The Points Don’t Matter
Marco:
I'm in a really good mood tonight.
Marco:
Good.
Marco:
You know, when you're writing SwiftUI, sometimes things don't go your way.
Marco:
Sometimes you hit walls and you can't figure out why something isn't updating or you can't get something to look or work right or whatever the case may be.
Marco:
today i had an incredibly good swift ui day where i'm like i was like firing on all cylinders like getting everything working like i would i actually would like you know go like yes like when i got something working to nobody and you know i'm alone in the house in a room by myself you know clapping to myself this was a really good day i feel so good right now this is like the swift ui high this is
Marco:
Things are working.
Marco:
Things are looking good.
Marco:
I'm actually making progress.
Marco:
Now I just have to rewrite the entire rest of the app.
Marco:
But the things I've been working on have been really good.
Casey:
Other than that, how did you enjoy the play, Mrs. Lincoln?
Casey:
No, all kidding aside, that's really fantastic.
Casey:
I love a good SwiftUI day.
Casey:
A good SwiftUI day, I really dislike the whole thing about a 10x developer.
Casey:
And I think that's mostly been put in the recycling bin.
Casey:
as things that we think are true.
Casey:
But when I'm having a good Swift UI day, I feel like one of those mythical 10X developers.
Casey:
I get so much done in so little time.
Casey:
Like when you and Swift UI are holding hands and skipping together, it is the best.
Casey:
It is the best.
Marco:
Five minutes before the show, I finally got the Vision OS SDK downloaded and installed, and I got to run Overcast, like the current version of Overcast, not the new SwiftUI Rewrite.
Marco:
I got to run that in the simulator, just like in iPad window mode.
Marco:
And hoo boy, do I have a lot of work to do.
Marco:
Yeah, definitely.
Marco:
That's, you know, it's funny.
Marco:
Like earlier I was, I had tried, hey, let me see if I, you know, should I be doing a Mac Catalyst version as well?
Marco:
I decided last week I mentioned like I'm not going to do the native AppKit version because it just wasn't worth the amount of trouble it would be.
Marco:
And I'm looking at Catalyst.
Marco:
I'm like, I might do Catalyst.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But it seemed like even that's like a decent amount of work.
Marco:
And then I look at Vision and I was like, oh, no, this is going to be a lot of work.
Marco:
But, you know, well, we'll see.
Marco:
I mean, the iPad version seems to work.
Marco:
I wouldn't say it's good, but neither is the iPad version that runs on the Mac now for M1 Macs.
Marco:
That's not good either.
Casey:
It's not that bad.
Casey:
It's not that bad.
Casey:
It's not that good.
Marco:
And I know that because it's just an iPad app running in a window.
Marco:
There's only so good that can be.
Marco:
And so it's fine.
Marco:
It's better than not having anything.
Marco:
It's certainly better than my horrendous web app, but it is not nearly as good as something that has any care put into it at all to customize it for the platform.
Marco:
And I would like to just keep that running on the Mac in the way it is now and just tweak things a little bit.
Marco:
Give it a nice toolbar.
Marco:
Give it a couple of little things.
Marco:
But I don't think I can actually do that without making a Catalyst app.
Marco:
And making a Catalyst app is harder because it's a whole separate target, a whole separate binary.
Marco:
You've got to submit it to the Mac App Store.
Marco:
Everything's separate from the iOS app.
Marco:
It's kind of a different beast that's probably not worth the amount of trouble.
Marco:
But Vision OS, I'm looking forward to.
Marco:
I think...
Marco:
I have a lot of work to do, and I'm really glad it isn't coming out next week or next month or anything like that.
Marco:
Thank goodness we have a lot of time because we're going to need it.
Casey:
Now, I actually think you're selling yourself a little short.
Casey:
Overcast for Apple Silicon on the Mac.
Casey:
is really not that bad the only complaint i have about it which you probably can't fix is that you know as we've discussed many times i'm a devout spaces person and overcast lives in one of the spaces on one of my monitors and the media keys work fine as long as overcast is on a visible space but if i like hit play when overcast is on a different space that i'm not looking at
Casey:
When I come back to the space that Overcast is on, that's when it starts playing, which, again, I don't know that there's really anything you can do about that short of going the whole Catalyst route.
Casey:
But that drives me bananas.
Casey:
Other than that, I actually think it's really not bad at all.
Casey:
It's more than serviceable.
Casey:
It's actually even pretty decent.
Casey:
So you're selling yourself short.
Marco:
I mean, it's bad.
Marco:
This is coming from the guy who was like, yeah, my iMac reboots itself three times a day, but it's not that bad.
Casey:
Oh, stop.
Casey:
At least I'm being generous, right?
Marco:
And the media key thing, I don't think I can do anything about that.
Marco:
I can try, but I made some change early on in the M1 Mac era.
Casey:
Which made it much better.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
I don't remember what it was specifically, but I remember you doing it, and it made it much better, but it didn't get us 100% of the way there.
Marco:
Yeah, it was some change to one of the remote control command things or some audio session thing.
Marco:
I forget what it was.
Marco:
Some little tiny detail.
Marco:
But, I mean, I've found, personally, I've found Mac media key handling, in general, not just in Overcast, like even just with Apple's own music app, has been so buggy that I usually don't use media keys anymore.
Marco:
Like, it works so infrequently, I usually just switch over to the music app and hit spacebar.
Marco:
Because it's just so...
Marco:
If I hit play pause on my keyboard at any given time, I don't know what's going to happen.
Marco:
Usually nothing.
Marco:
And so I'm just like, that's not worth the hassle.
Marco:
I just give up on them.
Casey:
Yeah, I think the problem for me with media keys, normally I feel like they work okay.
Casey:
But if there's a scenario where I have multiple things that I could ostensibly want to play pause, so let's say I have Apple Music open, I have a YouTube video open in Safari, then the Mac, I don't know how it's supposed to intuit which one I want, but I feel like it always guesses the wrong one.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
And so like, you know, I want, I like just opened up a tab in Safari that happens to have a YouTube video in it, but music is playing.
Casey:
So I want to pause my music so I can watch the YouTube video.
Casey:
And what ends up happening inevitably is it plays the YouTube video while the music is still playing.
Casey:
It's like, no, I wanted the other one.
Casey:
So yeah, that's, it's, it's a hard problem to solve.
Casey:
Like, again, how can you possibly know which one I want to control with this one button?
Casey:
But it's just funny to me that it seems to consistently choose the wrong one.
John:
Wait until they add eye tracking to macOS.
John:
Then they'll tell what you're looking at and play pause that.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And speaking of eye tracking, we have a lot of follow-up to do.
Casey:
And it starts with Vision Pro.
Casey:
And Brandon Jones has some feedback for us and information for us.
Casey:
Do you want to talk about this, John?
John:
Sure, this is something that was in the WWDC videos, but Brandon Jones did a good job of summarizing sort of the implications of it all.
John:
So I'll read.
John:
These are from several Mastodon posts that I've sort of compiled here.
John:
Apple's Vision OS significantly limits how applications are allowed to interact with the user, especially regarding their new gaze-based input, and I think it's worth talking about.
John:
The summary is, if you want to do AR apps, you must give Apple full rendering control.
John:
A lot of it centers around Apple's choice to both make eye tracking central to the headset's input and simultaneously declare it to be too private to be exposed to apps, which, to be fair, is pretty sensitive data.
John:
We've talked about this before when we were talking about the WGC sessions.
John:
Apple was saying you wouldn't get eye tracking data.
John:
You couldn't tell where the user was looking and how that might preclude certain types of games or whatever because it's a privacy concern.
Marco:
it's not the same as where your cursor is and mac os or whatever gaze data is more sensitive because you haven't even yet decided to do anything it's just where your eyes are wandering anyway that's the principle behind that right yeah and also and not just that but also like you know the vision pro is also looking at your entire room and all of your surroundings and and you know parts of your body and everything and so not only can apps not tell where you are looking until you choose to click on something but also they can't see your room
Marco:
And they don't even know necessarily where the walls are in regular app modes.
Marco:
And so, yeah, a lot of these details we'll get to.
Marco:
But the gist of it is your app can say, here's a button.
Marco:
Let me know if someone taps it.
Marco:
But it can't tell if you're hovering over it by looking at it or selecting it or anything like that.
Marco:
So there's all sorts of implications with this that are, I think, pretty interesting.
John:
So continuing here from Brandon's summary, in the Safari session, they described a whole new element highlighting pattern that discards the web's built-in hover APIs in favor of one handled entirely by the OS in the name of not leaking gaze data.
John:
But it's not just the web that gets this treatment.
John:
If you want to display anything in the user space, you don't get to render and shade it yourself.
John:
Instead, you hand off meshes and high-level materials to the OS and it renders it for you.
John:
The relevant WWC session, if you want to learn about this, by the way, is...
John:
Uh, one zero zero nine six build great games for spatial computing.
John:
Although I do, I haven't actually watched the session, but I do wonder if they talk about, uh, you know, shooting things with your eyeballs.
John:
Anyway, uh, Brandon continues from the OS perspective.
John:
This is an attractive approach.
John:
They can handle object selection and highlighting without ever exposing gaze or hand data.
John:
Now let me just summarize what this, what this part is talking about here.
John:
Uh,
John:
Like, so when you look at something, you might want it to highlight, you know, as the controls do, the little buttons and stuff or whatever.
John:
But hey, whatever you're doing, say you write an app and it's got a bunch of 3D objects and you want, like, the thing that the person's looking at to highlight so they know when they make the pinch gesture will do it.
John:
If you, as the application developer, were able to actually render the 3D objects, you'd be like, okay, well now, you know, if they're looking at it, I have to make it glow.
John:
So you'd have code for that.
John:
But you don't know when they're looking at it.
John:
the os handles all the rendering for you and because the os has handed the meshes and like it doesn't you know it says here you go here's the raw materials os you render it the os can decide when to highlight your button your 3d object or whatever without your app knowing
John:
Because that's all happening on the rendering side.
John:
So you don't get to choose like, oh, when they look at it, I want, you know, this to look like this or whatever.
John:
The OS handles that entirely, which is very unlike 3D APIs in the normal sense where you, yes, you construct the objects or whatever, but you also choose how to render them and not so envision OS.
John:
And that's so the OS can do things like highlight without your app knowing.
John:
Um, to continue, they can light the scene without exposing environment data.
John:
What that means is what Marco was just saying, how they don't know what your room looks like.
John:
Like if you're doing it in AR mode, they take like your room, whether, you know, you have, say you have like your, your walls are painted red and you have lots of lights on.
John:
That's going to bounce a bunch of red light around.
John:
That is incorporated into the rendering of whatever you put in there.
John:
If you have a little 3D object in your app or your little windows or whatever, the red light bouncing off the walls influences how they're rendered.
John:
But because you as the app developer don't even have access to the surrounding room, you couldn't do that.
John:
The OS does it for you.
John:
The OS sort of treats your room as kind of like, I imagine, kind of like a cube map or whatever and lights the objects inside.
John:
that you put in front of the user so they look like they're incorporated into the room without your app ever having any idea what the room looks like because you don't have to render that.
John:
You don't have to figure out what the lighting should be.
John:
You don't have to figure out how to like make it look like that object is really on the coffee table given the room's lighting.
John:
The OS does that for you.
John:
Continuing from Brandon here, they can occlude virtual objects without exposing room geometry.
John:
Again, they can, you know, they know what's blocked by your coffee table or whatever.
John:
Brandon says, want to try to experiment with different input models or try out an advanced new rendering technique?
John:
Sounds like you simply can't, at least not in any AR environment.
John:
Apple is offering more flexibility if you're doing a VR app, but there is no camera slash gaze data allowed.
John:
Uh, so I thought this was really interesting.
John:
And like, it's the sort of the technical side of this that allows Apple to do two things.
John:
One to handle a lot of the drudgery for you.
John:
Like, I don't want to, you know, I just have an iOS app.
John:
I don't want to figure out how my little floating window should look like it's well integrated into the room.
John:
But two, even if you're writing a full fledged native vision, OS app with a bunch of 3d objects and whatever, you know, whatever you come up with a cool app that would only work in vision, OS, uh,
John:
You both don't get to render those things.
John:
Also, you don't have to.
John:
The OS will handle it for you.
John:
And this is, you know, a great example of how privacy focused Apple is, that this sort of like fundamentally defines the application programming interface for 2D and 3D stuff on Vision Pro entirely in service of privacy and not letting apps get information that they don't have to have to do their job.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, you can imagine if they didn't put all these protections in place, look at the terrifying, awful, like morally bankrupt way that ad tech and surveillance tech over the years have to have exploited.
Marco:
Even the smallest bits of information they can collect from you or they can infer about you.
Marco:
Anything that you give them.
Marco:
They'll try to sniff your browser configuration and computer to try to fingerprint you.
Marco:
Obviously, IP address stuff.
Marco:
There's so much stuff they try to derive from any little bit of data they get about you.
Marco:
Imagine if they could see your room, everything around your room, everything about it.
Marco:
They could derive where you were.
Marco:
They could derive who you are very, very easily, even more easily than they do now.
Marco:
Then imagine gaze data.
Marco:
Imagine if they could track your eyes in real time as you browsed a web page.
Marco:
If you think algorithmically generated content is bad now,
Marco:
Imagine if they had that much data on exactly where you look and when and how.
Marco:
Imagine what they could create.
Marco:
What kind of hellscape of, like, the web would become even more horrible than it is now with data they could, like, generate based on, well, this will generate not only the most clicks, but this will make people look at it more.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
It would be a terrifying hellscape even more than it is now.
Marco:
And so having this level of focus on an AR environment is something that I don't think any other major tech company would even consider, let alone put this much effort into and have this much conviction about because you know –
Marco:
This is going to, in some ways, hurt app development on Vision OS.
Marco:
And I have more to say about that later.
Marco:
But talk about principles and courage to this heavily restrict such fundamental data about your apps environment and interaction from being visible to apps and to put as much effort into it as they did to keep those things separate and private.
Marco:
That really takes a lot of dedication on this front.
Marco:
And again, I think it's the right call.
Marco:
I mean, this platform is extremely early.
Marco:
It's really hard to say at this point what will be the best decision in retrospect, what will work out long term.
Marco:
Will they have to loosen up on some of these things over time?
Marco:
We don't really know yet.
Marco:
It's way too early to say.
Marco:
But I think this is going to prove to be a good move, even though it will create a bit of pain in the buttery for certain, you know, for certain development tasks and things that like, you know, certain things will become a little bit tricky that you have to work around or, you know, certain features or interactions that you'll have to either not do or stick with the stock way that they're done rather than doing your own custom thing.
Marco:
But again, I think overall, this is probably the right move and only Apple would have done this.
John:
And if they didn't do this, the ad tech companies would be reading the spine of every single book in your bookshelf, reading the publications that are sitting on your coffee table, doing face recognition against everybody in your family, listening to every sound that plays, like determining where you live based on looking out your windows at the angle of the sun and cross, you know, calibrating with Google Earth because you didn't give a location date, like...
Marco:
Oh, they're watching you.
Marco:
They'll be watching – they'd be watching your arms, your skin, like your fingerprints.
Marco:
They would – anything they could see, they would use.
Marco:
And they could see a lot from something that has such a broad view of the world.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And the flip side of that is that, you know, like so this is – it makes certain things in apps more difficult.
John:
But it does make the experience more coherent.
John:
Not having control over the rendering means every object that is rendered in augmented reality, everything that is supposed to be floating in the middle of your room or sitting on your coffee table –
John:
will be rendered in a consistent way.
John:
If you controlled that rendering yourself, app developers could do whatever they wanted with the rendering and the texture mapping and the shading and the shadowing.
John:
And would they all choose to do things in the same way with the same level of skill?
John:
Probably not.
John:
And that would lead to a...
John:
more of a hodgepodge inconsistent experience, even not in any kind of malicious way, but just if app A developer makes different choices about how to shade things than app developer B and you have them both running at the same time, they'll look different.
John:
Even if they both try to incorporate themselves into the room somehow, they would look different from each other due to different decisions.
John:
Whereas in the OS does it, it's going to be consistent across every single application because it has to be because the apps literally don't control the rendering the OS does.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, look at on iOS, you have many different visual styles and many different interaction styles.
Marco:
And even in the absence of any kind of malice, what you get is a world of a lot of web apps and electron apps.
Marco:
And the way they behave, we all know this by using them, they behave in subtly different ways in lots of little implementation details.
Marco:
Lots of feels, lots of looks, lots of behaviors.
Marco:
They're just different from the system defaults.
Marco:
Imagine that in AR like, you know, it's easy when we see we're seeing this new platform right now.
Marco:
We're seeing it in PR demo mode.
Marco:
We're seeing Apple's polished apps that they showed during the demo.
Marco:
We're hearing about the press demos that everyone else got that that are, you know, all these like carefully walked through events that were carefully polished for those demos.
Marco:
What we're not seeing yet is what's going to happen when this gets exposed to the world.
Marco:
And we get every crappy developer trying to make crappy corporate apps for this thing.
Marco:
It's not going to be that perfect.
Marco:
And the more Apple puts in place at the start to try to control the basics, the better this platform can be.
Marco:
And something like how an object is rendered in your room...
Marco:
That probably should be consistent because if you imagine different objects on screen at different times from different apps or different styles or different renderers that are being used, different libraries that are being used between different apps.
Marco:
If one of them is using like, you know, whatever the AR version of Electron will become like our Electron or whatever, you know, if somebody is using our Electron apps to make their corporate BS app, because they don't want to write it for three different AR headsets, that's going to have a different rendering style.
Marco:
Like the light might hit it differently and,
Marco:
It might have different textures or different edge behaviors or different interaction behaviors.
Marco:
There are so many ways that that could be really disorienting or just crappy looking and sloppy.
Marco:
And so much about AR needs to be both consistently rendered...
Marco:
and rendered with a lot of sophistication in order to prevent pretty basic fundamental problems like motion sickness or disorientation or things like that.
Marco:
And so you can imagine if there's some custom renderer out there used by our Electron apps that is a little bit crappier than Apple's built-in one, and you know it would be, it could cause weird problems for a lot of people.
Marco:
This kind of environment is very sensitive and needs to be controlled a lot.
Marco:
And to have Apple control more of that rendering pipeline from, again, from this early point of view that who knows what we'll think in the future, but this early point of view, that sounds like the right call.
Casey:
Well, plus what you're looking at isn't constrained to a small or at best medium-sized box in front of you, right?
Casey:
Like I'm looking at two 5K screens and even still, all of the UI wonkiness that's happening is contained in those two rectangles.
Casey:
Granted, it's not real, but when you're suddenly... You're not real, man.
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
When you're busting all of these things into your quote-unquote real life, I mean, again, I know it's not exactly true, but that can be quite a bit more jarring than when it's limited to just a couple of rectangles that are directly in front of your face.
Casey:
And so I think having that consistency makes sense.
Casey:
And I really applaud Apple because I think I could imagine other companies going for AR and just shrugging at all the privacy stuff.
Casey:
what i commend apple for is they clearly have really thought it through now as marco said you know ad tech in in in tracking and surveillance tech they are as slimy as they come and i'm sure they'll find a way around some of these protections but it sure sounds like apple's put a lot of thought into making sure this is safe for users which as a user you know whether or not i get one of these immediately or later or whatever that i really appreciate that you're getting one immediately
Casey:
Well, one of the three of us is going to have to, and I'm not sure which one of us is going to be without a chair when the music stops.
Marco:
I'm definitely, do you see how crappy my app looks?
Marco:
I have to get one.
Marco:
We always knew you'd find that excuse.
Marco:
I think given that I'm a professional iOS developer, I don't think it's an excuse.
Casey:
Are you a professional XROS?
Casey:
I mean, vision OS developer?
Casey:
I don't think so.
Casey:
No, I'm giving you a hard time.
Casey:
We're probably all in for one.
Casey:
All right, John, tell me.
John:
Actually, before we move on, for the people who listen to what Casey said before and think, I don't care that all my apps on my screen have different UIs.
John:
In fact, I think that's a strength.
John:
I like the fact that each app can have its own UI.
John:
It's not so much like, oh, people will be confused that apps have different UIs and they won't know how they look.
John:
it's it gets to more of what casey was saying it like they're not just confined to his screens they exist in the world of his screens and there is some consistency in that world the os controls like the you know the shadows on the windows for example or whatever although some of that's overridable but the whole point of augmented reality is that everything
John:
Even the stupid little rectangles, even the stupid little flat rectangles that are just a phone app or an iPad app, even those that are apps that have nothing to do with virtual reality or 3D.
John:
It's just a plain old app.
John:
The rectangle is supposed to be floating in the air in your room.
John:
That is not true of any of the windows on your screen.
John:
They're not supposed to be in your room.
John:
They are supposed to be, and they literally are, on a monitor that's in your room.
John:
But they do not incorporate anything from your room in there.
John:
They're not like floating above your desk.
John:
They're in the world of the monitor.
John:
So everything in Vision OS, when you're in AR mode and not in VR mode, where you're seeing your room and everything, is supposed to look like it is in that room.
John:
That's the consistency they're going for.
John:
Not that everything on the screen has to look the same.
John:
You can make wildly different apps.
John:
Take all those wildly different apps that Marco was talking about on iOS.
John:
You can run them all in Vision OS.
John:
But when those little rectangles are floating in the air, they better look like they're floating in the room that you're in.
John:
The rectangles themselves will be wacky and have stupid banner ads and whatever the hell they are, but they have to look like they're in your room.
John:
And of course, obviously for 3D objects, for actual apps that take advantage of Vision OS and aren't just little floating flat iOS and iPad apps, same deal.
John:
But even for the flat ones, the rectangles have to look like they're in your room.
John:
And that goes all the way up to the, I was playing with the Vision OS demo thing too.
John:
Basically, the window backgrounds, like someone was pointing out, like, hey, there's no light mode and dark mode in Vision OS.
John:
You want to know why?
John:
The window material, the thing that windows are made out of in Vision OS is this weird, magical, translucent, frosted glass watchamuhusi.
John:
And they have a bunch of, like, demo rooms that you can flip, like, kitchen during the day, kitchen at night, living room at night, living room.
John:
try all the different lighting it's like how can this window be legible and all this different lighting what color is this window is it a white window is it a dark window i can't really tell it's the os handles this for you like because if you tried to do it yourself and you said well my app is always a black window with white text and then you put it in a pitch black room and no one can see the window anymore just like the text is floating in midair the os is handling so much stuff for you to maintain the illusion that things really are
John:
integrated into your reality.
John:
And the final point I'll make of this is that by Apple doing all of this, when Apple gets better at doing this, when the new hardware comes out, when they revise their software, when they get better and better at making it look like it's photorealistically floating in your actual room,
John:
every app will benefit from that because the apps never controlled that rendering to begin with.
John:
So it's not like if someone does an app and doesn't update it for three years, it'll look like a cruddy, you know, old version.
John:
It doesn't look like, no, every app since they control the rendering will advance along with Apple doing this stuff.
John:
So I think this is definitely the right choice.
John:
I do definitely think they should expose gaze data in full VR for games, but those are two, you know, entirely separate things.
John:
One has an awareness of your surroundings and the other has no, it doesn't need to have any awareness of your surroundings at which point,
John:
I have no problem passing my gaze data to the shooting game of letting you know which thing I'm looking at to shoot.
John:
So hopefully Apple will figure out how to separate those priorities.
Casey:
And I think this is one of those things where Apple needs to see how are we going to use it.
Casey:
I'm not the first to say that the Apple Watch, Apple had ideas about how we were going to use it, both in terms of just regular use and in terms of developers.
Casey:
And over time, they refined what they thought the watch was for based on what people were actually using the watch for.
Casey:
And I suspect we're going to see a lot of that with the Vision Pro.
Casey:
And if there's a cry for, oh, we really would like to do such and such, but we need iData, then presumably Apple will figure out a way to facilitate it, be that only in VR mode, like you're saying, or maybe there's some sort of way to do it in AR mode that's privacy conscious, or maybe you have some sort of, like,
Casey:
a dialogue that you have to approve that says, hey, you know, this app really, really, really wants your location.
Casey:
I mean, eye tracking data.
Casey:
And, you know, is that OK with you?
Casey:
And any of those things, I don't know if they're the right answer, but they are answers.
Casey:
So we shall see.
Casey:
Speaking of gaze and things like that, we have some links to some various WWDC sessions, particularly 10073 designed for spatial input.
Casey:
Tell me about this, please.
John:
Yeah, so this is just kind of like, hey, how do I design things for Vision OS, assuming I'm making a native app for it and not just running one of my existing ones?
John:
One of the things that caught my eye was they showed the minimum area for UI elements.
John:
They say that it is 60 points, but the elements can be smaller than 60 points with margins.
John:
And so there's two little diagrams.
John:
They showed a button and a 60-point square.
John:
And they said, hey, so the button doesn't fill the 60-point square.
John:
In fact, there's an eight-point margin on either side making the actual button 44 points, which a number that stuck out may be good.
John:
Wasn't that exactly the same size that they used to say?
John:
It was like on the original iPhone, the minimum size of your button should be 44 points.
John:
So I thought that was interesting.
John:
And also interesting that the eye tracking is apparently less precise than our meaty fingers because they want the hit area to be bigger than 44.
John:
So the hit area is 60, but the visual thing is 44.
John:
now you may be hearing this and saying wait a second what the hell does 60 points mean in an environment where my window is floating in midair and can be pulled closer and farther away from the user and the person can walk around like what does points mean anything on a screen that means something because no matter how far away your iphone screen is to you you have to touch your finger to it to touch it and once your finger touches it 44 points given apple's dpi and blah blah blahs
John:
been roughly the same size across their phone lines.
John:
It's varied a little bit, but you can see how point size for touch targets having a standard makes some sense.
John:
But how does having a point size on an AR app make any kind of sense?
John:
Well, Apple continues in that same session to explain this.
John:
We'll put timestamp links to these two different offsets so you can see those parts if you don't want to watch the whole video.
John:
Apple says, the system provides dynamic scale for app windows.
John:
You can see how the window scales larger as it moves away and smaller as it moves close.
John:
Dynamic scale makes your UI fill the same field of view and preserve the size of the targets no matter where the window is positioned.
John:
So you can see this in the video, but think of it this way.
John:
Normally, when objects get farther away from you, they look smaller.
John:
That's, you know, just perspective, right?
John:
What Apple does is as you push a window away from you, it makes the window bigger.
John:
So no matter how far you push it away and vice versa, or how close you pull it to yourself, it always fills the same proportion of your field of view.
John:
That is a dynamic scale mode for Windows.
John:
So 60 points makes sense because it's like, go ahead, put that window wherever you want.
John:
I am going to make sure that in the world of this AR thing, that button is always 60 points.
John:
You can't make it bigger by pulling the thing towards you.
John:
You can't make it smaller by pushing the thing away.
John:
It's going to be 60 points no matter what, because you have to be able to target it with your eye and their judgment of what is comfortably eye trackable given their current eye tracking technology in people's eyes is 60 points.
John:
So that's really weird if you see it happening like they show in the video.
John:
From your perspective, it seems okay, right?
John:
But if you were to look at it from the side, like if you were to, you know, they give you like a view in the 3D world of like, well, what if there was another 3D camera over here looking at, you can see the window getting bigger as it gets pushed away and smaller as it gets pushed forward.
John:
And it looks really weird.
John:
You can use fixed scale instead.
John:
And in that case, it behaves like a regular 3D thing where when you push it away from you, it gets smaller.
John:
When you pull it towards you, it gets bigger.
John:
But I thought that was super interesting.
John:
And that answers a question I hadn't really thought about until, you know, actually try using these apps in the simulator.
John:
Like, can you make an app unusable because it's too far away from you?
John:
And in their default mode, they try to make sure that doesn't happen.
Casey:
Vision OS, where everything's made up and the points don't matter.
John:
Well, the points do matter, but everything's still made up.
Marco:
hey hey you you atp listener hi hey it's me we are sponsored this week by atp membership now if you're hearing this you're probably not a member because members get an ad free version of the show so all these little promos that i'm sticking in like this and of course the regular sponsor reads are not included in the member version of the show you can add that feed to any podcast player you want we don't care what you use well i care but you know the rest of us don't care so much
Marco:
um and all that's just eight bucks a month or whatever that multiple is per year now we also give you a bootleg version of the show if you want you can listen to that version which has its own feed again add it to any podcast player you want that includes everything we do in the live stream and it's unedited raw audio you know it doesn't have chapters but it does have casey swearing uh and it does have um you know whatever we talk about you know before and after the show if it yeah maybe i'll cut it from the published show because it might not fit or whatever but we'll put it in the bootleg a lot of people love that perk
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And now back to the show.
Casey:
And then Christopher Masto had some information on how our eyes work and will likely cope with Vision Pro.
Casey:
And so this begins with the two techniques your eyes have to focus on stuff.
Casey:
There is, and I read up on this earlier, I'm probably getting some of these details wrong, but the general idea is there's vergence and accommodation.
Casey:
So vergence is your eyes ever so slightly, they're pivoting along a vertical axis.
Casey:
So you're not going literally cross-eyed, but your eyes will come closer together a little bit as you're focusing on something far away.
Casey:
I think I have that right.
Casey:
And they'll spread out a little bit, so to speak, as you're focusing on something closer.
Casey:
And that's vergence.
Casey:
Then accommodation is basically, hey, you have a lens inside your eye that is used to focus things.
Casey:
And Christopher writes that the discrepancy between the two is one of the sources of discomfort in VR because everything is at the same eye squish distance, the same vergence, regardless of the binocular distance.
Casey:
And so this creates what's called the vergence accommodation conflict, or VAC, which is a visual phenomenon that occurs when the brain receives mismatching cues between vergence and accommodation of the eye.
Casey:
This commonly occurs in virtual reality devices, augmented reality devices, 3D movies, and other types of stereoscopic
Casey:
displays.
Casey:
The effect can be unpleasant and can cause eyestream.
Casey:
We'll put links to all of this stuff in the show notes.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Last week we talked, I was talking about the, you know, the two different things that we focus and it was the, the moving and the squishing.
John:
And these are the actual names for them.
John:
Right.
John:
And to be clear, the squishing in mammals anyway, the squishing is tiny little muscles in our eyes are squishing the lens of our eye.
John:
There's like a, you know, a little lens that you can make flatter to change how the light is focused on the back of your eye where the retina is.
John:
And that's, you know, as your lens gets less squishy as you get old, you have trouble focusing as much.
John:
Basically, there's a measurement of like how much can you squish the lens in your eye?
John:
It's like really round or really flat.
John:
And that distance, like how much you can squish it is measured.
John:
It's like measured in diopters or whatever.
John:
As you get older, you have less range of squishing.
John:
So the squishing thing is the accommodation, and the vergence is, like Casey said, the cross-eye type thing.
John:
If something's real close to you, your eyes kind of point towards the bridge of your nose.
John:
If something's far away, your eyes point straight out.
John:
Now, here's some stuff I don't actually know.
John:
Everyone who has sent in information about this has said, hey, I use VR stuff, and in VR stuff,
John:
The, uh, the vergence distance, uh, you know, the vergence is the same.
John:
Like there is no, there is no, uh, like pointing your eyes straight forward to look at things that are far away or going cross-eyed to look at things that are close.
John:
Every single thing that is seen on the screen in most VR headsets is at the same vergence level.
John:
And that that's this, you know, vergence accommodation conflict type of thing.
John:
Because you think you're looking at something farther away, but your eyes, I might have got it backwards that it's the same accommodation.
John:
Anyway, the discrepancy between the virgins and accommodation, because one of those two things is fixed.
John:
Now, is that how it is in the Apple Vision Pro?
John:
Is everything at the same focal distance, regardless of how far away it is?
John:
Will the Apple Vision Pro suffer from virgins accommodation conflict?
John:
Here's what, again, session 10073, Design for Spatial Influid.
John:
had had some things to say about it and i'm not sure what this means i can interpret this both ways so at four minutes they said we should also consider depth when thinking about eye comfort depth is a unique feature of spatial experiences placing your content near or far away creates different feelings in your projects okay i can that that seems like a reasonable truth uh regardless of this whole virgin's accommodation thing they continue but our eyes focus on one distance at a time and changing the focus depth frequently can create eye strain now wait a second
John:
How would you change the focus depth of anything inside the headset if the focus depth is always fixed at a particular depth, no matter how far away anything is?
John:
Because they're trying to say this, hey, you know, don't bring things close and far and make the person focus at different distances.
John:
But if the Apple Vision Pro is just like most headsets,
John:
no matter how close or far the objects are from you in the virtual world, your eyes never have to refocus.
John:
And to be clear, like we said last week, the screens are fractions of an inch from your eyeball, but the focal distance due to lenses in the headset is not inches from your eyeball, right?
John:
The focal distance is like, I don't know, like six feet in front of you or something or nine feet, whatever it is.
John:
Like there is a, in most headsets, there is a fixed focal distance and that focal distance is far in front of you.
John:
That's why we were saying like, you're not going to get myopia from looking at screens that are a fraction of an inch away.
John:
because the focal distance is farther and how is the focal distance farther there are lenses in the apple vision pro even if you don't wear glasses there are additional lenses that you add on to that if you wear glasses but even if you have perfect 2020 vision the apple vision pro has lenses inside of it that set the focal plane of you know hey if you want to see the images on that screen focus your eyes as if they're looking at something six feet in front of you or whatever the focal distance plane is
John:
So Apple continues, look to keep interactive content at the same depth to make it feel effortless to switch between UI.
John:
By maintaining the same Z position, your eyes don't need to adapt to the new distance.
John:
Again, I am confused.
John:
Z distance, by the way, is like, how far is it from your face?
John:
Like, is it really far in the distance or is it really close to your nose?
John:
And they're saying, hey, don't don't make things different.
John:
Z distances keep things close together.
John:
So your eyes don't need to adapt to a new distance.
John:
They could be talking about virgins accommodation conflict saying, hey, when you put things closer and farther away, people's eyes will instinctively try to refocus on them.
John:
But unfortunately, in our headset, everything is at the same focal distance.
John:
And that will cause virgins accommodation conflict.
John:
So don't make people do that.
John:
You could also interpret it as saying, wait a second.
John:
It's possible to focus my eyes at different distances inside this headset.
John:
Now, there is technically a way they could do that because they know where your eyes are pointing individually.
John:
They could tell where, like how, you know, what your, what your vergence is like, you know, if we have two laser beams came out of both of your eyeballs, where would the laser beams meet?
John:
And that is the distance where you're looking like, you know, the vergence distance that you're looking because they know where your eyes are looking in which direction they're pointing.
John:
They could calculate that and then they would have to mechanically move the lenses inside the headset to refocus at the new focal distance where your eyes are.
John:
But I don't think they're doing that because A, they would have bragged about it a lot.
John:
And B, focusing and refocusing in response to the vergence of your eyes.
John:
Would have to be really fast like you know super expensive like you know Super expensive mirrorless camera fast and would make noise and would have motors and would destroy battery life or whatever So I don't think they're doing that.
John:
So my interpretation of this my best guess is There is a fixed focal different distance inside the Apple vision pro everything no matter how far away it is from you is at that focal distance and
John:
And that means this headset does suffer from divergence to combination conflict because your eyes will expect things farther away.
John:
They will expect you to focus on them at a different distance, but you won't have to.
John:
And this whole session is trying to say, hey, don't do that.
John:
Don't put one thing really far away and then one thing close, then far away, then close.
John:
Because people's eyes will constantly be trying to focus on them, and they don't need to do that in our headset.
John:
If we actually had a headset or were able to try it, this is a thing that we might look into.
John:
But for now, we're just speculating.
John:
But I thought this was fascinating because it's a topic that Apple pretty much entirely didn't touch on.
John:
I didn't hear anybody who tried the headset talk about this either.
John:
And I personally don't have any experience with headsets to say how bad Virgin's accommodation conflict is or if it's tiring or eye straining or whatever.
John:
But that's definitely something we will follow up on when Marco gets his headset in case he maybe gets his.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Are you not in for one, John?
John:
Maybe.
John:
We'll see.
Marco:
Oh, come on.
Marco:
I think when you look at the design of Vision OS, how it seems to be structured so far.
Marco:
So first of all, I think people have, I forget whether Apple said this or whether people have analyzed it, but it seems like the default physical fixed focus distance of the Vision Pro seems to be something like two meters in front of you.
Marco:
It's like two to three meters in front of you, something like that.
Marco:
If you look at the design of Vision OS, when new windows are shown or when the home screen icons are shown, etc., they all seem to be shown at about that distance from you.
Marco:
It seems like what Vision OS is doing is kind of having like a default distance from your face that it renders things at.
Marco:
And that is almost certainly the actual accommodation distance that the optics are designed to simulate.
Marco:
And so if you leave things at that distance from your eyes, that like the default distance is placing things from you,
Marco:
I'm guessing you don't get VAC, or at least it's as minimized as it can be.
John:
Well, I mean, the problem in AR mode is the whole rest of the room also exists, and the wall is farther and the coffee table is closer.
John:
And, you know, so if you do choose to look at them and try to, quote unquote, focus on them, it will feel weird because you don't have to focus on them because it's, you know, that's part of the unreality of it.
John:
Like, does it look like the room or does it look like a screen?
John:
Well, if you're looking at the room and you're looking at the coffee table, you will...
John:
have virgins and accommodations such that you can focus on the coffee table that's a foot and a half and away in the in the headset with a fixed focal distance you won't it'll it's you'll just put your eyes over there you point your eyes at it and it'll already be in focus uh except if your eyes try to adjust with the expectation that it will not be or anyway
John:
So but yeah, you're totally right about where like, even when you put the windows to the side, it tilts them, it's trying to maintain that radius of like, this is the this is the non VAC region.
John:
If you're anywhere in here, there is no conflict.
John:
And anything that is closer or farther away is potentially conflicting.
Marco:
Yeah, and I think – I'm not an expert in this.
Marco:
I've just read some of the same articles that you probably have.
Marco:
But it seems like this effect, like the eye strain and discomfort that can result from VAC, it seems like it's magnified more when you're holding or looking at stuff that it's simulating to be too close to you rather than too far away.
Marco:
Like it seems like the closer the thing is, it magnifies the problem.
Marco:
So –
Marco:
It wouldn't surprise me if that's the case to see Vision OS not give you lots of ways to pull things that close to you and instead try to stick with stuff like more at this distance and a little bit further from or a little bit closer, but not a lot closer.
Marco:
And there's all sorts of things that go into that too.
Marco:
I kind of had this funny thought a minute ago.
Marco:
We keep seeing all these simulated rooms in Apple's demos or simulator and everything.
Marco:
Everyone has all these rooms that have a good amount of empty space a few meters ahead of where you're sitting.
Marco:
and i was thinking like if this actually becomes like a really meaningful uh computing platform that lots of people are using to get a lot of work done can you imagine people possibly like starting to like rent out offices that are just circles like the wall is just a circle that is like a three meter radius around you just go in vr at that point like just turn on the yosemite you know what i mean like yeah
Marco:
But then you could you could just if you're sitting inside your three meter donut room, you could just you could place anything on any of the walls.
Marco:
You can even have like, you know, your coffee sitting three meters away from you over here.
Marco:
And, you know, it's like a picture of your family sitting three meters away over there.
John:
Three meter long arms.
John:
I don't know if that quite works.
John:
In the simulator.
John:
I was playing with the Vision OS simulator in Xcode.
John:
It just came out like, I don't know, hours before we recorded.
John:
So I didn't have that much time to play with it.
John:
But you can fly the camera around.
John:
And one of the first things that I did was I flew the camera around to the side of a window to see if it had depth.
John:
And I'm pretty sure it doesn't.
John:
Like, I looked at it edge on, and it basically disappeared.
John:
The other thing I tried to do was take Windows and bring them right up to my nose.
John:
And I think maybe I just don't know how to do that in Vision OS.
John:
Obviously, everything in the simulator is weird.
John:
Have you ever tried to use an iPhone app in the simulator?
John:
It's weird, and this is 10 times weirder because you're using, like, a mouse and a keyboard and a scroll wheel to substitute for eyeballs and pinching.
John:
It's super weird.
John:
But I couldn't, like...
John:
It wasn't conducive to that.
John:
I could zoom in.
John:
I could zoom the camera in, but I was just flying the virtual camera in the simulator.
John:
I don't think you'd be able to fly the virtual camera that way when you're wearing it, because when you're wearing it, you'd have to push your head closer to the thing, but...
John:
This is another thing to try.
John:
Again, with the idea of the floating rectangles or whatever trying to look like they're positioned in space, there's that button, whatever it is, I forget which button it is, whether it's the digital crown one or the other button that re-centers all your crap in front of you.
John:
And I think if you were sitting on the couch and had the windows in front of you at the intended focal distance and then just got up and walked forward two steps and shoved your face into Safari...
John:
It would let you get as close as you want, but it would be useless because now you're now you can see is three letters of the Safari window.
John:
And if you press whatever button that is, it would recenter things nine feet away from or six feet away from where your head is now.
John:
So that recentering and redistancing thing, you know, makes sense.
John:
And it's also why everyone you see in one of these demos, they're not using they're not like.
John:
Again, they're not walking through their house, walk and talk Aaron Sorkin style and using 17 apps while they walk and talk.
John:
They're sitting on a couch.
John:
They're sitting at a chair.
John:
They're stationary so that the things can be placed into the real world with them, but also maintaining that focal distance.
John:
I don't know if there even is a mode where like as you walk, your windows follow you, you know, at maintaining the six feet distance or whatever, because you probably walk into a wall or do something terrible.
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Casey:
So the Vision SDK is out.
Casey:
There is, at a glance, some really freaking good documentation.
Casey:
I think hell may have frozen over, my friends, because Apple's been, like, firing on all cylinders about documentation.
Casey:
It's been very strange.
Casey:
But we'll link to Dive Into Featured Sample Apps, where they have a series of sample apps, including Happy Beam, where you shoot hearts at grumpy clouds, if I understand this properly.
Casey:
But anyways...
Casey:
But it's, it's a full on walkthrough of the code.
Casey:
Not only here's what we did, but why we did it like brav fricking.
Casey:
Oh, no sarcasm.
Casey:
This is excellent.
Casey:
So I'm gonna have to dig into this at some point when I'm not well over my head, deep in call sheet stuff.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
But yeah, this looks really, really good, and it's worth checking out.
Casey:
And then it's also worth noting, I think John had noticed that Jonathan White, I believe former Apple employee, pointed out that if you have a PlayStation 5 or Xbox controller hooked up to your Mac, that you can use that to navigate in the Vision OS simulator.
John:
Which is vastly preferable to trying to use the tiny little camera controls they have in a little floating palette.
John:
Again, it's very awkward to try to use a VR headset simulator with a mouse and a keyboard.
John:
The main reason I put this post in here is because he posted an animated GIF of one of the little... They have virtual rooms for you to be in in the simulator because obviously there's no headset looking at your room, so they have a bunch of virtual rooms for you to try.
John:
And it's just a box floating in space.
John:
And he takes the PlayStation controller or whatever and just flies the camera in and out of the room.
John:
And you can see there's just a giant black void with a living room sitting in it.
Marco:
Neat.
Marco:
Going back a second when Casey was talking about all their good documentation for this, which I'm very happy.
Marco:
I haven't seen it yet, but I'm very happy to hear that.
Marco:
That's fantastic.
Marco:
And then explaining why.
Marco:
I think what's very important here is that
Marco:
They want us to develop apps for this platform that fit and make sense and are good.
Marco:
But we not only have never tried this platform, but we also won't have a chance to try this platform for a while.
Casey:
Well, that's half true.
Casey:
Did you see, you might not have seen, but I think it was Underscore that pointed out that somewhere, I don't know where, there was Apple documentation that said, starting next month,
Casey:
you can do the lab thing that they have at like five or 10 locations around the world.
Casey:
So that is, I mean, and I still think your point, Marco, is fair, but breaking news, apparently it is as early as July, if we all read this right, that one could go to, you know, Cupertino, London, et cetera, et cetera, and actually try your stuff on Vision Pro.
Marco:
i mean that's that helps but that's a very limited like you know oh sure totally when you look you know when when the iphone app store came out we had already had iphones for a year yeah and we we already and before that we had had smartphones for a while yeah they sucked but we had other you know so like the concept of a smartphone and and what's what smartphone software should be was fairly known and then we all had iphones for that for a year and so we knew how iphone software should behave and and how it should be designed and
Marco:
Yeah, it was a learning process.
Marco:
We didn't get it all right right at the start, but we had a huge head start.
Marco:
When the iPad came out, we didn't have a chance to use them before it launched to the world.
Marco:
However, we kind of assume like this is probably like a giant phone and just kind of use that as a starting point.
Marco:
And yeah, our initial apps sucked, but they weren't that far off.
Marco:
And again, it was a learning process.
Marco:
With this, every other major VR, AR kind of headset that's had any success at all, besides very, very specialized narrow markets, has been gaming-focused.
Marco:
And so we kind of have some idea, like, hey, if you want to make a VR game, here are some principles that you might want to follow, or here are some things that work and don't work.
Marco:
That's fine.
Marco:
But the idea of a spatial computing environment, of using an AR environment for general-purpose computing...
Marco:
that is still really in its infancy in the rest of the world.
Marco:
And most of us have not used that.
Marco:
And none of us have used specifically the Vision Pro for this purpose yet.
Marco:
And so to try to make software for this platform that we have no experience with and that can't really be simulated very well...
Marco:
And even if even if it was, you know, even if the simulator was really good and this could get into like, you know, they said they're going to offer dev kits at some point.
Marco:
And, you know, we mentioned like we don't really know what that means or what the dev kits will be able to do.
Marco:
But if the dev kit is anything less than a full blown environment that has all of Apple's built and apps already working and everything, which it probably will be like, I can't imagine that will those will all be ready yet.
Marco:
I expect the dev kit to be basically like the simulator in terms of what it has and what it doesn't have, in terms of other apps and everything.
Marco:
And you're not going to be able to install stuff, really, besides your own app.
Marco:
So you're not going to get a good experience of what it's like to actually really use this thing for computing.
Marco:
And because it's so radically different from what we've used before...
Marco:
Apple needs to really step up above and beyond to with things like documentation and tooling and, you know, explaining that, you know, human interface guidelines, explaining why they're doing things, explaining how things should be designed, why things should be structured this way, because we don't know because we can't use this platform yet.
Marco:
And the good thing is, it sounds like that's what they're doing.
Marco:
And it's going to take a whole lot of immersing ourself in this documentation and in the simulator and in the tools and reading up and experimenting with things for us to get stuff right.
Marco:
And it's still not going to quite be right when we get it because we will have no experience actually really using the hardware and using the software and figuring out how things work and how things should behave, how things should feel, how things should look.
Marco:
There's so much of that.
Marco:
When you look at the iPhone, there's so much kind of built in like, you know, here's how things should be laid out on the screen.
Marco:
Here's how navigation works.
Marco:
Here's how things should be structured.
Marco:
Here's the different conventions that we use.
Marco:
We know none of that with Vision OS.
Marco:
And until we're actually able to use it with real apps, with our real data, with, you know, really in our actual world trying to get things done in our real lives...
Marco:
We're not going to have those feelings kind of naturally inherent to us.
Marco:
So it's going to be a learning process.
Marco:
But in the meantime, Apple really has to step in.
Marco:
And so I'm very glad that it seems like they are doing that.
Casey:
Yeah, very much so.
Casey:
All right, John, tell me about the John Ternus external GPU question that was surfaced at the talk show.
John:
Yeah, we talked about it last week, I think, asked about external GPUs, and Ternus said he doesn't quite see how they would incorporate that into their system of built-in GPUs or whatever, is kind of closing the door on external GPUs and also saying that it just didn't even seem to make sense to him.
John:
It occurs to me, thinking about that question and the talk show in general, that
John:
Maybe that is also a question that could have been asked to Craig Federighi, because Ternus is the hardware dude, right?
John:
And you think, oh, external GPUs, like, that's a question for him, right?
John:
Because if he's like, oh, you're going to make a Mac Pro, are we going to support external GPUs or not?
John:
And how can we incorporate those?
John:
Ask the hardware guy, right?
John:
But there is a software component to this.
John:
As far as I'm aware, there's nothing inherent about any of the M-whatever-SOCs that precludes the idea of, for example...
John:
Using an external GPU for compute like setting aside the video stuff.
John:
I don't know what the deal with that is But just like just doing it for compute if you're trying to do like, you know AI model training or something like using GPUs for a computer or whatever Especially in the Mac Pro where you actually have card slots and all that other thing, right?
John:
Um, so the hardware may be capable, but you can't actually use any of those GPUs to do anything unless you have a driver for it.
John:
And that is a software question that Ternus doesn't really control.
John:
That's on the Federighi side.
John:
It's like, Hey, are we going to support on Apple Silicon?
John:
Um,
John:
You know, Apple Silicon native drivers for, let's say, AMD graphics cards.
John:
And it's not like, you know, Craig Federighi, like his organization maybe writes all those drivers or whatever.
John:
Certainly it falls on the umbrella of what kind of things does macOS support?
John:
Because, you know, in my Mac right now, I've got a bunch of drivers for my AMD graphics cards and they came with the operating system.
John:
And the operating system, that's Craig.
John:
So it would have been interesting to pose the same question.
John:
Obviously, he's not going to make the whole talk show just to be the giant Mac Pro show.
John:
That would be what it would be like if I was hosting it.
John:
I was going to say.
Marco:
And that's why Apple does not give you executives to interview.
John:
but anyway that's that's uh you know it's just an interesting thing to think about that there's more to it than just like oh you know when you design the mac pro hardware you didn't make it support this or you're you know because the soc has the gpu on it i can't do that as you know as i think we've talked about many times in the past intel gpus intel cpus had integrated graphics for years and years and max with intel cpus with integrated graphics are
John:
also supported discrete graphics.
John:
In fact, Apple had this wacky thing in the OS where it would use the discrete versus using the integrated and go back and forth and all that stuff.
John:
And of course, in the Intel Mac Pro, actually the Xeon, I don't think doesn't have an integrated GPU.
John:
But anyway, you could have put like, instead of a Xeon, put like an i9 or whatever, or i7 or whatever the most recent one, put something with an integrated GPU and still use the external GPUs.
John:
Apple did all that work for Intel, but that work is a software work.
John:
That is not hardware work.
John:
So that would be an interesting thing to muse on as we go in the next round of the Mac Pro to see if Apple changes course on this, to see if it would even be technically possible to change course, for example, with just a new version of macOS with a bunch of drivers that suddenly lets you plug in.
John:
you know, GPUs.
John:
And I don't think it's going to happen, obviously, on the M2 Ultra Mac Pro, because all of their slots are bandwidth starved, and they would need extra power connectors to power a big GPU and yada, yada, yada.
John:
But I was just thinking about this, that, you know, it's not just a hardware question, it's also a software question.
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Apple has added passkeys to Apple ID and iCloud logins.
Casey:
So they are dogfooding this or allowing us, I guess, to dogfood it.
Casey:
I haven't really messed with passkeys at all.
Casey:
So I don't really have much to say about this, but I applaud Apple for actually making it possible.
John:
They say this from a six-color story.
John:
They say the feature has been rolling out as of yesterday and can be tested on devices running iOS, iPadOS 17, or Sonoma betas.
John:
And some other people have said if you're running Ventura and you use Chrome, because Chrome, the latest versions of Chrome know about passkeys, that you could actually do it on Ventura with Chrome.
John:
That's funny.
John:
Yeah.
John:
They say it's rolling out and that must it must not have rolled out to me because I tried for a while earlier today to get to the point where it would let me use a passkey or prompt me like by going to the iCloud login page.
John:
And I just don't have access to that feature yet.
John:
So it's coming eventually.
John:
but i wasn't able to try it i have used passkeys with other things like in chrome because again chrome supports them with other services that support passkeys and it's fun and it's nice um i use them in addition to names and passwords i haven't yet had the guts to take any of the services that support them and say you know what forget about my password and do everything with passkeys although honestly i shouldn't really it shouldn't really be that scary because
John:
We all know how the world works.
John:
What if passkeys break or don't work or whatever?
John:
It's exactly the same thing you do when you forget your password, which happens to all of us.
John:
In the end, your email address is the ultimate key to your stuff because people forget their passwords.
John:
You'll never forget your passkey, but say there was a bug and the computer screwed up and the computer forgot your passkey.
John:
You're just going to use the forgot password link and have them email you something, yada yada, which is not great.
John:
But in theory, once the passkey feature is worked out and all the bugs are ironed out and it basically works reliably, you don't have to worry about forgetting anymore.
John:
And I think humans forgetting is going to happen way more often than iCloud keychain, like deleting stuff accidentally.
Casey:
Tell me, with regard to passkeys and passwords and things like that, tell me what's going on in Sonoma.
John:
So there's an app on macOS that's been around for, I don't know, a decade or two called Keychain Access that gives you a view of your macOS keychain.
John:
It started off looking at just your local keychain, and eventually iCloud keychain was introduced, and they put that into the app.
John:
It's a pretty nerdy app.
John:
It hasn't been updated in a really long time.
John:
It's scary and confusing.
John:
And in general, people should not mess with it because it's very easy to screw yourself up because you'll say, I don't know what this is.
John:
Do I need this?
John:
I'm going to delete this.
John:
Sometimes you need it.
John:
It's like people used to go into a library folder in the early versions of Mac OS X and being like, library?
John:
What the hell is this crap?
John:
And just delete everything.
John:
Yeah.
John:
It's not a good idea.
John:
So on Sonoma, when you launch Keychain Access, it throws a dialogue in your face that says, manage your passwords and system settings.
John:
Go to passwords and system settings to manage your passwords and pass keys, set up verification codes, and view your security recommendations.
John:
And it has a big button that is the default button that says open passwords.
John:
And the non-default button is open Keychain Access with a checkbox to say don't show this message again.
John:
So for users who are used to using keychain access because they're nerdy and that's the place where they go for passwords, they're trying to tell them, hey, we have a significantly more friendly interface to passwords over here in system settings that you might not know about because it's buried.
John:
Please use that one instead.
John:
If only that friendlier interface to passwords could be a standalone application that could replace Keychain Access.
John:
Maybe not replace it because Keychain Access does much more fancier stuff.
John:
So I hope they keep Keychain Access around, but I do like the idea that they are trying to herd users towards the nicer, friendlier interface that is in a totally different place.
Marco:
Also, can I take this moment to thank the Xcode team or whatever part of the Xcode team is responsible for automatic certificate management?
Marco:
And in particular, whoever at Apple made that work for CarPlay apps as of a few years ago or a year ago?
Marco:
i have not had to go into keychain access for probably two or three years now i used to on a regular basis because i used to have to do all the provisioning certificates and everything and all that management and everything and inevitably something would mess up and i'd have to go in there and clean up some garbage and i haven't done that in like two years nice so thank you whoever did that thank you yeah go team uh john there's good news about notification center we're being told anonymously
John:
Like I said last week, the two things I had to say about Sonoma was that my weird bug seems to be fixed, but also that the notification interface actually has buttons that you can click that don't disappear when you try to click them.
John:
So here's some anonymous feedback on that in Sonoma.
John:
Notification Center has been significantly re-engineered for macOS Sonoma, probably in big part because it's responsible for hosting widgets, which can now be at the desktop.
John:
So it wouldn't surprise me that the notification hover bug is finally fixed.
John:
Before Sonoma, the Notification Center process would be responsible for all things related to widgets, including when to update them, the running of extensions, and unarchiving of views.
John:
With Sonoma, they brought ChronoD, the ChronoDemon, to macOS.
John:
So now all Notification Center has to worry about is actually placing views on the screen.
John:
So here's to rewriting a part of the system that had been broken for three years.
John:
I don't know what ChronoD, I think it's some internal thing or whatever, but like...
John:
I mean, this matches with my experience.
John:
The notification center, the interface looks the same.
John:
It's the same stupid like, oh, we can't show you the buttons until you mouse over them because we're afraid your little brain will explode.
John:
But now when you mouse over them, you can actually click on them.
John:
So there is some support for the idea that it's not just my imagination that they actually made this particular user interface work.
John:
Now we can get back to complaining that this particular interface is dumb, but at least it's dumb and working as designed now.
Casey:
Hooray!
Casey:
All right, there's a couple of tidbits that we wanted to share with regard to iOS 17.
Casey:
First of all, if you recall, Apple has done for the last year or two like a semi-private Slack for WWDC.
Casey:
I was going to say attendees, but that's not really true.
Casey:
People who are interested in WWDC.
Casey:
And in there, somebody caught, and then it was eventually posted to MacRumors, that somebody from Apple said...
Casey:
As of iOS 17 and macOS Sonoma, disabling the iCloud Drive switch will no longer disable syncing in your app.
Casey:
It'll be controlled by the individual switch for your app, which means, Marco, that you can still sync with CloudKit and iCloud stuff, even if iCloud Drive is turned off because of some sort of work provisioning.
Casey:
This is critical for Marco today, but not a small amount of call sheet also rides on CloudKit.
Casey:
And so this is critical for me soon.
Casey:
So I am very excited about this.
Casey:
This is very good news.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm very curious to see, you know, once I get running on 17 and get some real user data out there.
Marco:
Because, you know, right now, as a quick reminder, and I just verified...
Marco:
If I look at my iCloud, my CloudKit state of like whether I can save data in CloudKit, I track this in analytics so I can make a decision in the future about whether to switch to that for sync.
Marco:
And right now I got 12.5% of my user base saying no account.
Marco:
And I believe that's the result you would get in iOS 16 and below when iCloud Drive was just disabled in addition to not actually being logged into an iCloud account.
Marco:
And in that case, you can't use CloudKit.
Marco:
so right now i'm at 12 and a half percent as my ios 17 adoption goes up which is already at like two percent as as that goes up i'm curious to see if this number goes down and and my analytic system is not advanced enough that i could say like you know what what is this value just for icloud or ios 17 people um i'm kind of curious to see how that tracks maybe i'll add something separate for that but um
Marco:
Right now, this doesn't help me because that's still way too many people to not be able to use iCloud with iOS 16 and below.
Marco:
And maybe in a year from now, that'll be different.
Marco:
Right now, I still can't use this.
Marco:
I can't rely on iCloud Drive being universal enough.
Marco:
or rather CloudKit being universal enough.
Marco:
But maybe next year I will.
Marco:
We'll see.
Marco:
I hope so.
Marco:
Either way, this is a very, very important step towards that possibility that might enable this possibility next year.
Marco:
So looking forward to that.
Casey:
And also with regard to iOS 17, apparently there's now a crossword puzzle like mini app within Apple News Plus.
Casey:
I don't even remember hearing rumblings of this until today.
Casey:
Maybe I missed it.
Casey:
But starting with iOS 17, Apple is taking a page from the New York Times and integrating crossword puzzles into the News app.
Casey:
Puzzles will be available to Apple News Plus and Apple One subscribers.
Casey:
This is from 9to5Mac.
Casey:
We'll link it in the show notes.
Casey:
Again, news to me.
John:
It makes sense to be in the news app, but this is just sort of raising the bar for everybody else.
John:
People complain when Apple adds functionality to be built into the US, but if they make a news app and part of news is the New York Times and part of the New York Times is the New York Times crossword, you can see how they got there.
John:
I still think there's plenty of room for better third-party crossword apps, but it just goes to show that you never know when Apple's going to come for your little section of the market.
Marco:
That being said, if it's limited to news plus subscribers, I'm not sure that's a huge threat to the market.
Marco:
But, you know, we'll see.
John:
Yeah, I mean, like, it's, you know, again, there's third-party opportunity there for sure because, A, you got all the free crossword apps.
John:
And, B, what if people don't want Apple News or Apple One?
John:
They just want a crossword.
John:
Well, they just go to the App Store and find one.
Casey:
And Marco, we have news with regard to why Apple isn't allowing third-party watch faces and watchOS 10.
Casey:
Do we?
Casey:
Does this actually say anything?
John:
No.
John:
It does say something, but what it says is BS.
Casey:
As per Mac rumors, in an interview with Swiss newspaper something or other published today, Apple's VP of technology, Kevin Lynch, and product marketing employee, Deirdre Kaldbeck, explained, and these quotes are machine translated from German, Lynch said that Apple puts, quote, a huge amount of effort, quote, into every watch face to ensure that they work, quote, uniformly and simply, quote, and said, Apple needs to plan ahead to make sure watch faces continue to work if we want to change something or add new possibilities.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
This is the most non-answer answer I've read in a little while.
Casey:
But what are you going to do?
John:
Because, you know, Apple would never change how someone integrates into their operating system, like, say, a different system for writing widgets or entirely different system for writing apps for the watch.
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
This is, yeah, so we don't want to do this because what if we change our mind about how the watch faces work?
John:
You change your mind about things all the time.
John:
That's what WWDC is about.
John:
That's what we all do when new OSes come out.
John:
It's like we can't give you watch faces because what if we change our mind about the API?
John:
Nothing has changed more than going from, what was the previous one, the crappy owner?
John:
Is it WatchKit to non-WatchKit?
John:
I don't remember.
John:
They change stuff all the time on every OS.
John:
That's the nature of what they do as a platform owner, so that is not the reason why watch faces don't exist.
John:
We put a huge amount of effort, and we want them to work uniformly and simply.
John:
You can use this as an excuse for why you don't want to have the App Store as well.
John:
This is...
Marco:
i mean this may be the reason why they're doing it which is basically saying it would be more work if we did it i agree it would be more work just like it's more work to run the app store but geez please third-party watch faces first of all yes i know this is a machine translation uh but first of all apple's own faces don't work uniformly or simply so let's let's rule that out right now they don't they don't so that's not a good reason but also like
Marco:
everything that we've seen from the way widgets are rendered and the way swift ui works suggests that they could do a really good like watch face kit using the widget rendering system where your process isn't even needing to run all the time just like complications just like widgets like you you can kind of use pieces and they could give you like
Marco:
here's here's clock hands for the current time or here's a digital version of the time or whatever they can give you components and you can place them in your view and lay them out however you need to and and style them and you know with a few custom ways like they could do that so easily with what they've already built and what they what they're already shipping not even not even just brand new this year but like what they've already been shipping for a few years so there really isn't any technical merit to this argument
Marco:
The reason we don't have third-party watch faces yet is because they don't want to.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
There is no technical justification.
Marco:
There is no good argument.
Marco:
It's simply they don't want to.
Casey:
Apple has a new system for installing betas.
Casey:
Anyone with a free Apple developer account can do it now.
Casey:
You don't need to pay the $99 like you used to.
Casey:
There's a write-up in RS Technico about this.
Casey:
Basically, you go fiddling in settings and select which beta train you want to be on, and then you reboot, and you're on that train, which is kind of neat.
John:
You used to be able to go to the developer website and download an installer, basically.
John:
And you could still I think you can get like a restore image for Apple Silicon only to do that.
John:
But that's not what they want you to do.
John:
They want you to go to software update, which is buried in, you know, system settings.
John:
And you got to know to click on the little I in a circle.
John:
Everything's about the little I in a circle.
John:
That lets you pick, hey, I want beta updates.
John:
And importantly, it lets you pick which Apple ID you want to use as the Apple ID that has a developer account that is being used to download the thing.
John:
It doesn't have to be a paid developer account anymore.
John:
So you don't have to pay $99 to get access to the betas.
John:
You can have a free developer account.
John:
But the question is,
John:
If you're like us, old school Mac users or developers, we have multiple Apple IDs.
John:
Which Apple ID is the one that has a developer account?
John:
And you want to configure that.
John:
Because if you don't, if you're trying to use your real Apple ID with a beta, but another Apple ID has a developer account,
John:
You'll end up in your other developer ID in the beta and be like, but this isn't my Apple ID.
John:
I want to be in my real Apple ID, but oh, I have to stay in this Apple ID because that's the one that gets the updates from the beta.
John:
They're two separate things.
John:
You just have to, again, the little tiny I in the circle and the stupid system setting interface lets you pick which Apple ID you want to be the one
John:
that gets the betas and that doesn't have to be the same apple id as the one you're actually signed into in mac os or whatever so i don't know how this works outside of mac os because i've only done the mac os beta but i think the new system is a little bit confusing but it's better than installing dev profiles which is one option i think it's maybe not better than downloading installers but we'll see but just fyi don't feel like you're trapped to actually using your developer apple id as your user's apple id
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
And then finally, very, very good news.
Casey:
DP Review was purchased by Gear Patrol.
Casey:
So they are not going away into the sunset.
Casey:
They will live on, which is great news.
John:
It's kind of a shame that they will live on after half of their employees bail to get new jobs, which who could blame them?
John:
Obviously, the price for Gear Patrol is probably lower if you wait until after the site is declared to be shut down and half the employees leave.
John:
But they're also getting a less worthy asset, less valuable asset, because some of the good people who are at DP Review are no longer there.
John:
All in all, probably not handled the best, but it's better than it just actually literally dying inside Amazon and nothing coming of it.
John:
So I'm rooting for its resurrection.
John:
I do wonder if the if gear patrol is actually dedicated to it.
John:
Will they try to hire back the some of the people who left to go elsewhere?
John:
We'll see.
John:
But apparently it will live on to fight another day.
Casey:
Okay, so Safari 17 has a bunch of new features, a plethora even of new features, but one in particular is very interesting, link tracking protection.
Casey:
So my executive summary of this is, you know how you get those like really heinously long URLs whenever you share something from like Instagram or Facebook or something or Twitter or something like that.
Casey:
Well, apparently Safari 17 will do its best to strip out the query string entries that are clogging up those URLs and leave only the ones behind that matter.
Casey:
And I haven't tried this myself, but this sounds good.
Casey:
I'm here for it.
John:
Like all these blocking and prevention things, it really depends on how good a job it does.
John:
So it's deleting stuff from your URLs.
John:
You take a URL and it's going to say like, no, some of the stuff in this URL we think is being used to track you.
John:
So we're just going to delete it.
John:
some websites are surely designed so that if you don't have the tracking information they don't work right and that's crappy but other times i do worry that this thing is going to delete something from the url that it thinks is a tracking parameter but is not because the only thing the way it has to tell is based on the the names apparently jeff johnson found that there is a query param.wplist file that contains a list of the url query parameters to be removed
John:
Uh, and it currently contains 25, uh, of the usual suspects.
John:
And he lists a bunch of, uh, query, uh, parameter names.
John:
I do wonder if he can get specific, like, oh, on this website, this parameter, or if it just looks for like, you know, any query parameter named, uh, you know, GCL ID, which is some Google thing, apparently.
Uh,
John:
Um, but yeah, I hate it when, you know, ad blocking, privacy, whatever things cause a website not to work because you're trying to do a thing on the web.
John:
You're trying to order dinner.
John:
You're trying to buy movie tickets.
John:
You're trying to, to book a reservation.
John:
You click a button that to do a thing and nothing happens.
John:
You're like, is this webpage broken?
John:
Is one of my blockers screwing it up?
John:
You know, same thing when someone sends you a URL and messages, you click it, you try to load the thing.
John:
It says, I tried to load it and it didn't work.
John:
And they're like, well, it works for me.
John:
And they're like, well, it doesn't work for me.
John:
And little do you know that Safari 17 stripped out a query parameter that it thought it was for tracking.
John:
And you can always turn off content blockers and blah, blah, blah.
John:
And I hate that dance.
John:
But...
John:
I also hate tracking stuff.
John:
So I applaud the effort, but this is an extremely hard problem, especially since you have so little information.
John:
You've got a string.
John:
It's shaped as a URL.
John:
It's got query parameters.
John:
You know some names are commonly used for tracking.
John:
Is it okay to delete this?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Let's try it.
John:
So I'm a little bit nervous about this feature, but I'm sure you'll be able to disable it if you don't like it.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
I mean, I agree with everything you said, but I'm excited.
Casey:
This hopefully will work really well.
Casey:
DocKit is a new thing that is coming with, I guess, iOS 17.
Casey:
There's a WWDC session about it called Integrate with Motorized iPhone Stands Using DocKit.
Casey:
And the description begins, discover how DocKit can help your camera app create incredible photo and video experiences with motorized stands.
Casey:
We'll show you how your app can automatically track subjects in live video across a 360-degree field of view.
Casey:
take direct control of the stand and blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
So this sounds pretty cool.
Casey:
I haven't looked at the session yet.
Casey:
This is one of those things where I don't personally think I have a need for this at the moment, but I could totally see how you could make like an incredible sunrise video, you know, with you panning as the sun is rising or something like that.
Casey:
I think this could be very, very, very cool.
John:
The integration of this is exactly the thing they showed in the keynote, which is, Hey, you can use continuity camera and FaceTime with Apple TV now.
John:
And it'll follow you around.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So like you're putting your, your camera, like by your TV.
John:
I mean, imagine if Apple made a TV set anyway.
John:
Um,
John:
But of course, the only tool it has to use is a center stage, which is just like a big wide fisheye lens.
John:
And then we crop a portion of it.
John:
But now if you had one of these docket things integrated with FaceTime, integrated with Apple TV, and you had a bunch of kids in front of you on the couch squirming around, it could actually turn the camera and use like the good camera and, you know, change how the picture is framed by literally changing how the picture is framed.
John:
You know, imagine if the docket didn't just rotate, but also tilted and everything.
John:
you know this is working towards the idea of just everyone sits down in front of the tv and you can just do facetime with the whole family and it just makes sure everyone's in the frame and zooms in on people when they talk and it all looks good and this is a piecemeal way to do it uh supporting continuity camera having an api for these third-party things could you actually find a tv that supports apple tv that supports stock kit that supports facetime that supports continuity camera and put this all together and in your living room with your iphone and your set of cameras so that it works
Casey:
who knows it's not exactly an integrated apple solution but it's more of the type of thing that people always say they want from apple which is like a geeky type endeavor where all the pieces are there to do something really cool uh you just got to assemble them yourself no this sounds very very neat uh and just to be clear uh i i don't know what it sounded like when i said it but it sounded like john was saying docket it is dock kit and i might have made the same mistake when i introduced this so just to be absolutely clear it's two k's in a row
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
It's not hover, it's hover, apparently.
John:
Don't start with that again.
Ooh.
Marco:
Bye.
Marco:
Bye.
Marco:
Bye.
Marco:
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Casey:
Nick asks, do the capabilities of the Vision Pro make you more bullish about Apple's potential in the car space?
Casey:
Assuming Vision Pro ships, Apple will demonstrate both delivering projects very long in development and a ton of visual capabilities.
Casey:
The thing that I think is...
Casey:
What is most interesting to me about Vision Pro is the R1 chip, I believe it's called.
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
The one that does all the real-time processing?
Casey:
Because if I understand it properly, the R1 chip is running some sort of real-time OS on it or something like that.
Casey:
I might be making things up here, so definitely check my work on this.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But it runs a real-time OS, and that's the sort of thing that you would need for a car safety computer or something like that.
Casey:
I don't necessarily think Apple's going to do any actual automobile.
Casey:
I personally feel like that ship has probably sailed, to use a different vehicle metaphor.
Casey:
But I do think that this...
Casey:
is probably either, and I think I said this either last week or the week before, I think this real-time stuff was either born out of the car project or could be used by the car project if it wasn't born there originally.
Casey:
So does it make it more bullish?
Casey:
I don't know about that.
Casey:
but it certainly expands the possibilities of things that apple could potentially conquer you know it's one thing to do a screen used for infotainment it's another thing to do the gauge cluster and obviously apple has already announced they intend to do the gauge cluster but all of us were very worried i think well how does that work when apple doesn't really have a real-time os that will keep this the speedometer on your screen and refreshing quickly always and well
Casey:
Now they have hardware and software to do it.
Casey:
So it's definitely interesting.
Casey:
Although, again, I don't personally think an Apple car will ever be released, or at least I don't think that's sitting here now.
John:
Yeah, this doesn't give me any more confidence in the car project for one very important reason.
John:
With Apple Vision Pro, your life is not on the line.
John:
Yeah.
John:
at least i hope not like i guess the battery could like burst into flames in your pocket or whatever but like the stakes are so much higher i get what you're saying like oh vision pro real time stuff vision stuff ar like like the technology matches there like some related car thing self-driving cars car visual experience like you can see how this technology overlap but there is no overlapping consequences
John:
right this is like you're literally on your couch and yeah maybe the thing crashes and you can't use an app right or whatever the stakes are just so much lower um and it's not you know so look apples can ship things that have been in development for a long time the car thing is not about the length of development time the car thing is about the consequences if it's not great the consequences of the vision pro is not great is whatever the product that flops but people aren't going to die uh no matter what apple does in the car space unless it's just a you know better car play even just better car play there's higher stakes like
John:
But if they're doing anything having to do with controlling a car or whatever, boy, that's so much harder.
John:
And it's an area that Apple has never really gone into.
John:
None of the things that Apple ships are so directly responsible for the, you know, the life of the people who are using them as something that is actually controlling anything about a car.
John:
So I still think that Apple has a lot of hurdles to overcome to figure out anything.
John:
in the car space.
John:
Maybe a better analogy would be between health and cars, because health, you know, like that blood glucose thing or whatever is rumored.
John:
Health and car, both, you know, things where people's lives are on the line.
John:
Vision Pro, hopefully no one's life is on the line.
Marco:
Going back to the real-time OS thing for a second, you know, when you look at...
Marco:
We did hear rumblings back years ago that Apple was working on a real-time OS as part of the car project.
Marco:
Now, whether that was the same thing as the real-time OS that's running in Vision OS, we don't know.
Marco:
I bet there's some overlap.
Marco:
I bet there's at least some shared expertise there.
Marco:
And if not some shared code, although honestly, there probably is some shared code as well.
Marco:
One thing we learned last summer when they kind of pre-announced that new CarPlay system with the gauge cluster, as you were just saying, Casey, and Ars Technica did an article about it.
Marco:
We talked about it on the show about how just by regulatory reasons, gauge cluster OSs have to be real-time OSs.
Marco:
And listeners wrote in to inform us that – I didn't even know this – that Apple's modern chips, the modern Apple Silicon ARM chips, are able to run in virtualization two OSs at the same time.
Marco:
One of them can be a real-time OS, and the other one isn't.
Marco:
And I think this is how – I think some part of Google's stack for cars, some part of it does this, I think.
Marco:
And so we were speculating at the time, hey, maybe future iPhone, you know, iOS versions will be able to run like this real-time OS as, you know, some slice of the resources of the chip and then run iOS kind of, you know, side by side with it.
Marco:
And that little real-time OS could run the gauge cluster in CarPlay if your phone is running CarPlay without disrupting the rest of iOS.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, it sure looks like when you look at how Apple describes the architecture of Vision OS, it sure looks like it's that exact same architecture with the real-time OS running on the R1 and running the kind of AR pass-through functions of Vision Pro.
Marco:
And then having Vision OS kind of running inside of that, but the real-time OS is not disturbed.
Marco:
So if some part of Vision OS hangs or crashes or something, your reality is not kind of weirdly paused or warped or some way that could make you sick or anything like that.
Marco:
So it seems like they're doing that kind of split architecture here.
Marco:
And maybe the car project produced the real-time OS and, you know, gave them the foundations to do simultaneous real-time OS and, you know, other OS.
Marco:
And maybe they didn't use that to make a car, but they used it to make the AR headset and also future CarPlay stuff with the iPhone.
Marco:
So I think the car project... I still think the car project is as doomed as it ever was, but I think we're also seeing stuff falling out of it that is good and that's being able to be used in other areas.
Marco:
Now, going back to the actual car project as a product possibility, in addition to everything John said, which is correct, that I don't think Apple is super willing to make products that could potentially kill you, I think also...
Marco:
When you look at the general purpose computing landscape, who else is going to make an AR headset that has strong general computing possibilities?
Marco:
Maybe Microsoft, maybe.
Marco:
Maybe Google with Android.
John:
I mean, Microsoft did.
John:
It's called HoloLens.
John:
It costs as much as the Vision Pro and is not as good.
Marco:
Yeah, I understand it's useful in a couple of very narrow markets, but it's not at all a mass market thing.
Marco:
And I don't even think Microsoft even thought it would be.
Marco:
But you have basically three companies, Microsoft, Google, and Apple, who even could make a general purpose AR headset.
Marco:
And we've seen what they make in other areas, and they're fine, but they're not great.
Marco:
So if anyone was going to make a great AR computing experience, it was going to be Apple.
Marco:
Look at cars, though, and I don't see that strong need.
Marco:
Why does this have to be Apple?
Marco:
Lots of people make really nice cars.
Marco:
Whatever Apple thought they could add to that market, that would be so much better than what everyone else is making.
Marco:
I don't see it.
Marco:
I mean, look, maybe I don't have the imagination for it.
Marco:
Maybe I'm not seeing something.
Marco:
Maybe I just don't know what amazing thing they had or thought they could do or still think they could do there.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But I just don't... The amazing computing prowess they have to make awesome computers for general purpose use, I don't see them having that same amazing advantage in making cars.
Marco:
We haven't heard much about the car project recently.
Marco:
It seems like it gets disbanded and regrouped like every two years or something or even more than that.
Marco:
Maybe it's finally now kind of sizzling out.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But I sure hope we don't hear more about it, honestly, because what we see now is like the headset.
Marco:
Here's something that probably took a similar scope and scale of resources and time investment.
Marco:
But what they were making was what is probably going to end up being a pretty great computer.
Marco:
And they're really good at making great computers.
Marco:
And I can't imagine them spending a similar amount of time and resources making a car that would actually be worth all that time and resources.
John:
Even if the tech was directly transferable and exactly related, which I don't think it actually is, it wouldn't matter because that's just the tech.
John:
In the end, the product, the car thing, if you want to do anything with cars other than just like show the current speed and play songs from your phone, like if you're going to control some part of the car, like all the self-driving stuff or whatever, even a safety system, that's the hard part.
John:
Not like, oh, implementing something that you could implement self-driving on top of, like a platform with a real-time OS and a chip and a controls.
John:
Now you have to write the software to actually drive the car.
John:
That's the hard part.
John:
And it's the hard part both technically, because no one's figured out how to do it, even as well as a human at this point, but also it's hard organizationally for Apple because they're not accustomed to shipping products like that.
John:
And that's why I'm saying success with Division Pro does not...
John:
make me more optimistic about the car project because the things that are hard about the car project are not the things that vision pro is doing well again even if you are willing to believe that the tech is directly transferable that's not the hard part of the car project the hard part of the car project is outside of the technical platform foundations it's everything else like okay now drive the car
Marco:
Not to mention, now sell the car and service the car and provide repair parts and a dealer network.
Marco:
There's so much about cars.
John:
Apple have a self-repair program.
John:
They'll just send you a two-post lift in the mail in a big, giant Pelican case.
Casey:
Oh, my goodness.
Casey:
Yeah, a two-post lift in a Pelican case.
Casey:
That's definitely it.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Mark Blender writes, do you have any sort of app uninstaller such as AppCleaner on macOS?
Casey:
Or do you use any sort of it?
Casey:
I know the official way to uninstall something is simply to drag it to the trash, but I find myself perhaps unreasonably worried about leftover files.
Casey:
Leftover files are definitely a thing, but I haven't run one of these in forever.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
Marco, let's start with you.
Casey:
Is there anything on your computer that serves this purpose?
Marco:
I don't use anything like this.
Marco:
I don't like having to install accessory apps to serve accessory functions that I think shouldn't need to exist.
Marco:
I know that's kind of a broad statement, but in general, I don't run a lot of different utilities on my Mac.
Marco:
That are like kind of always there or helping out some or replacing some system function.
Marco:
For the most part, I like to use the built in stuff the way it's meant to be used, because that tends to not get me into trouble.
Marco:
It tends to not break stuff.
Marco:
And we were, you know, John was saying earlier how, you know, sometimes like privacy, preserving stuff or ad blockers, whatever can can break websites.
Marco:
I always worry that using apps like this might break something else, and I don't see the need.
Marco:
I just delete stuff.
Marco:
If something has its own uninstaller, I will run that uninstaller.
Marco:
So certain things that install hooks in parts of the system, they'll have uninstallers, so I'll use that.
Marco:
For regular old apps, I'll just delete them.
John:
this is a big focus of my early mac os 10 reviews was talking about the next based bundle system where you have a folder with a dot app extension and inside it are a bunch of files and that's how applications are made up and i was comparing it to like the classic mac where you had resource forks which were their own sort of structured thing where you could have different kinds of resources that belong to the application and they were individually editable with the resource editor but the next bundle system did that but in the file system
John:
And, you know, because I'm an old school Mac user, uninstaller is something Windows users use.
John:
Mac users don't need to do that.
John:
You just drag the app to the trash.
John:
But the reality of Mac OS X was, especially in the early days, there were some apps that came with quote unquote installers, which would spray files all over your drive.
John:
And also when you drag the app to the trash,
John:
obviously any file that wasn't inside that app bundle is still on your computer because all you did was put the app bundle in the trash.
John:
And there has never been, to my knowledge, any part of the Mac operating system in the post-Mac OS X days that magically knows that when you drag an app to the trash, like that it has to go clean up a bunch of other files or whatever.
John:
There's no hooks for third-party developers to do that.
John:
There's nothing for the first-party developers to do that.
John:
So this market for app cleaner things is like, hey, when you drag your app to the trash, do you know it's leaving some files behind?
John:
Two things about that.
John:
One, sometimes you want it to leave files behind.
John:
This was true in classic macOS and it's true of macOS 10.
John:
I want it to leave the preference file behind because if I ever reinstall that app, I don't have to reset all my settings.
John:
Preference files are tiny.
John:
They've always been tiny, even classic macOS.
John:
They're definitely tiny now.
John:
Please leave that on my computer.
John:
So that if I ever do decide to reinstall this app, it'll be able to read those settings.
John:
Even if it's a newer version, hopefully it'll read an old version of its settings file.
John:
So that's an example of residue that I want to leave behind.
John:
Second, app cleaner apps.
John:
Those have no idea how any individual app works.
John:
They're making a best guess based on heuristics, based on maybe some knowledge of some specific applications.
John:
But I don't want an app from a third party to try to know what things it can safely delete that other apps put there.
John:
uh most of the time you'll be fine because it can say oh well the preferences are in the preferences folder and anything in caches can be deleted and this that the other thing but things get complicated when you get into more sophisticated applications or suites of applications where i'm not confident that a third-party application even could know what the right thing to do is to delete this stuff hell i'm not even that confident that the installers that people write work correctly
John:
um so yeah i'd never use one of these app cleaner uninstaller type things now the final note is as matt the mac operating system in the post mac os 10 era has uh matured over the many many years apple has slowly but surely been removing every single kind of thing that is that cannot be inside the app bundle it used to be that
John:
whole swaths of common functionality could not be inside the app bundle.
John:
And now they've just been moving them all in there.
John:
Extensions, secondary applications, helper apps, login launch items, menu bar things, like so much stuff that used to have to be outside your application that'd have to be sprayed into your slash library folder at the top level of your disk or until the slash library or whatever, all that stuff now can live inside the app bundle.
John:
Which means that when you drag the app to the trash, a really good, modern, well-behaved app, you've deleted its login item.
John:
You've deleted its menu bar thing.
John:
You've deleted its embedded helper application.
John:
You've deleted everything, right?
John:
I mean, you may even have deleted its helper command line thing because they could have just put a symlink in user local that just symlinked into the bundle or whatever.
John:
Not every app is that well behaved.
John:
That's true.
John:
But the path that Apple has been paving is we have a way for everything to be inside.
John:
Even Safari extensions.
John:
If you ship a Safari extension now, the way you do it is you embed the Safari extension inside an app.
John:
It's not like the Safari extension goes into slash library slash Safari slash extensions and you have to remember to dig it out of there to get rid of it.
John:
No, it's literally inside the app bundle in your applications folder.
John:
That's where it is.
John:
And when you put the application in your applications folder, macOS scans it, finds the Safari extension and tells Safari about it.
John:
So Apple is trying to make it so that when you drag it to the trash, that it's not just an illusion that really you are trashing everything having to do with it.
John:
Finally, there are still some apps that spray things in various locations, which is why I use and recommend the app, what is it called, Launch Control, which lets you see
John:
the things that are outside the app bundle that apps may install and that is the only thing remotely like an app cleaner that i use and all it does is show me what exists and then i use my knowledge and experience to know which things i can safely disable or delete but app cleaner is even more dangerous than kitchen access not app cleaner uh launch control is even more dangerous than kitchen access do not muck about it and if you don't know what you're doing it is very easy to break things
John:
Instead, just ignore apps in this class and just hold on tight and wait until everything is actually moved into the app bundle for every app you care about.
Casey:
Dave Copeland writes, in the discussion of Google Auth and syncing, there was an implication that keychain can perform two-factor authentication.
Casey:
I've seen others say that 1Password can as well, but how is that a second factor?
Casey:
Doesn't it turn a second factor into a first since access to your computer and keychain means passwords and 2FA?
Casey:
Shouldn't 2FA be kept as a separate factor on an iPhone or other device?
Casey:
I feel like I can take a stab at this, but John, I think it might have been you that have added some very relevant replies into the show notes here.
John:
Yeah, we don't have to answer it because it was answered by other people on Mastodon.
John:
So here's Sebastian Cohen saying, this is all just two-step, not two-factor.
John:
This can still be valuable in case your credential entry gets intercepted, for example.
John:
So I know this confusion about what is two factor, what is two step or whatever.
John:
You have to think about what is this protecting against?
John:
One of the things this protects against is if, say, your password is intercepted somewhere.
John:
Your two step thing, even though they're both on your phone or both on your Mac or both on your whatever, saves you here.
John:
Because the thing that was intercepted or was dumped from some database or website or whatever is just your password.
John:
They don't have the other factor.
John:
Even though both of the factors are on your phone, like the password's on there and the 2FA code is also on your phone, what they got was a cracked password dump from some website that had bad security.
John:
They just have your password.
John:
They don't have the other thing.
John:
And Drew writes, the central threat model motivating 2FA is not that someone has access to your computer.
John:
It says they've captured your password from someone else's insecure system.
John:
Given the centrality of email to the account 2FA management workflows, if someone has access to your computer, they can likely reconfigure your quote unquote true 2FA too.
John:
This goes back to what we were saying before.
John:
Your email account in the end for most services is the key to everything.
John:
If they have your phone, don't worry about the fact that your password and your two-factor code are both in the same place in settings.
John:
Worry about the fact that they have your phone.
John:
That means they have access to your email.
John:
That means they can reset any password and all the 2FA stuff.
John:
So you're thinking about the threat modeling wrong if you think.
John:
If only my second factor was someplace separate, I would be safe.
John:
There are cases where that's true, but if someone has access to your computer, your phone, as you, like if they have that kind of access, you're probably screwed no matter what, unless you're really hardcore with the security keys and you never keep them in the same place as your phone, because how did they get your phone?
John:
They didn't get your little YubiKey thing at the same time.
John:
you know security is difficult um but i i will say that the whether you're it's just two-step or two-factor it is better than nothing it does protect against more scenarios than just a password which is why i recommend it same same thing with passkeys they have a different set of trade-offs passkeys you don't have to worry about forgetting them they're impossible to fish because the human does not choose when to submit them the computer does and the computer is not fooled by fake looking emails
John:
So, yeah, security is complicated, but two-factor is not pointless.
John:
It is just different than you might think it is.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and Rocket Money.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join, please do, 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.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
John:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R
Casey:
So I have some updates with regard to computers and cars.
Casey:
So which one would you like to know first?
Marco:
Car.
Casey:
I don't remember where we last left our heroes.
Marco:
You had ruined Aaron's car.
Casey:
Yes.
Marco:
And you still don't drive an EV somehow.
Marco:
And you consider yourself a driving enthusiast.
Casey:
Well, because I would like to shift for myself, sir.
Casey:
And yes, I'm aware of the Toyota garbage.
Casey:
Yes, everyone sent us that.
Casey:
I can't decide if that's delightful.
John:
We were way ahead of the curve on that.
John:
We talked about this almost a year ago, I think, on the show.
John:
Remember when we were talking about the EVs with manual transmission?
John:
I think it was a prototype Mustang at the time.
John:
Anyway.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
But anyways, pro tip, you do not, if you're an Allstate customer anyway, you do not need to use SafeLite Autoglass in order to replace your windshield.
Casey:
And may I recommend that you do not use SafeLite Autoglass to replace your windshields.
Casey:
That good, huh?
Casey:
Oh, it's been a nightmare.
Casey:
So we are on our second replaced windshield in as many weeks as we speak.
Casey:
The short, short version is somebody came out to install the new windshield.
Casey:
They said, oh, they sent me the wrong thing.
Casey:
Your car has a heads-up display.
Casey:
This windshield will not work with the heads-up display.
Casey:
So we wait another week or two.
Casey:
A very nice gentleman comes to install the windshield at our house.
Casey:
And he says, oh, this isn't an OEM windshield.
Casey:
It isn't a Volvo-produced windshield.
Casey:
It's a third-party windshield.
Casey:
It should be fine.
Casey:
Okay, great.
Casey:
And then the next time we get in the car, everything is lit up with warning signs with regard to safety stuff.
Casey:
No lane keeping aid, no speed limit signs, no pilot assist, nothing.
Casey:
Stupendous.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So we call safe flight.
Casey:
We go on the way there where I'm expecting them to do their super fancy calibration on the way there.
Casey:
All the warnings go away.
Casey:
Super.
Casey:
So I get there.
Casey:
This is a 15, 20-minute drive away.
Casey:
I get there.
Casey:
I say to them, look, it wasn't working.
Casey:
Now it says it's working.
Casey:
Just can you hook it up to whatever computers you have and at least just tell me that it should be fine?
Casey:
And they did.
Casey:
And they said, yeah, it should be fine.
Casey:
The next day, everything lights up again.
Casey:
Stupendous.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So I go back to say, I call Safe Flight back and say, hey, it's me again.
Casey:
Can I have an OEM windshield, please?
Casey:
Because obviously everything associated with this is screwed.
Casey:
I said, sure.
Casey:
Hey, how long do I have to wait for that?
Casey:
Like a week and a half.
Casey:
Stupendous.
Casey:
So we at least at this point have a windshield that from the outside looks good, but the heads up display is like blurry and none of the automated driving sensors work.
Casey:
It ended up that we drove like an hour and a half just a couple of days ago to go to the Blue Ridge Tunnel, which I think I've talked about in the past just for fun.
Casey:
It was on Father's Day.
Casey:
And, uh, we took the Volvo cause we took the dog with us and yeah, we didn't have any, we didn't have any form of cruise control cause it wouldn't even let you do like regular cruise control because it didn't, it wasn't able to do automated cruise, you know, the, the distance following cruise.
Casey:
And it was like, well, if I can't do automated cruise, there is no other cruise.
Casey:
And so that was kind of a pain, but whatever.
Casey:
So, uh, today, literally today we went back to safe light in downtown Richmond and they put in a Volvo windshield and
Casey:
and they recalibrated everything, and knock on wood, I think everything might be okay now.
Casey:
But it has been a month and two days, I believe, since I slightly shattered Aaron's windshield, and it is now hypothetically fixed.
Casey:
What a nightmare.
Casey:
And as I'm going around and around with Allstate, with Safelite, and all these other people, come to find out, and this is what I said earlier,
Casey:
Despite the fact that when you fill out a claim online with Allstate, they're like, oh, it's glass.
Casey:
Here, go to Safelite.
Casey:
They'll take care of it.
Casey:
Come to find out, you don't have to use Safelite.
Casey:
And I could have gone to Volvo from the get-go and had Volvo do it.
Casey:
where Volvo presumably knows how to replace their own windshields and certainly should know how to calibrate the God darn thing.
Casey:
Oh, man.
Casey:
So I could have done that, but I had no idea.
Casey:
And so the Volvo people were very nice, but they were like, my guy, why didn't you bring it to us?
Casey:
And I was like, my guy, I didn't know I could.
Casey:
But sure enough, I could.
Casey:
So anyway, so pro tip, if you have a glass issue, you might want to investigate with your insurance whether or not you have to go to the SafeLite people because you might not have to.
Casey:
But that seems resolved as far as I can tell.
Casey:
With regard to Aaron's computer, I don't think I mentioned on the show, I might have mentioned it offhandedly, but the MacBook Adorable randomly came back to life after I let it sit for a couple of days.
Casey:
I didn't do anything.
Casey:
I don't know what happened.
Casey:
It just decided to work again.
Casey:
But that isn't really a long-term solution.
Casey:
And I still don't love the idea that with the MacBook Adorable dead and even with it alive potentially...
Casey:
I didn't really have any sort of backup plan if my computer kicked the bucket.
Casey:
I do have the Mac Mini that I use for Plex and channels, and it is more than computationally capable of doing a podcast recording if necessary.
Casey:
But it would be kind of a pain to move it and attach monitors to it and so on and so forth.
Casey:
So I wouldn't want to have to do that.
Casey:
So I was trying to figure out what the right answer is in order to replace Aaron's computer with something more modern, preferably Apple Silicon and so on and so forth.
Casey:
And I was hemming and hawing about what the right answer was.
Casey:
And it seemed kind of wasteful to...
Casey:
you know, replace what is effectively her Kroger online shopping computer if it's still puttering along, somewhat working.
Casey:
But out of the woodwork came, I don't know if this person wanted to be anonymous, and I will assume anonymity just to be safe, but out of the woodwork came a random person who I know through the internet, but not extraordinarily well, who was kind enough to say to me, I have an M1 MacBook Air that's collecting dust, would you like it?
Casey:
to which I said, oh my freaking God, yes, I would.
Casey:
So this exceptionally kind individual who I would name generally, but I didn't think to pre-clear this conversation with them.
Casey:
They shipped, well, I paid for shipping because it was the least I could do, but they shipped this computer to me and it has arrived.
Casey:
I have loaded it with Aaron's stuff.
Casey:
Oh my word, it's so much nicer than the adorable.
Casey:
I will always and forever love the adorable.
Casey:
I will always love that computer, always.
Casey:
But oh my God, it's so much nicer than the adorable.
Casey:
It is so fast.
Casey:
And this particular model, I genuinely, I said, I'll take it.
Casey:
I had no idea how much RAM, no idea what disc it had in it, did not care.
Marco:
It doesn't matter.
Marco:
Even the lowest, tiniest configuration is miles better than the MacBook adorable.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
And sure enough, it arrived, and because this person is a developer for a very big technology-related company, not Apple, but someone in that kind of neck of the woods, this computer happened to have a terabyte hard drive and 16 gigs of RAM.
Casey:
I could not have asked for this to go any better for me.
Casey:
So thank you to the whether or not you wanted to be anonymous individual who has, well, I mean, I guess I paid for the shipping, but they still shipped me the computer.
Casey:
And I am so thankful for it because now I have a backup computer, which now Marco is thankful because I have a backup computer in case my computer has problems.
Casey:
And it is genuinely very nice, so much nicer than we need or deserve.
Casey:
And so thank you very, very, very much for doing that.
Casey:
It was extremely kind.
Casey:
And the best part of this, it's a person after my own heart, right?
Casey:
I opened the box.
Casey:
Well, first of all, no, it's the silver, whatever.
Casey:
But no, I opened the box and first of all, it came in the Apple box.
Casey:
I had no idea what was being shipped to me other than that it was an M1 MacBook Air.
Casey:
That's all I knew.
Casey:
And that I understood it to be in good condition, you know?
Casey:
So I opened the shipping box and sure enough, there's the original, you know, MacBook Air box.
Casey:
Bonus points for this individual.
Casey:
I opened the box and there are probably three lunatics in this world that would have done this.
Casey:
I'm one of them.
Casey:
I bet John is one of them.
Casey:
And this just wonderful anonymous human not only kept that like shrink wrap, not shrink wrap, but you know what I'm saying?
Casey:
That like plastic stuff that's wrapped around the computer when it was shipped from Apple.
Casey:
Not only did they keep it, they put the frigging computer back inside it the best they could.
Marco:
I was overjoyed to see this.
Marco:
Oh, I do that, too.
Marco:
When I sell a computer, I did the same thing.
Casey:
Oh, fair enough.
Casey:
I apologize, Marco, for selling you short then.
Casey:
I thought you were a little more normal than John and I. No, I do that.
Casey:
So this extraordinarily tasteful individual, they did that.
Casey:
They sent me the power brick.
Casey:
I didn't expect that.
Casey:
Not only did they send me a USB-C cable...
Casey:
I'm pretty sure that it had been used at some point, but they have the dexterity to somehow put it back in the little cardboard thing that it came in.
Casey:
Maybe they never used it.
Casey:
Maybe I'm wrong, but I think it had.
John:
The trick is never take it out of the cardboard thing.
John:
Just FYI, someone who also packages products will just never take it out.
John:
Exactly.
Casey:
But either they never did, and I'm mistaken, or they took the time to make it look really close to the way it came from the factory.
Casey:
Again, this is a person who gives a crap, and I am forever indebted to them and in love with them in a friendly way.
Casey:
So Aaron's computer problems are solved because now this incredibly kind individual has sent me a M1 MacBook Air, which I don't deserve, but I am so thankful for.
Casey:
The best part, of course, of this whole story, though,
Casey:
is that Aaron's working on, for Declan's yearbook, it's very weird the way his school does it.
Casey:
You order it online.
Casey:
You don't get it until the summertime.
Casey:
You don't get to go around to your friends and have them physically sign it, but you can electronically sign it.
Casey:
It's very unusual.
Casey:
But anyway, she's been working on this for the last several days and trying to amass pictures because you can pay a couple of bucks to put in a few extra pages with your own pictures and content in it.
Casey:
It's like the world's crummiest photo book, but it's really cute.
Casey:
And, um, and Aaron's been working on this really, really hard.
Casey:
And I look over at her and she's using the goddamn adorable.
Casey:
And I'm like, Aaron, what are you doing?
John:
And she's like, what did you do with that?
John:
What did you do with the adorable?
John:
Apparently you did nothing with it.
Casey:
I didn't.
Casey:
Do anything with it yet.
Casey:
I've also been well over my eyeballs deep in call sheet stuff.
Casey:
Like everything's fine, but I'm trying to get this out the door and blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
So I didn't do the due diligence of like hiding the adorable or anything.
Casey:
Or even in Erin's credit, I didn't really have a lot of conversation with her about it other than saying, hey, your new computer's ready.
Casey:
But anyway, so I look at her using this damn adorable and I'm just like, oh my God, how are you doing this to yourself?
Casey:
And I was like, well, why don't you use the new one?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
This is the one I grabbed.
Casey:
I was like, okay, well, that's fine.
Casey:
But anyway, so the car hypothetically fixed, thanks to me just being basically a Karen to Safelite and finally getting them to do the job properly.
Casey:
And then the computer's fixed, thanks to this incredibly kind listener.
Casey:
Someone in the chat is perhaps tongue in cheek, perhaps not saying, am I going to pay it forward and send your adorable to someone?
Casey:
I should, but I'm not because I freaking love that computer and I will keep it forever, even though it is a pile of garbage.
John:
You're going to give someone an unreliable, crappy computer?
John:
That's not paying it forward.
John:
That's a punishment.
John:
Yeah, that's not a gift at all.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
So yeah, that's my updates.
Marco:
That's good.
Marco:
Man, you've had a better tech week than I have.
Marco:
I have had a terrible family device week.
Casey:
Oh no, what's going on?
Marco:
All right, so long story short, someone in my house, who is not me, accidentally sat on someone else's iPad and caused what appears to be a crack in the screen.
Casey:
How bad, how big, how deep?
Casey:
Tell me more.
Marco:
It's so subtle that it could be easily confused for a scratch on the surface, but it's across like a third of the screen.
John:
I think we have developed a hierarchy here.
John:
Now, rock, paper, scissors style?
John:
So an iPad can destroy a car windshield, but a butt can destroy an iPad.
John:
So if you touched your butt to the windshield of your car, it would just shatter.
John:
Just blow it right off.
Casey:
Into a million pieces.
Casey:
Well done, John.
Casey:
Well done.
Marco:
Anyway, so the owner of the iPad was extremely upset at the butt crack situation.
Marco:
And because the iPad is the owner's primary computing device and they didn't cause the damage, I thought...
Marco:
It would be inhumane to make them suffer with this damage forever.
Marco:
But it is a crack.
Marco:
It is not a scratch.
Marco:
The pencil doesn't work across it.
Marco:
There's a whole bunch of little weirdness about it.
Marco:
And this person uses the pencil, so I decided I have... This is an M1 11-inch iPad Pro.
Marco:
I have the exact same one as my iPad.
Marco:
I'll just swap it.
Marco:
Now, my iPad, because I use it so infrequently, but when I do, I really need cellular usually.
Marco:
Because of that, I had gotten the T-Mobile like super cheap data plan on it.
Marco:
It was like five bucks a month or something.
Marco:
It was super cheap, way cheap.
Marco:
Normally we're an AT&T family.
Marco:
It was way cheaper than AT&T's cheapest option.
Marco:
So this was active on T-Mobile for, I don't know, a year or two.
Marco:
When I transitioned it over, that plan didn't carry over because it was some weird prepay thing.
Marco:
And the eSIM instantly got lost when I did the restore and everything and all this stuff.
Marco:
I'm like, who needs T-Mobile anyway?
Marco:
It isn't that good.
Marco:
And the new owner of what was previously my iPad actually used the cellular pretty heavily.
Marco:
And oftentimes, while we're on road trips, it's like, all right, well, T-Mobile is not great for that, coverage-wise.
Marco:
I want this to be on AT&T now.
Casey:
Let me just interrupt you very quickly to go on a very brief tangent.
Casey:
I want to be a T-Mobile customer so badly because they seem to actually treat their customers, as far as I can tell, like human beings rather than just another cash machine to extract money from.
Marco:
What?
Marco:
Well, try canceling an iPad plan.
Marco:
It's not super easy.
Casey:
Okay, so maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.
Casey:
But I think I might have talked about this on the show.
Casey:
Like a year or two ago, I did the T-Mobile try-on or something like that.
Casey:
I'll probably forget to put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
But you can download an app on your iPhone if you have an eSIM.
Casey:
And you can literally provision your eSIM on your iPhone to have a T-Mobile data plan for a month.
Casey:
And so you can...
Casey:
Tell your iPhone, hey, use Verizon, AT&T, whatever, for your existing, or excuse me, for phone calls, but use T-Mobile for data.
Casey:
And you can even tell it, don't fall back to your old carrier so you know, like, oh, if I'm not getting data here, it's because T-Mobile sucks.
Casey:
I tried this, admittedly, a year or two ago.
Casey:
And when T-Mobile worked, it worked really damn well.
Casey:
But let me tell you, in the Richmond, Virginia area, it was very spotty, very, very spotty.
Casey:
And I tried it thinking maybe I will switch in now.
Casey:
No chance.
Casey:
Or at least maybe I'll have to try again in a few years, but not right now.
Casey:
So it bums me out because they really do seem, cancellation issues aside, they seem to treat their people, their customers okay.
Casey:
But golly, the service around here anyway, no good.
Casey:
So anyway, I apologize.
Casey:
Carry on.
Casey:
So you need to now cancel this plan that's been orphaned.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Anyway, long story short, T-Mobile makes it hard.
Marco:
You've got to talk to a web chat person, and it was complicated.
Marco:
Anyway, got that done.
Marco:
So now I have this iPad that was on T-Mobile that its new owner really needs to be on AT&T.
Marco:
I have had the hardest time ever trying to get this done.
Marco:
Now, one could argue, why don't I just fix the butt crack screen?
Marco:
I don't know why.
Marco:
For some reason, I didn't get AppleCare on this iPad.
Marco:
I should have gotten AppleCare.
Marco:
I often do for family devices.
Marco:
I didn't on this for whatever reason.
Marco:
The out-of-AppleCare repair price for an M1 11-inch iPad Pro for a screen is $600.
Marco:
$600.
Marco:
Oh, gosh.
Marco:
Now, a new one of the same configuration is $1,100.
Marco:
So, you know, that's less, but it certainly doesn't feel like a good way to spend money.
Marco:
And I thought, my iPad use is relatively minimal.
Marco:
I don't care about this crack, so I'll take it as mine.
Marco:
No big deal.
Marco:
Fine.
Marco:
Anyway, so switching the other one over, the good one...
Marco:
Trying to get this iPad that was on T-Mobile to now be active on AT&T has been a nightmare.
Marco:
I have had so many, like, resend the eSIM, please.
Marco:
Like, try to get carrier settings to update.
Marco:
I have verified that T-Mobile is no longer active on T-Mobile.
Marco:
The plan I paid for has expired, like, weeks ago now.
Marco:
It's definitely no longer active there.
Marco:
going back and forth at&t both web chat and then i brought it into a store and it's like it'll it'll activate in just my house and then if i leave my house and go anywhere else it deactivates there's no service what it or it'll activate for like a day and then the next day no service
Casey:
That doesn't make any sense.
Marco:
I finally have it right now where it partially works because I abandoned the eSIM and the person in the AT&T store gave me a physical SIM and that has made it work a little bit better than the eSIM has.
Marco:
And there's like eight of those messages stacked up in settings saying AT&T wants you to install an eSIM.
Marco:
This whole system...
Marco:
I've always had it work pretty well where I get a device and it's only on AT&T from the moment I get it.
Marco:
And I never have any problems.
Marco:
I have activated and deactivated so many iPads and watches for AT&T over the years.
Marco:
And it's great because you can do them all through the web interface, like no chat bots, no calling anybody.
Marco:
I don't think it works with phones, but for smartwatches and iPads, you can do that with AT&T.
Marco:
It's all web based.
Marco:
So you can go on, cancel, add new ones.
Marco:
No big deal.
Marco:
It's super easy.
Marco:
This one, because it was on T-Mobile before, has been a nightmare.
Marco:
So I strongly suggest, people out there, the thing that Casey just told you to do where you try T-Mobile, yeah, don't do that.
Marco:
Definitely don't do that.
Marco:
This has cost me so many hours, literal hours, of going back and forth with either doing the eSIM dance, calling T-Mobile, going to AT&T.
Marco:
I have honestly thought I should just replace this iPad.
Marco:
It would be easier at this point to buy a new iPad and to save myself hours of time than it would be.
Marco:
Or, you know, or to pay $600 to get the butt crack fix.
Marco:
Like if you would have told me like two weeks ago, hey, look, you can pay $600 to solve this problem or you're going to have two weeks of stress and like at least 10 hours of wasted time.
Marco:
I would have paid the $600.
Marco:
Knowing now what I know then, that would have been the better idea.
Marco:
My time is that valuable right now.
Marco:
I'm so crunched on all angles.
Marco:
I need to recover time from different places in my life.
Marco:
This iPad is ruined.
Marco:
by this weird cellular weirdness that I can't get either Apple or AT&T or T-Mobile to figure out, it's been a nightmare.
Marco:
So yeah, word of advice, when you get an Apple device, leave it on one carrier for its entire lifetime.
Marco:
Do not change carriers.
Marco:
And especially in the eSIM era.
Casey:
i would i would be saying the same thing as you after that experience but for what it's worth i have never not yet anyway had any such problems like if you recall a year year and a half ago something like that we switched from at&t to verizon i'm pretty sure we were i don't remember if we were on e-sims for at&t at this point i
Casey:
think we were, but we went to Verizon eSIMS and that was all fine.
Casey:
I've put different eSIMS on and off iPads, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
I have never run into this.
Casey:
I used to use T-Mobile physical SIMS years ago because they used to have this absolutely extraordinarily great prepay plan.
Casey:
It was like five bucks for like five gigs that you could use over the course of something like six months or something like that.
Casey:
And that doesn't seem like that much, but if it's an accessory device that you're not using to like watch YouTube nonstop, just a few gigs will last a real long time.
Casey:
And that was the best, but they don't do that anymore.
Casey:
Anyways, I haven't had these personal experiences, so I don't want to make everyone forever and always think that eSIM is garbage, but that experience is unquestionably garbage.
Casey:
Like that sucks.
Casey:
And what do you do?
Casey:
Like if Apple can't do it and if T-Mobile can't do it and AT&T can't do it, who do you turn to?
Casey:
Do you throw the thing in the ocean and start anew?
Marco:
Yeah, and I posted the Mastodon maybe almost a week ago now.
Marco:
I heard from a bunch of people, many of whom have had similar problems, and they're like, oh, well, you have to go to super high-level support with AT&T or Apple.
Marco:
One person said they had to go through AppleCare and get the whole device replaced.
Marco:
oh my gosh actually most people said that uh most people said you know the at&t you got to like get them to properly register the imei in their system it's somewhere it's not associated right or whatever else and i i had the person in the store at least look at that and they couldn't figure out any problems with it uh someone else said that it's it takes all these like levels of escalation through different customer support i'm like
Marco:
how many more hours am i going to spend like honestly i was looking at trade-in prices i'm like can i just trade this in like how how quickly can i solve this problem without going through hours more customer service and then mailing it off and being without it for a week and like all this stuff like oh my god like there's so and all this for the stupidest problem of like the cell service doesn't work and for this ipad cell service is a must like it's it's it's very frequently needed for this ipad
Marco:
so like i'm not gonna just not have it i'm not gonna tether i believe me we've been we've been doing that for the for the last like we just took a big road trip did a lot of that it's oh tethering is the worst uh yeah anyway i need cellular for this ipad and i'm seriously i'm like about to replace it like it's just it's that bad
Casey:
That sucks.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Marco:
Anyway, I'm glad to hear your windshield and computer worked out.
Marco:
For now, for now.
Marco:
See if your friend has any extra iPad Pros lying around.
Marco:
Yeah, right?
John:
I think this is your punishment for not selling me that iPad, Margot.
John:
Do you want this one?
John:
Yeah.
John:
If you don't need cellular.
John:
I mean, I don't need the cellular, but it's too late now.
John:
I already bought a brand new one, but I was ready to buy your M1 iPad Pro off of you.
John:
And you're like, yeah, I want to keep it.
John:
I might need it for something.
John:
And look what happened.
Marco:
I can offer you the butt crack one for a good price.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
Because Apple's traded and currently values it at $80.
John:
Your chance to sell to me was before someone cracked it in half with their butt.
John:
I'll give it to you for $81.
John:
Pass.
John:
Wow.
Marco:
Even then.
Marco:
Who wants a thing with a cracked screen?
Marco:
If you don't use the pencil and you don't look that closely, you'd never know.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The little slivers of glass are driving themselves into your thumb.
John:
You'll barely notice.