
John:
dedicated employee.
John:
Like we talked about the person who's like from a big gaming company and they have dedicated Apple engineers and a slack with them.
John:
Like that would be a waste of Apple's time.
John:
They're not going to give individual developers like me or even Marco with like a smallish number of sales compared to the gigantic companies.
John:
They're not going to dedicate employees to that.
John:
They're not going to give them the white glove treatment.
John:
They're not going to handhold them or whatever, you know.
John:
But for bug reports, the source of the bug, like how many apps are sold by the person who had the bug, doesn't matter that much.
John:
Where it comes in a little bit is like, okay, well, this bug is stopping Microsoft Office from running correctly on our new OS, so they'll pay attention to that.
John:
But that's not the nature of most bugs.
John:
Most bugs are not like a showstopper where we literally can't ship our product until you fix this bug.
John:
Most bugs are just like, oh, this doesn't work right, and until it does, we're going to have to do this weird workaround, or we have to do it the old way instead of the new way, or something like that.
John:
So...
John:
I get what Matthew was saying, but I think there are some other factors that he was not considering that make bug reports, even from a dinky developer, almost as valuable as bug reports from big developers.
John:
And the only difference being if there's a showstopper that is stopping a big developer product from working at all.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Claude Zines writes, last episode, Marco noted, quote, people learn that trick of canceling your App Store subscription immediately and then you still get your free month.
Casey:
Something worth noting is that for Apple's own apps, when you cancel any of their free trials, you do not get to continue to use the app or service for the duration of the trial.
Casey:
It ends and you're locked out of those privileges.
Casey:
I've not tried this on Final Cut for iPad, but it is the case for every Apple One service.
Casey:
I'm not a developer, but I don't believe the end trial immediately option is available for developers.
Casey:
It's absolute cuckoo bananas.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, I think this is correct on all counts.
Casey:
It is, yeah.
Casey:
We don't have any control over this, and that is the way it works for Apple One, I'm pretty sure.
Marco:
Yes, it is.
Marco:
Yeah, and it's Apple One, and I believe Apple Music trial, like whatever, all those differently Apple service trials that they spam the crap out of you from settings with or from the actual apps themselves, they all work that way as far as I know, which, and I knew that, I just kind of forgot to mention it during the discussion, but yeah, that is totally correct.
Marco:
Their trials end immediately.
Marco:
Ours don't and can't.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Quick aside with regard to Claude Zines.
Casey:
I've probably brought this up at some point in the past, but I am pretty sure this is the same Claude that was kind of the star of 110-100, which Sandwich Video, our friends at Sandwich Video, did a couple of years back.
Casey:
Do you remember this?
Casey:
It was Wistia, I believe.
Casey:
paid them a thousand dollars ten thousand dollars and a hundred thousand dollars to make the same commercial three different ways and claude was the director for all these it is the coolest documentary i freaking loved it again it's like pre-pandemic i think uh it was a while ago now but it is so worth your time if nothing else watch the three two-minute commercials and it's hilarious to see the differences between the three um if that's not the same claude then i'm sorry but i'm pretty sure it is uh and you should check that out we'll put a link in the show notes did you guys see this when it went around i don't think so doesn't ring a bell
Casey:
Oh, man.
Casey:
Well, now you two have homework.
Casey:
But nevertheless, we shall move on.
John:
It's a pretty calm time of year.
John:
We have tons of time for homework.
John:
Yeah, right.
John:
One thing occurs to me.
John:
I was really studying the Apple engineer talking about bug reporting and how it works.
John:
The fact that they only see the initial report and everything else is through an intermediary.
John:
That means like essentially the most valuable piece of information in my bug report on my weird window bug.
John:
Isn't a like subsequent comment, right?
John:
It's like the fifth comment down.
John:
They don't get to see that at all.
John:
They only get to see whatever the intermediary just decides to pass on, if anything.
John:
Another thing I saw recently with people sending us feedback, I forget where it was, but it was like.
John:
uh one of the best things you can do for or maybe it wasn't for us maybe it was just in general one of the best things you can do for reporting bugs is every time apple has a new release of a new os just copy and paste the bug as a new report and say this still happens in you know ios 17 and by the way i previously reported this in feedback whatever whatever and i know that's dumb like you're copying and pasting and you
John:
know it seems like it might be annoying but that keeps it fresh because there's this whole recency bias where bugs filed right after a release are given more attention than bugs filed later and what that would mean for me is that what i should do is you know summarize and coalesce all of my comments because if you look at my bug report it's like here's my bug i think it's like this here's another video showing it here's what i discovered today next week i tried this and i discovered this oh i had a breakthrough it turns out it only happens when more than one user's logged in like that's the headline right so the next time i filed this bug which again is probably futile but what
John:
whatever the next time i filed the same bug the bug will be multiple when multiple users logged in windowing doesn't work or like that'll be the name of it because you just we mentioned this before but you can't edit bug reports so they see what i initially wrote in the description uh but i can't change that after the fact and apparently they don't see anything else that i write they just see the stuff that's passed on
John:
And we had a comment in the chat room.
John:
Somebody said, when I was at Apple, my team read every bug report, but we couldn't communicate back directly.
John:
All correspondence went through dev relations and they were like 20 people for the entire company.
John:
So there was your bottleneck.
John:
No idea if it's still like that, though.
John:
So more reports of the dysfunction from inside Apple.
Marco:
I love the advice of if your bug gets stuck, just file a copy.
Marco:
Imagine if your toilet worked that way.
Marco:
Just send some potatoes down.
Marco:
I don't know what the advice would be.
Marco:
Fortunately, I guess Apple's bug reporting process works worse than all of our toilets in all of our houses.
Marco:
But it sure reminds us of some similar themes.
John:
I mean, the idea is like you're gaming the system because if you know that special attention is to paid to bug reports that happen in the 48 hours after a new release goes out, you filing a dupe in that period gets your thing to be seen, you know, but at the time when you know more people are looking at and paying attention, which is terrible for Apple because like all that means is just more information.
John:
More pebbles on the pile of the giant mountain of pebbles that is bug reports.
John:
Like the reason they're so perpetually behind and leave things unresponded to for years and years is they just have too much to deal with.
John:
And the advice from the inside is, hey, if you want to take advantage of the broken system the most, add to our problem by filing more and more of the same report.
John:
And like I said, working around the idea that they don't see my subsequent comments, I now have to periodically coalesce all of my comments and discoveries on my bug into a new description under a new bug and just keep that cycle going.
John:
It's dumb.
Casey:
I am pretty sure, you know, I have to try to verify this with a birdie, but I'm pretty sure.
Casey:
pretty sure anything that you or i or whomever puts in the feedback does make it to the account the associated radar that's internal to them now unquestionably things in the radar do not go back out toward us and that's well it's not really a problem but it's part of the problem i thought though that as you add comments i could swear that does bubble back into the internal radar but i'm not 100 sure maybe an employee can uh
John:
And maybe this is on a per team basis.
John:
Maybe, you know, the anonymous feedback from the Apple engineers information is out of date or only applies to their team.
John:
Again, within Apple, there is not as much consistency as you might imagine from department to department, team to team, so on.
Marco:
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Casey:
A lot of people were very grumpy.
Casey:
I think it was at Marco.
Casey:
Maybe it was John, but one of us saying that people who don't subscribe to things just don't want to pay.
Casey:
Somebody put this in the show notes, so I guess there's a retort coming.
John:
Yeah, I put it in there to give Marco a chance to clarify what he meant.
John:
I know what I think he meant, which is why I didn't comment on it during the episode, but I think we should let Marco, if he wants to, clarify his thoughts there.
Marco:
Honestly, I don't have that much to say.
Marco:
There are some people who wrote in to say, hey, I will pay.
Marco:
I just don't, you know, I object to subscriptions on grounds XYZ.
Marco:
The problem is, again, in most of the instances where people said that, what they, you know, what they went on to say with like what they would pay, what price would they pay, it ends up being, you know, maybe two years worth of a subscription price.
Marco:
And it's not...
Marco:
it doesn't really work and and people get brought up all sorts of examples of you know what if i only use the app every so often what if i'm fine with the old version and you can bring up counter examples to any software pricing model where it doesn't work as efficiently for those examples but as we discussed you know last week when we were talking about this as we discussed all the other models for paying for software are also imperfect and also have usage cases or models where they don't really work very well for the user or the developer and
Marco:
All these systems have flaws.
Marco:
All these systems have use cases that are not great in them.
Marco:
But I think given the modern software ecosystem where the platforms we are all developing on are constantly changing, both the software and the hardware that our apps are running on change at a pretty aggressive pace here in Apple land.
Marco:
And the expectations of what your apps will do are constantly going up.
Marco:
I know this because I'm an app developer.
Marco:
And I know, for instance, Overcast generally gets very good star ratings and reviews in the App Store.
Marco:
I took a little while after... Was it iOS 15 that introduced widgets or 14?
Casey:
I don't remember.
Marco:
I forget.
Marco:
I took a while to implement widgets because I was behind in my development, which is the theme of the last few years of my life.
Marco:
But anyway, I was behind.
Marco:
I took a few extra months to implement them before... After the OS came out, I didn't have them for a few months.
Marco:
And I started getting a pretty significant amount of one-star reviews that were destroying my review average.
Marco:
It was enough to make a difference.
Marco:
So we have to keep updating our apps.
Marco:
People say, oh, I can just buy this version and use it for years and years and years.
Marco:
You say that, but that's not, as a collective, that's not what you do.
Marco:
What people actually do is expect apps to be updated on a regular basis indefinitely into the future.
Marco:
And so the best model that has the least dysfunction in it to pay for that is either advertising or subscriptions or some choice between either one.
Marco:
So that's how software is funded these days.
Marco:
I know it's not perfect, but when you say I object to subscriptions, usually the use case you're citing is either I really just don't want to pay you that much money.
Marco:
Or it's something that's a fairly uncommon use case that we can't accommodate everything and make it perfect for everybody, but a different model would have more of those problems or more things that didn't fit into it.
Marco:
So this is the model we have.
Marco:
And if you want to pay for software and not just have it be ad funded or creepy data funded, if you want to pay for software, this is the way to do it for most people, for most apps, most of the time.
John:
Two things there.
John:
One, the implied thing in all your statements is there is that given the choices we have from Apple, like Apple doesn't allow infinite number of business models.
John:
It only supports certain ones.
John:
So the one that a lot of people cite is old style upgrade pricing where you pay one price and then you have a discounted price to upgrade to the next major version because you bought the previous one.
John:
Apple doesn't support that in any reasonable way.
John:
So even though people may like that model, it's not an option for us currently in any of the app stores.
John:
Outside the app store is an option and it's widely practiced there, but not inside.
John:
And the second thing is I think the main objection people have was when you said when people say they don't want to pay subscription, what they really mean is they don't want to pay anything.
John:
And people object and say, that's not true.
John:
I do want to pay something.
John:
And then they go on to explain all the stuff that you were just addressing about, well, I want to pay two years worth or I want to pay a small amount and never have any future updates or whatever.
John:
And my most charitable interpretation of Marco's typically somewhat extreme statement that people are really saying they just don't want to pay is basically that given the limited options we have for certain classes of applications, subscriptions or ads are the only way that those apps can be a feasible ongoing concern.
John:
And if you say you don't want to pay in one of those ways,
John:
What you're effectively saying is you don't want to pay at all because there is no other option for you and there is no other option for the app, right?
John:
We understand that you would pass money to the developer in exchange for what you want.
John:
But what we're saying is like, again, for a given app and a given context, that would not work.
John:
If everyone did that, the app would disappear in a year because the developer would not be able to afford to continue making it.
John:
um so that's i don't think he's saying that you're lying and that you you know you're you're trying to pretend you would pay money but really you wouldn't i believe people when they say they would pay money it's just that the way they want to pay it either isn't supported by apple or it is supported but is not sustainable for app developers for the reasons marco described and you can debate it on an individual app basis because we're all just speculating like we think this would not be sustainable would be casey's app is a great point
John:
He's got a potential for ongoing cost to him if that API that is currently free becomes expensive.
John:
And he's got a plan for that now.
John:
But you could say, well, the app is free now.
John:
He shouldn't worry about it.
John:
But that is risky for the developer, right?
John:
Well, why don't you just try it?
John:
And if they start charging, you can start charging us and it'll be fine.
John:
And it's...
John:
It's a judgment call.
John:
It's why I've been debating it or whatever.
John:
Nothing is cut and dry.
John:
But I feel like that's the thing we're trying to express here is we're trying to find a business model where it's sustainable for the app to continue to exist and then find the customers who are willing to support that model.
John:
And the two are tied together because you have to find something that enough people are going to pay for.
John:
And as we said in the past, you're always going to leave some people out, either because the model they want isn't supported by Apple or because the developer thinks that the model they want won't support their app development.
Marco:
Sure, we'll go with that.
John:
A couple more things related to subscriptions that we didn't quite get to.
John:
One, this isn't relevant to Casey's app, which is why we never discussed it, but it's worth mentioning.
John:
If you have a document-based application that has some kind of file format, which CallSheet does not, um...
John:
There is the complaint about subscriptions that says, hey, if I make a bunch of documents with some application and it's a subscription application, if I decide that I don't use that application anymore, that's fine.
John:
I stopped paying a subscription, but also I can no longer even open the documents that I made over the past whatever number of years when I was subscribing it.
John:
So basically people say they're holding my file formats hostage.
John:
I can't even, you know, continue to just look at them.
John:
Like, say it is like a graphics program where you draw stuff or whatever and it's a subscription and you draw, you subscribe for four years and you draw a whole bunch of stuff and you're like, okay, well, I'm done with my drawing now.
John:
As soon as you stop paying, you can't even open those documents.
John:
You know, you could export them or whatever.
John:
But anyway, that's the idea, that the file format locks your stuff up.
John:
People may not remember back in the bad old days of, or the good old days, depending on how you look at it, of, you know, paying $500 for MacWrite 2.0.
John:
and then next year having to pay 200 more dollars for the upgrade price for the next version, they would also do the file format thing where the next version of MacWrite, well, maybe not MacWrite, Word is better.
John:
The next version of Microsoft Word would save all its documents in Word 6 format, and you couldn't open Word 6 documents if you had Word 5.
John:
So even though you're perfectly happy with Word 5, and Word 5 can continue to open all of your Word 5 documents
John:
anytime anyone sends you a microsoft word document like i can't open this can you resave it to me in 5.0 format and they go what and so eventually you need to upgrade so file formats have always been a weird kind of lock-in slash dragging you into the future of making you pay more money but i do get that in any application that has a file format
John:
subscriptions, especially if you can't export your data in sort of a non-proprietary format, subscriptions do kind of hold your files hostage.
John:
At the very least, if you ever want to look at them again or open them or edit them again, you have to pay subscriptions.
John:
On the flip side of that, I think subscriptions do fit that pattern in one way in that if it's like $5 a month like Final Cut Pro is or whatever, it's like, oh, the second I stop paying, I can't open my Final Cut products.
John:
Yeah, but if you paid for Final Cut for two months and you paid $10 and then you have a year gap and you want to open one again, just pay five more dollars for a month.
John:
It's so much cheaper than having to buy the new version of Final Cut Pro for $300 just to open your documents again because the old version you had no longer even runs on the new Mac you got or whatever.
John:
Yeah.
John:
everything everything has its ups and downs uh and i and i don't think the current model we're in is perfect again i think there's lots of models that are that are suitable for some applications that apple simply does not support if you want to see how different models work look at the mac software market such as it is i know it's small outside the mac app store lots of different models exist there including old style upgrade pricing
John:
more flexible subscriptions more forgiving subscriptions all different kinds of subscriptions like panic does this weird thing where like you pay a certain amount of money you get a certain number of updates as part of that however long it takes them to put out that update or something i forget the exact model but people try all sorts of things to try to find the right combination of model that funds the development of the application combined with model that developer that customers are willing to pay for and we're all just trying to do the best we can here sometimes you screw it up in one direction or another and we course correct
Casey:
Do you want to tell me about what Zumphrey had to say?
John:
That's just about my speculation about what Bungie owns and what they don't.
John:
Zumphrey wrote in to say, just confirming that both Myth and Oni were given to Take-Two Interactive after the Microsoft acquisition.
John:
Take-Two is a game publisher.
John:
So Myth, a beloved game franchise, beloved by me anyway.
John:
And Oni, a less beloved game that I'd also played.
John:
War Bungie games, they were given or sold or whatever to Take-Two Interactive.
John:
Uh, according to the folks maintaining myth, and you may be wondering who the heck is maintaining myth.
John:
There's like a open source project to sort of basically re-implement myth, uh, that has existed for years and years and it still exists.
John:
We'll put a link to it in the show notes.
John:
Anyway, according to the folks maintaining myth, take two still wants far too much money for both myth and only, especially since they've let both rot.
John:
for them to be purchased back by either fans or bungie because i'm assuming the people who maintain myth like wouldn't it be great if we could get the rights back to myth and like be the official maintainers of myth and sell a new version and take two is like sure give us i don't know 50 million dollars or whatever whatever they want it's not going to happen um and some free continues but yes pathways into darkness marathon and destiny have always been owned by bungie myth and only are owned by take two and halo is owned by microsoft so there you have it
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Marco:
Marco, what time is it?
Marco:
It is time for our first ever OS exit interviews.
Marco:
So I started this tradition on our show a couple years ago, giving exit interviews to the outgoing iPhone right before the iPhone event of each fall.
Marco:
So we can kind of review, like, how was this past iPhone?
Marco:
After a year of using it, what do we think of it?
Marco:
What are we hoping for for the next one as a result of shortcomings of the current one, etc.
Marco:
?
Marco:
And so I thought this would be a good time for us to do that same thing for this past year's Apple platform OSes because they are all about to be sort of replaced.
Marco:
I know it's going to be in beta for a while, but whatever.
Marco:
So I wanted to do quick exit interviews before we get to our dub-dub predictions for the past year of OSes.
Marco:
So that would be iOS 16, iPadOS 16, watchOS 9, and macOS Ventura.
Marco:
I'm not doing tvOS because nobody cares, and nothing ever changes.
Marco:
So anyway...
Marco:
true story yeah i mean sorry that's the reality um so i figured let's start out with the big one let's start with ios not ipad os yet we'll get to that but ios ios 16 was a pretty significant update in a lot of areas like user-facing features and apis and the apis
Marco:
As I'm developing now, I'm trying to rewrite my entire app in SwiftUI, and SwiftUI got a bunch of really useful changes, and there's a whole bunch of little API tweaks that happen in iOS 16, big and small.
Marco:
SwiftUI's entire navigation paradigm changed, which I think...
Marco:
It went from one horrible thing to something that is mostly not horrible, which is pretty impressive.
Marco:
A bunch of smaller stuff changed as well, a bunch of new utilities, a bunch of new layout capabilities.
Marco:
It was a huge update for SwiftUI and for various other small areas of the APIs.
Marco:
and also user facing features the lock screen like the lock screen customization having multiple lock screens having lock screen widgets that was all new in ios 16 um and there were a whole bunch of other smaller stuff live activities came you know a little bit later that was kind of an ios 16 thing it kind of came late but it got there um there were a few a few changes to like the the like the way focus modes could do stuff
Marco:
I forget.
Marco:
Did we have focus modes in iOS 15 or was it still called do not disturb then?
John:
Oh, it's, it's been around for more than one year.
Marco:
I thought so.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But the, but the focus mode became an API that apps could integrate with, um, as did I believe share for share with you.
Marco:
Uh, I think that also came in iOS 16.
Marco:
Um, and then messages got a huge upgrade with being able to edit, being able to mark as unread, uh,
Marco:
so there were it was a pretty big update and I would say overall oh pass keys I forgot about pass keys like there's so much like there's like there were there there have been so much in iOS 16 um certain things I think didn't
Marco:
come out so well.
Marco:
One of the major changes was they added this automatic dictation.
Marco:
Before, while you're dictating with the little Siri microphone thing into a text field, you would have to say things like period and new line.
Marco:
And they added a thing that tried to make that automatic.
Marco:
Frankly, I changed it back.
Marco:
Fortunately, they made that a setting, and I changed it back because I found it too unreliable.
Marco:
I still now just say period and new line.
Marco:
But
Marco:
I'm glad they at least were working on that.
Marco:
Otherwise, I think that's the biggest stuff.
Marco:
I mean, the home app got redesigned and everything.
Marco:
But for the most part, those were like the major themes, I think, for the user and developer side.
Marco:
And I would say overall, iOS 16 was a pretty good year.
Marco:
It was a pretty solid release.
Marco:
I don't think I really had a lot of major problems with it.
Marco:
There haven't really been major unstable features.
Marco:
And this is honestly, you know, listeners, you know that when Apple has software quality problems, we will be brutal and we will call them out on it constantly until they fix them.
Marco:
I think Apple's software quality is in a pretty good place these days.
Marco:
I really think that... I was just going to say about iOS.
John:
Okay, okay, okay.
John:
About iOS 16.
John:
I think it's a great example for people who are new to the platform or new to the earth.
John:
LAUGHTER
John:
You may think, like we say every year, you know, every year the iPhone's pretty good.
John:
And, you know, usually iOS is pretty good.
John:
Like one of the things you didn't mention at all is like, is iOS crashing?
John:
Are there stability issues?
John:
Are there data loss issues?
John:
Like we don't even talk about this stuff related to iOS.
John:
Was the upgrade terrible?
John:
Did it brick people's phones?
John:
Like you just don't hear about those things.
John:
And I feel like that goes – this is a great example of –
John:
The platform that is the most important to Apple, that makes them the most money, also gets the most resources.
John:
Makes perfect sense.
John:
But it wasn't always that way.
John:
Those of us who have been in the Apple ecosystem for long ago, remember when iOS was not 60% of Apple's profits or revenue.
John:
I forget which one it is, but...
John:
it used to be that ios was a tiny little sliver because the iphone was brand new and there were ios releases that were terrible that did crash that were just like everything was broken and it made everything worse and it was a giant mess there was a long time ago so we're talking about like you know iphone os version 5 or you know back when it was called firmer 13 yeah 13 was a bad release yeah they're
John:
They have been worse, but in general, because iOS gets so much attention and so much resources, which is warranted, I think, because of the importance, the importance it is to the company.
John:
Apple has this is evidence of like what happens if you put lots of people on something?
John:
What happens if some of your best people are on something?
John:
What happens if you put tons of money into it?
John:
What happens is that every year new iPhones come out and we go, you know what?
John:
These are pretty good.
John:
This is a good phone.
John:
We have quibbles and, you know, it's like these tiny differences that we debate.
John:
But in general, the phones, you know, don't catch fire, don't fail.
John:
The Wi-Fi things don't go bad.
John:
The screens don't burn in.
John:
They don't delaminate.
John:
Occasionally they bend.
John:
But again, that was a long time ago.
John:
Like the iPhones tend to be good.
John:
And iOS, the recent releases of iOS, for the most part, they've been pretty good.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
When I look back at iOS 16, the things you listed, even if I don't care about any of those things, there's not really any negatives like iOS 16 erased all my photos.
John:
iOS 16 crashed all the time.
John:
iOS 16 burns my battery down.
John:
iOS 16 made something that used to work not work, right?
John:
You hear about those things for, you know, let's say macOS, but not so much for iOS.
John:
So I think iOS and the iPhone continue to be great examples of what Apple can do when, you know, when they put the maximum amount of effort into it, when they think it's important to the company, when it is important to the company, and they resource it as such.
John:
even for a platform like ios that's like old and creaky and it's not going to be super cool like the vr platform or whatever like it's their bread and butter but it's really important to have that bread and butter because it keeps everything else going so i'm i'm glad that ios 16 was good i agree i don't have any complaints about it i enjoy the new features they added the new features they added more or less work you know like all the stuff that you're talking about like you you know the the ai uh
John:
not AI sorry the ML punctuation thing where it figures out to put the that's a hard problem but it doesn't crash it doesn't cause the screen to get all scrambled if you don't like it you can turn it off and in general the features they added like editing and marking is unread and unsending and all that stuff or whatever
John:
That stuff just works.
John:
It works like they said it did in the keynote.
John:
It makes the phone better, and we just take it for granted.
John:
Like, yeah, another good iOS release.
John:
Good job.
John:
So I hope Apple continues in that path, and I kind of wish some of the other OSs could get that treatment.
John:
Obviously, the other OSs don't sell like iOS does, and I get it, but we can all dream.
Casey:
Yeah, you know, I agree with both of you guys.
Casey:
The one complaint I have about iOS 16, which is maybe a desire for an improvement, I guess is a better way of phrasing it, is a lot of the stuff they added, I feel like either the configuration is clunky or non-obvious, or there's not enough configuration.
Casey:
So like setting up your custom home screens and
Casey:
That's very, very clunky, and I don't love it.
Casey:
And plus, for the longest time, they forced you to change both wallpapers at the same time.
Casey:
I'm not sure if that's true anymore.
John:
No, no, they fixed that.
John:
That's another example.
John:
Even when they make a fumble, like that new feature comes out that they've never had before, and they kind of flub the UI, they fixed it in a mid-cycle release.
John:
We didn't even have to wait until iOS 17.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
But even still, I wish there was a little bit easier to configure and perhaps more configuration.
Casey:
Another thing that drives me absolutely batty is I have my phone set up to randomly rotate through pictures of Aaron and the kids.
Casey:
And every time I lock the phone, it will find a new picture to show on the screen, the always on screen, which I have left on.
Casey:
It'll find a new picture to show.
Casey:
And figuring out where or what picture that is, is like a 75 Tap Pro.
Casey:
that underscore documented way back when i don't even remember how to do it but it's a nightmare and i wish so badly if there was a way that you could even if it's like a triple triple tap or something but some way to say please show this to me in photos i would love for that all that actually on that point with the photos thing i think this is a great example of what money and resources can't buy which is
John:
Like, you know, no matter how many people you put on it, how much money you put into it, when something is a 1.0, like the very first version of this lock screen customization thing, it's not going to have all the features everybody wants.
John:
Even if they thought of that, even if they thought someone said, hey, you know, people see these photos on their home screen, they're probably going to want to be able to find them in their photos collection.
John:
There's probably not time to do that for a 1.0, given the size of the team that's assigned for this brand new feature.
John:
So this is a lesson for people, all the people who have never written software for a living.
John:
No matter how much you care, no matter how much money you have,
John:
1.0 is not going to do all the things that you wish it did.
John:
And it seems like you could fix that by adding people or money, but there are many books about this that you can read if you care to understand why that's not the case.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
Yeah, I completely agree.
Marco:
One thing on that too is like, you know, all of these home screen customization feature, or I mean, sorry, rather lock screen customization features.
Marco:
Like the other day I was in a restaurant and the people at the next table over, one of them had shown the other person their iPhone and the other person was like, oh my God, how do you get that up there?
Marco:
And they had no idea that lock screen widgets existed.
Marco:
And I feel like a lot of these features, a lot of the iOS power features that have come along in the last few years, they're really hidden from people.
Marco:
I've said before how nobody knows about how you can customize the complications on watch faces.
Yeah.
Marco:
Similarly, no one knows about lock screen widgets.
Marco:
When I look around in public and I see how other people have their phones set up, I almost never see anybody with any lock screen widgets because I think that whole system is still very hidden if you don't know to look for it.
Marco:
And so that I think that is one area that, you know, I recognize Apple's resistance towards, you know, adding adding like setting screens and the settings app and stuff like that when not necessary.
Marco:
And they want everything.
Marco:
Oh, you just you just long press here.
Marco:
And then this whole new world opens up.
Marco:
And I think they I hope that future OS is maybe that we're about to see in a week, maybe improve that a little bit.
John:
Yeah, it's a hard problem because you don't want to be like, oh, you have to go through this manual tutorial and then you launch an iOS app and there's like a 17-tap thing where some overlay is showing you every new feature they added and everything.
John:
It makes it quote-unquote discoverable, but at a certain point you just tune out and you're like, okay, next, next, next.
John:
I just want to get to the point where I'm using the app.
John:
Apple tends not to...
John:
belabor the onboarding process of the phone.
John:
There's already enough crap you have to go through.
John:
They're not going to be like, oh, and by the way, did you know that in iOS 16 we added the ability to have widgets on your live screen?
John:
At that point, people are like, oh, I just want to use my phone, right?
John:
And it's a hard problem because you don't want to shove it in their face, you know, and you don't want to force them to go through a big tutorial.
John:
it's the nature of an os when it gets as old when the version number hits 16 there's probably a lot of features in there that are going to be more sort of power user expert features or features that i get discovered by word of mouth or popularized by seeing somebody else that has them and in some ways that's kind of inevitable like it's you should every single feature on your phone can't be easily discoverable because that would be a nightmare right there's always going to be things that are
John:
obscure and that's why apple has things like in the you know apple retail stores where you like come and we'll show you how to use your phone or your mac or whatever and we scoff like oh people old people have to go there and they have to learn how to use their phone like people who don't listen to tech podcasts are not going to discover this on their own but maybe they will realize hey there's like a free class i can go to at the apple store where they'll tell me how to use my phone
John:
And I bet they will cover stuff like this in that, you know, 30 minute class or whatever.
John:
And people will feel like they get great value of it and they'll love Apple.
John:
So I think those classes are a great idea.
John:
And those classes are way better than forcing everybody to go through like a tutorial level in video game parlance to learn how to use the new features of their phone.
John:
Because most people do not care, especially at the moment they're setting up their phone.
John:
But maybe later they will care.
John:
And when they choose to go to a class to learn about their phone, they'll be happy about it.
John:
If Apple chooses to try to show them all the new features they added, they will not be happy.
Marco:
Yeah, but there is kind of a middle ground, though.
Marco:
The lock screen customization and widget thing, I just looked around the settings app.
Marco:
I don't see anything about it anywhere in there.
Marco:
As far as I can tell, the entire section of the phone of lock screen customization does not exist in the settings app.
Marco:
You have to get to it from the lock screen through the long press or whatever.
Marco:
And I feel like that's, you know, look, they'll add things to the settings app whenever they want to.
Marco:
Have you set up a new phone recently with a new Apple ID?
Marco:
It is spammed like crazy with all sorts of service upsells and other garbage.
John:
Services, it goes the other direction where they're not shy about saying, did you know we have a new service?
Marco:
Yeah, like, they already have a section called home screen.
Marco:
They could have one there called lock screen.
Marco:
Or they could have this section renamed home and lock screen and have it be two subscreens.
Marco:
Like, they have obvious places for it.
John:
Yeah, I'm not saying this particular problem is intractable.
John:
But, you know, like, another example is, like, when you swipe left or whatever.
John:
When you swipe...
John:
to reveal the widgets that are to the left of your first home wait do you swipe left on the home screen you don't want or how which direction is that i don't even actually i don't even know we talked about this last time like what do people mean when you scroll down what i mean is that imagine in the imaginary physical world of your phone to the left of your first home screen is a screen with a bunch of widgets that you can put on it right um how many people know that screen's even there oh that's different
John:
That's a whole different section of widgets.
John:
It's not the lock screen.
John:
It's the place where widgets were before you could put them on your lock screen.
Marco:
And it uses different widgets because lock screen widgets are a special type.
Marco:
The apps have to bend and it can only be black and white.
John:
I know.
John:
What I'm saying is that screen
John:
How many people don't know that screen is there?
John:
Because it's not like you open your phone for the first time and there's a little blinky arrow saying, hey, did you know there's something over there?
John:
I mean, I think they might have had some kind of discoverability thing the very first time that feature was added to iOS, which was years and years ago.
John:
But right now, I think people might accidentally do and go, oh, my God, what is this?
John:
What is this screen I've never seen before?
John:
Which, like, whatever outputs, is it the default?
John:
Maybe they have, like, the photos widget and the weather widget is the default or whatever.
John:
That is, quote unquote, not discoverable.
John:
But if you see enough people using a phone and you see them doing it and if you see someone do it, you can say, can I swipe in that direction and find a bunch of widgets?
John:
And lo and behold, you can at the bottom of that screen is like a plus or an edit button or whatever.
John:
So a little bit more discoverable than lock screen stuff.
John:
But like I said, there's always going to be examples of that.
John:
that's sort of what do you call it?
John:
Progressive disclosure or whatever they call it, where it looks simple to the person who wants it to be simple, but there is more complexity if you know where to find it.
John:
And then we're just trying to find the way to smooth that ramp between those two worlds.
Casey:
To go back a half step to what John was saying about a version one,
Casey:
So I'm trying to, I don't think I'm going to succeed, but I'm trying very hard to get CallSheet out the door before WWDC, which means I probably should have submitted it last week, and I haven't yet, but that's neither here nor there.
Casey:
Anyway, I have 18 open tickets issues, whatever, in GitHub, of which I plan to only fix two of them before I send it to the App Store, or, you know, to review.
Casey:
So I have 16 things for me to work on the moment I get this thing published.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
John is exactly right.
Casey:
Now, granted, it is just me, but still, that is how this works.
Casey:
And then one final thought on iOS 16.
Casey:
Another thing where I've come to really like the features, but I feel like while we simultaneously have gotten a lot more configuration than I expected, I want more configuration, and that's with focus modes.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I think on analog, at some point I'll talk with Mike about what I've been doing with focus modes recently because I've ended up in a situation – well, that seems like it happened to me.
Casey:
I have chosen a situation wherein – Like the white cars.
Casey:
Just like white cars, which do happen to you.
Casey:
I've chosen a situation wherein I'm basically in a particular focus mode 24-7.
Casey:
Well, anytime I'm not sleeping, I'm in this one focus mode.
Casey:
And it actually has been working pretty well for me.
Casey:
And like I said, I'll unpack that on analog probably later this month or whatever.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Uh, but I've really even have come to really like focus modes quite a bit, but there's, there's things.
Casey:
And of course, off the top of my head, I can't think of what specifically they are, but there are definitely some things that I wish I could be either more explicit about or tweak just a little bit.
Casey:
Oh, a great example.
Casey:
I would love to have a specific home screen for a focus mode and everyone is reaching for their email clients saying, Oh, contrary, you can do that.
Casey:
Well,
Casey:
Not exactly.
Casey:
What I want to be able to do is say, take these five or six apps and put them on my travel home screen when I'm in the travel focus mode, but that's not how it works.
Casey:
What you need to do is dedicate a page always and forever.
Casey:
That is the only one that happens to be surfaced during the travel focus mode.
Casey:
Does that make sense?
Casey:
So you can't like have a bespoke thing that only shows up during your travel focus and then it goes away and
Casey:
You have to have it there always, and you're just choosing to kind of sort of highlight it or not.
Casey:
It's a silly example, but it drives me bananas.
Casey:
And so stuff like that, I wish we had a little more control.
Casey:
But as much as I'm harping on a few of these things, it's because I love them so darn much.
Casey:
And iOS 16 really is really, really good.
Casey:
I mean, heck, they could have done making iMessages unread.
Casey:
And that would have sold the release for me right there.
Casey:
I'm in.
Casey:
That's all I need.
Casey:
So it is really, really quite good.
Casey:
And I've been really pleased with it.
Marco:
All right, let's move on to iPadOS 16.
Marco:
This, obviously, many of the same features apply to iPadOS, although not any of the lock screen stuff.
Marco:
We'll see if that happens this year.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
But I think the major headliners for iPadOS that were unique to it, or at least mostly unique to it, were Stage Manager,
Marco:
and maybe freeform and kind of the new paradigm like they had this whole thing called desktop class apps and and what this kind of meant in practice was things like customizable toolbars and stuff that made it gave ipad apps a lot more of the abilities that mac apps have have always had and kind of made like system native ui for a lot of that stuff
Marco:
But that's kind of a longer term play for the iPad.
Marco:
Like I think a lot of this stuff with the iPad, they change some things like, you know, some better external display support.
Marco:
They had like display scaling modes and stuff like that.
Marco:
A lot of that stuff seems to be giving the iPad, you know, slowly over time, giving it more and more abilities that are like a Mac in some way or that can be closer to a Mac in some way.
Marco:
And I think they largely succeeded, although that, you know, it remains to be seen how much the market will use that.
Marco:
But at least, look, at least now Apple's using it, you know, with their new Pro apps and stuff.
Marco:
So that all helps.
John:
Although Apple is not using all the features you just mentioned, the Pro apps.
Marco:
That's true.
John:
Steve Stratton-Smith has been commenting that both Logic and Final Cut do not use the resizable window thing that works with Stage Manager.
John:
I don't think they even support Split View.
John:
I mean, again, they're 1.0s.
John:
See, previous discussion about 1.0s doesn't mean they're never going to, but...
John:
Yeah, Apple, I mean, Stage Manager does feel like it definitely fizzled, like it was an idea they had about how multitasking might be better.
John:
I continue to think it works better on the Mac than it does on the iPad.
John:
iPad people don't seem to be big fans of it.
John:
Support from third-party applications for it has not been wonderful, including from Apple itself.
John:
So let's set that aside.
John:
But the other the other desktop class application stuff of like more controls, better widgets, a way for you to have a kind of sort of menu bar type thing without rolling your own.
John:
Like that's all good and positive.
John:
But I mean, I feel like we're going to get to eventually the summary of what we say about iPadOS every year, which is
John:
the hardware continues to be let down by the software because the hardware is so incredibly capable and by that i don't just mean power because the phone is incredibly powerful too but it's got a tiny screen and it doesn't support a stylus and you can't connect it to external displays and like it's the the full picture of the power of the ipad the fact that it uses mac socs the fact that you can get one with a really big screen and you can put a keyboard on it and you can connect it to an external monitor and you can use a pencil with it
John:
the os does not do that those capabilities justice that's always our complaint and they moved one tiny little inch closer to it with 16 by adding some of the desktop class application stuff and then one tiny little inch backwards by attempting to fix multitasking again with stage manager and having kind of land with a thud so you know not not i'm not even though ipad os also you know didn't cause crashes and the features they added existed and were fine um
John:
The fundamental complaint about iPadOS, a complaint that we don't have about iOS, continues to exist and that we just feel like the hardware is let down by the OS.
John:
Whereas on the phone, we feel like the hardware is well supported by the OS.
John:
The OS lets the phone do things that we think phone apps should be able to do for the most part.
John:
Not true on iPadOS.
Marco:
Yeah, I think because, you know, iPadOS, the the I would say specifically like the area of the software that makes it so frustrating for a lot of power users is specifically multitasking.
Marco:
Like, you know, and when you look at the way the phone, the phone doesn't have things like split view.
Marco:
So you don't really like we're able to enjoy the iPhone as you know, there's always one app on screen.
Marco:
There is never more than one app.
Marco:
One app on screen is
John:
We got picture in picture on the iPhone.
John:
Another example of a thing that said, you know what, we always know we've had the power to do it, but actually phone screens are big enough.
John:
We should support picture in picture.
John:
And they did.
John:
And that is a limit for multitasking that I take advantage of on my little tiny phone screen.
John:
But it's not like, you know, on iPad, again, iPadOS, you have an external monitor.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
Like, you know, you have exceptions on the phone, like the Dynamic Island stuff and, you know, control center widgets.
Marco:
But, you know, for the most part, the phone is each app takes up the full screen.
Marco:
And that, you know, iOS is really good at that.
Marco:
That's what it was made for.
Marco:
iPadOS still feels like it's fighting you at every turn.
Marco:
And I appreciate that, you know, some of the changes they've made in the last couple of releases, like when they changed some of the, like, split view controls to put it into that little ellipsis dot thing on the top of the windows.
Marco:
Oh, yeah, that was very good.
Marco:
Yeah, some of those things helped a lot.
Marco:
But whenever I'm using an iPad, multitasking and window management still are very clunky to me.
Marco:
And iPad OS 16 attempted to change that in a big way with Stage Manager, and I think it just...
Marco:
I don't think it made anything better.
Marco:
I think it was a big sidestep in certain ways.
Marco:
I think it was a step back in certain ways.
Marco:
I tried using it myself for maybe a few weeks on my iPad usage.
Marco:
Granted, I'm not an iPad power user, and that's part of the reason why this stuff drives me nuts, but
Marco:
i i found it infuriating like everything i i i was only i only kept using it for that brief time so i could say i give it a fair shot and i hated every minute of it and it would it was fighting me at every turn so i think that was a clear misstep i honestly think they would have been better off not shipping stage manager on the ipad
Casey:
I agree with you wholeheartedly.
Casey:
I'm looking at the page that will link in the show notes for features for iPadOS 16.
Casey:
And other than stage manager, there's not really that much here that I consider to be unique to the iPad.
Casey:
And I think what there is has already been covered.
Casey:
They added a weather app.
Marco:
That was a long time coming.
Casey:
Uh, no, I mean, I, I obviously I bought, uh, one of the new M two, uh, iPads and I do like my iPad.
Casey:
I, I would not say I'm a power user though.
Casey:
I really, really like having an iPad pro for both casual use and couch use, but also on the go if, if necessary, it's very rare that I would try to accomplish anything that vaguely looks like work on an iPad.
Casey:
It's fact, it's almost never, but in certain cases it can be done.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
But no, I love my iPad.
Casey:
I love the hardware.
Casey:
I love that I was able to keep using the smart keyboard or whatever it is, the super fancy floaty keyboard from the 2018 iPad that I could still use it on my brand new iPad.
Casey:
But yeah, software wise, it's just like stage manager never clicked for me.
Casey:
Maybe it's a perfectly good feature and it's just my brain doesn't operate that way.
Casey:
But what I've heard is that it's not very good.
Casey:
And when I tried it, like I said, my brain just did not click with it.
Casey:
And it's funny because looking at this page, the primary feature here is iCloud Shared Photo Library, which has been very good for me personally.
Casey:
I know we covered over the past couple of months a lot of places where there were gotchas and oopses.
Casey:
But in my experience, it's been great.
Casey:
I've been really happy with it.
Casey:
And I'd like to jump very briefly back to iOS.
Casey:
Yeah, with iOS, the Dynamic Island, granted, it doesn't happen often that I've found an app that I use that supports the Dynamic Island, that I use the features in the Dynamic Island.
Casey:
But man, when it is there,
Casey:
when you have an app that supports it, when they, when it's, when it's working properly, it is pretty freaking great.
Casey:
And I do love it.
Casey:
Uh, but with iPadOS, I mean, shrug, which kind of sucks, right?
Casey:
Cause these are such powerful pieces of hardware, but like, there's nothing, I don't have anything
Casey:
bad to say about iPadOS, but whereas I can come up with a ton of great things to say about iOS, with iPadOS, it's kind of like, well, they didn't ruin it, I guess.
John:
Yeah, showing the iPhone getting a little bit more attention, iOS getting more attention, it reminds me of the, you know, so the iPad Pro didn't get revised, because the, like,
John:
Apple pencil thing is in the place of where the little face ID sensor would be and so on.
John:
So the rumor is like, hey, well, one way they might fix that when they eventually do fix it is they could move the face ID sensor down into the display and put a notch on it.
John:
And people are like notch on the iPad.
John:
Why would they want that?
John:
That would be so dumb.
John:
But here's the thing.
John:
As I said, when the notch came out in iOS, this is Apple making lemonade out of lemons, right?
John:
Apple doesn't want to have to have this gigantic sensor array there.
John:
It's just they can't get it to be invisible under the screen quite yet or whatever.
John:
So it is what it is, and they're trying to make the best of it, and they did great.
John:
And people love it.
John:
Oh, I love the dynamic island.
John:
I love it when it works like you just said or whatever.
John:
But as I said when the new phone came out, what people love is a new place for always visible system-level UI to be on the screen.
John:
They don't love a giant black hole in the middle of their phone, right?
John:
But you can get that.
John:
Pretend it's all screen.
John:
There's no notch anymore.
John:
You can get all those features of the Dynamic Island in probably a more aesthetically pleasing form by just dedicating part of the screen to have always visible system-level UI like the Mac does all the time.
John:
iPads can do the same thing.
John:
We mentioned the three little dots, which was like the first after years concession of iPadOS.
John:
I'm like, okay, I guess we'll have some visual UI that is like system-level thing.
John:
Yeah.
John:
You know, every single freaking window in macOS has three stoplights on it or whatever.
John:
There's so much room on big iPad screens.
John:
Dedicate a portion of the iPad screen to some kind of system-wide, always visible UI, like a dynamic island.
John:
And I know you can't... Well, we don't have a notch or whatever.
John:
I feel like if they put a notch on the iPad to deal with the pencil situation, that will finally give iPadOS the excuse slash kick in the butt to add...
John:
you know, always visible system level UI to their interface.
John:
Like they're, they're going, they're bending over backwards to continue to this model of like, we don't have window Chrome.
John:
We don't have windows.
John:
We don't have window controls.
John:
I'm like, yeah, we know you don't.
John:
That's what makes it so annoying to do anything.
John:
And they're grudgingly adding little grab handles and three little dots with a menu.
John:
They're grudgingly adding a control to have like a menu bar.
John:
And I feel like if you give the notch on the next iPad, uh,
John:
I think it will be kind of a shame because I don't like the screen real estate being taken.
John:
But I do believe people will see it as a net win because finally iPadOS will be forced to essentially copy the dynamic island.
John:
And then you'll have the ability to have some kind of visible UI for apps that aren't the front most.
John:
You know, it frustrates me so much.
John:
Anyway, iPadOS, do better.
Casey:
That's a pretty good summary, actually.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
What I want from the iPadOS for me, and I know that my needs and preferences are obviously not going to be representative of everybody, but every time I use an iPad, it mostly makes me want either a Mac or a phone.
Marco:
And I wish over time for that to be diminished and for me to really love what the iPad is.
Marco:
And maybe that's just not me.
Marco:
Maybe it's just wrong for me.
Marco:
But I've never quite gotten there with an iPad or I've only gotten there for brief moments.
Marco:
And I would love for that to change.
Marco:
Anyway, how about watchOS 9?
Marco:
This is actually, I don't think there's that much to say about watchOS 9 because there's not that much to say about most versions of watchOS because most versions of watchOS have not that many visible changes to either the user stuff or developer APIs.
Marco:
And I think watchOS 9 was very similar.
Marco:
They did actually – so I recently was setting up – I was trying to customize the metrics that were displayed for certain workout types in the watch.
Marco:
And this used to be in the watch app on the phone, which was really frustrating because it's like if you were already out on a run, for instance, and you're like, oh, crap, I wanted to see the average pace, not the current pace or whatever.
Marco:
Like there was no way for you to change that if you were already gone.
Marco:
Um, now with this new version, they moved it.
Marco:
They moved all that customization into the workout app on the watch.
Marco:
Um, and they moved, they changed a whole bunch of stuff.
Marco:
And that actually took me forever to find if in case anyone out there, in case you want to find that you got to hit the ellipses button on the start workout blobs.
Marco:
And it's buried way deep in there.
Marco:
You'll, you'll see if you start, if you start hunting around in there.
Marco:
Um, but anyway, the workout app got a whole bunch of like, you know, new stuff like that.
Marco:
Um, a few new capabilities here and there, but for the most part, um,
Marco:
I think that was about it for obvious user-facing features that you would actually see that were part of watchOS 9.
Marco:
Obviously, with the launch of the Apple Watch Ultra, there were certain abilities that the Ultra got that the rest of us, that other watches might not have gotten, or some of them came to both.
Marco:
But for the most part, watchOS 9 was a pretty quiet release.
Marco:
And again, this is like every other release of watchOS.
Marco:
The developer APIs were also pretty quiet.
Marco:
Whenever something happens to SwiftUI...
Marco:
that usually is spread to all the all the platforms that swift ui runs on sometimes except for mac but you know for the most part like whenever ios gets swift ui thing usually watch os gets it too so that helps at least but for the most part the you know watch os 9 was was a pretty subtle release um as well as just alongside of almost every other watch os release um they they
Marco:
The watch face situation is still really, you know, underwhelming and limited.
Marco:
I still wish for third-party watch faces or at least very, very large complications that we can have more control over or something like that.
Marco:
I think there's so much more that watch faces could be and watchOS 9 did basically nothing to really improve that.
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, I really like my Apple Watch.
Casey:
But that being said, I agree with you that there wasn't that much here.
Casey:
I did dedicate myself to being a little bit more religious about sleeping with my watch, but that quickly fell by the wayside because I would put the watch on the charger in the evening when I shower because that's the correct thing to do.
Casey:
Don't at me.
Casey:
Uh, and then I would, you know, never put it back on and, or, and, or maybe I would put it on to charge while I was brushing my teeth or whatever.
Casey:
And then I would forget to put it back on or it wouldn't charge by the time I passed out.
Casey:
And it, uh, so I, I tried to be very good about it for like a couple of weeks and then it fell off, fell by the wayside.
Casey:
I didn't even realize, you know, you're talking about the complication thing.
Casey:
Like I didn't even realize that you could futz around with the, um,
Casey:
with with the views on the workouts i'm sure i knew this at some point but it wasn't until you said something a moment ago that i was like oh yeah can i do oh wait where is it oh you got to go in you got to hit the ellipsis then you got to hit the pencil like it is so not discoverable which i mean it is the watch i can i can give them a buy on that but it no part of this was obvious to me but i was just fiddling with it while you were talking there's some cool stuff in here
Casey:
Um, but yeah, I mean, I love my Apple watch.
Casey:
I don't know that I yearn for that much more from it other than perhaps a little bit more, uh, customization with regard to like, uh, complications and what complications fit where and so on and so forth.
Casey:
I would love third party watch faces, but I mean, that's going to happen the same time we get an Apple TV set, right?
Casey:
Like it's just at this rate, it's never going to freaking happen.
Casey:
But no, all in all, I like my watch.
Casey:
I like the hardware.
Casey:
I like watchOS.
Casey:
It's not perfect, but it works pretty well.
Casey:
And yeah, I mean, there's not much to say.
Casey:
John, I know you have a lot of thoughts about watchOS, so hit me with it.
John:
I just want to chime in to say that I continue to believe third-party watch faces will happen eventually.
Casey:
I hope so.
Casey:
I'm not so convinced, but I hope so.
Marco:
Yeah, me too.
Marco:
One can hope.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
The big one, macOS Ventura.
Marco:
I know John has nothing to say about this, right?
John:
Yep.
John:
The big feature that we skipped over, even though it was on two out of the three OSes we've discussed already, is the iCloud Shared Photo Library.
John:
Right, and that was another... This is a thing that Apple does, and when it's a service, it makes sense.
John:
They roll out a feature across all their platforms, because honestly, a feature like this wouldn't make sense if it wasn't rolled out across all platforms, because all the platforms support Apple's iCloud photo library.
John:
They all have a photos application from Apple on them.
John:
Of course, there's going to be some back-end change.
John:
It should be on all of them, and it is, and I think the feature has been...
John:
a rousing success at least as far as my library is concerned it you know it was able to handle my library it didn't destroy all my photos a duplicate feature a little bit scary as we had many weeks of follow-up on that but in general i've been able to uh you know mitigate any problems there by backing up 30 000 photos not ideal but you know it could be worse and it's a version 1.0 like for example when now when i see it find duplicates that aren't really duplicates i would like to tell it no photos those aren't duplicates
John:
But there is no option to do that because it's a 1.0.
John:
So maybe in the next version, they'll say, oh, now if it suggests a duplicate and you believe it's not a duplicate, you can click another button that says, don't tell me about this one again because it's not actually a duplicate, right?
John:
That's the type of feature you get in a 1.1 and a 2 or whatever, you know, however we're versioning this thing.
John:
So I think that was a great new feature on the Mac.
John:
The Mac is also an excellent example of the opposite of iOS.
John:
What happens on a platform that doesn't sell a lot, that doesn't have a lot of people on it, that doesn't have the very best people and the most money and the most resources?
John:
You get macOS, which, even though it's incredibly mature, simply does not have...
John:
The polish, stability, reliability, just general fundamental goodness that iOS or even iPadOS, hell, even watchOS have.
John:
To give just a random example that everyone's been talking about for years, but only because it's so glaring, when those little notifications appear in the upper right, setting aside that we think the UI is bad and they have buttons that only appear on hover, we're like three years into that redesign and when you drag your pointer over there with your mouse and you try to click one of the buttons, the buttons disappear out from under your pointer.
John:
That's not a 1.0 problem.
John:
That's not something that was in the initial 0.0 release of this thing.
John:
This thing has been out for years, and no one can be bothered to fix it.
John:
It's embarrassing every time I go and do that.
John:
Now everyone knows a trick.
John:
Like, oh, put your cursor into the menu bar first, then sneak up on it from behind, and you'll be able to, like, you have to flank the button or something.
John:
It's...
John:
This is like years into this.
John:
That type of thing would not stand on iOS.
John:
iOS has... They care more about it.
John:
They will make sure it's more polished.
John:
If some of that slips out into 1.0, they'll fix it within a couple weeks or a month.
John:
It's not like it's going to stay there for years.
John:
Parts of macOS are like that all over the place.
John:
Setting aside the system settings redesign, which I think is terrible, at least that is a 1.0, and in theory they could fix it or whatever.
John:
But there's just so much stuff that...
John:
is unreliable has bad ui or both uh and it's not like we're begging for tons and tons of new features to be added again i do like it when we have feature parity we got the catalyst version of messages so we have the messages features parity finally uh but like
John:
it just needs to it needs to be good in the way that any boring ios release is good and they have not yet achieved that what do we want out of mac os just make you know stability speed and fix the ui that's bad yes on top of that we can add new features but like let's achieve that first and they don't they're not getting it like setting aside my weird bug with the windowing thing or whatever that's just who knows what that will end up being that's that's not a big deal i'm talking more about the things like the notifications or
John:
The fact that system settings is so terrible and it's 1.0, right?
John:
Maybe you let that one stew a little bit longer.
John:
Or just any feature that's been in the OS forever.
John:
Basic stuff, how networking works, DNS resolution, like just features that have been there for literal decades, right?
John:
That just either get flakier over time or don't get enough attention paid to them or just plain don't get any better.
John:
That the world moves on and that still, like the one that drives me nuts, I've talked about this before.
John:
I have multiple Macs within this same room here.
John:
And when I want to copy a file from my Mac to the one that I can practically reach with my arm, how long does it take for me to mount that Mac as a shared thing in the finder, open it up, drag it in there?
John:
Why can't I reliably make an alias to that and reopen it?
John:
How many different ways are there with aliases and symlinks and internet addresses with SMB colon slash slash?
John:
Which one of those should I use?
John:
Which one will work reliably?
John:
Which one will stop working inexplicably?
John:
And why does it take so long to do that?
John:
Airdrop is faster.
John:
That's newer technology, but why does plain old file sharing through the officially supported SMB file sharing, why is that so slow?
John:
Why is it so bad?
John:
Why does it have so many bugs?
John:
Why do things not work?
John:
Why can I not reliably make an alias to a network drive and have it mount on launch because periodically that alias gets stale or goes bad or dies or something?
John:
Basic functionality, file sharing and mounting other Macs on your desktop as a volume should be so fast and so reliable and so brain dead simple.
John:
And it's not.
John:
And that's, you know, that's what I want out of macOS.
John:
All that said, that's just my general macOS rant because comparing to iOS.
John:
Ventura in the pantheon of recent macOS releases.
John:
pretty okay they didn't break many new things right they didn't nothing terrible was in it the stuff they did added mostly kind of sort of work so things that i'm complaining about are mostly already there system settings is crap we know that we it did need to be redesigned and fixed this is not the greatest redesign i do feel like mac os is going through this
John:
weird phase where where i don't know i was gonna say where apple can't decide what the ui is supposed to look like it seems like they have decided it's just i disagree with their decision like the way controls look in the swift ui mac appearance like the way buttons lurk the way like pop-up menus look and everything i think it's bad i think it's not good i think they don't work well i think they don't look good i think everything about them is bad worse than the app kit controls that they replaced
John:
But that's the direction Apple is going, and that stuff can change over time, so we'll see if the course correct on that, right?
John:
But now we're in this weird place where if you look at what the UI looks like in system settings, if that's the future of Mac UI as opposed to the app kit controls that I use in my app...
John:
I think all apps on macOS are going to start looking worse and working worse.
John:
Hopefully they will fix that.
John:
But right now we have half and half.
John:
Some of Apple's old apps have AppKit style or even Carbon style controls in them.
John:
I mean, I know Carbon isn't running anymore in 64bit, but anyway, they have controls that look like the macOS from years past.
John:
And then other ones use SwiftUI and have SwiftUI-ish Mac controls that look and work differently, usually worse.
John:
And they're all coexisting.
John:
And
John:
You know, we'll see if they get that straightened out.
John:
But I really do wish macOS could they could find a way to give macOS the right kind of attention.
John:
It's never going to get the attention that iOS gets.
John:
It doesn't sell as much doesn't deserve as much attention.
John:
I get that.
John:
But like the resources they do have, I wish they would put them on the more boring stuff.
John:
of just you know fixing notifications making system settings way better and making like basic things like file sharing that haven't been touched in decades just like hey look at that with a modern lens and say if we did this now would it suck this bad and i really hope the answer is no
Marco:
Yeah, I think where I want to get with macOS, I mentioned that with iPadOS, I want to get to a place where I'm not constantly wanting to use a different platform when I'm using my iPad.
Marco:
What I want to get to with macOS is I want to get to a point where when I hear that Apple has redesigned or rewritten something in macOS, I want it to not feel like dread.
John:
Well, well-founded dread and not just like pessimistic dread, but like, you know, proven by past experiences and continuing evidence that when they redo it, it's not going to be better.
John:
And we would like it to be better.
Marco:
One important difference is that when you look at all the other OS's that we're that we're talking about today, watchOS, iOS, iPadOS, even, hey, throw in tvOS.
Marco:
One of the critical differences here is that those are all based on iOS and
Marco:
and to some degree, UIKit.
Marco:
Mac OS is older and is different, and the APIs are very different.
Marco:
The behaviors in the system, the capabilities of the system are very, very different.
Marco:
It shows.
Marco:
It shows when you see Apple's attention to the OSs and to their features and to their designs.
Marco:
That even though many, I'd say most, of the software quality issues that plagued them a little while back, I would say most of those issues are behind them.
Marco:
Again, like I was saying earlier, I think their software quality is in a really good place overall these days.
Marco:
And that really is to their credit.
Marco:
The number of platforms they have, that's not easy.
Marco:
I really do give them credit.
Marco:
Their software quality is substantially better now than it was five, ten years ago.
Marco:
And it's definitely in a pretty good overall place in absolute terms.
Marco:
However, obviously there's going to be things that are not so good in every set of software.
Marco:
And Mac OS, and especially in terms of design choices, seems really needs a lot of work in those areas.
Marco:
Again, quality-wise, I'm not having to reboot stuff, stuff's not crashing.
Marco:
That stuff is mostly good.
Marco:
Things mostly work.
John:
But reaching for a button and having it disappear as your cursor goes toward is just one level removed from crashing and losing data, right?
John:
Because this is like fundamental basic functions.
John:
When a button appears on the screen, I should be able to click it with my mouse pointer.
John:
And that's just not the case for years on end.
John:
And surely everyone at Apple knows about this, but the fix doesn't get prioritized.
Marco:
And when you look at trying to write, for instance, as I'm doing this overcast rewrite, I've so far kept everything Mac and iOS neutral.
Marco:
So I have this huge amount of code that's like, instead of using UI color or NS color for color computations, I have things like platform color.
Marco:
And trying to use Swift UI color whenever possible, although I can't use everything with it because it doesn't offer all the variables and stuff.
Marco:
It can't tell you RGB values and whatever.
Marco:
Anyway, so I have all this, like, cross-platform glue code in there.
Marco:
And every time I launch the Mac build of my test app...
Marco:
It looks ridiculous because Swift UI, the idea is you can share a lot of components between the platforms.
Marco:
You can even maybe share like some certain layouts and stuff.
Marco:
And then you see the way it renders like something that looks and works totally fine when it's an iPad or iPad or iPhone mode or even in Catalyst mode on the Mac.
Marco:
You run it in Mac native app kit mode and it's a train wreck or things are just randomly broken.
Marco:
You know, there's more bugs like Swift UI in the Mac is is in a pretty rough place still.
Marco:
And it makes it very difficult to use both.
John:
And it's not app kit mode to be clear.
John:
That's the thing that's so frustrating about the Mac app kits controls.
John:
And, you know, carbon went away and everything about it was all folded into app kit.
John:
there was a time where mac the cassette of controls on macs buttons radio buttons check boxes pop-up everything scrolling views all those controls those all existed had tons of features looked really good and were 100 consistent and that period is over because now here comes the swift ui version which they're different and sometimes i feel like they're different because they you know they're different with reason they like someone has decided they think this is better but they're just plain different and
John:
If running a SwiftUI app in Mac mode used all AppKit controls, it would probably still be weird to get it to work right.
John:
You'd have to pay some attention to it.
John:
But at least it would be consistent.
John:
But it's not like that.
John:
SwiftUI's Mac controls are kind of like...
John:
modified iPad OS controls, kind of, sort of, but occasionally an actual AppKit control will peek its head out.
John:
And it doesn't make for apps that look consistent, that work consistently.
John:
And again, I think the AppKit controls universally were better.
John:
They looked better, worked better, were easier to use, had more features, were more obvious, more intuitive.
John:
They were just better.
John:
And maybe, you know, again, SwiftUI is young.
John:
Maybe they'll fix it or whatever.
John:
But I feel like the people who are designing the Mac look and feel for SwiftUI...
John:
don't understand what makes good mac controls it's kind of like ios 7 all over again or they have they have this aesthetic idea only at least ios 7 look kind of cool the mac ones don't they don't even look good and they don't have a lot of features and they don't work well and i think they're fundamentally barking up the wrong tree when they think a pop-up menu should be some text with a v and an upside down v next to it
Marco:
Yeah, and I think that's like overall what I want, you know, the Swift UI-ification of system settings and the rewrite of system settings on Ventura.
Marco:
Obviously, you already mentioned how it's garbage, and it is.
Marco:
And system settings over the last year has not gotten any better.
Marco:
It still feels like a really rough beta.
Marco:
It doesn't even feel like a 1.0.
Marco:
It feels like a 0.8 or something.
Marco:
It feels like a rough beta, and there should be still a lot more iteration on both the design and the bugginess of it.
Marco:
But
Marco:
It kind of reflects the general state of when Apple touches Mac OS, especially in the UI area, the results always seem really half-assed.
Marco:
It doesn't seem like this is a nice unified design between iPadOS and iOS and the Mac.
Marco:
No, it feels like iPadOS and iOS have their cool, nice design, and the Mac is a half-assed clone of it or a half-assed re-implementation of it.
Marco:
That's how it feels.
Marco:
We can quibble about design choices, and we do, and we will.
Marco:
But I want the Mac to stop feeling like every time they touch it, they do a really half-assed job of whatever they were trying to do.
Marco:
And that is... I don't think Apple is... Apple has not shown that they have that level of rigor and care about the Mac anymore, software-wise.
Marco:
Now, hardware-wise, it's been amazing recently with all the Apple Silicon stuff.
Marco:
But software-wise...
Marco:
macOS is mostly coasting on what was established a very long time ago.
Marco:
And the stuff they have changed, the stuff they have made new in recent years about macOS, especially design-wise, has been pretty shaky at best and really feels very half-assed at worst.
John:
they're chipping away at that other stuff like the old the old the old stuff like that old stuff granted it was old but a it was internally consistent and b it was really good like i don't the same way we say we don't think there's a lot of people inside apple who know how to make a good mac app i'm not sure how many people are inside apple who have who have ideas that i agree with about how to make a good mac user interface like the again the basic controls buttons windows that whole nine yards because every time they touch an area they take
John:
an app kit looking thing from decades ago that looked old and creaky but nevertheless had internally consistent and very good controls and they replace it with something like system settings like notifications got replaced with a worse an increasingly worse version of what was previously there system settings got replaced with the granted the old one was all old and creaky and you know needed to be expanded but all those controls all those beautiful buttons and all those you know those beautiful hand laid out things got replaced with just this boilerplate thing that looks worse than a web page and it's
John:
Like, if that's your vision for the whole OS, I don't want you to find any more old, creaky parts of the OS and replace them with that because you're making them worse.
John:
They look worse.
John:
They feel worse.
John:
They are fundamentally worse.
John:
And they're buggy, by the way, with all the bugs.
John:
It's like, it's so frustrating.
John:
Yeah, they work worse.
John:
Yeah, so it's kind of like, I think about that with my own little applications.
John:
The parts, I enjoy doing the little app things.
John:
Right, the programming model is old and janky.
John:
But like, the result is a window, like a settings window, that looks to me like a settings window in a Mac application.
John:
I look at it and I say...
John:
That's a Mac settings.
John:
And other apps are like that, you know, Safari or other like good Apple apps.
John:
Like they have Mac looking UIs, but some of them don't.
John:
Some of them have weird.
John:
You would think, oh, is this a Catalyst app?
John:
And like, no, that's 100% native Swift UI Mac OS only app.
John:
You just think it's a Catalyst app because you look at those controls and think those don't look like Mac controls.
John:
But that's supposedly the future of Mac controls.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I'm very frustrated with it.
John:
I get done saying that Ventura...
John:
didn't really fundamentally break everything, but everything they do touch in each new release is not an improvement on the old.
John:
It is just a replacement of the old with a creaky 1.0 of the new, and I don't like the new.
Casey:
In the defense of macOS, though, obviously you two both love it as well, but on a positive note, for all of Apple's platforms as they exist today, and who knows what will exist in a week, but for all of Apple's platforms as they exist today, for me, and I suspect for you two,
Casey:
mac os is the one where i am most at home it is the one where i feel most comfortable it is the one where it gets in the way the least now i'm not saying that's true for everyone in fact i would argue for a lot of people especially not olds like us it's probably either ipad os or ios but for me as a official old i love sitting at my mac
John:
It's not that we're old.
John:
It's that we're programmers.
John:
We're computer nerds.
John:
We're people who know and understand Unix stuff.
John:
That's not true of the general public.
John:
That's why we feel the most comfortable there.
John:
It's also why other people feel the most comfortable on their phones and iPads.
John:
So I don't think it's like an age thing because it's older.
John:
We want something that's older or whatever.
John:
iOS is pretty darn old at this point, too.
John:
it's just that mac is the system mac os is the system where you have the most freedom it has a command line it has it doesn't constrain us on what we can do you can have multiple windows or the basic windowing system you can move around you can have always visible controls you can put icons in your menu bar like all sorts of things that maybe the modern apple wouldn't do but that are here for quote-unquote legacy reasons mac os is the platform that you use to develop for all of other app apples other platforms even you know i know you can you know develop on the ios apps on the ipad now or whatever but
John:
i don't think many people would choose to do that willingly just because you have so much more flexibility in a development environment and development tools and all that stuff if you develop on a mac so i i think that's why we like it the best and it does mean that it is narrow interest it does mean that we are on the fringe because we're you know tech nerds who are into the things that the mac can do better but it's not because we're old or there's something old-fashioned about the mac it is just simply the most powerful and flexible platform apple has
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
I was mostly making fun of myself and trying to be silly, but you are completely correct, as always.
Casey:
And so I agree with you, but I don't know.
Casey:
I feel so much more at home and so much more free on a Mac than I do on anything else.
Casey:
And there is something amazing about having an iPad, especially if you don't have it in the keyboard case, which I love, or the smart, fancy, magic, whatever keyboard.
Casey:
I know we went through what means what a couple months ago, and I always forget.
Casey:
But
Casey:
when you have an ipad and that thin little sliver of a device with you know this beautiful screen and optionally a pencil and you can be in the middle of anywhere because it has a cellular modem not to get marco and i started but you can be anywhere and do things on the internet and if you want to add a keyboard you can but you don't have to like it is amazing and i love the ipad for that and i love that i have the whole of human knowledge in my freaking pocket with my iphone
Casey:
And I can be fast on the iPad.
Casey:
I can be fast on the iPhone.
Casey:
But never do I feel as unconstrained.
Casey:
Is that a word?
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
I never feel more free than I do on the Mac.
Casey:
And I feel that way even on the 13-inch MacBook Pro screen in and of itself, which honestly is way too small for any serious use.
Casey:
But you know what?
Casey:
It still works.
Casey:
I feel extremely that way when I have my two 5K screens.
Casey:
You know, I'm sure this is the same for you guys and your ridiculously expensive monitors.
Casey:
It's just, I feel so free and I feel like I can get things done so much faster.
Casey:
And that's what I love so much about the Mac.
Casey:
And just to very quickly pick out one thing on this, honestly, mostly unimpressive marketing page, continuity camera.
Casey:
If you just bought an Apple monitor that maybe has a piss poor camera on it, continuity camera is a pretty nice feature, especially when you hoard old iPhones.
Casey:
So I don't use the hub features of the studio display for anything except a USB-C to lightning cable that's plugged into my last year's iPhone that sits on top of my studio display 24-7.
Casey:
And every once in a while, it'll take me flipping to a different camera and then flipping back to the continuity camera to get it to work.
Casey:
But once I do that, it looks great.
Casey:
It works flawlessly.
Casey:
It is amazing.
Casey:
And I know that for you guys, you don't have any camera to worry about onboard the screen.
Casey:
And I know you've had to add your own.
Casey:
But I really love if you're one of those seven idiots that keeps their old phones like I do.
Casey:
This is an incredibly useful feature that I use several times a month as I'm having chats with friends that are overseas and so on.
Casey:
And I really have enjoyed continuity camera quite a lot.
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John:
so is there anything else going on this week or should we just end here let me do a little speed run of the uh the last minute rumor slash preview things just because it's mostly obvious stuff and we can get to it quickly um headset we've been talking about it forever uh people keep talking more and more about it a couple things on that one as pointed out i think on the talk show recently or maybe it was on dithering i forget
John:
One of the early tales of whether Apple is going to actually release something that has been heavily rumored is as the date approaches, if you don't see any reports of a denial saying, actually, everyone thought this thing was going to come out at WWC, but rumor has it that actually it's not now.
John:
That hasn't happened.
John:
Whether or not Apple strategically leaks those to tamp down expectations so people don't go to a WWC keynote expecting them to release the Apple car and that everyone's all disappointed because they didn't release the car and afterwards every single story is about there was no car, there was no car.
John:
That's the kind of time when it would behoove Apple to strategically leak the information that there's not going to be a car this time.
John:
Well, they haven't done that with the headset.
John:
So far, one week out.
John:
There is no story that says everyone was expecting the headset, but it turns out Apple is not going to reveal it.
John:
This is setting aside of when they're going to ship it or when it will be available or anything else like that.
John:
Everyone thinks the headset is coming and there hasn't been no sort of rumored denial.
John:
Adding more support to it.
John:
Apple has apparently invited a bunch of what this article phrase is, XR media outlets, which is like, you know, AR, VR, whatever.
John:
Um,
John:
These are websites, publications that are focused on AR VR that have previously not been invited to Apple Keynotes.
John:
So press from these websites like Upload VR and what is this one called?
John:
Road to VR dot com.
John:
These people have previously not gotten press invites and this time they did.
John:
Why would these people get present right now?
John:
I wonder.
John:
Maybe it's because Apple is going to reveal the headset.
John:
Steve Troutman Smith pointed out today that the OS behind this, which we've known has been, you know, rumored to be called reality OS, whatever the trademark is.
John:
We had an item in the show that we didn't get to before was like,
John:
xros xros pro with xr being lowercase or whatever uh steve trotten smith says it's such an open secret that they didn't even bother scrubbing the most recent references they left in their open source linker and you can put a link to github where you can see an enum showing all the different platforms and there's a platform for ios tv os watch os bridge os ios mac which that's what catalyst is i believe they're the final two enums are reality os and reality simulator
John:
undisguised in github in parts like that's the type of stuff that they would in past years try to remove from their betas try to remove from their open source but it's like it's like look wdc is next week why even bother hiding it yes the thing was internally called reality os the enums are probably going to be reality os that's what the symbols would be maybe the branding will be xrs or whatever
Marco:
By the way, can we just – I hope it's Reality OS because that's such a better name than XROS.
John:
Yeah, like they filed a bunch of trademarks for XROS or XROS Pro.
John:
Those may just be protective trademarks or whatever.
John:
The word reality when it comes to 3D computer graphics stuff has a long history with SGI and also I think maybe with MIPS and N64, which are also connected to SGI.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
So Cisco had a product called iPhone and trademark on it.
Marco:
No, no.
John:
I'm not saying that's why they can't use it.
John:
I'm saying that's why it is a fitting word because it has kind of a storied history in the world of 3D or whatever.
John:
But I'm not sure the word reality means anything to people.
John:
Of course, XR...
John:
doesn't mean anything to regular people is they don't know the x is a placeholder for a and vr as we just discussed with these media outlets in the end the brain doesn't matter that much how many people know what the name of the os is on their uh on their ipad or on their iphone and the fact they change names it's just it's another example of apple's platform naming
John:
They're stuck on this lowercase letters with capital OS, which I've never really liked.
John:
It was fine for iOS, but then when they did Mac OS, it was a lowercase.
John:
Anyway, whatever.
John:
The point is, the mounting evidence that Apple will reveal the headset to WWC is now just, it's like as close to 100% as you can ever get without actual confirmation.
John:
so that's going to happen probably uh we'll talk more about it next week the other thing related to the headset which is that the the people who can't keep secrets are now uh demonstrating they can't keep secrets and can't contain themselves uh by leaving subtle hints or rumors or stories about game developers uh being buddy buddy with appy so with apple so
John:
Hideo Kojima, the maker of the Metal Gear series, maker of Death Stranding, very famous creator of video games that many people know and love, has been seen around Apple campus, supposedly.
John:
There's been rumors that they're working with Apple or whatever.
John:
Sean Murray, the person who made No Man's Sky, the video game, just tweeted today, like...
John:
uh this morning i guess a single apple emoji that was the entire tweet yeah that's that was uh like not subtle that's the thing about being a famous game developer like apple can't fire them because they don't work for apple whatever deal they have with apple is too far along to be canned although steve jobs would kick somebody out of the keynote if they pissed him off enough but he's not around anymore um
John:
And what are you going to do?
John:
What are you going to say?
John:
Oh, now we're not going to work with Hideo Kojima because he leaked something or because he was spotted at a Starbucks near Apple or whatever.
John:
We've talked a lot about, like, what are they going to try to pitch the headset for?
John:
And the thing that headsets are most well known for in the world right now is games, despite Facebook trying to make it for doing meetings and stuff like that.
John:
VR games have been a thing for many, many years.
John:
The big gaming company Oculus was made as a gaming headset.
John:
And, you know, anyway.
John:
So we've wondered what Apple's going to do there.
John:
This smoke around the famous game luminaries orbiting this makes it think that Apple will have some portion of the keynote where they will try desperately to convince you that in addition to all the other wonderful things that their headset does, it's a great platform for gaming.
John:
And here are some famous game people to let you know that their famous games are going to be on this new platform.
John:
that's better than nothing on the last episode i was saying how apple needs to pay people money to bring their games to their platform uh the the thing is you have to be it's all about consistency you have to do that you have to do it consistently on an ongoing basis you can't just do the thing that apple has always done which is one big famous person or game shows their big fan their big famous product from three years ago runs really well on a mac and
John:
I know everyone who cares about game has already played it.
John:
Maybe you even already played it in VR.
John:
But now that three-year-old game that you already played in VR is available on the Apple headset.
John:
And that's it.
John:
Right.
John:
Or maybe two other games.
John:
And like just to compare that to what Microsoft had to do with the Xbox, they had to consistently over years and years and years court game developers, pay game developers, money, acquire game developers, be really dedicated to the production of games and
John:
in a kind of in the way that apple has been trying to do with apple tv plus television shows where i feel like they have actually put their money where their mouth is and paid to have lots of television shows produced and when some of them didn't turn out that well they didn't give up and say oh well we'll try again another decade no they made more shows with more people and they found the people who knew how to make tv shows and they found stars who are good in television and writers who like that's what they would have to do with games so anyway the rumors about these famous people orbiting around apple
John:
Makes me think that there will be a significant game portion of the headset thing where they will show some famous games and some famous game makers running on the headset.
John:
But that by no means is sufficient to make this a viable gaming platform unless Apple actually follows through for the first time in their entire history when it comes to games.
John:
So fingers crossed in that.
John:
But headset.
John:
Seems like it's going to be there.
John:
Nobody disagrees.
John:
One week out.
John:
At this point, if it's not there, if there's no rumors in the next week and the headset isn't there, I think people are just going to be sad and mopey walking away from that screen.
John:
So I think it's going to happen.
Marco:
Yeah, I feel like if you look around the industry, we touched on this a little bit last week, everyone is talking about new AI capabilities.
Marco:
Everyone.
Marco:
Every large tech company is investing massively in these new AI techniques, large language model-based things, generation.
Marco:
There's so much in these new AI techniques and abilities that we've gotten in the last year, basically, in the industry that
Marco:
that we're investing in super heavily in every other company.
Marco:
And Apple, it seems like, is not probably ready to show anything in that area yet.
Marco:
I hope they're investing heavily in it.
Marco:
I hope they realize how important it is.
Marco:
I hope they fix Siri.
Marco:
But it seems like none of that is probably on the table for this year's WVDC and this year's platforms.
Marco:
So in the absence of that, I feel like we need something else that's really nice.
John:
Can you imagine if they didn't have the headset this year, how angry the press would be after an entire keynote where they don't mention AI once?
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
Oh, goodness.
Marco:
And as I said last time, I'm pretty sure they're going to find some little token things that they can call AI that they would have previously called ML or Siri.
John:
Yeah, anything that you previously called ML, just swap the letters out.
John:
No one will know what to do.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
But like, you know, I feel like they they need to have something to and I know this is not why these things are shipping there, but like they need to have something to distract the press from their lack of AI, you know, announcements that are that's likely.
John:
I mean, and it's not just a distraction.
John:
It's a new platform.
John:
It's a big deal.
John:
Like it's not like this is a diversion.
John:
Don't look over there.
John:
It's just a happy accident.
John:
that they have this massive new product that's been rumored for years that unlike the car is actually going to be revealed to the public and that will really do a good job of tamping down the ai angst which will still exist by the way they will get asked about it but you know not as much yeah and i and i really i have high hopes for this platform because i mean first of all look i like apple i don't want them to lose you know like i want i don't want them to have a flop um but also just as a technologist and as a developer i
Marco:
This is really baffling to me why this thing would be so amazing.
Marco:
In my house, my son has the Facebook Quest 2, and it's a totally fine product.
Marco:
It's getting a little long in the tooth.
Marco:
I know German had a Quest 3 little preview piece the other day.
Marco:
But, you know...
Marco:
it is a very um pc product it's like here's a thing that's like this plastic piece of garbage that has low resolution screens and it is you know it's uncomfortable on me you know i the optics aren't great for my eyes and how often does it get used how often does it get used in your house compared to like the plain old switch
Marco:
Or the iPad.
Marco:
Well, it depends.
Marco:
Well, it kind of, I know what you're getting at because it goes month at a time without being used.
Marco:
But it is currently, there's this adorable game called Gorilla Tag that my kid is super into.
Marco:
And it basically seems, as far as I can tell, like just like a giant playground that's mostly other kids that are his age group, just like running around yelling and jumping on stuff.
Marco:
And it's actually ingenious because, you know, one of the big problems with VR games is like if you have to move your legs in the game, you're going to walk into walls and stuff in real life.
Marco:
And so in this game, they simulate all the kids are basically simulated as gorillas with no legs.
Marco:
So they walk on their arms.
Marco:
And so he's up there like swinging.
Marco:
He's getting the most buff shoulders for an 11-year-old.
Marco:
because he's he's like swinging his arms moving around it's it's so funny and it seems to be only like children who play this game like i like you can hear over the voice chat when you're in the room you hear the other kids and like there's no older kids or adults playing this game like it's all children and it's so adorable and it seems like there's no like you know combat or you know anything like that it just seems like a nice you know wholesome thing anyway so right now it's
Marco:
But, you know, I also see the limitations of it.
Marco:
You know, I personally can't really use it very comfortably for a very long time.
Marco:
It is not good for my eyes.
Marco:
I do get a little bit motion sick with it.
Marco:
And I'm not usually a motion sick sensitive person.
Marco:
Like that's that's saying a lot.
Marco:
And I don't find the game experiences that compelling on it yet.
Marco:
And maybe that's because I'm not a gamer much.
Marco:
And, you know, maybe I'm just missing stuff, but I haven't found it that compelling.
Marco:
And, you know, using using the hand controllers is clunky and stuff like that.
Marco:
And so when I hear about the Apple headset rumors,
Marco:
And from people who know more about this than I do, you know, things like the hand tracking, the eye tracking, the foveated rendering with higher resolution displays, all this stuff that it's pretty heavily rumored to have sounds like it is going to be substantially better than what I have tried so far, which is this dumb thing.
John:
It should be like quadruple the price.
Marco:
Yeah, at least quadruple, if not more.
Marco:
But, you know, it sounds like what Apple is going to release here, or at least unveil here, is...
Marco:
Not just a small step above what we've seen, but a big step above what we've seen.
Marco:
And that has me excited because while the existing products have not been compelling for me, again, I don't believe Apple would ship something if they didn't really believe it was compelling.
Marco:
And I can't imagine, you know, a high-level Apple person using a Quest 2 and being like, yeah, this is pretty good.
Marco:
Let's just match this.
Marco:
No, that would never happen.
Marco:
I guarantee you the Apple attitude towards those products would be about as positive as, you know, when Steve Jobs had to demo that Motorola Rocker phone.
Marco:
Like, it would be, you know, not glowing.
John:
i mean there are higher end things in the quest the quest is fairly low end there are higher end like pc gaming uh vr headsets and apple's probably going to basically match them maybe be a little bit better the software story may be better it'll probably be more more refined more you know higher performance lower latency hopefully but it's not going to be 10 times better than any existing headset the question is like how much does the how much is apple able to elevate it the way it usually does by you know
John:
Just making the software better, having a more compelling story about use cases.
John:
And the other thing I'm really interested about it by the reveal of this is it's the most recent test of Apple's hardware design.
John:
You know, with respect to the things that we have complained about in the past, about their obsession with simplicity and removing ports and, you know, all that type of thing, like designing it to be a beautiful object, a beautiful featureless object with adhering to certain aesthetic principles.
John:
rather than making it usable rather than recognizing what do people want to use this for and it's it's it comes to a head particularly on devices that you wear the watch did a pretty good job of this i think and that the watch does not have any sharp things that shove that poke into your wrist right they it's
John:
It generally fits on your body and the watch straps fit on your body in a way that recognizes the size and shape of human wrists and what they're made out of.
John:
Like, I think it does an OK job, but I do worry a lot about this headset.
John:
I want what I'm looking at is like, what does what does the hardware look like?
John:
Because I look at, you know, let's look at the the AirPods Max, the big over your headphones, which I think have a lot of problems.
John:
Yeah, those look really nice.
John:
But ergonomically, there's some some fairly obvious fumbles.
John:
One of the biggest ones is the ear cups have metal on them, which looks and feels great in premium, but it's heavy.
John:
And this is the type of trade off I'm looking to see when when Apple comes to a decision like that.
John:
well we could make the ear cup things out of metal and they'll be gorgeous and feel really good and be very dirty durable and sturdy but also they'll be really heavy and that could be wearing over time what should we choose should we make them lightweight but have it be not quite as premium looking or should we just go for the thing that looks and feels the best and not worry about the weight and i think they made the wrong call on the airpods max and for a headset that type of thing is paramount the
John:
That also gets back to the whole, you know, compute module battery pack thing on your belt.
John:
I think that would be the right decision.
John:
Rather than trying to build it into a thing that goes in your face, they recognize that after testing this thing for however many years, having lots of weight on your face doesn't feel good.
John:
so let's get that weight away and so when i'm looking at this thing they want people to strap on their face what i want to see is i would you know again the ideal is like if i have to put it on my face it better be the oxo good grips of headsets i do not want any part of this thing to have been designed to look nice to look symmetrical to look like anime from the 90s i don't want it i want nothing about this to be like i care about how i look
John:
I want, first and foremost, the highest priority to be comfortable on people's faces, breathable, light, no places that pinch you, good visibility in the ways that you want to have visibility.
John:
Like, just everything about it doesn't make you sweaty, has an easy way to put in the prescription lens thingies they're going to support.
John:
Like, just because, you know, the watch you wear, but your wrist is fairly, you know, far away from the sensitive organs that do all your sensing, like your nose and your mouth and your eyes and your ears, right?
John:
this thing is on it's not just on your head it's on your face and so this is a a perfect crucible for apple's worst predilections of like we want it to be a beautiful symmetrical solid with no features on it made of sharp aluminum and really heavy and like all that and on the other side is yeah but i had this thing on my head while we've been testing for the past three years and it sucks when it's like that so
John:
that is the number one thing I'm looking forward to is when they reveal this headset, I obviously I'm not gonna be able to tell by looking at it, but like when they reveal this headset, does it look like something that was designed to look beautiful or does it look like something that was designed to be comfortable?
John:
Ideally you do both.
John:
Like obviously the Apple ideal is, Oh, it looks beautiful.
John:
And it's also comfortable and it's breathable and you don't get sweaty and, and, and, and you don't get motion sick because we made the latency a little like that's, that's the ideal.
John:
But in any design, there are trade-offs and historically, especially recently, historically, Apple has made poor trade-offs when it came to those decisions.
John:
They reverse a lot of them on a laptop.
John:
So kudos.
John:
So they're going in the right direction.
John:
But the headset team, like there's nothing that the laptop team did that I can say, and that will transfer directly to the headset because they'll, they'll, you know, learn from like, this is totally separate, like totally separate development lines.
John:
So totally separate everything.
John:
So that is the thing that I'm most looking forward to only because I don't believe the Mac pro is going to be released, but you know,
John:
setting aside the Mac Pro, which seems like it's not going to happen.
John:
Speaking of rumors of things that aren't going to happen, you know, we did get the rumor that's not going to happen and that hasn't shifted.
John:
So I want to see what this headset says about how Apple is thinking about designing things that literally go on people's faces because that will give us a good idea of
John:
how much the company has learned over the years.
John:
And for me personally, if Marco gets motion sick with it, I will get massively motion sick.
John:
I get motion sick so easily, so this is probably not going to be a product for me.
John:
It doesn't mean I'm not interested in it.
John:
I'm interested in it, and I think Apple should make it and do it, and I look forward to the day when it gets to the level where I can use it without getting sick, but I have no illusions that that day is going to be next Monday.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And that's fine.
John:
I'm not in the market for it.
John:
That's why I'm looking at it from a more academic perspective.
John:
What does this product say about how Apple designs things?
Marco:
I would expect Apple to be pretty good at things like avoiding motion sickness.
Marco:
When you look at...
Marco:
the software stacks of, of how to ensure like really high performance for what is effectively a giant game environment all the time.
Marco:
Like even if you're not playing a game in it, it's basically a game, a game engine running, you know, for a lot of this stuff to work.
Marco:
And Apple is actually pretty good at the, the level of like top to bottom hardware, software integration to be able to do things like super low latency input or output, you know,
John:
Yeah, I mean, but I'm sure they're going to do it really well, but I'm not sure technology is there yet to get this to the level where someone like me can wear it without getting motion sick.
John:
I mean, there's not a single headset that exists today that people say, and don't worry, no one will ever get motion sick.
John:
It's just a question of who and by how much.
John:
And unfortunately, I'm at the far end of that spectrum.
John:
So I think Apple will do a good job because they do tightly control the hardware.
John:
But at this point, I don't think it's technologically possible
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
and then release a product and only do things that would not make people motion sick.
Marco:
I can totally see them doing that.
Marco:
And we're looking at, obviously, much higher component costs than this.
Marco:
We're looking at a much higher power envelope and much higher end chips powering it.
Marco:
So maybe it's possible.
Marco:
Maybe they have achieved that.
Marco:
I can't imagine Apple would release something that a large portion of the population would get motion sick from.
John:
No, it'll be small, but I think it could push up against double digits.
John:
Because I feel like that's the true of the existing high-end headsets.
John:
It also depends on the software, obviously.
John:
This is another thing, you know, if you've used one of these headsets that, like, the actual software that's running on them, like the game, for instance, has a huge influence over whether you're getting motion sick.
John:
So it's not just the hardware.
John:
And that is another area where I hope Apple would do a good job in that, like, you know, whatever their OS is or however apps work,
John:
um because that you know it's apple's filled with regular people who are employees and some percentage of the apple employees who worked on this headset are just as susceptible motion sickness as i am so they know they know how it breaks down even if it's like oh they don't let the public use it they don't know there's enough people working on this that the apple kind of knows like which things are causing the most motion sickness like there's the setting screens and xros is that causing motion sickness what can we do to fix it
John:
like they've had years to work on this so i think they're going to do the best they can i just again i'm not willing to believe the technology has got to the point where um i'm going to be in the fold eventually it will right but maybe not this year but that's fine that you know i just i just hope they do a good job that's why i hope they do a good job with the fundamentals of the physical reality of it because i think there'll be many years before the physical reality becomes actual little glasses and so if they get the fundamentals of the headset right kind of like they got the fundamental ergonomics of the laptop right with the power book
John:
keyboard pushed up pointing device down in the middle in the center uh it took them a few tries with their portable portable computers but that fundamental design was good and better than everything it became before it and has lasted and has stood the test of time touch bar notwithstanding
Casey:
You know, I'm very interested to see, John, what you specifically feel about the headset in no small part because of the three of us.
Casey:
You're the only one with eyeglasses, and I have to imagine there will be a story around that, but it's the story that you need.
John:
You have eyeglasses.
John:
What are you talking about?
John:
No, he has super special contacts.
John:
Right.
John:
I know, but you've also got glasses for when you take your contacts out.
Casey:
Yes, but I never take my contacts out except when I sleep because otherwise I'm frigging blind.
John:
Don't you have reading glasses now, Marco?
Marco:
Yes, I do.
Marco:
And that sucks.
Marco:
I hate every moment of it.
John:
We're all enough to have glasses.
John:
Yeah, no.
John:
And by the way, I also do have contacts.
Marco:
By the way, reading glasses don't seem to be addressed by any VR heads that I've ever seen.
Marco:
I mean, maybe, you know, I don't follow the news as closely as you.
Marco:
Maybe I'm missing, like, the ones that have custom things, but...
John:
The thing is, everything in, well, things inside VR headsets are physically close to your eyes, bottom line.
John:
Even if you're doing the outside camera view type of thing.
John:
So I think for someone like Marco, whose eyes have difficulty focusing on things that are close by,
John:
there may need to be some lens help out there for maybe i don't know what marco's prescription is but like it's not much it's like 0.75 magnification yeah you'll probably be fine and in fact it'll maybe help you uh the pixels blur together but like that's another thing that you know every headset manufacturer knows that people don't have perfect vision so you must accommodate for some kind of you know diopter adjustment or prescription lenses prescription lenses is going farther than just like diopter adjustment because you can have things like astigmatism that are not easy to do by just moving lenses back and forth and anyway
John:
I do hope Apple does a good job of that.
Marco:
I don't know what part of visual problems this is, but I had this problem with both the Quest 2 and with the DJI headset that I briefly owned for that DJI FPV drone that I briefly owned.
Marco:
Um, that like, I can never get things set right so that the center of my field of view and the edges of my field of view are all in focus in one of those headsets.
Marco:
Like the edges, the, the outer edges of my field of view were always blurry.
Marco:
And I don't know, like, again, like, I mean, this is one of the, like, I have pretty good eyes overall.
Marco:
And yet I still have problems like this because of this one minor flaw that I have.
Marco:
People have so many different, you know, eye conditions and lens shapes and different abilities and different, you know, needs for different corrections.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
this is going to be a tough problem to solve.
Marco:
And frankly, I hope that... And I think... I have pretty good faith that Apple has probably put a lot of effort into making this as accessible to different people's eye needs as they possibly can compared to the rest of the industry because that's the kind of thing they would care about.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I also don't know what are the physical limits of what they can even correct easily.
Marco:
And maybe they just can't correct for certain types of conditions yet.
Marco:
And maybe they never can.
Marco:
And that's why I'm a little worried about this product's overall accessibility.
Marco:
Even if you get past issues of price, which is its own version of accessibility, but even if you get past that,
Marco:
are there going to be certain eye conditions or other types of ability differences that make it impossible to use this product?
Marco:
And would people with those conditions or abilities have just this entire world of technology that they can't access?
Marco:
Like, I...
Marco:
Hopefully, Apple will do the best job they can for that.
Marco:
And Apple, I think of all the major tech companies, I think they do the best work in accessibility by far.
Marco:
So hopefully, they would accommodate as best as they possibly can all different abilities and needs.
Marco:
But
Marco:
This kind of product is so specialized because it goes right on your face and is right on your eyes.
Marco:
And it has to measure your hand tracking, allegedly.
Marco:
And what if you have motor difficulties?
Marco:
There's all sorts of potential accessibility limitations and challenges with this product that, again, I have a lot of faith in Apple to address those to whatever degree they can, but they might not be able to for certain things.
John:
I think Microsoft is the leader in accessibility when it comes to gaming.
John:
They have tons of custom controllers, more accessible custom controllers.
John:
They've gone way above and beyond what any other gaming company has done to provide a more accessible interface to video games.
John:
You can play
John:
Full-fledged AAA, same video games as everybody else, but with controllers that, if you look at them, they may not make sense to you until you see somebody using them.
John:
Apple doesn't have a controller at all.
John:
There's third-party controllers for iOS and Apple TV and everything.
Marco:
Controlling games on Apple platforms sucks equally for everybody.
John:
Yeah, well, I mean, you can use your PlayStation controller, but Apple has basically ceded that market to third parties.
John:
But Microsoft has put considerable effort into it.
John:
So this is another place where we can look at what Apple does and compare it to... I keep comparing them to Microsoft because Microsoft actually did break into the gaming market and showed what it takes to do that.
John:
And by the way, it's been so hard for them that they're currently considering maybe bailing out.
John:
I'm not sure they're going to do that.
John:
But anyway...
John:
What does Apple do in the area of accessibility?
John:
So they have people come up and say, okay, we're going to show the cool video games that we support on the headset or whatever.
John:
Do they take any time to say, oh, and by the way, since AR VR games demand more of you physically to be able to play them, here is our accessibility story for that.
John:
Because it is more demanding.
John:
You mentioned Adam waving his arms around or whatever.
John:
It's physically more demanding to play most VR games.
John:
Because you're not just sitting on the couch motionless with your thumbs on a thumbstick.
John:
And even that has accessibility issues because, you know, there's lots of controls, lots of buttons.
John:
They're not easy to hit depending on, you know, what kind of mobility you have and how control you have your digits.
John:
That's why they have those, you know, all sorts of accessible controls that Microsoft.
John:
I'll try to find a link to show notes to show people what those are like, but they're really cool.
John:
But yeah, VR also has that same story.
John:
And I'm not, you know, again, it's a 1.0.
John:
You don't expect Apple out the door to have this.
John:
It took Microsoft years and years and years to get seriously into accessibility for console games.
John:
So I'm not going to fault Apple if they don't have a big story there.
John:
But it's what we talk about with these headsets all the time.
John:
How many people are you removing from your market by requiring them to put something on your face, by requiring them to be able to wave their hands around, by requiring them to be able to stand up and turn their head or focus their eyes or all the other things that this headset will demand for you to do anything with it?
John:
How narrow is your market going to be when all is said and done?
John:
And again, for a 1.0, it might end up being pretty narrow.
Casey:
All I know is sitting here today, and we've talked about this a lot, I have no damn idea what the point of this is.
Casey:
But the closer we get to this phantom headset thing, leaving aside the fact that I cannot fathom looking in the mirror and saying, yes, this is worth $3,000, much less saying to Aaron, hey, I think I want to spend $3,000 for something that may or may not ever be anything.
Casey:
All that aside.
Marco:
Guarantee you buy one.
Casey:
Oh, I'm sure I will.
Casey:
It's for the business, Aaron.
Casey:
What do you want from me?
Casey:
It's for the business.
Marco:
See, at least I don't tell myself I'm not going to.
Casey:
That's true.
John:
There are two rumors related to this, by the way, related to Casey buying it and the price and whatever.
John:
The rumors are, one, that someone did like a bill of materials check on it because now so many rumors have leaked that they know like this is the vendor of the screens.
John:
This is the vendor of the, you know, like they did a bill of materials thing and they said the cost of the thing is around $1,500, $1,600.
John:
And the other rumor is that Apple would be selling this at cost and not making its customary 30-40% margins.
Marco:
So what do you think, like $2,000 maybe?
John:
Yeah, if those are both true, maybe the thing comes out as a $1,600 device.
John:
Like that they're not, that it would be even like a loss leader that they might even lose a little bit on.
John:
I don't know if I believe that, but you know, it's a thing that's happened, you know, occasionally in the game console world.
John:
It always happens, except for if you're Nintendo.
John:
The other console makers, when their consoles first come out, they sell them at a small loss and eventually they start selling them at a profit.
John:
nintendo has been more like apple and said you know what we always want to make a profit but the nintendo does that by cheaping out on the hardware apple does it by raising the price so we'll see so i feel like the uh the case is saying oh how am i going to spend three thousand dollars on this there is a possibility however dim it might be that it won't be three thousand dollars so we'll see
Casey:
Yeah, and I agree with you, and I also agree with Marco that I'm sure I'll end up getting one because I can't resist.
Casey:
Of course you will.
Casey:
But all that said, I have crossed the Rubicon threshold from, what, really?
Casey:
Into, really?
Casey:
Really?
Casey:
Really?
Casey:
What's this going to be about?
Casey:
I'm excited to see what this is going to be.
Casey:
And so I'm really stoked for, as we sit here and recording this a week from today, I am really, really stoked to see what is this?
Casey:
What does it look like?
Casey:
What is the point?
Casey:
What is their spin?
Casey:
Are they just going to throw a bunch of random different styles of pasta against the wall and see what sticks like they did with the watch?
Casey:
Are they going to have an extraordinarily mature and specific story about it?
Casey:
I am really excited about
Casey:
to see what this is.
Casey:
I'm really excited to try one whenever that may be.
Casey:
Maybe that's when I receive mine.
Casey:
Maybe that's when I get an appointment at the Apple Store like we do with the watches.
Casey:
I'm super excited to hear for those that are able to try them at WWDC because presumably whether or not the broader press does, you've got to imagine these XR press people will.
Casey:
Probably some general video game press establishments will.
Casey:
The big YouTubers.
Casey:
I was just about to say, you know how much Apple loves YouTubers these days.
Casey:
Podcasts don't exist, but the YouTubers, they're where the cool kids are.
Casey:
So yes, I'm curious to see what they have to say.
Casey:
I'm excited to hear it.
Casey:
And it's almost a bummer that this is the event for it because...
Casey:
I am also excited for new iPad OS.
Casey:
I'm excited for new iOS.
Casey:
I'm excited for whatever ridiculous part of California we're getting on our Macs next.
Casey:
But I almost don't care about those because I'm so hyper-focused on what this headset is and what does it mean for me.
Marco:
I care a lot about those, but I think they are so overshadowed in the hype and the attention and the anticipation because we are going to get a new platform in all likelihood.
Marco:
And that is a very exciting thing.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, I'm still excited for the boring stuff.
John:
One thing related to that, in case this doesn't end up being released, I just want to mention it now because it was one of the most fun rumors I saw, and I just assumed I'd be able to talk about it when it gets released.
John:
But maybe it's totally false.
John:
But anyway, it was an iOS 17 rumor.
John:
And the rumor was that on the multitasking switcher on iOS, they'll have a button that basically removes everything from that screen.
John:
And now the question is...
John:
Does it do the equivalent of force quitting every single one of those applications?
John:
Or does it just remove all the pictures?
John:
I really hope this feature exists because then we'll discover which of those two things it does.
John:
And it's a great experiment for all the people who reflexively force quit applications, which, again, people shouldn't be doing.
John:
to see like how apple satisfies that user need because we discussed in the past reflexively force quitting every application is bad for you and bad for your phone but the desire to not have a bunch of images cluttering up that screen is perfectly reasonable desire those are two separate things but people just don't want the pictures there so the only way they have to get rid of the pictures is by swiping them upwards which by the way does something else force quitting them and then other people want to force quit it anyway
John:
As we said in the past, force quitting apps is fine.
John:
Reflexively force quitting every single application every time you're done using your phone, not fine.
John:
Those are two different things.
John:
So if they add this feature, I can't wait to see what it actually does.
John:
I have a hard time imagining that it will literally force quit every application.
John:
I think it will just get rid of the pictures.
John:
And I think that's all people really want.
John:
But then what about when an application is hosed and you do have to force quit it?
John:
That will cause you probably still have to swipe up.
John:
And so there will be some people who say, I don't use the button because the button doesn't actually force quit the applications.
John:
I still swipe everything upwards.
Marco:
See, I think they would actually make it, like, you know, terminate all the applications, but, you know, over time, when they first introduced that mechanism, if your app was, quote, forced quit and not running in the switcher, or not available in the switcher, whatever it was...
Marco:
You couldn't do things like background refresh.
Marco:
You couldn't do things like background downloads.
Marco:
You lost a lot of those abilities.
Marco:
And then over time, they have actually given you more abilities to have your app woken up for background activity when it is forced quit in subsequent updates.
John:
You may be in the middle of doing a background activity when you get forced quit, and that's not going to be good for you.
Marco:
No, it's not going to be good, but maybe it would call your termination block and give you a few seconds to close it up rather than instantly closing you up.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
But if they would do something like that, it wouldn't surprise me if there were also some tweaks to what your app was able to do when it has been forced quit to make it less of an extreme negative for the experience of using each app.
Marco:
But I think it still would actually terminate the current executable of the apps.
John:
We'll see.
John:
We'll see.
John:
But I think if these rumors are true, I think that they need to go a step further, which is like for the visual clutter thing, requiring someone to go back to that screen and hit the one button to get rid of all the little pictures.
John:
Why not just let people like say, hey, every time I lock my phone, get rid of all the little pictures or put a maximum number on the little pictures.
John:
Right.
John:
And I keep saying little pictures because for people who don't know, very often those little pictures of screens of apps are apps that have not been running for days.
John:
But like iOS keeps little pictures of what the screen looked like the last time it was running.
John:
And so as you scroll to the left and more and more of those things, like those things haven't been running in ages.
John:
They're not currently running.
John:
They haven't been running.
John:
It's just a little picture.
John:
So I think people just don't want the visual clutter on that screen and requiring them to manually clean up that screen every time a single button is better than having them swipe up.
John:
But it's not as good as saying, hey, just let me know.
John:
Should I have a maximum of three items there?
John:
Every time the screen locks, you want me to remove all those little pictures?
John:
I think that would make people happier.
John:
Because at this point, there's so many people who have trained themselves to clean up all the little pictures.
John:
They just need to do it.
John:
iOS can help them out there.
John:
iOS can get rid of those pictures for them automatically.
John:
But anyway, we'll see if the rumor is not true, then whatever.
John:
This has all just been a pointless discussion.
John:
But the rumor is true.
John:
I find this the most exciting and fascinating feature of iOS 17 that I've heard rumored.
John:
Oh my god, you have pretty low standards.
John:
It's a headset year, like whatever.
Marco:
But I'm actually hoping for other platform improvements as well.
Marco:
And I don't need to be blown away with tons of user features.
Marco:
I just want to see... First of all, the idea that was rumored about watchOS being potentially pretty well revamped in a lot of ways, that's very exciting to me.
Marco:
Because as I mentioned earlier, most years it seems like watchOS is barely touched.
Marco:
And I know that isn't always the case, but...
Marco:
in terms of what features actually show up to users and developers, it's pretty minimal every year with watchOS.
Marco:
So the idea of there being a substantial update or change to how watchOS works or looks or behaves is pretty promising to me because as much as I've really gotten into the Apple Watch in the last couple of years, in terms of I've been wearing it most days and not wearing my fancy watches as much,
Marco:
I think it still could be so much better than it is.
Marco:
And there's a lot of low-hanging fruit that they just haven't picked.
Marco:
So I hope that this is a big harvest.
Marco:
To stretch that metaphor way too far.
Marco:
But in general, what I want as a developer...
Marco:
is just give me the next give me the next iterative iterative set of improvements for swift ui and swift itself um swift itself is actually doing pretty well that happens kind of separately from the wbc cadence in a lot of ways but give me just you know next version of swift ui and next version of xcode like there's been a lot of weird little xcode bugs this year i have weird source kit crashing in the background sometimes sometimes i have to reboot my entire mac to get things to work correctly or to update in the simulator which is really scary um
Marco:
whenever i work on a package like blackbird or like my overcast new sync engine when you have a package open in xcode and you try to then open a project that uses that package weird stuff happens and it basically doesn't work there's all sorts of weird little behaviors like that um errors that that stick around forever on xcode even after you've cleared the air oh gosh yes there are so many so like annoying yeah
Marco:
So many little bugs like that and little limitations like that that make day-to-day stuff in the current version of Xcode less reliable or weirdly limited in some way.
Marco:
That's the kind of stuff I want to see fixed.
Marco:
Improvements of developers' day-to-day lives.
Marco:
Fix the tool bugs.
Marco:
Make things perform a little bit better if you can.
Marco:
But really, fix the bugs first.
Marco:
And iterative updates to SwiftUI.
Marco:
That's what I'm really hoping for.
Casey:
I would love to see some SwiftUI improvements.
Casey:
I've actually been pretty happy with SwiftUI for the most part.
Casey:
There's definitely some things that are very frustrating and very janky.
Casey:
And there's a lot of places where I wish I had more control than I'm allowed, especially with regard to the search field, which is what I'm running into a lot with CallSheet.
Casey:
I ended up needing to go, thanks to the help of Guy Rambeau, I needed to end up going down to UIKit and plucking the appropriate UIKit control out of the view hierarchy, which is gross and I hate it, but I needed to do that in order to accomplish what I needed to do.
Casey:
but for the most part i haven't had to do too much of that with swift ui the new navigation stuff that you had brought up like an hour and a half ago it took me kicking and screaming or i was kicking and screaming going to embrace it but once i did it actually makes everything way way easier and way way nicer it seemed completely overblown see also all of swift ui it's always that way no
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, that's true.
Casey:
No, you're exactly right.
Casey:
But once I embraced creating an enum that represents all of my different screens and then having basically an array of that enum or enumeration or whatever that manages what is the current navigation stack
Casey:
Once I finally committed to that, it made so many things so much easier, and I'm really digging on that.
Casey:
There's definitely times where it's annoying, but for the most part, it works really well.
Casey:
But yeah, there's a lot of stuff, both low-hanging and not, that I would love to see get better.
Casey:
Marco and I have both been whining, or we've been commiserating with each other slash whining publicly about...
Casey:
how bad the error messaging still is in SwiftUI.
Casey:
And that is a hard problem to solve.
Casey:
It really, really is.
Casey:
Because we're bending Swift in half, breaking it and trying to put it back together again.
Casey:
I totally, genuinely sympathize with what the Swift and SwiftUI developers are working against and up against.
Casey:
But
Casey:
As someone who is using their work product, getting these completely unintelligible error messages, often being highlighted on 50 lines away from where the actual error is, all too often, and I forget the way it's phrased, but all too often, SwiftUI will just throw its hands up and be like, sorry, dude, I got nothing.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It'll be like, this is wrong, but I can't tell you why.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Help me.
Casey:
Help me, please.
Casey:
Give me 50 lines to narrow down on.
Casey:
nope no i don't think i'd like to do that just just figure it out just keep hitting command z until you get something that builds and then slowly what is it command shift z back until something breaks you know stuff like that and marco the thing you mentioned which i've been running into more and more often the xcode errors that you've fixed yet are still shown in the sidebar for the basically until you reboot your computer at least restart xcode it's driving me batty
Casey:
But hopefully that'll get better.
Casey:
But all in all, I have been really enjoying doing the Swift UI work in Call Sheet.
Casey:
And God knows, whether or not you think Call Sheet is ugly, I can assure you that it would be...
Casey:
way uglier.
Casey:
It would just be straight up ugly in UIKit.
Casey:
And a lot of that is because I'm not as good a UIKit programmer, but I think SwiftUI makes making pretty interfaces much easier for someone like me who is not a designer by any stretch of the imagination.
Casey:
And yeah, I echo what you're saying, Marco, to have improvements in Xcode, improvements in SwiftUI, improvements in just what we're able to do as developers in any general way.
Casey:
All of that is welcome, and I'm really excited to see...
Casey:
to see what lands.
Casey:
And I hope that even though I know, you know, the headset will overshadow all these things, a lot of times some of the boring stuff is some of the best stuff.
Casey:
Like StoreKit 2 is not perfect, but it's really nice and a hell of a lot nicer than StoreKit 1 was.
Casey:
You know, silly stuff like that really matters.
Casey:
And I hope we see some of it.
Marco:
Yeah, that's like what I'm ultimately looking forward to is all those little tiny iterative changes.
Marco:
Like, for instance, there are still so much in the platform APIs where we can't use async code yet.
Marco:
And it would be like any every time, you know, every new OS version since async has been released, they've added a few more places you can use async code.
Marco:
I assume we will hopefully be in for the same thing this year, that we'll have more places we can use async code, more places that are made more Swift native, more places that are more easily compatible with Swift UI.
Marco:
All these major platform and language shifts and framework shifts they've made over the last decade...
Marco:
more and more places in the code where we can use them, where we can write the most modern kind of code possible.
Marco:
Swift, async, SwiftUI, all the hooks that we get into various system callbacks and frameworks and different UI components, the more they can modernize, the better.
Marco:
That makes developers' lives easier.
Marco:
I have faith that they will do that again this year because they do that every single year, and it's wonderful.
Marco:
And that's the kind of stuff that actually makes a bigger difference, honestly,
Marco:
to most developers' lives than a new platform.
Marco:
Like, that's why, you know, it's not going to get mentioned, it's not going to get news coverage, it's not going to make anybody super excited, except when we're going through, like, the API diffs, or we see a session in the middle of the week, and I'm like, oh my god, that one little tiny change to that one API call, that makes my life easier.
Marco:
That's wonderful.
Marco:
Like, that's what I most look forward to in WBDC, is...
Marco:
The big stuff, yeah, that can be game-changing for some people, not usually for everyone.
Marco:
It's the small stuff that makes everyone's lives a little bit better once you can actually use that OS version.
Marco:
That's the kind of stuff that I really look forward to because that helps everyone.
Marco:
Even if you have an app type that doesn't benefit from any of the other big changes or a new platform that's announced, you can still benefit from this one improvement to this file or network API or whatever it is.
Marco:
Yep, couldn't agree more.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Green Chef, Trade Coffee, and Judo.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
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.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter...
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C, USA Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental, they didn't mean it.
Marco:
casey i have to ask in the document under after show it says casey has destroyed aaron's car and computer in the span of one weekend now i can guess you know maybe there was a water spill on the computer but how did you spill enough water to destroy her car
Casey:
Yeah, no, that is a little bit of, not hyperbole, but a little, well, I guess it is hyperbole.
Casey:
It's a little bit exaggerated.
Casey:
I know, right?
Casey:
It's funny.
Casey:
It's shocking, I tell you.
Casey:
Erin was slated to go on her first girls trip since just before the pandemic, like weeks before the pandemic.
Casey:
She was slated to go to a place a couple hours away from home and that she was going to spend the weekend there and have some time not being mom, which she freaking is deserved.
Casey:
She is owed that so badly.
Casey:
We had a whole bunch of stuff that was going on the morning, Friday morning that she was intending to leave.
Casey:
So I am in the passenger seat of her Volvo.
Casey:
I forget why we took her car, but we did.
Casey:
It was a little bit brisk that morning.
Casey:
And so I had a couple of ATP sweatshirts, actually, on my lap.
Casey:
And then I had my iPad on top of that, which I brought with me, as I often do, just in case I needed to, like, do something on the computer.
Casey:
Well, I was putting the stack of two sweatshirts and iPad onto her dashboard just very briefly as we were running in to drop Michaela off.
Casey:
I wouldn't leave the iPad there, generally speaking, but it's at a church.
Casey:
It's not the sort of place where I'm really worried about something walking.
Casey:
So I attempted to put the stack of sweatshirts and iPad onto her dash.
Casey:
Now, I've just put something in Slack.
Casey:
You're going to want to zoom a little bit.
Marco:
Oh, no.
Casey:
No.
Casey:
That's Aaron's windshield.
John:
You don't know your own strength.
John:
You may be a Hulk.
John:
There is a giant star-shaped crack right in the middle of this windshield.
John:
Not like a little chip you get when a rock hits your windshield.
John:
Not like that at all.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
It radiates out the whole length of the windshield.
Marco:
It's a big crack.
Casey:
And there's like a fairly large impact crater, if you will.
John:
You know what you did?
John:
You know those tools they give you, like if your car goes underwater and you can't roll down the window and you have to get out and it's just a tiny pointy piece of metal that you whack into your window to free yourself?
John:
Mm-hmm.
John:
You did that with your iPad, didn't you?
Casey:
With the corner of my iPad.
Casey:
That is exactly right.
John:
Well, this is good for people to know.
John:
If your car goes into a lake and you can't roll down the window...
John:
And you can't open the door because like the pressures, you know, the water pressure is keeping it closed.
John:
Just take the corner of that iPad or I guess the iPhone if you take it out of your case and just whack that against the window and then swim to freedom.
Casey:
So Erin is climbing out of the car.
Casey:
She's getting Michaela out of her car seat.
Casey:
I go to put this on the windshield.
Casey:
Hand to God, gentlemen.
Casey:
I hit the windshield.
Casey:
That is not up for grabs, obviously.
Casey:
I won't even try to do Foley work, but it was the littlest glance off the windshield.
Casey:
It's not like I'm slamming the iPad into the windshield as much as we're joking about me being the Hulk.
Casey:
I wasn't slamming the iPad.
Casey:
It did hit the windshield, but it was the tiniest little glance off the inside of it.
John:
Did the iPad leave your hand?
Casey:
No, the iPad was in my hand and it was in the magic keyboard that I can never remember the name of the smart keyboard, magic keyboard, whatever it is.
John:
Was it upright?
Casey:
Like, uh, no, it was horizontal.
Casey:
I think I just happened to glance off the corner of the iPad just right.
Casey:
So, so Aaron's getting out of the car.
Casey:
Uh,
Casey:
I put the, I attempt to put the iPad and sweatshirt stack in her dash and I hear tink.
Casey:
And I see that did grow a little bit since that picture, before that picture was taken, but it was mostly like that immediately.
Casey:
And so I do tink.
Casey:
Oh, sh**.
Casey:
And she looks at me and she's like, what?
Casey:
And then she goes, oh, no.
John:
This amazes me because if you've driven a car, you know rocks can fly up from the wheels of a truck in front of you at 60 miles an hour on the highway and they'll just leave a little chip.
John:
But you just destroyed it.
Casey:
I don't know how.
Casey:
And I agree with you.
Casey:
It's exactly accurate.
Casey:
Is the iPad okay?
Casey:
Yeah, the iPad's fine.
Casey:
She's supposed to drive her own frigging car two hours to go visit or have a weekend with her friends, and some jackass over here decides to accidentally shatter her windshield.
Casey:
Erin, to her credit, was extremely good about it.
Casey:
She said to me, how did that happen?
Casey:
I heard the little ting.
Casey:
How could that have possibly been the result of that little ting?
Casey:
She was very, very good about it.
Casey:
Much, much better than I would have been.
Marco:
What happened is somebody got Casey talking about the bug reporting process at Apple.
Casey:
Right?
Casey:
I was just thinking about it.
Casey:
And that's what happened.
Casey:
That or documentation.
Casey:
It was one of the two.
Casey:
But I absolutely destroyed her car.
Casey:
And I feel terrible about it to this day.
Casey:
I know I'm joking about it, but I really feel terrible about it.
Casey:
And again, I can't say enough good things about my wife, who has been an angel about this whole thing.
Casey:
I would have been such a turd if this had happened to me.
Casey:
And this is why she is, for a zillion reasons, the better person of the two of us.
Casey:
Uh, but she, she has been extremely good about it and, you know, hasn't, she's, she's made fun of me for it, but she hasn't been a turd about it.
Marco:
She has full right to make fun of you forever about this.
Casey:
Oh, absolutely.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
Exactly.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Now it also says in this, in this bullet point that you destroyed her computer in the same weekend.
Casey:
so that's that's that is definitely hyperbole so uh erin uses her actual computer which if you recall is my old macbook adorable my old macbook one you know the one port one usbc only and a headphone jack macbook which i still love i seem to recall that she previously had a macbook air that had some issues oh yeah that had been in the drink like six times that were also i believe your fault
Casey:
Those unquestionably were my fault.
Casey:
There is nothing up for grabs there.
Casey:
But we're sitting on the couch, and during the pandemic, Erin had started doing the online grocery stuff through Kroger, where she goes on Kroger's website, she picks out what she wants, they shop on her behalf, if you will, and then she drives up and they plunk all the groceries in the car.
Casey:
So she's sitting there doing the Kroger order on her MacBook Adorable that was already...
Casey:
in need of like a reload.
Casey:
I don't even remember what version of macOS is on it, but it's years old at this point.
Casey:
And I've been meaning to, you know, pull a Windows, if you will, and refresh everything and start anew, but I hadn't gotten to it.
Casey:
And she was using it.
Casey:
I'm sitting on the couch next to her watching her do this.
Casey:
I don't remember why I was watching her.
Casey:
I think she was asking about which version of something I thought we should get.
Casey:
But all of a sudden it freezes.
Casey:
And she's like, oh, that's weird.
Casey:
I was like, oh, that's a little weird, but I mean, it is a MacBook adorable.
Casey:
It was a piece of garbage when it was new.
Casey:
I love that piece of garbage, but it was a piece of garbage.
Casey:
And then it turns off.
Marco:
Not good.
Casey:
So then she starts it up again, and I see the Apple logo, and then I see a padlock.
Marco:
It's not getting better.
Casey:
Not getting better.
Casey:
I think what it is is FileVault asking for a password, I think.
Casey:
But I tried every permutation of any of the passwords that she and I would ever normally use, and none of them worked.
Marco:
Is that like a firmware password?
Marco:
Do they still support those?
Casey:
I have no idea.
Casey:
Your guess is as good as mine.
Casey:
So I see this padlock.
Casey:
I'm like, okay, something's not right.
Casey:
So then I think, well, I haven't looked back at this since that evening, but I was like, all right, well, let me see if I can do like an internet recovery and just like do some diagnostics or something like that.
Casey:
And it's able to start up.
Casey:
It's able to go into the internet recovery thing.
Casey:
I'm able to download all that it needs for internet recovery.
Casey:
And then it fails every time.
Casey:
And I forget the error message off the top of my head, but it fails every time.
Casey:
I think that either the SSD has died or the logic board has had some sort of catastrophic failure and the thing is toast.
Casey:
So I actually, honestly, I didn't destroy it.
Casey:
That was just, it made for a fun message for you two to see in the show notes, but I don't think I destroyed it.
Casey:
And, and so that thing, I have not been able to resuscitate it.
Casey:
If you have an idea for me, I am all years.
Casey:
I have thought about bringing it.
Casey:
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, get her a MacBook Air.
Casey:
Well, it's funny you say that, because one of the tabs I have open on my computer, and I am not a John Syracuse, so I only have a handful open right now, but one of them is a certified refurbished 13-inch MacBook Air Apple M2 chip with 8-core CPU and 10-core GPU midnight for $1,530, which is, I think, what I'm going to do.
Casey:
this particular one has 16 gigs ram and a half terabyte ssd that's great she probably needs neither of those things but what i haven't mentioned to either of you particularly marco uh earmuffs marco is that the only functional computer that i have in the house i guess other than the mac mini which i hadn't thought about until just now but the only computer i have in the house right now is this one is mine is my macbook pro and if you're prone to occasionally putting computers underwater like i am
Casey:
Seems a little inadvisable for me not to have some other computer capable of podcasting somewhere in the house.
Casey:
And so I told her, you know, whether or not she really needs a computer, because again, the only thing she ever really did on this computer was Kroger.
Casey:
And she could do that on like the iPad or my computer or what have you.
Casey:
But it seems prudent for us to have a backup computer for me, just in case I have a computer issue.
Marco:
You are a computer professional.
Marco:
It is okay to have some kind of backup in the house.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
So my current plan, and I haven't acted on this yet, and I do want to try a little bit longer to see if I can resuscitate this thing.
Casey:
But my current plan is to probably just buy our MacBook Air, which is long overdue anyway, and just call it a day.
John:
If you're looking at refurbs, look at M1 and MacBook Air.
John:
instead of m2 because she doesn't need the m2 and you can ask her which form like because she had that wedge-shaped computer before she might want one and the m1's going to be cheaper and it's it's just as good for what she's going to be doing with it that is true but she's that much cheaper though i i haven't looked i will look i i think marco's right i don't think it'll be that much cheaper she definitely deserves something better even though like i don't think she needs it i think you're right john
Casey:
But more than anything else, I want this thing to last a long time.
Casey:
And so I agree with you that it's probably not that different between the M1 and the M2.
Casey:
But my thought process is, you know, I'll get refurb because she doesn't need or want something brand new.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I would like to get as good as I can reasonably get right now without breaking the bank.
John:
I kind of like the M1, but I've said this before.
John:
I think the M1 is a MacBook Air is a better machine than the M2, just like in terms of balance.
John:
Obviously, the M2 is a little bit faster.
John:
And if you like the flat form factor, it's fine.
John:
But the M1, the M2 is like a little bit heatier and throttleier.
John:
than the m1 was they both don't have fans and it's fine and it's not a big deal but i just i feel like the m1 hit the sweet spot a little bit better than the m2 does so when i think about buying like a cheap laptop or something i still think i'm on macbook air even though the m2 is and i got my son an m2 because you know same thing future proofing or whatever but
Marco:
Also, that sweet MagSafe port, that means that you have one more port.
John:
Oh, that's true, too.
Marco:
Now you have three ports.
Marco:
When you have power connected, you now have two USB-C Thunderbolt ports that are free.
John:
I mean, she was using the MacBook One, so I don't think ports are a big need for her.
Marco:
But still, in case this computer gets repurposed in your household down the road, it is a little bit more versatile to have the M2 one.
Casey:
Exactly right.
Casey:
Somebody who is this.
Casey:
GardnerVH posted in the chat a link which we will put in the show notes.
Casey:
Here's all the things that your computer can show on startup.
Casey:
And it is, I don't think I can link to the heading, but the heading is lock icon.
Casey:
And if your Mac is using a firmware password, the lock icon appears when you try to start up from another disk or volume, such as an external drive or macOS recovery.
Casey:
Enter the firmware password to continue.
Casey:
If I put in a firmware password, I have zero recollection of it.
Casey:
Again, I tried any permutation I can remember to get through this of both my passwords and Aaron's, and none of them worked.
Casey:
And also note that I just read to you, when you try to start up from another disk or volume,
Casey:
I wasn't trying to do that.
Casey:
I was trying to start up from the internal SSD.
Casey:
Something has gone wonky, and it's probably not good.
John:
You can't get to the hardware diagnostics thing?
Casey:
You know, I haven't tried it.
Casey:
The computer's behind me.
Casey:
I can try it right now if you really want me to.
Casey:
I forget exactly how you start that on an Intel Mac, but I'm happy to try it.
John:
It's like a hold down command D during boot or something.
John:
I don't know.
John:
You can look it up.
John:
It's in one of those documents.
Marco:
um but yeah i think it's just toast i think either the ssd or the logic board is toast yeah it does say in this document that like you can bring it into an apple store with proof of purchase and they can reset it for you but that's only that's only if the firmware password that you never even set is somehow a problem right rather than being the symptom of a different deeper problem so yeah i'm guessing this is probably the end of this computer and good riddance and you know get her an m2 map okay you just destroyed her car it's the least you could do
Casey:
Right, exactly right.
Casey:
And I mean, again, she doesn't really care.
Casey:
And I mean that in a good way, not that she's like, it's just not something that's important to her.
Marco:
Yeah, but everyone likes nice things, especially after you destroy their car.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
And by the way, globe with warning symbol, if memory serves, this is what it looked like.
Casey:
This is on the same page right above lock icon, actually.
Casey:
a globe with warning symbol is what i saw when i tried to do internet recovery and it failed on two or three consecutive oh well no i shouldn't say consecutive i went back and forth but two or three tries on that same night i didn't like bother plugging it into ethernet which is a nightmare because it only has one port but i could have done that uh i haven't bothered but i i really truly think that this thing is just fried and i thought about bringing it to apple just for the purposes of diagnosis but even if they're like oh yeah this is the problem like what am i really going to do what what actionable information is that really
John:
You can give it to them and they'll recycle it for you.
Casey:
I guess.
Marco:
That's about all it's good for.
John:
Exactly.
John:
I mean, it's better than throwing it out.
Marco:
Or you could, you know, look, there's also reduce and reuse.
Marco:
It's too late for reduce.
Marco:
You can reuse it.
Marco:
Maybe a doorstop.
John:
Maybe you can put it in the door pocket in one of your cars for emergency egress when you land in the water.