That’s Why I Like Computers
Hey, everybody.
We're live from California in a hotel room.
Good to be back, John.
We're here.
We're looking at each other.
It's a little creepy because we haven't done this in a long time.
We've got a table.
We've never had a table before.
Yeah, we're here.
And, yeah, we have a couple of hours to talk, and we'll go until we drop dead.
You know, all of us are still mostly on Eastern Time, so...
We'll see how well this goes.
Why is Casey so much louder than me?
Because Casey just enunciates more than you.
I know, but you've got to turn me up then.
All right, I got it.
I got it.
I'll turn Casey down.
Especially if you're going to use a live mix.
I mean, yeah.
Oh, yikes.
You're not going to be able to correct it.
I'm going to shove this microphone into my face here.
Don't do that.
No, I can just do it.
I got you.
I got you.
You're up to 50 decibels.
That should be funny.
I'm old and tired.
Once I start yelling, it'll probably be better.
Oh, my God.
That'll happen eventually.
I'm going to put locking wheel nuts on this podcast.
You'll hear about it.
I have a high dynamic range.
HDR.
I'm at HDR.
Casey has already gone through a compressor.
Everything's the same.
My whispers are low and my under the breath jokes are low, but then I get all excited and I'm loud.
That's what you got to deal with.
we're off to a really that's why people like vinyl that's why people like me did you see my socks did you see my socks look at this i know this is terrible audio content it's supposed to be records but they're all warped because it's on a sock wait then it's even more fitting it's exactly like the real amoebas oh my god i know that's i know i apologize from being in person i know ckc's socks
i have my shoes off too marco yeah i'm just flat gray oh you have you have the white champion you have the boring champion white i got the flat gray adidas i got a great really it's such a mess what the bootleg pays for sock comparisons so only you could smell our feet are we yeah right you've been walking around in the california june heat all day right i'm sure they smell fantastic indeed
Is this the show?
Is this what people came in for?
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
I got to tell you.
So we're at a circular table, right?
The table is, I don't know what you want.
It's three, four feet across.
So like a meter-ish for those of you who have other units.
And I had set a capped water bottle on the table between my computer and John's.
That water bottle was on the table for three and a half seconds before John, which he's now doing again because I was demonstrating.
They can't see you.
Yeah.
Well, earlier today, we were sitting on the ground outside of the Steve Jobs Theater lobby, trying to watch the State of the Union.
And we were watching it.
There were a big group of us around, and we were watching it on my laptop.
I put my laptop on the ground and just had the screen going and the speakers up and everything.
And Casey had placed a can of Diet Coke within a foot of my laptop.
Oh, easily three or four inches.
And I took a picture of it.
Oh, nice.
didn't know that because i thought if this spills onto my laptop evidence i'm going to want to have this picture just in case fortunately i'm very lucky that casey in fact noticed this was a problem and a few minutes later moved it himself he moved it another foot away or so uh yeah my laptop survived being near casey drink for a few minutes yeah because we would have had no recording today if that had happened i would have been
There's no other computers in this room.
You're right.
It couldn't have happened.
I only have two ports.
Sorry.
All right.
We should probably get the show on the road.
We have a lot to talk about.
We do.
So, John, the ruling is no follow-up.
Is that correct?
No time.
No time.
So WWDC 2024.
We are all here, as we've mentioned.
I'm very excited for it.
I think I'd mentioned on the show I was exceedingly anxious and nervous about travel.
And I will just suffice to say there was no travel issues.
Everything worked out.
I'm a big baby.
You know, same as it ever was.
So we're all here.
We're safe.
We're sound.
And we got to the Apple Park, you know, like entryway and we went through and it was all amazing.
And, you know, John and I are eyes are as big as saucers because, you know, we've never seen this before.
John is now plucking a piece of dust off of my life.
You don't have to give a play of a play of everything I'm doing.
I'm just improving your life.
Something I can't do remotely.
I've missed you guys so much.
Likewise.
So we go and we got to visit with some other press people, which was awesome.
It was...
It was so lovely for me, at least.
I presume it's the same for both you guys.
But it was so lovely having that time where we were upstairs above where the actual event happens.
And they served us like breakfast and whatnot.
And we had some time to just visit with a lot of our peers and friends.
And it was just very, very cool.
And we had a couple hours of that.
And then the show started with what I thought, and admittedly, I am so giddy about everything that's happening right now that I'm going to love everything.
But I thought it was a hilarious video of Hair Force One and Schiller and a bunch of the other presenters in a plane, skydiving out of the plane.
I loved when Craig Federighi put the helmet on that was his own hair.
The helmet was in the shape of his own hair.
It made me laugh quite a bit.
Yeah, that was fun.
I love the video now and I will say like first of all, it was amazing that like everyone else's hair was getting blown around except Craig's because that's that's got to stay in place.
Right?
I also like I love having having Schiller as the pilot.
Yep, but he could not have looked less happy to be there.
Also true.
Like most like old and cranky.
I
Was that the idea?
I didn't believe him because his line is I'm getting too old for this and he said stuff.
Yep, an apple video, but you know, Phil didn't want to say that they had me.
They had him using a click will iPod, but that was cute and nod to his, you know, his age is in spring.
No, since he came up with the click will remember
Oh, that was, oh, I don't think I know.
It was a meeting Phil Schiller, but it's public knowledge.
It said it somewhere that it was his idea to have a rotating wheel on the iPod.
Oh, that's cool.
So that's his little feather in his cap, and he's the grizzled old veteran there.
I think this video, what I liked about it is that it didn't try to be like too corporate, too over the top, too high production.
It was just like a relatively short, relatively light, cute video production.
just about the event and a couple of fun execs and then that was it like there there was no like major statement they're trying to make they're not trying to be grand and show off how amazing everyone's lives are being saved by it like it was just a nice simple like intro to a developer show like that video could have been made 10 years ago and we would have well everyone would have you know
a little bit less gray hair but not that i could be talking but like that i feel like that was more of the spirit of the event than i think many of their more recent efforts with these like pre-produced fancy videos that have been very much like just like very overproduced very like over polished over corporate over the top i i like this this was a good fit for the event
One thing you missed out on if you weren't here live, like we were, yay, is the two minutes when Tim Cook and Craig come out on stage.
And just for the live people, you don't see this in the movie.
And Craig introduced it by saying, we have so much to announce today.
We don't have time for one of our normal videos where we have this all over.
So there's no over-the-top video, no silly things or whatever.
We're just going to get right to the facts.
And I think that intro helped like the undercutting it helped to make that video land better because I was thinking if I had seen this video at home without hearing Craig's intro, I'd be like, Oh, another one of these Apple things where they pretend they're secret agents and do a thing.
But because he undercut it so thoroughly and so well live that when it started playing and it showed them jumping out of a plane and it was, it's so clearly like ridiculous and self deprecating.
They're now parodying themselves.
And that is a much better look than let's say crushing a trombone and a hydraulic press.
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah.
I mean, it was huge dad energy, but here we are three dads.
So I loved it.
Uh, but yeah, they went just broadly and we'll obviously pick apart everything, but broadly they went real fast and it was apparent pretty quickly that they were moving with a quickness and, you know, we were sitting next to each other, um,
And I had Jason Snell to my right.
And Jason pointed out to me, they're rounding out the main stretch of content.
And it was 11 o'clock Pacific or something like that.
They said that on the intro.
The parachutes open had the name of the OSs.
And they said, we're going to do all of our OSs before we get on to the other stuff.
They had something like that.
And again, forgive people listening at home.
You may have had time to review the keynote video.
We have not.
We've been busy all day.
But yeah, there was an interesting approach to just say,
you know the parachutes have the os's they're going to go through all the os's and they mentioned ai features but they always said like machine learning you made notes of it a couple times yep they would say oh there's a machine learning feature this that but you know anyway we'll get to the big uh the big ai stuff at the end but they they wanted to get their os's out of the way but there was so much content like casey was trying to take notes on it and i was trying to help and it was going so fast we couldn't keep up with typing
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was incredible.
So moving through.
Oh, do we want to do like an overview up front or we just want to plow through?
Keynote order.
Vision OS.
All right.
So, well, excuse me, Apple TV Plus.
That's right.
Oh, yeah.
I literally, I took a break during the TV Plus promo to write an email.
Yeah.
I'm like, I had to send this email to him this morning.
I'm like, this seems like a good time.
I'm excited about those shows, but I kind of don't want to be spoiled on them.
You don't like I'm going to watch the new season of Severance and Silo no matter what you show me.
So I was kind of trying to avert my eyes.
But yeah, that was there.
It was the thing.
It was apparently fifth anniversary of Apple TV Plus.
So there was that honestly, I mean, look TV Plus, I think it has turned out pretty well.
It's a great service.
There's a lot of great content on there and it got exactly as much time during a developer keynote as it should have.
Yeah, I mean, that's pretty good.
I would argue that I might be zero, but yeah, well, yeah,
Although I will say, so a little inside baseball, and I can't resist because it's my first time.
It was definitely loud.
Yeah, it was too loud.
During the like big cut sequences and stuff.
We should have used Margo as a concert headphone.
That's true.
I didn't even think about it.
Why did we do that?
I didn't even think about it.
It's so true.
But oh my word, it was so loud during anything that was like not just somebody talking at you.
It was astonishingly loud.
It was very clear though.
It was so clear that like because actual live Tim Cook comes out on stage and talks to a microphone and then recorded Tim Cook came and they sounded exactly the same.
Yeah, that's true.
That's a good sound system.
So anyway, so Vision OS, like Markowitz said a moment ago.
So Mike Rockwell comes out 1.5 million compatible apps.
I think it was Ben McCarthy had sent me a screenshot of what appeared to be a little baby call sheet icon somewhere in the mass of icons.
I was looking for it.
It was hard.
I was looking for it.
I couldn't tell.
But we were seated relatively far away from the screen, which that sounds like a complaint.
It actually wasn't.
It was chosen deliberately.
We wanted to be in the shade.
Because we wanted to be in the shade.
And so we were seated fairly far back.
And I tried to look.
And I haven't had the chance to go back, like one of you just said, to look at the video and see it.
But
That would be my first keynote appearance, if that's what happens.
So that's extremely exciting.
Well, I guess the ATP podcast was in a session, not in the keynote.
You're right.
Not in the keynote.
So anyway, so one and a half million compatible apps.
And then we had Haley Allen come out to talk about just Vision OS improvements.
I'm trying to just skip over the stuff that's not that exciting and go to the stuff that I find exciting.
First of all... Oh, iOS.
Oh, stop.
Well played.
But still...
So, yeah, so converting 2D images into 3D using, quote, advanced machine learning.
I thought that was very cool.
We'll see how it works.
Yeah, we'll see how it works.
It may be garbage.
It may be great.
I mean, it's just got to be the subject detection, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And trying to figure out, like, you know, how much depth certain subjects would naturally have and maybe what the side of their head might slightly look like.
I mean, they're not the first people to try to do this.
It's going to be a little weird.
I'm sure it will be fine.
If they do it with great subtlety, it should be fine in most cases.
Yeah, like Facebook, I think, I've never actually used this feature, but I believe it has something where you can take a 2D video and it'll do a parallax effect between the foreground and the background.
I presume, to y'all's point, that it's something like that.
They did mention, and I forget exactly how they were describing it, but the gist of it was it's very annoying sometimes to try to figure out the battery level and the time on Vision OS.
What you're supposed to do today is you look up, up, up, up, up, up, and there's a little
little gray circle with a down chevron.
And then you do a pinch gesture.
And that'll drop down like Control Center or whatever.
And they say that what you can do is you can flip your hand so your palm up.
And it'll detect that and show time and battery.
And then you can flip your hand over for Control Center.
Which, if that works well, I think that'll be really neat.
And the home gesture, too.
Because right now, to go home, you have to reach your hand up to the physical digital crown on the headset and push it.
And then with this, now that you can just have your hand palm up and squeeze together, I think, or something, there's some kind of gesture as the home button.
That's a good improvement.
Vision OS, the more you can avoid constant hand motion, the less fatiguing it will be over time.
for the control center thing like they put it up high like it's a balance they don't want it to be in your eye line so you accidentally trigger it but then they don't want it to be too high so it's annoying but it is like it's kind of important for it to be out of the way and that's why i think it's annoying to go because the people you don't look up that with your eyes especially with your eyeballs because you can't just look up with your head well i guess you can but it's just
No, if you look up with your head, you still got to look up with your eyes.
It's weird.
It's intentionally inaccessible, and the hand gestures seem great.
Although I do wonder if they're kind of like how you burn, like, you know, command click or whatever in an app.
Like, how many hand gestures are they going to have us doing?
You're five of this thing.
We're making the spells from the one.
I was going to say the same thing.
It's so true.
So, all right.
So in the interest of moving along quickly, Mac virtual display getting some big updates later this year, which I am genuinely super excited about.
I'm not using my Vision Pro that frequently, although I did on the plane on the way here and it was wonderful.
But one of the things I do love about it is Mac virtual display.
And they're saying that
Again, it was going so fast, I might be flubbing the details, and that's true of basically everything we're about to talk about for the next hour and a half.
But they said it was a much higher display resolution and size.
And they said something along the lines of it's the equivalent of two 4K screens.
Correct.
was like one just obscene ultra-wide curved thing.
It's like those PC ultra-wide monitors, but a virtual version.
Yeah, it's basically like 8K by 2K or whatever.
Right, right, right.
And what was interesting about this was they made brief mention that what's happening here to make this work and look okay is that they're doing the dynamic foveation stuff that they do for the entire OS, for Vision OS, that is.
but they're doing it for Mac virtual display on the Mac.
So I guess they're live transmitting where your eyes are looking so that the Mac will render appropriately.
I think they're doing that for bandwidth reasons because then they don't have to send the full resolution display to the headset.
They can send a crappier version, but with a higher res of where you're looking, which allows them to... I don't know what the limitation is.
Is it a video memory or something or whatever the M2's limits are?
But it's clear that if they could have just said, okay, well, you've got a bigger screen now and just not deal with this, they would have done it.
This is more complicated.
Yeah, very much so.
And then it was funny.
I have not looked at Mastodon all day, but I did see a handful of people send me a text as soon as they mentioned that train support is now supported or will be supported in travel mode.
It's hilarious to me that an American, of all people, is the one who is known for using the Vision Pro on the train, but...
Here I am.
I mean, only Americans can buy it so far.
I guess that's true.
That's a good point.
All right, I take it all back.
Although soon, they'll be opening in other countries.
Yeah, that's true.
And so actually, we can jump right over there.
I mean, just very quickly, there's apparently going to be a physical lens for certain Canon cameras.
I don't know, Marco, if you call it which models it was.
Yeah, for the EOS R7.
Canon has this whole new line of the mirrorless cameras that replace other big ones.
The R7 is one of the big, great ones.
And there's a new Canon spatial lens that will allow native spatial video capture.
They say Final Cut Pro for Mac can edit it.
They said specifically for Mac, so I guess too bad for the iPad people.
And it's viewable in the new Vimeo app for Vision OS, which is interesting.
And then they also announced some deals, integration with Blackmagic and DaVinci Resolve for Apple immersive video.
That's the 180 degree field of view with the 8K res for production of that.
And then they said, there's new Apple immersive video content on the way.
Yes.
so we will very slowly have new stuff coming to the vision pro great i mean hooray and what's interesting too is like almost everything else we're going to talk about it like they were very clear they kept saying that you know all these like new ai features and everything are coming to quote a mac
iphone and ipad yeah they it was very clear none of this stuff is coming to vision os at least not yet and the only reason i could think like it has the hardware it has an m2 and that's you know they it goes down to m1 ipads and max so we know it's it's like you know the hardware is compatible so i guess the only reason is like they just haven't gotten to it i think those code bases are just too far diverged like if you think about photos and vision os that's not a shared code base with the other platforms
Well, but why not?
When they made it, they knew they were going to have to unify it.
It's shared-ish, but they were so isolated for so long that there's enough of a divergence and they have to work on their 2.0 features that I kind of understand why they didn't get it.
I'm assuming they will eventually as they converge further, but right now it kind of makes sense to me.
I think the Vision Pro user base, such as it is, probably really needs to see signs of support from Apple.
And I don't think they really got a lot of that today.
I think they got a small amount of support, but all the cool features that they demoed for everything else, all their other platforms really, or all their other major platforms,
None of it's available for Vision OS.
And I think that's kind of a weird miss at this point.
Well, the rumor was that Craig Federighi got religion about ChatGPT in 2022.
So that gave all the other platforms two years to be figuring out how they're going to integrate this.
And Vision Pro hadn't even shipped at that point.
It's only been out for, whatever, four or six months.
Like, they're just behind.
You know, it's kind of a shame because they really want to promote this.
I knew that Vision Pro, I had it as the very first item in the schedule.
I didn't predict Apple TV Plus would be in there.
You know they want to talk about it because it's their latest platform.
But to your point, Marco, they had the least to say about it.
It's not in on this party, kind of like me with my Intel Mac.
yeah well just very briefly i wonder if because obviously an m2 is on the surface it supports all this new apple intelligence stuff which we'll talk about later but i can't help but wonder it seems like the vision pro is running at the edge of what the m2 is capable of just doing normal vision pro stuff i almost wonder if there just wasn't enough not literal bandwidth but figurative bandwidth to like layer all this other it's got the r1 doing a lot of stuff there oh that's true that's a good point yeah
And the M2 is very strong.
I don't think that's the problem.
I think it's just about they didn't have the time or the software resources.
I don't know, whatever it was.
Half the apps that the AI stuff integrates with weren't even native.
So maybe it will get it there.
It should make it easier, actually.
Just here, run the iPad version.
So anyway, so yeah, to wrap up Vision Pro, I tried to copy down the countries and when, and I failed miserably, so I don't have details.
But suffice to say, there's a handful of countries sometime in the next couple of weeks?
Yeah, June 28th was China, Japan, and Singapore, and then July 12th was Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and then there was one other one that I
went to went by too fast for you to write down exactly um so i mean this to me was a b you know like it was it was good it was there was nothing that really wowed me there's nothing that made me think oh thank god this is going to change and you think again we're talking about this the day of there's got to be more they just didn't it just didn't fit into the keynote once people install these betas and future episodes we'll talk about how you can rearrange icons in the homes they just didn't make the keynote or whatever
yeah but this was this was acceptable like i i wasn't overly jazzed about this i mean i am pretty jazzed about mac virtual display to be honest with you but it didn't seem to take away any of the problems that people are having with vision os in terms of how difficult it is for like text entry for example um so we'll we'll see what happens but yeah if you didn't like vision os before you still won't like it if you like it before you might you have a few a few improvements some of which might mean a lot to you most of it probably won't yeah exactly right
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ios 18 baby so do we do we want to have a sidebar about the the german rumor thing or do we want to put that aside i'll tell you what so i'm obviously leading up german always has lots of rumors right there was the he basically had a ton of info right beforehand i didn't even look at it because i was at this point like we were so close i think i was already on the plane when it came out and i'm like i don't even i don't even want to be spoiled at this point
I'm close enough now.
I'm like I'm in the mode.
I'm in like the very like you know theatrical like I want to I want to see the performance.
So, you know, I don't whatever he got like I've since heard afterwards.
He has very impressive sourcing.
Obviously, he he really is dominating the entire rumor game almost entirely by himself.
I am glad that he provides us content throughout the year to talk about, but when it comes down to two days beforehand dumping an entire presentation, I don't find a lot of value in that, to be honest.
I recognize this is not the universal opinion of everybody who ever reads news sites, and we've certainly been guilty of seeing these things ourselves and having fun with them sometimes, but to me, there's a certain limit on how much I want things to be spoiled, and that seemed like it was past it for me.
Yeah, and that's fair.
So anyway, so a lot of this we already knew if we had read the Mark Gurman report, but it starts with the home screen.
You can rearrange icons on Springboard.
So they had a picture of a dog, if I recall correctly.
The dog's head is in like the upper left-hand corner of the home screen.
I'm sorry, the dog was like the background of the home screen or what have you.
dog's head is in the upper left so craig arranges you know icons i think maybe there was a top row laterally and then there was a bunch of icons on the right hand side and some icons on the bottom um and it seemed like it was relatively easy like whatever the new jiggle mode is it seemed that like whatever he did he did it quickly and it i don't think it was like a sequences shortened sort of situation although he didn't show how he he picked up a bunch of app icons somehow and
And then he just showed him dropping a group of them.
The normal way where you drag one and then you tap a bunch of other ones and they join the group, right?
He probably should have shown that just because most people don't even know you can do that.
It is kind of complicated.
I mean, so we talk about the difficulty of rearranging icons in the home screen.
And obviously people do want to leave spaces and they've been using spacer icons and this helps them for not.
But if you can...
Uh, clear space on any of your screens.
This should make it easy, slightly easier to rearrange because one of the most annoying things is how they, whatever you do, it wants to fill the hole.
Like it'll pull one from the previous screen and they all just want to like, they just want to compress into this big, you know, like you can't leave holes.
If you know you're going to put something in a spot, there's no way to leave that spot open.
And that makes it so difficult.
And that's why when you remove an icon, everything shuffles up, and then one from the previous screen goes and shuffles in.
I hope that the way they've done it has made the icons less obsessed with being right next to each other, where you can actually make holes, because that's the point of this feature.
And I know people want this, so good job in iOS 18, the 18th version of the phone operating system, by allowing people to do something that they've been doing for decades.
years and years using blank icons.
Indeed.
So they also announced that icons will darken in dark mode.
And the implication, and from what little I've gleaned since the keynote, is that this does not require developer input, although I think we've since learned that you can provide alternative versions of your icon.
And that additionally, you can customize
all of your icons collectively in one shot with a tint color.
And again, now I'm not so clear what developer input is required for that, or do they do it all magically?
I think we had seen a screenshot that one of our friends had taken of their home screen with a red tint, and that was with today's icons.
So that makes me think you don't have to opt into it as a developer.
That's right, yeah.
It seems like you can opt in as a developer and provide them with separate icon assets that are maybe more optimized for it.
But even if you don't, they will still do it anyway.
Which I think, you know, this is what we were saying the other week that we were saying like, wow, it kind of seems like that would be a bit risky with like big brand recognition and things.
But they did it anyway.
And so I think it's a great move for users.
Do we know if it's like...
every home screen when you pick this color?
Is it per home?
Because I'd originally thought when this rumor, I thought it was per icon, but that seems to be not the case, right?
They only showed whole homes home screens were like all the icons are right tinted as far as I know.
It's the entire screen, but is it per like if I go to a different page?
We'll find out, but it's interesting like and the way they look like they're doing it.
I don't know if this is how they're doing it, but it looks as if they turn all the icons black and white and then all the things that were whitish become pinkish become green issue, you know, whatever like that's what it looks like if you don't have any sort of customization.
That's how it
tints your icons and that's not going to look great in some cases and you know it's like my my main objection to this feature is that i just don't think it would be attractive like i think people should be able to change their icons to whatever they want and they can with the stupid shortcut thing which is annoying just you know make whatever icon you want make a shortcut you can pick any icon you want
It would be nice if you could sort of just hold on an icon and say, I want to change this icon and here's what I want to change it to.
But that's not really this feature.
It's tinting.
It's developer support for, you know, custom icons for dark mode.
And it's so you can give your home screens a theme and they and it will pick the theme based on your background.
If your background is yellowish, it will make all your icons yellowish.
And
So on.
So I, you know, and apparently there's an Android feature that is very, very similar to this.
So it makes sense that they pull this out because it's a kind of, I guess, switching feature.
Like people on Android are used to being able to do this.
Now they can do it on iOS, too.
Yeah.
And I think they did this in a very Apple way of like, you know, there's this whole industry out there of these apps that let people customize their home screens.
And they do it through, as we mentioned, you know, all these.
ridiculous hacks to get that to be able to do per icon customization and you know to arbitrary icons you know you can you can have all these apps that will help you install a really aesthetic theme for your home screen and you can have this and it'll show you hundreds of things you can bypass them and everything and they work through all these you know terrible means
What Apple did here is not remove the need for all those apps and not remove their market at all.
What they did here was give you like the 20% solutions.
Like here, if you want to customize your home screen, okay, we'll give you this very limited like guard railed safe way to do it.
And we'll give you these, you know, these 10 options that you can pick or whatever.
Although actually the free form color picker was nice, but
Like, you know, we're going to give you these these very limited controls.
You can do a small subset of customization.
It's still very gated, very limited, very safe.
But we will let you do this.
And so that's going to be great.
A lot of people are going to do that.
And at the same time, it's not going to at all affect the market for the apps that go way further than that.
Yeah, I mean, we'll see what happens with it.
But I'm excited because it seems like there's a need for this or want for this, if nothing else.
And now Apple's satisfying it.
You're going to make your whole home screen yellow?
No.
No, I'm not.
But it would match your car if I did.
Control center.
So you're going to be able to swipe vertically between different pages.
And what I thought was most interesting is that, and this is the beginning of, I feel like we heard a lot about the Intense API in several places that it becomes important.
And I think, Marco, you had said over the last few weeks or months that you saw this, you know, the tea leaves pointing this way.
And it sure seems like you were dead right.
So anyways, third parties can donate controls to control center, which is really, really fun.
So the canonical example that they used was like, hey, if you have a Ford and you can unlock your Ford remotely, well, if the Ford app supports it, you can have a control center icon that is unlock my car.
And then they additionally said that lock screen controls are now going to be swipable.
Which I think is very interesting and exciting.
And although I don't remember if it was mentioned here, while I'm thinking of it, another thing that they mentioned at some point today was that third-party camera apps, there will be an API to have a third-party camera app work while the phone is locked.
Correct.
And that is tremendous news for my dear friend Ben McCarthy and a lot of other people who have third-party camera apps.
That is a real stumbling point because the fastest way to use a – when you're trying to take a photo, you want to do it immediately, right?
And you don't want to unlock your phone and blah, blah, blah.
So that's really exciting as well.
Yeah, this now gives people the full capability to have third-party camera apps that replace the camera button on the lock screen and work while the camera is still locked.
That's all very new.
And that's – yeah, for third-party camera apps, that's huge.
and presumably also the swipe gesture on the lock screen if you don't want to hold down on the camera icon you can just swipe sideways that will also be configurable do we know i don't it would be really weird if you held down on the icon and got one camera app and swiped and got a different one that's true yeah but i will see we will see what happens and and control center integration too like and the way this works is all built on widgets like this we we've been seeing the building blocks here for a while the the the modern widget system powers so many things all across the system and so
As far as we can tell, I haven't dove too far into it yet, but as far as we can tell, all of this Control Center stuff is all just basically widgets in a new place.
It does inherit the same seeming limitations of widgets.
Hopefully, we'll have some follow-up next week with details of this, but it does seem like if you have, say, an app running a thing in Control Center with one of these new blocks in Control Center,
The app is not constantly running in the background.
So it might be hard to do things like make a rich now playing widget for audio apps, for instance.
It's very similar to other widgets seemingly in that it supports things like buttons and toggles that kind of wake the app up when they are hit and then make the app go back to sleep.
So it's going to be a little bit limited, but I'm really glad they're doing this.
And what's interesting, though, is that kind of, to some degree, might replace...
Widgets on like because you can currently pull down like the widget screen or you can swipe over to the widget page Like there's there are certain places like you can kind of now have widgets in like three different directions of swiping on the phone It's I think it might be might get a little confusing as to like where you're gonna put certain things or like end up on the wrong page I don't know, but it I'm glad to have this you know, even if it's maybe getting a little bit busy.
I
Yeah, yeah.
They talked about privacy for a while.
They said that one of the things you might want to do is put face or touch ID or a passcode in front of apps.
So you can only open the Photos app, for example, if you authenticate.
They also said you can hide an app entirely.
I missed how you would access it.
Maybe you're searching for it.
I'm not sure.
So it shows up in the app library.
And there's like a special hidden apps block on the bottom of the app library.
And it didn't show it in a locked state.
But we assume you face ID probably to unlock that block, and then you can access the app.
That's like deleted photos in the photos.
Yeah, and hidden photos, the hidden album.
It makes all this thing work like the hidden album, it looks like.
It's kind of weird how, well, I guess there's two things, right?
So one is protecting an app, and you can do that individually to apps, and you're like, great, the feature's done.
And the other is hiding the fact that that app is on your phone at all.
Because the apps that you tap and they face ID, you can still see the icon to the app.
And you're right, they didn't show it in the presentation, but I assume the hidden app library folder doesn't even show you which apps are in it when it's in the lock state.
I would hope not.
Right.
And so that's why there's both of these features.
It's not just like, oh, if you don't want to individually lock apps, you can just drag them into this folder and they're all locked.
No, it's to hide the fact that the app is on your phone at all.
Yep.
They also said, and this is a long time coming, but I'm very happy for it.
You can restrict what contacts are being exposed to apps.
So there was a big brouhaha a few years ago where we realized, I don't remember what app, it doesn't matter, but like there was some app that wanted to slurp up all your contacts.
Wasn't it Path?
I wanted to say that, but I think it was After Path.
But you very well could be right.
It doesn't really matter.
One way or another, it slurped up all your contacts, which could have been for reasonable reasons.
But ultimately, what it ended up doing was like spamming all your contacts saying, oh, you should join Path or whatever it was.
And that was really gross.
And ever since then, I at least, and I think many others, have been really reluctant to let an app slurp up all your contacts, which I think is good to be reluctant about it.
Now, apparently, there's going to be some sort of API where you can say, I guess, again, in the vein of photos, you know, what context would you like to expose to such and such an app, which is great.
I'm here for it.
Yeah, because before, there used to be no API at all to contact access.
It was just a public open API.
And I think that's when a lot of these apps were really abusing it.
And so it's great to see this because there are so many apps where, like, in order to do some critical functionality, it requests access to your entire address book.
Sometimes it actually requires it in ways that I think are not actually necessary and that app reviews should take a look at, like WhatsApp, for instance.
Small app, no one's really heard of it.
But it's nice to see Apple putting a little more attention on contact privacy.
Yeah, it's kind of... I see that in some apps, and sometimes I can see, like, you want to be able... Say it's an app where you're going to have to type people's email addresses or contact information.
You want to autocomplete it, right?
I understand, like, I want this app to build up a database of all the contacts so I can autocomplete.
But you don't want the app to actually have all your contact info.
I wonder if there's some privacy-preserving way that they could...
like vend and a contact autocomplete typing i don't know it's a complicated problem they they easily could for like like the system text inputs but i think the reality is yeah in the in the app landscape we live in no app would ever use that they would just request access to your entire time and keep nagging you about it every time you launch the app you sure you don't want to give me access to all your contacts are you sure yeah and they would gate some critical functionality behind it an app review wouldn't have a problem with it they should but they won't right
All right, so we talk about messages.
Tapbacks could be any emoji.
Finally.
Finally.
I'm very excited about this.
Truly, I am.
I'm a little worried.
I don't think they did a great job of showing what the user interface is going to look like, so I'm a little nervous it's going to be super clunky.
I'm going on faith that it won't be, but assuming it's not clunky, I'm here for it.
Very excited.
Yeah, that's a good point because the one good thing about the limited set is you don't have to go through like a giant picker.
Their emoji picker has gotten better, but it's still sometimes cumbersome.
yeah i mean really and one thing i also loved obviously yeah finally the emoji uh everyone's been wanting that for how many years now and every other chat app does it and it's great and you know slack whatsapp like every other there's so many other apps people are using that just have free form emoji responsive things it has become a language that people like people expect to have that so that's good i also i love that they did um bold italic underline strikethrough
And then they have send later, which is interesting.
They use the example of if you want to send somebody a happy birthday message in the morning, you can schedule it at night and it'll go that morning.
You can just have AI send it for them.
You don't need to send it yourself.
You're getting ahead, man.
You're getting ahead.
Well, then you can have their AI read all their birthday messages and just summarize it for you.
All right.
Let's stay positive.
So there's also text formatting.
I'm sorry.
You said text formatting.
It's the text effects.
There's magnification, animation, a blow away.
We couldn't have a keynote without blow away reference some way, somehow.
Again, this sounds cool and interesting.
I'm a little worried and skeptical about the interface in order to do it because like text selection on iOS, not fun, which I don't know how it could be fun without a full physical keyboard.
So I'm not like faulting them for that.
But I don't know.
This seems like it might be more effort than it's worth.
um something that i thought was very very interesting particularly sitting directly in front of underscore actually was uh messages via satellite so to to back up a half step you can send emergency messages via satellite like you can there's a wizard you would walk through that says why are you hurt are you stranded whatever you know are you safe etc etc and it would basically write a message not in an a in an ai way just like you know so casey is hurt on the side of the road and he's at such and such latin long go help more of a mad
Yes, that's a good way of putting it.
That's a very good way of putting it.
Well, now you can do full honest to goodness messages.
Like you type your message and send it via satellite, which I think is great.
Yeah, it's almost like it's core messages or core features of iMessage via satellite.
Yeah, that's true, because it was like tapbacks as well, wasn't it?
Yeah, so it said, so now, you know, since the iPhone 14, you've been able to do those emergency messages, but it was like emergency only.
Now, when you are connected only via satellite, you can do, you can text seemingly anybody.
They have SMS support, and then for iMessage, they said key iMessage features, whatever that means, but they said it includes sending and receiving messages, emoji, and tapbacks.
So probably not like photos and stuff.
But that's pretty cool.
It's basically like free unlimited satellite texting with any iPhone.
They didn't mention any money, but I do.
I mean, all they said was works with iPhone 14 or later.
I mean, I take your point.
I think they're just kicking that can down the road until they figure out what they're going to do about charging for this.
It's got to be free.
Well, maybe they would do emergency for free.
That's a good point.
And then this new feature maybe will be part of some plus plan.
They didn't say anything about it in the keynote, which is weird.
I know.
What are you going to do?
Mails getting on-device categorization.
So this is where you filter in.
Gmail's had this for how many years, John?
Yeah, but I do not use it in Gmail.
But some people like it.
I mean, in the times I used it, actually, Hay, when Hay was new and exciting, like a lot of people were really interested in that.
It had its own little cute categorization.
Right, exactly.
The key feature of this categorization thing is what are the categories?
And it's not like the user can pick them.
It's basically the person who makes the app has to decide what are the categories of email that people get that they think would be useful to junk put into bins.
And then they have whatever machine learning thing puts them into these bins.
So here are the bins that Apple chose.
I mean, there's no reason that has to be fixed.
Like Apple has, I think, chosen to make it fixed, but you could do things like make a tagging system and then have the system automatically file into those tags.
I don't know if they're going to ever do that.
I don't mean just the word.
I mean like the analysis of the message to say what kind of message in it.
So Apple's things are what?
primary transactions updates and promotions is that all yeah something like that promotions was a great euphemism well i mean everyone has some promotions it's it's stuff that's not spam or whatever but like transactions make some sense people want to have receipts primary is like the catch-all for the important messages and then updates is newsletters and social media i don't know i i always find it like i find it more work for me to think about what bucket this thing would be and even though in gmail like gmail's buckets it can be in five all the buckets at the same time because they're not folders like it's tag system right but i i think this
a lot of people feel like they don't have any tools to manage their email even when they do because the tools are complicated or require setup that nerds will do but people won't they just go to their inbox and they just flail and they leave right and this at least like this will at first it's going to annoy people because like where's my email it's in these categories i don't care about it
But as long as it can be disabled, that's fine.
And for the people who do find this useful, they're like, oh, now something else is organizing my email for me, and they will learn where to look for certain things.
Like this, Gmail does it.
A lot of other email clients do it.
Obviously, people find it useful.
This is an Apple catch-up feature.
I think it's important for them to have this.
I just hope they allow.
I'm thinking people in my life, if they install this operating system and they say, where did all my email go?
I don't know what primary is.
That's a bad sign, but we'll see how it goes.
I'm also curious, they had the digest view per sender, and it seems like they had custom header images for companies.
I don't know how that... Are they defining some new standard of... Maybe they're just extracting it from the emails.
I don't know.
That seemed a little gross to me, but I don't know.
It's pretty harmless.
I wonder if all this stuff will work on Apple's emails.
Are they going to put all their own stuff into primary when they tell us about the latest sale on MacBook Pros or the WWDC developer emails?
We'll see what happens.
But I did think that DigestView, like the example they used was, here's all the emails about an upcoming set of flights, for example.
I'm here for that.
So I was very happy for Underscore when we saw messages via satellite.
And then I got very sad for Underscore because then just a moment later, they decided to announce new topographic maps.
In Maps, you can access them offline.
There's turn-by-turn voice guidance.
I think they specifically were talking about for hikes.
Yep, they were.
This was literally the only new features for Maps this year were targeted at Underscore.
Yeah, it was just targeting Pedometer++.
He, because Underscore is the nicest human that's ever lived, he was so positive and so upbeat about it.
But my heart breaks for poor Underscore.
And there are other hiking apps.
We just happen to know someone who makes one of them.
And to be clear, this is exactly, you would expect Apple to add this feature.
It is a logical feature to add to Maps.
They should add it.
Third parties have been filling this gap.
Now Apple is stepping up.
And I think Underscore is right that Apple is going to do what they do.
But third parties are able to do more sophisticated, complicated things with different decisions.
So it's not like when Apple enters one of these areas, it makes it impossible.
Like Apple made a podcast app and Overcast still exists, right?
It is dynamic that as a developer for any platform, you should become accustomed to.
And don't be afraid that it's going to destroy your app.
Because if your app was successful at all, there's room for...
to make something different than what Apple does.
And Apple almost never do what a third party would want to do with a given app.
Well, in all fairness, though, you know, when Apple really does damage by Sherlocking, it's usually because they do something in a way that someone else can't match, like in using some kind of system integration or APIs that we aren't allowed to use or business terms that we aren't allowed to use.
30 percent you know shenanigans like that's that's what usually really kills something else or they massively subsidize it because obviously apple can make apps that are subsidized by their bazillions of dollars from their other businesses and they can put you out of business but they tend not to do that like they they have surprisingly small teams on many of their apps but the real thing that keeps it back is because apple is never going to add really complicated sophisticated features they're just allergic to it
right yeah and so if you know whatever obscure feature that you think hikers want apple's probably never going to get around to that they're just going to give like the thing that works for 90 of hikers and that 10 would still be using your app so you just have to make sure your app i mean it probably already does does something opinionated specific that is too too nitty-gritty for apple to ever add because they have to make something that works for most people and you can make something that works for like the hiking enthusiasts
By the way, real-time follow, apparently the standard exists for email corporate logo headers.
It's called BIMI, or B-I-M-I, and apparently it's not very good.
But that is a public standard, so please don't email us.
Thank you.
Wow.
Today I learned.
It must be used so broadly.
Somehow we missed it.
Wallet gets tapped to Apple Pay Cash.
So the theory is, let's say you want to pay somebody for something, but you don't necessarily want to give out your phone number or your email address, what have you.
Then you can just tap your phones like you can to exchange stuff via AirDrop.
So that's pretty cool.
That's super cool.
It's like not just do you not have to share it with them, even with people who I don't care about sharing it.
Like I'll totally give you my you have to do the thing.
It was like, what's your iMessage?
What's your I mean, that's why Venmo and stuff have the little QR codes for you.
Yeah, that's the hassle of having to type something in or whatever.
And so this is a double whammy.
You don't type anything in.
And presumably it's privacy preserving where you literally don't need to give it to them.
You can use Apple Pay online.
I guess it's Apple Pay Cash online?
Is that what they are?
I missed that part of the... There were some kind of enhancements to what you can do with Apple Pay checkout online.
And it was various financial little tricks that we don't really care about.
This is another example of them flying by.
But they made mention of something about In the Wallet app.
So if you have a concert ticket, there would be an event guide for that particular venue, which in theory sounds really great.
um they talked about journal app honestly i don't really care we should probably move on they added a few they added search which it somehow magically did not have like amazingly now it has it you can log your state of mind also which i think i'm kind of surprised it wasn't there at first but it's good to see them you know doing something to the journal app like this is a brand new app that launched in a very minimal state
I didn't see yet, though, were there any changes to journal APIs?
Like, was there any way for, for instance, other third-party apps to vend activities to suggest for journal to use?
They didn't mention it in the keynote, but that doesn't mean it's not there.
We'll find out.
Indeed.
Then there's game mode in iPhone, so that's basically cranking everything else back so that game process is the priority.
Photos gets its biggest redesign ever.
It's got a two-pane design, which...
I didn't think aesthetically looked great, but I can understand how they landed there because it seems like functionally it'll be an improvement.
There's filters.
So one of the examples they enumerated was filtering out screenshots, which is pretty cool.
Granted, I was sitting with a bunch of journalists, so they were very excited about that.
If you don't have a lot of screenshots in your phone that we're intentionally taking, people who write about software for a living do.
It's built on the amazing intelligence in the Photos app is what was stated at the time.
Um, there's collections, time, people, favorite memories, trips, et cetera.
You can reorder collections.
You can pin collections.
This is so, I have, I have many albums and I want to put stuff in like the same three albums all the time.
And they're alphabetical currently.
Yeah.
Scroll, scroll, scroll.
Oh, I went past that letter.
Go back up.
This is great.
Yep.
Yeah, I think this is actually like I obviously this is like a high risk thing to redesign the Photos app.
I will have to see like what it actually is like in use, but I'm pretty optimistic.
The current Photos app really has a hard time scaling to very large collections, which we all slowly accumulate.
This seems like they've done a lot to try to make them more manageable.
They did mention in the part of the State of the Union that we saw that they had redone some of the Photos app in SwiftUI, but they made a point of saying, but not the collection view because they were showing how it could integrate with UIKit.
And I think that's because SwiftUI can't handle the collection view in photos when you have a lot of photos.
Yeah, that would not be something I would use SwiftUI for.
They also said there's a carousel that has a new set of photos each day, which is exciting.
And then on the bento box at the end, they mentioned RCS.
And we all laughed because we thought that that was all we were going to get with regard to RCS.
But then they actually briefly said verbally that RCS is coming.
And also something that I think is exciting, especially for those with not as great vision, is larger icons on the home screen.
So I think that was very briefly mentioned verbally.
Did they show that?
Because I would love to make some icons bigger and some icons smaller.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like it's my thing with game controllers.
Not every button is equally important.
The primary action button on a controller is more important than the tertiary button, right?
So I would love to make apps bigger.
Did you have other thoughts on game controllers you want to share?
All right.
Audio and home.
I don't know too much that we need to say about this.
I did like the AirPods Pro.
Maybe only the AirPods Pro.
One way or another, you can nod or shake your head to interact with Siri.
So, you know, an example they gave is, you know, Marco was calling, do you want to answer?
And you can shake your head laterally left and right.
And Siri will interpret that as, no, I do not want to answer, which is cool.
Voice isolation, which we got an email about this, actually.
And I don't know.
Do you remember?
I feel like voice isolation was a thing in the past.
they've talked about it on the phone and various other things i don't know why maybe they did it better or it seems like there's like a new like ml based because there are there's lots of new techniques out in the industry for ml based voice isolation i got i remember nvidia did this amazing demo showing it off like two years ago
um and and other products have added it here and there so i you're right they have had like various techniques for various noise canceling and microphone isolation techniques over time um i think those have mostly just been very kind of simple hardware tricks and this seems like it's more ml based yeah um so this should work a lot better and be more advanced uh it's gonna be pretty cool if it works yep i hope it's not airpods pro only they just showed the airpods pro the voice isolation is they said airpods pro they specifically said the nodding your head might be for both but sorry john you're gonna have to get on the pro train eventually yep
TVOS.
This was fun for you, huh?
This time, remember the big talk we gave about how third-party apps are still liable when Apple does something?
Insert that here.
Oh, God.
This was something.
There was a feature at its TVOS called Insight.
Now, I believe it was like something else I've seen.
Oh, yeah, Amazon X-Ray.
Yes, indeed.
That's right.
And what else?
There was some other app...
oh yeah your app that's right before casey decided to make call sheet we've been saying for years that x-ray is a great feature that amazon has and people always have a question when they're watching a show what is that person from and x-ray provides that feature x-rays interface to be clear is terrible like every amazon interface casey's app call sheet in case you don't know is the thing where you can look up what people have been in movies and tv shows and so on and so forth and it's a very nice app
The thing I would say to encourage you here is those on-screen things for doing that, I think they should be there, and they're great, but Apple's history of making an interface on the TV itself that lets you do anything sensible is not good.
I would much rather...
Look, when someone says, what is that person from?
If I threw an interface on the screen while we were watching the show, she doesn't want me to even pause it.
She wants me to look it up on my phone, in which case I'll use call sheet.
And again, I'm not pooping this feature.
I think it should exist.
I think it's great.
Hopefully it'll have a better interface than x-ray, but there is still definitely a place for a thing for app that you use on your phone to look up who that person is without pausing the show and without putting anything on the screen.
Yeah.
also the you know the the um the new feature will only were inside it's gone it will only work on apple tv app like it won't work in third which i didn't catch it yeah i thought it was just in the apple tv player but again yeah exactly in hindsight it does make some right they wouldn't have the data right they just they just do screen like do the shazam version video shazam oh they're definitely not doing that
i know but like that that would be the tech your tv's doing that to show you ads you know but apple's not doing like that technology does exist but apple is not you this is just for apple tv plus television shows or movies but plus if i use that instead of call sheet i'd be spoiled constantly on you know character reveals and that's true that's true yeah i apparently i owe you a drink at dinner you'll be fine
But no, it was funny, though, because for a hot second, I was devastated because I thought it was for everything.
And I think part of the reason I thought that, which in retrospect was silly, but I knew that there was so much AI and ML and what have you.
And I'm like envisioning this world where they're like...
figuring out what's on screen i mean they could hypothetically they could but the more i think about it the more i think that that's that's challenging at least today maybe in the future it won't be but today i think that's really challenging i don't think it's challenging i think it's expensive and it's privacy invasive in a way that apple doesn't like to do so anyway so there was a five minute window before people started reporting in and sending me texts that like oh no no no no no it's okay it's just apple tv plus
And then I was not quite so miserable.
It's all part of the developer experience.
Well, that's the thing is underscore, again, underscore sitting right behind me.
And he's like, nope, this is part of the process.
So anyways, but yes, it was funny in retrospect, not funny at the time.
Enhanced dialogue.
One of my favorite features about my beloved Sonos setup is that the soundbars, or at least my soundbar,
can do their own dialogue enhancing mode, which is not flawless, but it works reasonably well.
And I am old enough now that I feel like, generally speaking, I can hear, but particularly at nighttime when the kids are asleep and Declan's room is right above our family room where we watch TV, I don't want to have to crank the volume in order to just understand what the heck people are saying.
Do you have reduced loud sounds on?
I understand the question.
I don't recall.
You should try that.
I'll have to give that a shot.
You're talking about the reduced loud sound?
Just a compressor.
I leave that on all the time.
I should give that a shot.
But one way or another, there's now enhanced dialogue for, I think, any playback on Apple TV, which I'm really excited for.
because presumably an Apple TV box is going to have more processing power than my Arc soundbar.
So these enhanced dialogue features exist everywhere.
They're on every TV, they're on every receiver, they're on every set dial box.
It's good that Apple has one, but I have to tell you the quality of these varies widely.
So hopefully Apple does a good job of it because
it's easy to just like, oh, I'm just applying an EQ curve and human voices are around here and that is awful and that's been around for ages and there's, you know, increasing amounts of ML or whatever.
So I hope Apple has done a good job of this because it actually is pretty hard to do because if you listen to a bad one, it's grating on your ears.
Like the voices are just too loud and too clear and everything else feels in the distance.
So doing this well is actually kind of tricky and I'm looking forward to seeing Apple's implementation.
I mean, it could literally be the exact same algorithms as the voice isolation for AirPods Pro, just like tuned down, you know, with less reduction of the background.
But you do have to be careful because you don't want it to sound like the people are like right in front of your face and the whole rest of the show is back there.
You can over enhance it.
i mean one thing that apple is historically very good at is doing features like this with subtlety like a lot of times they get criticized for not like doing a more extreme version or having more controls over how they're doing things like this but i would trust them to do this well enough that it would be if anything people you would say it doesn't go far enough it would it's probably going to be a pretty subtle effect like the demo that was i mean obviously we were hearing it over like you know concert speakers so who knows how it sounds in person but the demo of it seemed like it was actually fairly subtle yep
uh auto subtitle appearance when muting or skipping back uh i thought that they already did this for like what did she say or whatever they do it when you when you ask those siri remote what did they say and it will go backwards three seconds turn subtitles on play through and then turn the subtitles back off which is one of the best features of apple tv and now this is even more of that of saying look if you just skipped back you don't even have to because it is kind of annoying to pick up the remote and mumble into it what did they say or whatever
uh this if you skip back it just assumes it's because you didn't hear something so that that removes a step and that's great and the auto subtitles subtitling appearance when muting is a no-brainer that is great yeah i love that uh support for i think it was 21 by 9 projectors whatever the standard um aspect ratio is uh which is kind of interesting and cool i don't know anyone that uses an apple tv with a projector but i know what happens so that's neat
And then different screensavers are going to be available.
Slideshows, portraits, moments from Apple TV plus shows.
And then they did a big song and dance about Snoopy and how that's going to be a screensaver.
So that's cool.
Before we talk watchOS, do we want to talk about something else that's awesome?
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Watch OS.
They talked a lot about activity or activeness.
I know that's not really a word, but anyways.
That's it, yeah.
Activation.
Activation.
That's what it was.
But they talked about training load, which was interesting.
To be honest, I was slightly tuned out at this point because I was still figuring out if my job was going away.
You were sending your emails.
Right, exactly.
No, but they talked about training load and, oh, if you've trained really, really hard, that maybe you need to back it off a little bit so you don't get exhausted, et cetera, et cetera.
You can customize the summary tab in fitness, which I'm excited about.
You can also have different goals for different days.
You can account for injuries.
And gentlemen, you can pause for rest days.
This is great.
You know, there's someone out there who got a Series Zero watch and they've been on a streak and they've been getting the badges and they haven't missed a single day.
And now, finally, that person can have one day of rest.
I don't think a Series Zero watch would have enough battery life to give you your standout.
They've been going from watch to watch and somehow haven't lost all their streaks.
Oh, yeah.
Because we're saying this for years.
They gamify this by giving you cool little badges for going on streaks, but it's unhealthy to, for example, keep doing the same activity through injuries or never to take a day off.
And we've always been like Apple.
You're not promoting a healthy lifestyle.
The people who are most...
addicted to this gamified thing are going to end up injuring themselves and making their lives worse let people have a day off pause for a day the streak still counts this is just a life lesson that apple is now learned and now is passing on to us it's okay to take a day off and if you're injured don't do the same activity you normally do and now the watch understands that and allow you to maintain your streak and i think it is completely legitimate
and also like there's there's this like falling off the wagon effect where like if you have had a long streak and then you you have to break it you're forced to break it for some reason a lot of times it's really hard to ever go back because you're like well it's over now yeah and like you never go back yeah exactly like well i'm off the wagon now forget i guess i'll go back to you know being a slob like it and it's so it can be very demotivating so and
actually like enabling rest days not only is is you know healthier mentally for the people who are trying to keep streaks going but i think it will result in people keeping more streaks overall and and like and not falling off that that wagon as much because it is not as you know you're not like losing oh there it is i'm gone forever like i lost all this that i've worked for might as well throw it away but it makes the apple watch stickier or not you know for a self-motivated thing where like you're you're not going to switch to a different watch if you still have your streaks going
Indeed.
They talked a little bit about a Vitals app, which I'm genuinely excited about, to see kind of like an overall status of what your health is across several different metrics, which is cool.
Because fitness, obviously, is specifically about exercise and things of that nature and fitness.
And Vitals is more of a holistic view of everything about you.
I like what they're doing here.
So the idea is like daily health metrics, overall health status.
If something changes in a few different ways, like if your vitals in different ways change, they will alert you like, hey, your heart rate's been up this week, and also other stuff has changed.
That's nice, but I have to wonder why can't this just be the health app?
I feel like the health app...
honestly, is a mess.
There's so much in there, and I don't think the health app does a good job of information architecture.
You mean on the watch?
Because this is the watchOS section.
You mean in general, the health app?
I mean in general.
I think this should be just a function of the health app.
Maybe it is.
Maybe there's just a vitals tab in the health app now.
No, well, maybe.
I mean, I thought it was a whole separate app.
I thought it was a whole separate app.
I'm pretty sure it is.
And I will concur.
I don't want to belabor it.
Chatroom is saying it's in the health app on iOS and on watchOS it's separate.
So maybe it's just a separate screen.
Oh, interesting.
That's what I assumed.
Either way, the health app...
From an information architecture perspective, the health app is a disaster.
It's just terrible.
Apple's modern design language that they use there of just like a grid of square, around wrecked squares with some text in the corner, and that's it.
And there's just a huge grid.
I feel like that is...
That does not scale to a lot of information.
That's fine if you have a simple app like Reminders where you have those little blocks.
It's the same pattern of Reminders.
That's okay there.
But the Health app has a thousand different things in it.
And I don't feel like it's organized well.
So maybe they'll do a better job of this.
Yeah, but that's for me.
uh they talked about cycle tracking and gestational age which i thought was very cool and a lot more support about pregnancy specific metrics so um as an example you know i think they i think they use blood pressure as an example but there was something that they cited that it goes up quite a bit during pregnancy and that's normally okay but you want to keep an eye on it etc etc so i thought that was really cool
That's another example of third-party app opportunity type thing.
Even more so here because the health data is essentially a shared database that other apps can access and do things with.
There are tons of pregnancy tracking apps on the App Store right now.
It's like, oh, Apple is now going to give you one for free, so why would anyone use a third-party one?
I hope the third-party ones can integrate with
the new pregnancy-specific information that is presumably in the health database to enhance themselves.
And of course, those apps are going to be way more sophisticated, way more varied, way more tailored to people's individual goals or whatever.
So I think this will actually be a boost to that market, not a detriment to it.
Well, honestly, maybe it might have to be a detriment because a lot of times, like, remember, it came out a few years ago that the privacy of those apps is horrendous.
Like, all of the leading pregnancy-tracking apps that somebody could find a couple years ago, they were all sending that data to Facebook.
Oh, that's true.
Yeah, yeah.
That is true.
I feel like this should help.
The competitive landscape should change so that now there is a privacy-preserving option, so maybe apps have to do that less.
Yeah, I think that anytime Apple can add this kind of... Even though their version is going to be more basic, more just core functionality, they're going to get the 20% solution, right?
But even... That is...
Usually a good thing if the alternative is a market full of privacy-invading awful apps.
I just want to sell your name to diaper manufacturers.
It makes perfect sense.
That's how they do it.
Connections was another section where they talked about several different things.
They will automatically add new widgets to the SmartStack watch face, which is kind of sort of the nouveau Siri watch face.
There's Translate on the Apple Watch that uses, quote, machine learning models to do the translation.
Mm-hmm.
Live activities in the smart stack.
I don't use live activities enough, but if there's anything that's going to get me on this watch face, it's live activities in the smart stack.
I am here for that.
Very excited about it.
And in fact, I'm jumping ahead a bit, but there seem to be a lot of different things where they're acknowledging and embracing the fact that the iPhone is kind of the core computing device of your life, even for the three of us.
Where I think we're all primarily Mac people, but, and John will argue with me as soon as I stop talking, but generally speaking, I think for a lot of people, the iPhone is the prime, or maybe not primary, but the most important hub of your digital life.
And I think a lot of things...
Apple is embracing that for a lot of features.
And this is one of them, live activities on the SmartStack.
So we're getting Lyfts and Ubers and whatnot while we're here in San Jose and Cupertino.
And so having that appear on your watch, whatever the live activity is on your watch, that's exciting.
So I'm looking forward to that.
Yeah, and that is a theme throughout.
I think that's a good... What we have with our iPhones is it's always the primary... It's always where things come first.
It's always the device that no matter what is going on, if you're traveling or something, you're always going to at least have your phone.
It makes a lot of sense to keep the iPhone as the center of everything and to bring those features to the other platforms when you can, but still having the... Because no matter what Apple tries to do, the iPhone is always going to be the primary computer device.
Yep.
as much as they can embrace that and and make the iphone help the other platforms as much as they can do it and we'll see the iphone helping the other platforms by making appearance on them yes can i just say my favorite my favorite addition to watch os the double tap api
So tell me more.
I'm not trying to be funny.
Tell me more about why that's so exciting for you.
Because I don't have double taps, so I don't know what I'm missing out on.
Remember, you couldn't do it before.
Only Apple had access to it.
Right.
But do you use the feature in Apple stuff at all, ever, or no?
No, because it's very slow and unreliable.
Cool.
So I try to use it to dismiss notifications or whatever.
I have found it to be way too slow.
And I have the Series 9.
I have the right hardware for it.
And it's just really unreliable.
And when it does work,
it's still very it's much slower than doing it yourself because you have to like give it a second to recognize it and then it like taps you to tell you hey I recognize this and like it shows like a little overlay saying double tap you know so but the reason I want it is that my customers want to use it
And I've gotten so many emails from people since it launched saying, hey, double tap doesn't work in your app.
What the heck, man?
Because they don't know that until this, the only thing third party apps could do with it was use it to dismiss notifications or perform the primary action on a notification.
That's all it could do.
And of course, what they expect from over tap is play pause.
Of course that would be what it does, right?
That makes sense.
And it just seemed like I was being neglectful by not having this in my app when really I couldn't have it in my app.
So now that's going to be good for the very basic thing.
And whatever they add in the future in this area, if they add more gestures or more things like that, hopefully they will now add these SwiftUI modifiers for them as well.
Photos watch face gets better customization and will automatically find photos.
I don't know what specifically that means.
I mean, I understand those words.
It meant machine learning.
That's what they said.
Now we're like a half hour and they still didn't say AI once.
All right.
iPadOS 18, yes?
Or are we taking another pause?
We don't need more pauses.
Okay.
Sorry.
Paused out.
We are paused out.
Okay.
iPadOS 18.
I would like to make an opening statement about this.
Everyone was waiting for Apple to say, don't worry, you guys, we've solved multitasking.
Like I said, there was no rumors about that.
No, there were no rumors.
No expectations.
I think it was just this morning.
I apologize.
I am not even going to be doing show notes for this episode, so the show notes are barren.
But there was a Verge link that I'm not going to look up, but you can look it up yourselves.
there's a verge link where they talked about basically i feel like it was literally this morning like hey we've got this incredible hardware where's the software um and so i all of us i agree john that nobody was necessarily expecting it but we were all hoping for it and it didn't land and what did land though was actually for me to this point the most impressive stuff i saw in the entire in the entire keynote like i was excited about other things for sure but
The iPad demo, iPad OS demo, blew my mind more than anything else I think I saw during the keynote.
So what did we talk about?
Well, first, it has the home screen customization from iOS 18, which honestly, that's new.
It's not a given that it's going to get features.
Usually when something cool comes to Springboard in iOS, the home screen, the widgets, usually that either doesn't come to the iPad at all that year, or maybe comes the following year, or it comes to the iPad in a much more limited way.
In this case, all of that home screen customization and stuff that is in iOS 18 is also all on iPad iOS 18.
So that was actually a pleasant surprise.
Yep.
Couldn't agree more.
So there's that.
The same story with Control Center and a lot of the photo stuff.
They talked a lot about a floating tab bar, which I believe they either said or implied has an associated API where this is like on the Apple TV Plus app where there's a tab bar at the top.
And I was like, OK, fine, whatever.
And then they said, oh, and there's some, I don't know if it's like a hamburger button or whatever, but there's some button you can press.
And then that tab bar will slide down into the, I was going to say the left, wherever your text starts.
Into a sidebar.
It'll slide down into dot leading.
Into dot leading, right?
Into a sidebar.
And that, I thought, was extremely cool.
And so they talked about, they made a big stink, a happy stink about how there's improved and refined animations.
They talked a little bit about SharePlay.
And at this point, I started to pass out.
But then they started talking about screen sharing.
And I woke back up.
And they said, there are a couple of very interesting features.
You can tap and draw on the screen to instruct the remote users.
So they showed putting a gigantic FU.
It's right here.
It's right here.
Circle the button in a big hot pink marker.
It's right here.
Click this.
Yeah.
So anyway, like a big arrow or circle or what have you.
And they also said that you can ask, the remote person can ask for remote control.
So if you have like grandma or grandpa or what have you, and they don't understand what's going on, but they live, you know, 500 miles away, you get on a share play call.
I'm not clear how you do the screen sharing.
It doesn't really matter.
But one way or another, you can say to grandma,
I would like the control, please.
And you can actually perform the operation that grandma or grandpa is trying to perform, which I was very excited.
Oh, man.
For remote tech support.
Yeah, this this this would back when I had needs like that with my grandparents, this would have been a godsend.
This I'm very I'm very happy for everybody who has to use this feature like this is going to be a big quality life improvement.
Yep.
The Sherlocking continues.
Poor James Thompson.
I love James so much.
Calculator is arriving on iPad.
I genuinely double down on what you guys were saying earlier about how this doesn't necessarily hurt James, but it's not a fun feeling.
And it's not... I don't know if it would help him necessarily.
I mean, it does draw attention to other calculator apps.
Well, I mean, I think PCALC is going to be fine because PCALC has, with the sole exception of the iPad, has always run on platforms that had built-in calculators.
Well, I guess the Apple TV.
But there were always Apple calculator apps on these platforms, and PCALC still had quite a market.
I will say also, when they announced calculator for iPad...
As of yet, that got the biggest applause in the event.
I would have expected emoji responses in iMessage to be a bigger applause, but no.
Calculator for iPad, by far the biggest applause in that keynote up to this point.
This is interesting with Casey being excited about the iPad stuff we're about to see in a second.
It's kind of just because of the order.
Because, as we'll see, this thing that was presented as a feature of Calculator is not a feature of Calculator.
It is like an OS-wide service that appears in other OSes and other places.
Like, it's everywhere.
Sort of.
Well, I think it's just Calculator and Notes.
Right.
But it's clear that it's not a feature of the Calculator app if Notes is using it.
Right?
So it's a framework.
So it's a framework.
yeah so so what's it so what we're going to talk about now is math notes like this is so calculator you know it's it's calculator for the ipad but then it has this other mode called math notes that it's totally unrelated it might as well have been a separate app like that's the thing like it and so there's all these apps now that are or all these features now that are kind of buried in apple apps in weird places so for instance like that one secret button on calculator there's like the document scanning that's just built into the files app or preview on the mac and
And there's a whole document scanner you can use with phone cameras and stuff, and it's tucked into weird places.
You don't even know it's there.
Notes is the king of this.
There are so many amazing features in Apple Notes that you wouldn't really expect to be in a Notes app, and it doesn't really have that much to do with Notes necessarily.
And so this is one of them.
So this Math Notes feature, this is what they demoed.
I agree, Casey.
I think this is one of the most impressive demos of the day.
math notes it's kind of like a combination of calculator and solver with handwriting yeah in the most amazing it's like a handwritten solver yeah yeah yeah that's good the most amazing recognition and like ways to play with numbers so this the way it works is you use the apple pencil
And you can just, you can like doodle up a note or whatever.
And any, you know, if you write like seven plus four equals, it will recognize that as a mathematical expression and stick the answer there.
Well, but there, wait, there's more.
And there's so much more.
But wait, there's more.
Not only does it stick the answer there, the naive way of building this is it puts like, you know, a monospaced font.
Right.
You know, what did you say?
Seven times four is 28 or what have you.
It doesn't matter.
It puts a 28 there in like a monospaced font, right?
Right.
Oh, no, baby.
It's going to try to mimic your own flipping handwriting.
How amazing is that?
I don't understand how this is possible.
I don't know if this was part of the same thing, but I think it also improves your handwriting as well.
So when you're scribbling the numbers, it's trying to, oh, you made the circle on that nine is a little bit squished.
It opens it back up for you.
So it's more legible to yourself later.
And then it writes the answer.
And then like Solver, which is a great app that we should link in the show notes that Casey's not making,
that will uh that will like it's it's a live thing it's like a spreadsheet where the answer is based on the things that are before it one of the really cool things i think i saw in the keynote was hard to tell because it was far away is what they were like oh you can change the numbers and like oh changing numbers is it going to make me get an eraser tool and then carefully scribble out the nine the presenter did that that was one of the choices but no but i think i i think there's like a gesture to sort of just swipe over the nine and the whole not it knows where the nine is
You know what I mean?
And the whole nine disappears and you type a new number in its place.
And there's a little slide.
If you hover over it, it shows a little slider above it and you can just slide the value up and down.
Yeah.
And it does more complicated math.
So more ways for kids to cheat on their homework.
Not that they need it anymore because there's a million web-based tools that will do all this for you already.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean like I personally I'm not a handwriting person.
That's why I like computers, but tons of tons of people are like, you know, I like solver.
I like typing actual numbers.
I don't want to see my handwriting.
I don't want to hand write math equations, but sometimes especially if you don't know like math ML or how to like make the big if you're in like an actual math class.
We have big giant expressions with fractions and and exponents and lots of parentheses and square roots over whole big things like it.
You know, doing algebra, this looks like a great teaching tool.
And this, you know, it's essentially, you know, I don't know if it's a public framework, but it's a private framework that's used by two of Apple's apps.
And it's so amazing.
They should just spread it everywhere.
Like Pencil Kit.
I hope they eventually will make this a third-party thing that you can just pop up because it's just...
What a great app.
And for the iPad, like it's their one app platform that has a pencil.
This is like, what can you do with the pencil?
They're really cranking up the features that we'll see more later that appear with the pencil in pencil kit or with pencil related things in the OS.
Yeah, because this feeds right into smart script.
This was...
Math notes and smart scripts seem to be the same system.
Calculator has math notes.
Notes also has math notes, but notes takes it further with the idea of smart scripts.
This is basically the engine that recreates your handwriting as a font, basically, dynamically.
As you handwrite notes, it figures out what your handwriting looks like.
As John mentions, if you squish a letter or flub a letter, it will correct it to make it more readable as you go.
and because what it's doing is converting your handwriting into reflowable text so yeah after you've handwritten a whole page of notes with the apple pencil in in apple notes you can like delete words by scratching them out and then just collapses them you can copy and paste you can paste other text in and it will paste it in in your handwriting it's just nuts i said to the dancer next to me i said oh i'll also sign checks for you yeah right
like wait, it's pacing.
Can people can like do kids still need doctor's notes or like your parents to get out of school.
Oh, this would be great.
No kids have other ways of hacking that they always do.
But yeah, this is definitely a cool feature and it also has kind of like shades of Newton.
You know what I mean?
Like being able to use handwriting as text and then interchangeably.
It's amazing looking tech.
I hope it works as well as the demos.
It demoed phenomenally.
If you watch nothing else from the ski note, if you ask me, watch this like five to 10 minute demonstration.
It was, I think Jenny Chen did it.
It was phenomenal.
It was so cool.
It doesn't evaluate an expression until you draw an equal sign, which I thought was clever.
she had a column of numbers she was putting together like a budget or something yeah yeah and there was a column of numbers and she likes oh she said oh i really wish i had a sum of this and so she just underlined the bottom number and then magically a sum appears it was unbelievable she put a graph in one of them she was doing like some physics problem yeah has a built-in grapher because of course might as well like what why not
It was incredible.
It was really.
I wish I was not like John and I hand wrote things.
Yeah, right.
I just never do.
But again, if you don't know like the correct note, if you ever tried to enter a complicated algebraic expression like in, you know, Wolfram Alpha or in something or whatever, and you don't know how to do that.
Are you trying to use the tools?
Oh, I need a big parentheses and using a toolbar.
If you don't know that like the ASCII syntax for it or whatever,
it's just like just let me draw it just let me draw the expression and you know that's it this is really making this stuff more accessible and again there are there are web-based tools that do this and there are teaching tools that do all these things as well and there's wolfram alpha exists but this is this is on your ipad this comes with your ipad it's also i think this also shows like some of the kind of hilarious limits of the rumor game because it was rumor that there would be like math ml support in notes and
Yeah.
Which is like, okay.
Undersells it.
Yes.
It's like, that is sort of what this is, but it's totally missing what this really is.
Yeah.
It's a Newton plus solver.
Exactly.
So we get to Mac OS 15.
Sequoia is the answer, which is good because everyone definitely knows how to correctly pronounce and spell Sequoia.
But here we are.
It gets Mac OS 15 gets all the note stuff we just talked about.
Well, I guess, except the pencil related things.
Not necessarily, because people can use tablets, drawing tablets with a Mac.
Oh, that's true.
I wonder if a Wacom would work.
I didn't even think about that.
I doubt it.
Then this is what I was alluding to earlier.
They had a big section on continuity.
And I think for me, if you're going to watch one thing, watch Math Notes.
If you're going to watch two things, watch this iPhone mirroring stuff.
So what they said was, hey, what about occasions when your phone is out of reach, but you want to do something with your phone?
Well, what they demoed was you can mirror your phone's screen onto your Mac.
And then not only that, but you can interact with your phone using your keyboard and mouse, which was very freaking cool.
And then apparently you can pinch to zoom.
I mean, they mentioned that I was wondering as soon as they did that.
I'm like, oh, that looks like a simulator, right?
They're going to make users hold down option to get the two balls and whatever.
I'm like, there's no way that they're going to ask users to do that.
But then I realized everyone has a trackpad, so you can just.
Oh, that's true.
Yeah, this is your virtual phone on your Mac screen.
It's I mean, if you're like, oh, how lazy are.
Why don't you just go get your phone?
But honestly, it's a backdoor to let you run iPhone apps on your Mac essentially because it
Previously, only iPad apps could be run on your Mac and their little windows.
Now, your whole freaking phone is there on your Mac.
I think this is a great feature.
It makes such a perfect integration of like because they make the phone platform and the Mac like excellent.
I give this two thumbs up.
I mean, I don't even know how often I'll use it, but it just seems like something that should be possible.
And now it is.
And think of so many.
Also, notifications from the phone will show up on the Mac.
The audio from the phone comes through the Mac.
You can have standby support where the phone can be on a charging stand in standby showing some widgets next to your desk and you can be using it on the Mac.
You can drag and drop files to the phone from the Mac.
I think this is going to be one of those things that we start to use all the time and not even realize it.
And wonder how we lived before it existed.
Even just something simple like what if you break your screen on your phone and you need to get info on it or something.
Extend the life of phones with broken screens.
I just need to bring his laptop around with me to use my phone.
Yeah, or, you know, get info off of it before you get a replacement phone.
Maybe Apple will start selling a headless iPhone shuffle.
Easy peasy.
I can't even with that.
It's like a stick of Trinan gum, but you need another device to use it.
No buttons.
No buttons.
I just want to reiterate what Marco just said because you went so fast, but I think it's important.
A notification comes through on your Mac.
It looks like it is pure with all your Mac notifications.
You can click on it on the Mac, and it will start up the phone mirroring so you'll see your phone, and then you can interact with that notification because your phone has now started whatever app that notification came from, which is incredible.
And like you said a moment ago, you could have standby.
I don't personally use standby just because I don't really have a dock that makes it easy, but I love the idea of it.
But if you are a standby person, you can have your phone sitting next to your computer.
And similar to how CarPlay eventually started working, where it was not literally what you were doing on your phone, it became like a second screen.
Well, standby can remain up while you're interacting with your phone on the computer.
So your phone is doing two things concurrently.
Very, very, very cool stuff.
And this is also, just now that it needs to be reinforced, reinforcing the Mac's dominance as the platform where you can do everything.
You can run iPad apps.
You can run Mac apps.
You can use your entire phone.
It integrates with all these things.
You can develop apps for all those platforms.
The only thing you can't do is the Vision OS stuff, and that still kind of seems like it's off in the corner.
And the Pencil, too.
Yeah, I do wonder about the pencil.
Obviously, you can use an iPad, a sidecar.
I don't think there's any pencil support in that mode.
But technically speaking, it seems like it would be plausible to allow you to use your Apple pencil on your iPad screen when using a sidecar.
And we'll see how, I mean, they should just make touch max with pencil support.
I mean, they'll get to it eventually, but not this.
And cellular and OLED.
Well, you know, get in line.
The OLED we're going to get.
Don't worry about it.
That's coming.
What else do they have?
Video conferencing stuff.
Oh, wait.
Window tiling.
You blew right past that.
Oh, I'm sorry.
You're right.
That's true.
There goes a bunch of apps that manage windows.
Don't worry, John.
You're totally safe from being Sherlocked.
do any of this stuff like again they still don't expose enough apis for you to do something good i know window tiling window tiling is one of the few things you can do because you don't need interactive support for it's like oh i just enter a keyboard command and the active window but goes into the third or a quarter or whatever but like real-time interactive window dragging like when you're dragging a shape in like adobe illustrator or affinity designer or something
There's no APIs for that.
And Apple doesn't do it itself.
But yeah, this does hurt a lot of apps that do the same thing.
This is just catch up with Windows.
They've had this forever.
People just expect to be able to yank a window to the side of the screen and have it tile.
And now it does.
And it will hurt a bunch of third-party apps.
But third-party apps do way more than this.
So again, there's room for them to exist.
Though this is another moment where there was a lot of applause when we were sitting there.
And it's so funny, too, because you guys have talked about, or maybe just Marco, I guess, has talked about in the past.
They don't have the pregnant pause when they're waiting for people to stop clapping because it's a recorded video.
They just keep going.
They just keep plowing forward.
But there was a lot of applause for that.
So like I said, there's some video conferencing stuff.
I mean, they have Zoom-style fake backgrounds.
I thought they already had that, but yeah, it's a catch-up feature.
Yeah, system-wide background replacement for any video input.
And presumably they'll do a less janky job of it.
I mean, their demo looked pristine, but we'll see.
It's a competition to see who has the best...
Machine learning.
Everyone's demos always look pristine.
Let's see what happens when you're in dim lighting and stuff like that.
All right.
So real time follow up.
I just adjusted where I was sitting and I definitely kicked over my capped water bottle.
So maybe John was right about this because I had it.
I had it at the edge of my chair and I adjusted where I was sitting.
See levels.
Levels are important.
Levels, levels.
I've had opinions about where 1Password has been going for the last year or two.
You?
And I will say that there is now a passwords app on all of the platforms, including Windows on the iCloud for Windows app.
And I will be exploring that later this year.
As will I. That's all I'm going to say about that for now.
Yes.
It is not as full-featured as 1Password by any means.
In particular, it seems – I haven't explored yet whether there's any kind of group functionality like family sharing and things like that.
So I had somebody talk to me.
There is.
We have that already?
So I had somebody reach out on Mastodon because I think I'd cast out a question about this.
And I know that there is something, but I don't know.
You talked about it on the show.
Now you're both like this.
I'm currently using it.
Yes, you can make arbitrary groups where you share things in your iCloud keychain.
I have two groups.
I have family passwords and parent passwords.
And once you put a thing into that group, it is shared with the people who you say, and it's just completely arbitrary.
It works great.
I mean, for passwords, the verification goes the whole nine yards.
And yeah, this app, I mean, people have been asking for this because passwords, like the keychain access app is...
obscure and weird that is not for regular people to exactly it's for me and they shouldn't really offer any but then there was the password you know settings thing on ios and the password preference pain slash whatever they're called in settings right but it's just kind of buried and people are making shortcuts to launch it but now there will be dedicated app so it's better it's more exposed it just makes it feel more comfortable like yes
when I need to get my passwords.
Keychain access does more than just passwords.
Keychain access has secure notes.
Keychain access has all your stupid developer certificates in it.
That stuff isn't exposed in passwords.
That is in the keychain, so to speak, and that is important stuff.
And so keychain access has to still exist, but regular people should not touch that because you can really hose yourself by like, oh, I don't know what these certificates
are let me delete all these like even if you're not a developer don't do that like that your root ssl certificates are represented in there there's your login keychain and the system keychain and things that people don't have to understand plus making uh what do you call certificate signing requests for making ssl certificates if you're not using let's encrypt which you should be um like keychain access will soldier on but since the last version of macros when you launch keychain access it says hey
are you sure you want to launch keychain access like passwords are over here yeah do you want me to just open the passwords preference but and now i hope it will say actually there's a whole other app called passwords you should go to that one and it's a swift ui app and it looks nice and i hope it doesn't have right aligned text fields for the passwords but we'll see how that goes yeah i i think this is you know there are going to be some things you know like secure notes you mentioned are not there but like you know where secure notes are in notes
Like, you can make a locked note and have all the... But those aren't in keychain.
I do wonder how they're going to square this, because I do have secure... Like, the secure notes in... Notes are in the notes database and encrypted.
The secure notes in keychain access, I believe, are in the keychain with all of the... In iCloud keychain with all the secure synced stuff.
I may be wrong about that, but...
I think there's two different worlds and I wonder how they're going to reconcile that because that is that is a feature that people like one password like they just want to like, here's an arbitrary list of secure stuff that I want to be locked up or whatever.
And you can do that in key chain, but it's a terrible interface for it then using it in notes is much nicer.
So I hope that's what people are doing.
I wonder if maybe they're just trying to keep the iCloud keychain data size small and lightweight.
With one password, you can have just arbitrary files that you stick in there.
And the way it does it is honestly kind of rough.
So I've scanned my driver's license and have the picture of it in there, for instance.
If you put one image or one PDF into keychain, it's going to be way larger probably than everything else in there.
And that's just for one of them.
So if they keep the size of everything small, maybe that helps them keep it fast and reliable.
All right, they talked about Safari for a bit.
They said the quote, private browsing, that's actually private, which I thought was funny.
They didn't go deeper into that, but we all know who they're.
Well, yeah, and then the next line was, if you've missed anything we've added to Safari over the last few years, it's time to check it out.
They were clearly targeting Chrome, because look,
The reality is, Safari has a Chrome problem.
Chrome is way more popular than Safari, and Google is being extremely aggressive at getting the most people possible to switch to it.
Google is so... The second you sign into any Google service, you get that email saying, like, complete your Google setup, and it hammers home, you've got to install Chrome, you've got to install Chrome on all your devices.
Like...
The fact is Safari has a severe problem with like losing people to Chrome a lot over the years.
So this was clearly targeted at that.
And I think it's good to see Apple being a bit aggressive there because they have to be.
Yep.
Couldn't agree more.
So they highlighted, quote, machine learning quotes, which includes...
directions to things that it detects on the page, summaries of pages, quick links to learn more about like people, movie, music, TV shows.
This was not a Kalshi thing in my eyes.
That's just, you know, hey, there's... Basically, this is all kind of Safari saying the web is junked up with crap.
And we know when you land on a webpage, maybe you just want to know what the deal is with this TV show, and you can't see it through the barrage of ads and other garbage.
And so this reader mode that's existed for years, it will summarize it, and if there's media stuff, it will try to extract that stuff and probably give you a button so you can see it on Apple TV+.
It's an opportunity for them to integrate with streaming services, but it's also just...
A lot of Safari's tools seem like the web is an annoying place to be sometimes.
And we will try to use our application to scrape out the stuff that you actually want and present it to you in a nice way.
And I appreciate that.
Yep.
Reader includes now a table of contents and a summary, which I thought was very cool.
It's in like a little sidebar area, which was neat.
Then they talked about Viewer, which was specifically for video playback.
It's unclear, like John wrote in the notes, does this work on YouTube?
We don't know.
So it's unclear what the situation is, but it has a mode where the...
Video will take up the entire window area, which I really liked, because I don't necessarily want to go full screen with video, but I wanted to make the video take up the entire window area.
And it uses the native player, too.
Like, if you watch some web page that has video, and it's some weird video player, and there's a bunch of blinking ads in the corner, and there's some things... Like, this will...
Yank it out into the native player somehow.
That's why I asked if it works in YouTube, because how would that work?
There's a bunch of utilities that do that with YouTube now where they'll essentially modify the markup on the page to let you use the native player, turn it into an HTML5 player.
So that'd be the first thing I try on that.
But that's, you know, it's good to have that feature available.
These features are great because if you don't want to use them, they don't mess with your web browsing.
But it's always worth a try.
And I've been using Reader more and more often just because so many web pages are so junked up, it's impossible to actually read them.
It's bad.
John, there was some talk about gaming.
So anyway.
Yeah.
So, you know, the game porting toolkit there, they are not budging on this.
The idea that this is a tool for you to port your games as opposed to what other people like, you know, Valve has done with the Steam Deck and everything.
of saying no no apple will take care of this you just run your game and we will make it work on the mac they're saying no this is a tool for you developer for you to make your game to run on the mac because we want it to be essentially a native mac game we don't want this to be a way to run windows games on mac although it is and they mentioned they mentioned crossover and that whatever that whiskey thing is like there's a bunch of other tools that use the game party toolkit to essentially provide an app that's like hey go here and you can play windows games on your mac and you totally can right but apple is not on board with that
And when they said this, it was like, why don't you do what they're doing, Apple?
But like, no, Apple says, we want you to port your games, and we found two more developers who are porting games that you played three years ago.
Wow.
I mean, the most interesting thing is, like, they mentioned Frostpunk, which I don't know much about, but they mentioned Control, which was one of the first sort of AAA games to...
really emphasize ray tracing they're like hey you just got an nvidia card with ray tracing support and you might not know what the hell that's good for we'll get control because it has a mode where you can turn on ray tracing and it looks kind of cool and again that was years ago now it's available on the mac as you know max and ipads have ray tracing hardware in their gpus
And so that's a good get for them, but this is back in time.
So if you've been wanting to play Control, which is a pretty cool game, you can try it out now on your Mac.
And then Ubisoft out there talking about Prince of Persia and the new Assassin's Creed game.
So Apple is schmoozing the developers enough to get them on board, and some of these games are not three-year-old games, like the Assassin's Creed is the upcoming one, so there's support there.
So they seem to be making some headway with the big developers, right?
It's kind of one of those things where Apple has to get to the point
where when a cool game is coming out, a Mac user doesn't have to think about whether it will be available on their platform.
All they have to ask is, is this a platform exclusive?
Because that's what people think of.
Oh, there's a game coming out.
And what they want to know, is this a platform exclusive?
Is it only on PlayStation?
Is it only on Xbox?
Right?
Is it only on PC?
And if they say, no, it's just, it's a cross-platform game, which most AAA games are because they want to make money from everybody.
When they say that, Mac users know they're still excluded.
No, it's not platform exclusive.
It's everywhere, except for the Mac, obviously.
That's the hurdle they have to get over.
And so it takes, you know, I bring up a new developer every year to say, we have this game, we have that game.
They have to get it to the point where gamers, when they hear a game is not platform exclusive, can assume that it's on the Mac, and we are so far from that.
But baby steps.
Every year there's one more developer, one more game.
It's just at this rate, it'll be like 2076 before that happens.
Do we know, John, if your ancient piece of garbage slow Mac Pro is going to be able to work with anything?
It seems like no.
They were pretty clear.
I mean, they didn't say anything about OS-supported platforms, but I would assume, this is a bad assumption, previous years you would assume that if this version of Mac OS did not support Intel, they would have said it in the keynote.
But in recent years, it seems like
they leave unfortunate news out of the keynote and maybe save it for state of the union or something, but they didn't say anything.
So I'm assuming Sequoia still runs on Intel minus all the features we're going to talk about in a little bit.
Um, but just, you know, uh, uh, reader sent in a listener, sorry, sent in a link to our predictions from past episodes.
Cause we mentioned that on the last episode, like what were our predictions?
Um,
i was kind of surprised to hear myself saying that my prediction was wwc 2024 but then i heard the reasoning that would be the exact pretty much the exact same time span for when apple dropped power pc support which is three years and seven months after the first intel mac so my if if they follow the same logic they should have dropped intel support today i don't think they did so therefore they're going even longer with this transition so good for them casey's prediction was 2026 and marco just waffled
Usually that's my cup of tea.
Sounds about right.
Yeah.
All right.
All right.
Now we have a little over an hour in.
We have our first mention of artificial intelligence.
Yeah.
This was, again, I think I'm going to request and give myself an opening statement.
I felt like what we all wanted, or certainly what I wanted, and I think we talked about this last week, was we wanted the adults in the room.
And that's not really to slag on Microsoft necessarily or Google, but we wanted somebody with a little bit of – I can't think of ways to say this that aren't going to sound mean, but here we are and I'm very tired.
So we wanted people that weren't – that were going to have taste and have not class, but just apply –
artificial intelligence and large language models and things like that in ways that actually help regular humans.
Not for me to figure out an FFmpeg incantation, but to do normal stuff.
And Craig comes out, or maybe it was Tim.
I think it was Craig, though.
It was Tim first.
Okay.
And says, you know, several things I'm going to read.
These may not be verbatim quotes, but I think they're worth noting.
You know, they called it Apple Intelligence.
I don't recall exactly when their reveal was, but they said, you know, we want to ensure that the outcome of using AI features reflects the principles at the core of our promise.
We want them to be powerful enough to help with the things that matter most.
They need to be intuitive and easy to use, deeply integrated into product experiences, and they should understand you and be grounded in your personal context.
What is your routine?
Who are your relationships with?
What kind of communications do you participate in?
And so on.
And obviously, privacy is a very big deal.
And so they say, oh, I think this is when the reveal was.
It goes beyond artificial intelligence.
It's
personal intelligence, it's now Apple intelligence.
So what you were saying about like being adults and like sort of it could be phrased as being less hasty, being more conservative, but really what it is is
So Apple's implementation of everything, as I said, it reflects a value system.
Apple has a value system that informs their products.
Every company does.
But the thing is, the value system of many companies is unattractive to customers.
So they don't talk about it.
Like their value system may be, we need as much of your information as possible because we can sell ads better to it.
And they don't want to say that to you.
because it doesn't make you want to buy their products.
But that is their value system, and it is embodied in their product, right?
And so Apple's value system, and again, it's not because Apple is a magnanimous or whatever, Apple's business model does not involve selling advertisement and collecting information about you to sell to advertisers.
That's why they do this.
It's not because Apple is good.
And you can say, well, maybe, you know, because Apple does have ad-type businesses or whatever.
And we've talked about Apple's conflicts with their services, businesses versus other ones or whatever.
But Apple's value system is such that telling it to customers is advantageous for their business.
Yeah, yeah.
And do they live up to their value system all the time?
No.
We call them on, right?
But they do have a value system.
And if you look at the amount of work and the amount of sort of technology they put into trying to implement artificial intelligence stuff
within the bounds of their value system, you see that it's not like BS.
They're not blowing smoke up your butt.
They did a lot of work that they didn't have to do to make these features exist and fit within their value system.
And the problem is this thing that's sweeping the industry, this whole AI trend with LMs or whatever, a lot about it
is counter to their value system of privacy and useful approach and making it easy for everybody.
And so Apple had to figure out how we have to get in on this train because, you know, it's the trend or whatever.
And Apple doesn't always follow trends, but Apple sees the value.
They see how good these features could be.
So they say, we can't ignore this.
We have to do something here.
But how do we take this thing that by its very nature...
consumes information indiscriminately, gives bogus answers to things, potentially harmful, offensive things that we don't want.
How do we figure out how to provide the benefit to people while still keeping it within our values?
And I was honestly very impressed with the lengths that they have gone to to try to do what everyone else is doing in their catch-up.
in a way that like i bet other companies are looking at this like they did what for what reason why would they do all that work to preserve privacy that doesn't make any sense you know to go fast and break things um and so i was i came away really impressed with what they've done i mean obviously the features that we're going to talk about it's like okay yeah you can every one of these features you can say someone else had this already but
I feel much more comfortable using these features in the way that Apple has implemented them.
And it remains to be seen in what we'll talk about for the next year.
How do they actually work?
Because if you're all wonderful and privacy-preserving and deeply integrated into the operating system, but it doesn't work well, we'll complain about it.
But it sure demoed well.
Yeah, I thought they handled it with a deft hand.
I thought it was well done.
Because keep in mind, the environment into which they are announcing these AI-based features, some of which are server-based, and this is an awfully hostile environment in the culture right now, in the media, in the press, even just among the public.
There's a lot of hate around AI stuff these days.
It's a very, very hot area.
And Apple historically has been hit or miss in terms of how they've been able to read the room in those ways.
That's true.
And I was a little concerned for them going into this, honestly.
But I think they did a really good job with it.
As John said, I think their approach to doing this in the Apple way with all the privacy focus and everything...
I think it probably will result in not being as good or as capable as some of the other systems here and there.
But overall, I think what they've shown... Again, we'll see how it works.
But I think what they've shown has a pretty good chance of working well enough that we will decide as Apple users this is worth the trade-off.
I think they might have an actual advantage this time because... Well, we'll talk to it when we get to it, I guess.
But like...
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that'll give us these amazing features.
But because Apple has implemented all of their AI features in such a privacy-preserving way, they feel free to pull literally anything, everything, all your relationships, all your contacts, all your photos, all your everything, because they know they're not sending all that information to the server to be harvested for advertising purposes.
They're custom-selecting just the two things you need.
Your wife's name is this.
Here's a picture of her.
Here's the information we have about her.
Here's the question the person asks.
And then it processes your request and discard that information.
You would not want that information to being sent to arbitrary third-party AI vendors.
You would never, like, say you're using this cool AI tool and say, great, I need access to all your photos and all your contacts and everything you've written in your messages and all your email.
And it's like, you would never give that.
It's like, well, we need that to do cool AI stuff.
It's like, but do you need it all now?
And they'd be like, yes, sell ads, right?
i think apple's apple's ability to pick and choose just the slices they want should make it possible for them to add not creepier features but features that as they said they take your personal context into account without you feeling like you're giving them everything never mind that apple already has access to everything because if you use apple photos they have all your photos but like the whole idea of like well apple doesn't have access to your photos and then encrypted and apple doesn't have access to your messages and then encrypted except for iCloud backups unless you enable advanced data protection anyway it's
The world is complicated, but I think in this case, they may actually be at an advantage here because they no longer have barriers to combining information about you to give good answers.
They feel free to just yank it all because they have this very privacy preserving way that they're doing it.
And I love that, as expected, they are doing as much as they can locally on device.
And that's great for privacy concerns in lots of ways because then you can have even more access to things.
But also it's great for latency and performance.
Some of the biggest problems that I've always had with Siri is that it's just so incredibly inconsistent in ways that feel kind of like server failures or server timeouts or things like that.
And so by putting so much on device, and of course by also having probably a pretty strong financial incentive to put more and more on device over time and to minimize server requests, that is both good for privacy, and you're right, when they do have to send them to servers or to another model, they're sending a minimal set of information, and that's good.
But I got the impression that most requests are intended to be handled fully on device.
And that's going to be just amazing for consistency and performance also.
Yeah, the one thing they don't have with this, and we talked about with learning, the LM's learning and everything, is they're not pitching, and they certainly don't have.
The idea of your own personal assistant that learns about you over time, right?
That's not this.
This is like one-offs.
You have an agent.
It can do it.
It can answer questions.
It can take commands or whatever, but it immediately forgets everything.
The servers forget everything.
The client forgets everything.
I know they have the semantic model, and they talked about this.
It's like,
we have a semantic model.
We didn't want to say we have the equivalent of Microsoft recall database on your phone, but don't think about that comparison, right?
Because they do have this local only semantic model of all this stuff that is the stew that processed all your email and all your photos and all your other things.
So you can ask Siri questions, find me the picture of this person with this thing or whatever, and I can pull it out because it's already done that processing, but there's no sort of like,
agent that learns about you because if there was it would live only on your phone and when your phone goes in a lake you would lose it well i think the phone is the agent in a way like like that the semantic index that you know they kept talking about i think what what they're trying to do is it use all the all the data and info that you already entrust to your phone not do something like microsoft recall or rewind ai where you're not creating like a whole new record of every single thing like a screen recorder it's not
in readable a readable form it doesn't have plain text versions and it doesn't have screenshots but it has hopefully that information inside it right but i think you know what they're doing seems to be you know more like a search index but it's it's it's a search index in ai terms of information that your phone already is keeping it's it doesn't seem like it's keeping new records but it's not but it's not learning anything
like it's not it's not gaining knowledge over time to become more and more intimately familiar with you it is always sort of just in time what it pulls from its semantic index and it can answer your question but there's no teaching at anything because the whole point is if there was teaching it what would you be teaching would you be teaching anything that's only on your device to do sort of a learning agent that learns about you and get smarter over time that would have to live somewhere other than on your phone and then introduce a whole host of other problems so they're not even addressing that they're saying you know this will you
crunch through the data on your phone which is all the data in your life and you could ask the questions and give you answer but it's never going to get any more knowledgeable about you other than you just adding new photos and new messages or whatever like there's no learning well but i think that is learning like you know you can't you can't give a huge preamble to your system prompt you know things like please speak to me only in limericks like you can't do that i mean i mean like learning learning like as in you know getting familiar with you and uh
like just the dream of the eye of like a thing that actually we discussed it.
The large angles don't learn in the ways that people think they do.
Right.
And Apple is not changing that here.
I just, I just think it's interesting to clarify because they do have that by doing going with this approach.
They do have the problem of where would this thing live?
Whereas all the voracious service side people are like, don't worry, it all lives in our cloud.
You'd both suck all your information up.
And if they figure out how to make that learn,
Don't worry, you have your own private one and it gets smarter over time.
And Apple doesn't have the ability to do that with this approach.
I don't think it's going to hurt them because as we discussed the last episode, there is no good way to do that with LLMs right now.
But if there ever is, Apple may need to, there may become a time where some intelligence needs to live somewhere other than on your phone.
And I'm sure Apple will work hard to find a privacy preserving way to do that.
All right.
Let's talk about how we're actually using this model.
Yep.
So they talked about several different things, and it started with capabilities.
So basically, what are we doing with this?
And they talked about language.
So prioritizing notifications, which seems like low-hanging fruit in terms of a good way to use it.
It may be a very difficult thing to implement, but in terms of a good way to use this sort of thing.
Are they going to prioritize down the Apple store notification?
I got this morning.
Yeah, right.
You never you need a Father's Day gift.
It's like thank you so much Apple store.
This is a stupid tangent, but like you know, the Apple TV thing tells you a sport score that pops over your screen.
Yeah, how do you disable that?
I thought I went through all the settings.
That drives me crazy.
I have never watched a sport on Apple TV ever.
No part of all the information Apple knows about me would indicate that I like sports at all.
And yet, I'm getting those sports promos on top of everything I watched in the Apple TV.
It makes me want to set it on fire.
I get so mad.
There is some way to disable this.
I'm sure.
I thought I had disabled it.
That's why, but I can't.
Someone write in and tell us how to actually disable it because it's driving me insane.
Anyway, it will prioritize those.
Top priority.
The movie you're watching, it's real important for you to know the score on a sports game you don't care about.
Hopefully Apple's learning index is better now than whatever's running on the Apple TV.
Sometimes I don't even know what sport they're talking about.
They're like, Rogers and Harrison are in the, like, I don't know who these people are.
Am I supposed to know people by their last name?
I can't tell what sport you're talking about.
All right, so then there's new writing tools that are available system-wide.
They may mention, I forget how they phrased it, but basically anywhere you would have a text field, like an actual Apple-vended text field, you can do rewrite, you can summarize.
at some point they talked about changing the tone that might have been email specific i don't recall but um you can change the tone of things i think it's anywhere i think all these this entire feature class is called rewrite and i think this is in any standard text field like like craig federighi said in the don't call it a talk show fake talk show they held afterwards um that it was probably explain what that is in a minute but carry on that that basically that it works it works anywhere that you sit you currently see things like spell check
like so any standard system third party apps not just any you know anywhere you see those standard controls and i was like mac i believe mac os 8 had a way to select text and summarize it we've come a long way that summarization was not very good i believe it would just pick the most relevant sentences based on analysis just string those together which worked about as well as you can imagine but yeah this another catch-up feature every app that we've used with ai enhancement has a feature to summarize it and rewrite it and fix the right but you know they're they're implementing it well it's system-wide it's available third parties we hope it works well
i think that it does make me a little bit uneasy that like all right so here we are we're having ai generate and edit our messages that are going to be sent to someone else who's going to use ai to summarize them and it's like what are we doing like what this seems like sexual waste i mean in some respects like
You would hope that this will teach people to be better writers when they see how things are rewritten.
Do calculators teach people how to map themselves better?
It's not quite the same because you just care about the answer with a calculator where I assume people will read the revised writing to see if it is acceptable to them.
Maybe that's not... That's a big assumption.
I know, but things like that...
i think you can learn by seeing you know seeing how if you have if you had a human editor revise your writing and you watch them do it you will eventually become a better i'm not saying this is a tool to become a better writer but i i think there is some learning happening there because a lot of time people just write a certain way and they don't think about it and just having somebody rewrite their stuff like even if it's a computer and them seeing oh that actually is better that way it can teach them to be a better writer in small ways but we'll see how much people actually use these features
And for people not reading, that's obviously the danger case is like, oh, I don't, I'll just hit this button and then I'll hit send.
People are going to get burned by that.
They're going to learn.
Oh, maybe I shouldn't read what I wrote.
Like it's just, it's one of those things, tools to give you enough rope to hang yourself.
And I think this is the case with that.
I do like, though, like the one of the options.
So first of all, rewrite is going to give you like a really, really good proofread, you know, grammar check kind of thing.
It's going to be more advanced than most grammar checks.
Isn't there a service Grammarly, is it?
Grammarly, yeah.
Whatever uses it for this.
So like that's good to have that be on device, too, to not have basically a key logger from someone else.
um so that's good but also like i like that they have tone changes as one of the options to rewrite messages so you can make your writing more formal or whatever and i think that's not or like you know have different like sentiment analysis to have it be like maybe less negative that i think is going to be nice for people who maybe are not great at that kind of writing or even that kind of speaking i mean like like forum software has had stuff like that for years where they'll say before you hit send on this message it seems pretty aggressive you should
You don't want to calm it down.
You know, like people have been using it to try to make people be less obnoxious online.
And I tried to write down the tone things, but they were all like nice.
It was like, do you want your tone to be more concise or more friendly or more conciliatory, right?
Where is the more aggressive tone?
setting.
I want it to be more assertive.
I want it to be like maybe you're negotiating for real estate over email or something like that wasn't in the options and I kind of understand that because the thing will just start threatening people's lives or whatever, right?
Make me a better negotiate, right?
But this is part of the being conservative with like this.
Let's just have all the tone settings to be make you sound nicer and none of them to be because sometimes you do want to be more assertive, but I will not.
It's too dangerous for I to help you with that at this point with respect.
I don't think that you needed to be more assertive about locking wheel nuts.
I was so nice about it.
I was just mostly incredulous.
No, but it's good, too.
For people who are trying to write a formal business email or something, and maybe they don't have that kind of writing skill, or maybe they don't know English that well.
I think this has a lot of really good applications, but I think we are definitely going to have the problem of people not reading what it wrote and just sending it.
And then people don't read emails anyway.
These are all...
us exchanging so much text is such a big change from when i was a kid when people did not exchange text this much period in their entire lives like they didn't write letters to each other and there was no no text messaging no email no this not right now people work with text so much more i think it is making people better writers and i think you learn like when you get your first job where you have to do like job email oh job email is different than text messages like kids will learn that when they get their first job and realize they can't
address their co-workers and boss the same way and like there's a culture that evolves around that and you know for better for us we all learn how to write work emails and having computers help out with that uh you know maybe we'll just smooth that curve a little bit yeah please advise right so the language stuff is in mail notes safari pages keynote and third-party apps as john had mentioned
Then we get to images.
I don't know why I wrote down photos, emojis, and GIFs, but apparently that was mentioned.
You get like a Bitmoji style generated images of people.
It's more like a Memoji, isn't it?
Doesn't it look kind of like the Memoji style?
Well, sort of, but then you've got like the backgrounds and they're not interactive, but they're like holding things, which is more Bitmoji.
I don't know.
I mean, it's one way or the other.
But yeah, what it's saying is you have pictures of people in your contacts, in your photos collection that it has identified using the people in places feature.
You can ask it to draw you a cartoony picture of that person, which is brave.
Yes, that's a bold move.
Because cartoony pictures of people can go wrong in many, many ways.
And this is an Apple feature, not an open AI feature, which we'll get to in a little bit.
This is an Apple feature.
So if Apple hoses this,
There's going to be press about it.
There's a lot of ways it's going to go wrong, right?
I bet they've been very careful with certain things.
Don't make my nose too big or whatever.
I bet there's a lot of that kind of stuff in there.
First of all, they don't want to make it something unflattering because people don't want to see a flattering picture of themselves.
And second, I think it's got the same problem that I've always complained about Memoji is that unlike the Miis and Nintendo, Memoji all have little pumpkin heads.
And my head's not a pumpkin.
It's a football, right?
Like...
They just regularize everybody into the little people from play school or whatever.
Everyone looks like a doll, and then you don't see yourself in that.
You're like, you have not captured my likeness.
That doesn't look like me, right?
This seems like it's going to try to capture people's likenesses so that when you paste it into a chat or whatever, or generate it in whatever way, people go, oh, that's Timmy.
I recognize his face.
It's not just because Timmy has brown hair, and it's just a round pumpkin head with brown hair on it, so...
This is the first sort of like potential danger zone of the features they've got.
Because all the other ones like text summarization, helping you with writing, changing the sentiment nicer.
This has the potential to go wrong.
But anyway, it's part of their image generation framework.
It can make people for you.
Indeed.
And you can do it as sketches, illustrations, or animations.
And it's built into the system apps.
Then another capability, Action.
Basically what they're saying is you can say, I think to Siri was the implication.
This is such a weird structure of the thing.
We've talked about it before of like, how are they going to talk about the OS without talking about AI features?
And the fact is they didn't.
They talked about AI features.
They just didn't call them AI.
How are they going to talk about Siri when they haven't introduced Siri yet?
They just talked about it and they just didn't mention Siri.
Like later they're going to mention Siri.
Normally they have a way to arrange it so they can talk about what they want about it.
They couldn't avoid it.
They had to talk about things that they hadn't quote unquote talked about yet.
And this is one.
Yes, you're asking Siri.
So the examples they gave, you know, pull up the files that Jaws shared with me last week or show me all the photos with Declan and Michaela and Aaron and me or show me the podcast that my wife sent last week.
I was happy to hear that.
Um, and so, you know, I wasn't, I can't do that.
Well, my point is just that I'm always pleased when Apple acknowledges that podcasts are a thing, but, um, but yeah, I think these make a lot of sense.
I think this is the sort of thing we want to see from Siri is making it more useful.
Um, they also said a lot about personal context and they started to flirt a little bit with like rewind AI and, um, what does it recall that Microsoft has been embroiled over and,
But they said that there is an awareness of what's on the screen.
They didn't say that.
They showed things that said, hey, when you're on the screen, that's the context.
And so when you say something like, oh, send this to whatever or like, I'm assuming it's not OCRing the screen and scraping the info.
I'm assuming this is all like user activity APIs and Apple's apps that have integration.
I don't know if that's true.
Well, I don't think that's exclusively true because one of the examples they showed at some point, it might not have been at this part of the presentation,
But like somebody sent their address in the text message thread, right?
So like you and I are exchanging messages.
You send me your mailing address.
And they said to Siri, you know, add that address to his contact or something along those lines.
But Siri has full access to messages, right?
True.
It's Apple's own app.
Like if that was WhatsApp, what would it have done?
I see your point.
Yeah, I'm not sure.
That's a good point.
I'm not entirely sure.
Honestly, I think because of the way they're doing this, I would have no problem with it screen scraping and OCRing it because I know that it is just getting the information it wants, it's sending it to a server that doesn't log it, that has no ability to store things, and it throws it away.
That's so much better.
It is also probably just using the accessibility APIs.
It's probably already all...
There are lots of, like I said, there's NS user activity, not NS, but there's user activity API.
There's the other various ways where this information is exposed to the OS, to the frameworks that you're using, because you're not, you know, you're using the UI frameworks.
There's lots of ways they can do this.
And that is the advantage they have as the platform vendor.
And
being having being context aware in this way is great because when they said about context like how are we providing context you're providing context by just using your phone whatever you're doing on your phone that is the context and then you activate the new siri which we'll see in a little bit and you don't have to do anything to provide the context it's already there and the os sort of extracts that from what you're doing and what you have done right because the os knows all that and uses that to hopefully get a more useful answer out of the l1
So I talked about architecture.
I feel like maybe we should try to breeze through this as quickly as possible.
But basically, they made a whole speech about how privacy is important.
And of course, they cited that on-device processing is where they're doing most of this, which leads us to Apple Intelligence being Apple Silicon only, apparently A17 Pro and above.
They talked about how there's different models.
There's LLMs and diffusion models.
They have an on-device semantic index, the software image.
They talked a lot about how their images, which they meant both for the iPhone and for their servers, which we're going to get to in two seconds, are independently verifiable.
And I'm not entirely clear how or why or what.
All they're saying is like, you know how security researchers can find flaws in iOS because they have iOS?
that's the same thing.
If you run servers, there was no reason for you to give them what's there.
Now, anyone listening to this who's not an Apple and I was like, why don't they just give them the source code?
That's not yet the Apple way.
But honestly, analyzing a compiled binary is much harder than analyzing the source code.
But that's the way it is.
So they talk about private cloud compute, which basically the short short of it is they try to do everything on device when they can, including a lot of the image generation.
I think they had said at one point that they do that on device.
But there is an awareness that, oh, this is not going to work on device.
I got to send this to something with more compute power.
Yeah.
They're using servers that are, in turn, using Apple Silicon that draws on the security properties of Swift, among other things, which I'm not entirely clear what that means.
It doesn't mean, like, memory safety and stuff.
This private cloud compute finally makes sense of the rumor we talked about in a past episode about...
using Apple Silicon and service finally makes sense, right?
And not because of the secure on client, it's because this is stuff they would run on device, they're just farming it out.
And if you're going to farm it out, you have to farm it out to you don't have to, but it's much easier to farm it out to the same architecture, I would run an Apple Silicon, but it would burn your CPU or you don't have enough RAM.
Well, guess what?
Apple makes bigger Apple Silicon chips.
Finally, it's like, why would they use the M two ultra?
This is why it's it's Apple Silicon.
It is think of it as just an outboard giant processor for your phone that you call upon briefly to do a thing and get the answer back.
That may I feel so much better.
I'm like, why are they doing this?
Why are they making service?
And so, yeah, they'll give you the image of the thing that's running on that server, and they'll do a cryptographic thing where, you know, you can prove that iOS won't talk to it unless it's been... The one piece they didn't mention is, like, there's got to be a third party involved in here.
Otherwise, we're just taking Apple's word for it that will only let you use the published ones.
But they're bending over backwards.
Like, they're going almost as far enough to give you the source code to it.
It's saying...
We're going to do outboard processing, but we don't want any of your data.
These things can't log.
They have no storage subsystem.
They're running like a version of Apple's operating system that takes those parts of the operating system out.
There's no support for persistent storage.
There's no file system.
like it's just so you see this a lot in the cloud computing where they have servers that can't log that don't save any information.
This is what they're doing because they don't want this information.
It's cheaper for them not to have it and they are really really going to great lengths to try to make it so that an outside observer could say yes, they're honestly not saving my stuff.
But they do want to be able to do things faster than they can on your phone or with more RAM than they can on your phone.
This is a very clever solution.
I'm much more optimistic about it now than I was before.
Yeah, and the other thing that I think worth mentioning is Marco alluded to a quasi-talk show that we went to, and then we ignored it after that.
But what we had done was, during the State of the Union, actually,
They had iJustine interview John Gianandrea, I think was the pronunciation.
Tim Cook didn't say, Tim Cook just called him JG.
That's what everyone calls him.
Yeah, John Gianandrea.
But anyways, they had a conversation, and it was like half an hour long.
it was mostly softballs and mostly it appeared to be, you know, prepared both remarks and questions.
But one of the things that Justine had asked was, well, you never really talked about the environment.
And this all comes back together because I forget who it was, but one of them said, look, all of our chips began life as iPhone chips where power is incredibly important.
And so...
If we're going to do all this cloud computing, why wouldn't we try to do it on something that sips power rather than slurps power?
And so here again, like you were saying, John, this also helps me grok and understand why they're doing all this with Apple Silicon.
And they emphasize, oh, and by the way, all data centers run on 100% renewable energy anyway.
Yep, exactly right.
So anyway, so experiences.
Now we get to Siri.
So Siri apparently serves 1.5 billion requests per day, and it was introduced 13 years ago.
I think that was my first WWDC then, because that would make it 2011, wouldn't it?
It doesn't matter.
It was introduced in 2011.
My first was 2009.
I was 11.
That was your first as well, right, John?
Sorry, I'm looking at John and pointing, which is not helpful for the listeners.
We don't do this in person often.
So anyways, it's more natural, relevant, and personal.
It has a whole new look.
It's like a
a glowing rim light and rainbow animation.
It's a cool look.
I also like how there's a little bit of an indentation animation where the button is where you're squeezing it.
That's kind of a cool look.
We were talking about in the pundit world, are they going to rename Siri?
Because the old one has such bad PR.
It's so dumb.
Everyone hates Siri.
Maybe they'll call it Siri X or Siri 10 or something like that.
Not that they would rename it, but rebrand it.
Siri AI, another possibility, right?
And then people are like, oh, no, they'll just keep this name the same.
It'll tell us really this time it's good, right?
Yeah.
They did something that I hadn't heard anyone predict, which is, you know, keep the name the same, which a lot of people did say that they would do.
But they essentially totally rebranded Siri.
The icon is different.
The user interface is different.
How it manifests in the OS is different.
It is.
You would be forgiven for thinking that Siri is gone and has been replaced with something new.
I didn't think they would change the icon.
The iconic Siri look with the wavy thing, gone.
Now there's a colorful infinity symbol thing or whatever.
The icon's out of the menu bar.
Everything about this is rebranded, except it's still Siri.
This is really trying to let people know this is...
You may have been annoyed with Siri and we didn't change the name, but this is better.
But everything is better.
Yeah.
So they made a big point about how it will understand you even if you stumble over your words, which I use Siri most when I'm in the car because I'm using it with CarPlay and I'm responding to text messages or whatever the case may be.
I don't know what my problem is.
I literally talk for a living.
That is literally my vocation, and yet I am constantly stumbling over my own words, and so hopefully that will get a lot better.
It maintains the conversational context, and they gave examples that you would expect.
I can't recall any of them right now, but it was what you would expect.
So do this, and then, okay, what about, or taking several steps in a row.
Because the context window is a natural part of LLMs, and so this fits well with that.
There's type to Siri, so you can double tap on the bottom of the screen, and then you can type kind of sort of like a chat bot, which I think there's a type to Siri already.
You can type to Siri now, but they're just exposing it more broadly because a lot of the time the barrier to using Siri is I don't want to talk out loud right now in whatever context I'm in.
I don't want to or can't, and so this gives it a more prominent option to something you could do before, but most people probably didn't know how to access.
they're giving Siri a lot of product knowledge, which I was like, I'm sorry, what?
So they said, you know, you can ask Siri, how do I scan a QR code?
And once it processes and realizes what you're asking, it will show like a little help...
thing at the top of the screen saying step one do this step two do that step three do this which i thought was phenomenal and you know another example they gave very quickly is how do i write a message now and schedule to send later and so it will tell you it will teach you how to do that which i thought was very cool although i don't i they didn't go through with that as like do those instructions stay on the screen how can you access the UI when they're there but it's better than nothing but yeah to be clear they didn't say this explicitly i'm assuming it's only apple products and
like how do i fix my refrigerator like they're not on board for that but uh i will definitely use this because very often i want to google for something and find like a text bag like how deep does it go can i ask it what the resolution was on like the second ipad or something you know like i mean apple has this info i it's great that they're exposing it uh maybe it's mostly useful for tech podcasters but i'm looking forward to it
It's just a KBase index at this point.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, but by all means, it's like a better search engine for information that's already on Apple's website somewhere, but you'll never find.
Unfortunately, John, I don't think it will prepare the way for you, so I wouldn't try that.
There's in-app actions, so add this photo to the email I drafted to Steve, or show me photos of Stacey in New York wearing her pink coat.
Like that example in particular.
I find that one of the things I miss so deeply about Google Photos, which was also not perfect, but at the time that I abandoned it a couple of years ago, was pretty darn good, was being able to search for something with natural language.
And Apple has supported this for the last couple of years, but it's not great.
Yeah, they had a fixed set of words and phrases that you could use.
And if it wasn't, I remember I have an app on my phone called Queryable.
And I showed this to an Apple person at one point, and I said, I use this third-party app to search photos.
And they're like, why don't you just use the photo search?
You can just type things or whatever.
And I showed them an example, and it was like ripped blue T-shirt or some phrase like that.
Queriable, a third-party app that has to grind over and index all your things, but that uses type an LLM type thing.
Like, look, it found it instantly.
And
You know the photos didn't have ripped blue T-shirt as any one of the keywords, so you would never find it.
And finally, Apple has caught up with that and said, yes, you just type what you want to find.
We'll do our best to find it.
We're not confining you to keywords powered by modern technology.
I'm very happy to see this.
Me too.
I hope it works really well because this is one of those things, and this is to bring it full circle, what I was talking about earlier, and not to say that you guys disagree at all, but this is what I want to see.
Take something that is frigging painful in my life.
I know that I took a picture of me and Marco on the Nürburgring.
And I know that it was sometime in 2013.
And yes, I could like drill in via map.
But I forget where the Nürburgring is.
And you're scrolling.
And you find the month.
There's so many photos there.
And you go past it because it's just one picture.
Right.
Yeah, it's so frustrating.
This is the moment that I want the adults in the room to fix that problem.
And as far as we know so far, they're fixing it.
So I'm here for it.
But they also said you can do something like, say, make this photo pop.
And I guess it increases saturation or something on those lines.
I have funny ways for you to hit a button in the UI.
OK, sure.
Significant enhancements to app intents.
And this was kind of hinted at or obliquely mentioned many, many, many times.
But basically, the app intent system, and Marco, I'm happy for you to jump in whenever you're ready.
But the app intent system is powering a lot of what Siri is doing, which is exactly, I think, what Marco, you had predicted.
Yeah, it's what I've been hoping for.
Because it's a way for apps to expose different actions like, you know, play a podcast, you know, send email or whatever to the shortcut system so far.
And that's great for shortcuts users, but there's not that many shortcuts users.
So this is like what they're doing is expanding the system and basically adding it to the semantic index.
So that way, at some point rolling out slowly over the next year or so, you know, Siri will first be able to access those those app intents and like in and start doing actions like, you know, give me a list of all the podcasts and overcast that they never set up a shortcut for.
That it can use the AppIntense system with AI approaches and linguistic analysis to look at the descriptions and actions and kind of try to figure out what you actually meant and then actually do that in those apps.
What they showed today is the early foundations of that.
It's going to be a while before we can actually really do that.
And a lot of this stuff is kind of hand-wavy as like
soon this will be available or later later in the year or next year but this is good this is a this is exactly what i was hoping to see this is a great first step yep couldn't agree more uh they also gave another great example siri when's my mom's flight landing and it was pulling together not only the email that has her flight number but also what is the actual arrival time for that flight and again this is smart useful useful ways to solve problems for people i have a
question about that though a lot of the examples they were showing were like oh and we pulled this from email or whatever and they did show the superhuman email app at one point but like my question is i don't use the mail app does it have no access to my email because it's from google i understand it's a third-party integration problem google's not going to share that with you google already does a lot of these things google will read my emails knows where my flights are gives me summaries and so on and so forth but it seems like because i use gmail the
Nothing in my email will be exposed to Siri, which will make it less useful for me.
And that is actually a problem for Apple because a lot of people do use third party mail clients.
And I hope Apple at least comes up with a way to integrate with Siri, you know, for third party email apps that then Google can ignore for three years like they did with like, what was it, them?
I don't know if we know yet, through documentation and everything, to what degree the existing Spotlight APIs are being used to feed the semantic index from third-party apps.
I don't think we know that.
Very different question.
Google is not motivated to do this.
Google has no spotlight support.
Google has its own search, which is very good.
But it's kind of a shame that the usefulness of Siri depends highly on having access to things like your email that it just may not have access to if you don't use Apple Mail.
So they said it's a new era for Siri.
Then you can enhance your writing.
We spoke about most of this already, but there's smart reply in mail.
And what I thought was interesting was, like I write to the boys, you know, hey, when are you going to San Jose?
What is your flight number?
When are you getting in?
Et cetera, et cetera.
So I have like a list of questions, right?
What they had was like a wizard thing.
sort of interface where you would just say, okay, my flight number is one, two, three, four.
I get in on Sunday and I'll be in at 5 p.m.
or whatever.
And then it would, based on my answer, their answers, I guess, it would draft an email that would say, you know, hey, I'm getting into such and such time and blah, blah, blah.
And I thought that was very neat.
Yeah, and people are like, oh, don't you want to write that email yourself?
Especially on a phone, if you're on the go, you don't have time to tap out an email, but you just want to say, yes, I'll be there, and I'll be there at 8, or no, I'm not coming, and you don't want to have to type out that email, this is a useful feature.
You called it a wizard using the Microsoft terminology.
It's turning what would be a typing exercise into a button pressing exercise, and when you're on the go, especially on the watch, I don't know if this is exposed in the watch, but even on the phone, sometimes you don't want to sit there and grab your phone with two hands and type, type, type, or whatever.
I give this feature a big thumbs up.
Yeah.
Mail, previews and mail.
So what I was going to say is previews and mail, now summaries.
What does that even mean?
So when you're looking at your inbox, for example, and you'll see the first two or three lines of text from that email, oftentimes it's like, hey, how's it going?
Hey, we spoke about this.
Well, now what that's going to show is a summary of the email.
Two very big thumbs up for me if that's what's happening or if it works well, I guess I should say.
And it also will bubble up priority messages.
Same thing with notifications, priority at the top.
You'll get summaries, et cetera.
They specifically enumerated, oh, if the group chat is popping off.
You'll get a summary of it, which is great.
Focus has a reduce interruptions mode.
And, you know, they showed a screenshot of like maybe important.
And I think it was like a ride share or something like that.
I forget exactly what it was.
They have a they had a section about expressing yourself and they talked about Genmoji.
So what you can do is you can type a T-Rex wearing a tuxedo on a surfboard and then you'll get a T-Rex, an emoji looking thing of a T-Rex wearing a tuxedo on a surfboard.
Yeah.
If this works, that's really cool.
It's basically an emoji generator that generates new art in the style of Apple's emoji, which is great.
This is a clever idea to choose to do this particular feature because the images generated are low resolution.
That's true.
That's faster to generate.
Oh, that's interesting.
Yeah.
They picked very tiny images.
Very often, the AI image generators will make you a thumbnail first.
And if you really like it, it'll do the longer processing for the bigger thing.
But these are all fast and presumably on device and presumably trained on Apple's own emoji.
That was one of the questions, by the way, that I just asked.
They said, you may be wondering, listen to this.
They asked Apple, what did you use to train all your AI models?
And their answer was not...
Great.
I was hoping they would have touted in the thing.
And by the way, everything we train these with is information that we own.
But what they said instead was we trained it on, you know, publicly available information on the web, yada, yada.
Like they didn't have a story kind of like Adobe or whatever of like, look, we paid for our own all the information we train this on.
It's nothing.
Not on any of your user data.
It's just on like stock photos that we bought or licensed.
We licensed things from New York time.
They didn't say that.
They trained it on publicly available information.
So Apple is not currently entirely, you know, immune to whatever the fallout is of the legal ramifications of training AI stuff.
Yep.
So they have an image playground, which this is where we're starting to jump the shark a little bit, but it could be cool.
So what this is, is it's in line, or I believe they said in a dedicated app, and you can create playful images.
There are themes, costumes, accessories, places, and more.
It all happens on device, and you can use different styles, like we mentioned before, animation, sketch, or illustration.
There are suggestions related to personal context.
You can you can do this, I think, in many different places.
And this is creating like a what was the image generator thing?
You just said it a second ago.
The stable diffusion.
It's giving like a stable diffusion style image.
This is 2024 clip art.
Yeah, actually.
But they really showed it being used as clipboard.
You need an image of something.
Now you can just describe what it is.
Or if you did a sketch of something, they showed someone they drew like an outline of something.
You can just say, take this and make it into a picture.
And they even showed, hey, maybe you didn't provide an illustration.
Maybe you wrote a note or a document.
And you just circle the blank area next to it.
And it says, make me an image.
And it will look at the text and figure based on that text, here's what the image should be.
I presume that this was trained only on known licensed images because this is a big danger zone.
But if they train it only on like if there's no porn there, right?
It's not going to generate those type of things, right?
It seems...
very constrained and it's just the interface is wacky and weird and really yes maybe it's like a glowing blob and these things floating around it i'm not sure that's the right choice for this feature but anyway uh if you need to generate ai looking stock art that everyone will know was ai generated uh you can use this feature to do it it's available to third parties it's available as a dedicated app it appears in lots of places it's blobby and weird and i think this is the most sort of out there feature they decided to add that is a
questionable utility of questionable legality based on what they've told us and i think all the stuff that it generates is kind of recognizable as having been generated but you know it's better than i guess doing what other people what people did before features like this which is that you just google you just type what you wanted in google you make it an image search you grab some image you found on the web you yank it and put it in your thing and this is probably better than that
They mentioned a few other things.
Photo editing.
They have a cleanup tool, magic eraser style thing, searching using natural language, which we talked about.
The memory movies, which I actually really enjoy those.
They're clearly a very naive implementation, but they're fun.
And I guess they're going to get a lot better.
Or you could even type a description and it'll assemble the movie for you.
They even said including chapters.
I'm not sure if they literally mean chapters or if they mean like different phases.
Like a title card or whatever.
And by the way, the way the third party thing of like scribbling over an image or whatever, that's their magic wand tool.
It's part of like pencil kit.
The little pencil thing that you see lets you pick like a highlighter, a pencil, a pen or whatever.
Now you have a new tool, which is like a magician's magic wand.
And that's the thing you use in any document where you're using pencil kit and that thing appears.
You can just grab the magic wand and circle something that you drew and it will make an image out of it.
And then Craig comes back to say that notes will record and transcribe audio.
And then I believe he said you can also do this on a phone call.
And part of that is that it will notify you.
They didn't explain how, but notify you and the other party, I should make it clear.
They will notify both parties that the recording has started and that will be part of the phone call and then it will record and transcribe it.
Yeah, and summarize it afterwards.
Right, right, right.
So all common voice meeting features.
And then all this is available for free on new OSs.
Then they talked about, hey, what if you need to do something more, like something more intense that requires more general knowledge, et cetera, et cetera.
So we have partnered with ChatGPT and GPT-4.0, and Siri can leverage ChatGPT.
And what we've talked about, and we are not the only ones, is, well, how does Apple make it clear that if this gets gross or weird or whatever—
that's not on us.
That's them over there.
That's the weird, that's the double popped collar weirdos over there.
Don't blame us.
And so what happens is as you're using Siri, it will say, Hey, I forget exactly how it's verbalized, but basically, you know, I can't do this chat.
It doesn't say I can't do this.
That's the thing about this feature.
We're like, how is this going to manifest?
How are they going to present it?
The fact is, they don't have anything like this.
Now, if they did have something like this, how would they use it?
We don't know, because they don't have anything like this.
But basically, you talk to Siri, and I'm sure it doesn't say I can't do this.
What it does is helpfully offer, hey,
do you want me to send this to chat GPT?
As if people know what the hell chat GPT is.
They do.
People know.
And you can say yes or you can say no.
And if you say yes, it will do it and it will bring it back.
And they're really sort of isolating it to lay the blame.
And I was kind of surprised when they said, and by the way, this may work with other things besides chat GPT in the future.
They even named Google Gemini.
They said, you know, Google Gemini, we were talking with them and the rumors that you read.
No, they didn't say this, but they said, hey, we may, you know, we may integrate with other third party large language models.
What they didn't say is we're also internally working to make our model as good as theirs so we can use it.
They do have their own models.
They're using everything we've talked about so far is Apple's own models running an Apple's own servers and Apple's own device.
And they emphasize this in the keynote.
That's just just to be clear, everything you've seen.
It's us.
It's all us.
It's privacy preserving.
But
But then they didn't say this.
We don't have, we don't have this.
There's a thing we don't have that we know people are interested in and we wanted to provide access to it.
And the way they're doing it is sometimes when you talk to Siri, it's just that you talk to somebody else.
Yep.
And so they will go to chat GPT.
This will do composition, image generation, no account required.
It's free.
There's nothing logged.
ChatGPT subscribers can optionally connect their account to get more paid features, et cetera, et cetera.
They said you're in control of when ChatGPT is used.
It's coming later this year and support for other AI models in the future.
uh and so basically that's ai for the rest of us as they said iphone 15 pro and ipad and mac with m1 or later u.s english this summer everyone else pound sand for the time being an ipad m1 and later sorry yes yes yes yeah i this is this is pretty great i mean i think we need to wrap up because we're going along here um this i i'm very happy with what they've announced today i i think it is
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So overall, we'll see over the coming months as we dive into the APIs and see what the limitations are.
And then as we actually get to use these betas, we'll see kind of where the rough edges still are, what features aren't there yet.
But overall, as a way for them to have set the direction, I'm very happy with what this is.
Yeah.
I mean, all these things are still subject to, OK, well, we have to try to use them because the things they describe are great until we see what answers they give them.
But with these sort of AILM things, that's the big question.
Like, will it do a good job?
We like we like how it's set up.
We like, as I said, the architecture and their private clouds and the privacy preserving.
And we like how it integrates and we like everything about it.
But the bottom line is you're going to get a result.
Is the result useful?
Does it get it wrong?
This has always been the problem with Siri.
Siri ostensibly can do a bunch of things, but often you ask it to do them and it can't do them.
Will it be consistent more than Siri is?
Will it be faster?
These are all things that we'll find out when we start running the betas and see how it works out.
But the architecture and the arrangement and the selection of features they've laid out all look good.
It's just a question of execution now, and we hope they do that well.
Yep.
All right.
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What are we doing for overtime this week?
I think we're going to be talking about the Apple Park WWDC experience, which I'm very excited to talk about.
Everything except maybe the food will be in overtime.
We'll probably, we'll give everyone the food stuff in just a moment.
So overtime is our member exclusive segment.
You can join and listen atv.fm slash join.
Thank you so much, everyone.
And we'll talk to you next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-G, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
It's accidental, they didn't mean it.
So John, how was the WWDC food?
So we used to talk about the WWDC box lunches because they would be in like big convention centers and the convention centers very often have contracts that require Apple to use their vendor for food that you serve people.
So they had to use those vendors and that food was often...
exciting and surprising and unexpected and soggy and strange and just the source of lots of conversations.
This was my first WRC at Apple Park, even though they've done it here for a couple of years.
It was Casey's first as well.
They did not have box lunches.
Apple is not required to use some weird vendor for their food.
In fact, they can do whatever they want.
It's their food.
It's in Apple Park.
And I have to say, not that this is a high bar, but this was the best WRC food I have ever had.
Not even close.
It's nothing like the box lunches you see.
It was better than most catered food at any kind of office conference thing you're going to see.
It was interesting.
It was executed pretty well.
They didn't have many items that were ill-advised.
Yeah.
like an ice cream sundae and they leave it out in the sun for an hour.
Like there's some food items that are will work better in a context where you have to put out large volumes of it out for people.
Now, I will say that I was with the media people in a smaller area.
I don't know if the attendees got different food than we did, but the media area had maybe, you know, 100 or 200 people versus 5000 attendees.
Well, no, it's not 5000 anymore, right?
No, I think it's like 1500 or something.
I don't know.
It seems like a lot, but anyway, I
There's a lot more and so maybe the food was different down there, but yeah, they had a selection.
I don't even think they call it pizza.
I think they called it like focaccia with tomato sauce and cheese on top with basil and that's what it was and I have to say it was not pizza.
It didn't I mean it looked it would look like it was pretending to be Sicilian pizza, but what it tasted like was focaccia with mozzarella, but it was for for what it was.
I give it a thumbs up.
I it was it taste it didn't taste like pizza, but it tastes like a good food item that I want to eat right and that's what it's got to do and they have this little thing with like the pork belly on a cornbread thing.
Yeah, the hell that wasn't like thumbs up on that too and
Yeah, because it was like a slab of thick-cut bacon, basically, because that's what pork belly basically is, or vice versa.
And a little piece of cornbread, like a little sliver of jalapeno.
That was really good.
They had some sort of fish-like sandwich thing.
Yeah, I didn't bring the fish.
I wouldn't go for the fish.
It was really good.
It was actually really, really good.
You came back for seconds.
I did.
You got a second.
one of those and actually breakfast was really good to come to think of it.
They had little yeah, I had a great overnight Oats thing at breakfast.
I didn't have that, but I had they had little breakfast sandwiches that were like egg and bacon whatever those really good.
Yeah, those little mini slide like I got one with like eggplant on and some other stuff some pickled peppers and eggplant just I mean it wasn't you know, it's not high cuisine and you could tell some of it's you know, it's been out for a while and some of the pickled peppers did soak into the like the kind of hot dog bunny type, but I'm not saying it's amazing great food, but boy so
So much better than those box lunches.
Night and day better.
So much better.
There was something else that I – oh, I saw you grab a little, like, cup of salad.
And I'm really allergic to spinach, and so I'm always a little – like, I love salad, but I'm always a little reluctant to, you know, brave that in this sort of scenario.
But I looked, and they had the ingredients there because California, I guess.
But, hey, it worked out in my favor.
And I had that, and it had all sorts of ingredients that –
I don't typically eat, but it was very, very tasty.
So I enjoyed that.
They're called vegetables.
Oh, stop.
I have salads all the time.
The chocolate chip cookie, they had little packages.
The chocolate chip cookie was pretty good.
Yeah.
Even the touchscreen coffee was actually pretty good.
Oh, I'm impressed.
They have one of those like, you know, touchscreens where you push what you want and it just very slowly drips it out.
This very fancy looking faucet.
But even that was actually like, okay, which I was not expecting it to be.
Yeah.
No, I was very... One complaint is they had water, just, you know, water bottles there, and to try to be environmentally better, they didn't have plastic water bottles.
They had, like, aluminum water bottles.
The caps on those aluminum water bottles were so hard to get off.
Way too hard.
I have one right here.
It's fine.
just the initial thing where you have to break the little things that are connecting.
That's what I mean.
Not once it's open.
It's fine.
Yeah, do some strength training on that your wrist actually know it's just I mean, I got them open is that but it was harder harder than it should have been.
So there's one design problem with those with those bottles.
But yeah, again, the bar is low.
You're not expecting much but but
pleasantly surprised you know it's as you would expect the apple park food i'm sure people who work there and just like it's like work cafeteria food but well i think it was it said cafe max oh yeah no it's all the same that's what you get if you work there but like it is having eaten at a lot of company cafeterias in my career this is a step up from any place i have ever worked
Have you ever been to any of the Cafe Max ever, ever, ever?
Yes.
Okay.
So because we went like in 2017.
Honestly, I've always been very pleased with them.
I've gone to a few here and there like over different years and different buildings and different people giving us lunches and stuff.
And it's always been good.
Yeah.
I was very impressed with food.
It got two thumbs up for me.