Mid-Life Rally
We have to start with some housekeeping right away.
Happy birthday, Marco.
You are 40 years old in what, like six days?
Something like that.
Yeah, five.
How are you feeling?
We've heard our friend Merlin always joke about getting older and he apparently injured his ankle while sleeping a few weeks ago.
and i have now i was 40 for like 72 hours i woke up one morning like a half hour before my alarm was supposed to go off i thought oh crap i convinced myself all right let's go back to sleep a half hour later i wake up i can't move so literally in that half hour
I had somehow slept on my neck or shoulder in some weird way that... And, like, I do a lot of, like, core and flexibility exercises.
I am usually very healthy in these areas.
And yet, somehow, 72 hours after I turned 40, I slept for 30 minutes and broke myself and, like, can't twist my body for, like, two days now.
Like, it's slowly getting better.
But I'm like, oh, my God.
Like, I...
wow that comes on quickly right i feel like the warranty doesn't run out until like the mid 40s so i'm not sure what this is i don't know man i i genuinely feel this is such a boring thing for three old white guys to whine about being three old white guys but here we are um but no i feel like once i hit like 35 things that never ever used to bother me started to occasionally bother me and i i didn't have the planned obsolescence of 40 in three days that you have had
But I definitely will, like, bend wrong and can't twist my back for a week or whatever the case may be.
Like, all sorts of weird ailments.
Or, you know, I'll cough the wrong way and suddenly, like, my abdomen hurts for a day or two.
actually i'm not saying i exercise more or less than marco but i all i exercise every day like again maybe not maybe not the same way maybe not as strenuously but i exercise every single day and i am probably the healthiest i've ever been in my life or at least certainly the strongest and yet still if i look at something the wrong way suddenly like an entirely opposite end of my body is broken so yeah
well that's i don't understand how this is happening to marco because like i said on twitter like marco is i think probably also in probably the best shape of his life he's got rid of his banana allergy he's all you know trim and buff and doing all these exercises and like well not trim well trim er yes well i'm yeah i i am i'm very strong in certain ways i am not trim
That's not a thing.
Anyway, either way, you've definitely sort of had a midlife rally here, but now this whole sleep thing really sets you back.
Ever since I got more serious about fitness a few years ago and started doing more and more stuff, having the trainer and everything, our trainer's awesome.
We'll do things that exercise muscles that I didn't even know existed.
The problem most people have when they're doing fitness stuff on their own, maybe you go to a gym, maybe you have
like a treadmill or bike at home whatever it is usually most people can think of a few top hit muscle groups that you should work and you don't think of everything else because you're not a trainer you're not a professional in that area you know i love our trainer so much because we it's always a variety of stuff we're doing and it's always exercising all sorts of different muscles like you're
inner hips or like you know weird side bending things or something it's like stuff that you would never think to even know how to exercise on your own let alone like you know to do it correctly and so i'm very fortunate to have that and i've i've been able to avoid like i don't have any rsi problems anymore i've been able to avoid lots of like you know back problems i used to have like that's all gone and fixed well asterisk it was i mean i i
it was fixed until last weekend when i turned 40 but like it's just i i've i've put in all and i i guess you know this is why you put in the work right like you put in all that work you know you you do all the fitness stuff because yeah when you're when you're you know 19 you're made of rubber and you can do whatever you want and you won't get hurt truth um but you know as you as you
approach and then cross 40 you know these things start adding up and and uh i'm so glad that i do all that stuff because i can't imagine i'd probably be in way worse condition like just you know i'm sure i'd be hurting constantly uh if i if i wasn't doing all that other all the exercise stuff that i do and it's oh my god it's so it's so disheartening to somehow like sleep wrong for a half hour and be hurting for two days should have got marco care plus
Speaking of which, I have unplugged my HomePods.
Are you okay?
They just don't work anymore.
In the last couple of weeks, I don't think I've gotten the stereo pairing to work once.
It's been such a rollercoaster.
They've gone up and down.
We've had good times and bad times.
and this time like it just they are so broken like they're so unreliable in so many different ways they're slow they don't respond to things they forget what they're saying halfway it's just everything about them is just broken they don't work reliably anymore and so i'm officially decommissioning them i unplugged them i i actually i oh this is embarrassing i i got some stupid thing from
It was supposed to be a really good replacement, and it lasted like two seconds on the counter before it was rejected by the historical committee.
But it wasn't even good enough to keep... If I'm honest, it wasn't good enough to be worth the stupid price.
So what I did now, I just plugged in a HomePod Mini up there, which...
is not even close to sounding good in in the relatively large room it's placed in because of course it's a tiny little thing but i just i wish i wish apple would fix the home pod and release a new big one because whatever they're doing with the mini it's and we've i don't want to drill this into the ground but whatever they're doing with the mini it's clearly running a different software stack than the big one it's certainly a different hardware stack but i think the software stack is very different as well and so the big one just is so much more broken
in so many more ways the small one seems to work pretty well we have a few small ones around the house they seem to work pretty well the big ones just don't anymore and on one hand i feel very burned in the sense that these were expensive and they aren't that old and they're already like pretty much not for not functioning um so on one hand i kind of feel burned on the other hand
i'm looking around the environment and i'm like i i still just want apple to make a good one i don't trust anyone else to to uh to do this because i've looked around the market and there just isn't anything good so i don't know what to do that's that's going to be an ongoing thing i'm also i'm kind of upset because i also have to replace my ipad keyboard oh because that it died oh did it just turn 40
it is about four it's almost it's almost four so that's it's 40 in overpriced accessory years right you multiply by 10 and yeah which keyboard the floaty one or the not floaty one the the one that came out in 2018 the folio without the trackpad oh okay because i was gonna say the floaty one came out like early on in the pandemic if i'm not mistaken so it wouldn't be four years old but but no i didn't realize okay
I don't care for that one on the 11-inch because, well, either side, just because I'm not that much of an iPad power user, and it's so big and bulky and expensive.
And the combined object you get with the Magic Keyboard, which is what you're talking about with the trackpad, the combined object you get, I did not like.
I thought it was clunky.
I didn't like how hard it was to move the hinge, and it was very heavy, and it was just like, forget it.
But I like the regular keyboard folios they've been making since the iPad Pro forever ago.
I like those.
Those are great.
Those are like almost $200, like $160, $170 usually.
So they're almost $200.
They do die eventually.
We got one for my father-in-law a few years back, and his just died this past year.
I've had one other one die before this.
Mine just died again.
Whatever...
And it seems like it's an electronic thing.
It's not a, like, key switch failing thing.
It's something with the controller electronics where it just, like, it just won't appear to the iPad anymore.
Like, the iPad will just think there's no keyboard connected.
And you can, like, pop it off, pop it back on, and it might reconnect.
Eventually, that stops working.
Like, over time, even that doesn't work anymore.
It doesn't seem to be, like, a dirty contacts thing.
It's, like, try cleaning the contacts.
Like, it's not that.
So...
it just seems like these keyboards just die so often so worth pointing out if you're going to buy a 200 or if you get the magic keyboard a like 330 i think dollar ipad keyboard yeah whatever it is it's a lot yeah be aware they only last a few years um which again i'm not happy about that either and through other various this is i don't want to make this too much of the marco show but
through other various things that are that are mostly boring in the last couple of days i have ordered both a new ipad and a new iphone um for various reasons and family needs and things like that um off cycle and it feels really dirty i'm like i know new stuff in both of those areas is going to come out in a few months but like i need them now
and so it's like i'm just i'm becoming like a normal person like i have to just buy stuff and kind of not care for these particular roles like well this thing's going to be replaced in a couple of months like i've done it plenty of times too getting kids phones and stuff when they don't want to hand me down or when they break a hand me down and they need a new phone now and you know a new one's coming in two months they just got to buy
Yeah, I've been eyeing an M1 iPad Pro because, as I've said many times, I'm on the 2018 iPad Pro, which honestly still runs really well.
Like, it's not brand new and the battery is a little eh.
But all things considered, this thing is four years old or thereabouts, and it runs really well.
And I hear what you're saying about the Magic Keyboard, the floaty keyboard.
It is heavy and bulky.
I disagree about the hinge, but otherwise I agree with everything you said.
But I do really like it.
And I like, maybe I'm just easily amused, but I like having a trackpad from time to time.
So I still really like my iPad, but I'm looking at, you know, the beta and center stage or whatever the heck it's called.
No, not center stage.
I'm doing the same thing.
Stage manager.
Thank you, stage manager.
And I'm looking at not having an M1 iPad Pro, and I'm thinking, oh, should I get an iPad?
It's about time to upgrade, but no, I should wait, shouldn't I?
I should wait.
I should definitely wait.
That's one of the reasons I upgraded.
So I didn't even have an iPad for most... I don't even have a TV.
I didn't even have an iPad for most of the last year, because as my kid's iPad was breaking, and we were awaiting that product to be updated...
As that was happening, I lent him mine for a span of like a number of months.
So and I just didn't have one for a while.
I hardly ever use the iPad.
However, now I have significant reason to have an iPad for testing because now my app became a lot more resizable on the iPad.
and i have to really make sure that works and you can do i think you do some testing in the simulator but anyway so at the same time as i was as i was thinking because again i i too have the 2018 11 inch uh ipad pro and it's because you know for my uses it's fine
Yeah, I really do want to point that out one more time.
I know I said it a second ago, but this is a four-year-old device that for the sorts of things that Marco and I are doing up until now, it's been fine.
It doesn't feel slow.
It doesn't feel like a four-year-old device.
It's actually held up stunningly well, and I feel like we should applaud Apple for that.
But that being said, somebody buy me an M1 iVent Pro, please.
Yeah, well, that's the conclusion I came to.
I wanted a stage manager test device, and I looked at the Air, I looked at the Pro, and basically the Pro could get to me faster.
And separately from that, there's a new role in my life for boring reasons, but I now could use an iPad again on a regular basis.
I kind of need a separate device.
I need an iPad.
the ipad i currently oh and oh and and like over on my side of my desk is tiff's old 12.9 inch ipad the previous gen one so i have the 12.9 and the 11 both from 2018 sitting around not doing anything meanwhile i need an m1 version for testing that hurts
So I'm just like, all right.
So I did the Apple trade-in for both of them, and the combined trade-in for both of them gets me the cheapest M1 iPad.
So I'm just like, all right.
I'll trade these two in for the one I actually want and spend the $200 on a new keyboard and call it a day.
So what's the story with the iPhone?
Oh, and so that's a separate thing.
So that's a family member finally has accepted an iPhone.
And so for various reasons, not my kid, just, you know, older family member.
Finally, we've been trying to find an iPhone for a long time.
We finally did.
They agreed to take my old iPhone 12 mini.
Currently, before that, my main testing iPhones for testing my app on different Apple IDs and different store configurations and stuff like that and different OS versions, my testing setup has been an iPhone 7 and my iPhone 12 mini.
Well, the 12 mini just got given away, and the iPhone 7 doesn't run iOS 16.
So I'm like, all right, I could really use one more iPhone.
And so I went on Amazon and bought their refurbished, renewed, crap, used iPhone 13 mini.
So that way I will have the best mini phone that was ever made.
paid almost nothing for it relatively to its new price um and that will be a new good test phone because it is both mini so it's cool and i'll be happy when i pick it up and also i can run all the latest stuff on it we are sponsored this week by collide a new take on endpoint management that asks how can we get end users more involved
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So popping up the stack several levels.
We also need to go back to our housekeeping and congratulate John's son, Alex, who is a high school graduate, which is very exciting.
Hey!
So how are we feeling, Dad?
Good, I guess.
I mean, one thing I learned about his high school, and I don't know if it's just his high school, it seems to be a trend.
When we were in high school, and maybe...
I don't know.
I should say when I was in high school, and maybe when you two were in high school as well, the sort of tradition was that at graduation, the school valedictorian would give a speech, right?
Is that a thing that you two experienced?
I gave a speech at my high school graduation because I was president of the graduating class.
Thank you very much.
But yes, it was valedictorian.
I think the salutatorian gave a speech in me, if memory serves.
Yeah, there you go.
All right.
So they don't do that as much anymore, I think.
And my son's school also...
As far as I'm aware, doesn't even give like rankings, academic rankings.
Oh, interesting.
And so instead what they do is everyone in the school votes or something like that to say who should speak.
So they had a bunch of student speakers and people voted for them and they got up to go up there and talk.
Right.
But it's not based on like academic rank or.
class president or anything like that although i think one of the people that spoke was someone involved in student government but anyway i'm not quite sure how it works but all this is to say is that like so okay well there's no because i asked myself like what what do you think your class rank was like oh they don't do that dad you're so old
And so I'm like, well, you know, I can just say that you are the number one in your class, right?
Because who knows?
I mean, you might have been.
So my class rank was 90 out of 180.
Nice.
I was exactly the most mediocre student in my class.
it's that's you know so the number yeah the number like that is like well you know academically the numbers are what they are but the numbers are so weird now because they do waiting for like honors classes and all sorts of weird stuff and some people do out of 5.0 some people do out of 4.0 it's just so confusing so anyway i'm just declaring my son probably the valedictorian of his class let's be honest were his grades all kidding aside were his grades that good
His grades were fantastic.
He's better in school than either of his parents.
Oh, that's awesome.
And I'm not asking you to upset the privacy clown or whatever it is from Dubai Friday, but he has a college plan or a postgraduate plan or what have you.
He's off to college.
College admissions is rough and college tuition is rough, but you can do what you can.
But he did great in high school.
Very proud of him.
Good.
And then is he doing any sort of summer work or anything like that, or is he just chilling out?
No.
I don't know what his – I haven't been really – I mean, this is the thing when you have a kid who's, like, academically excellent.
You feel bad, like – you know, it's my wife's inclination, especially to, like, get on his case about schoolwork.
It's like, look, how – like, he's –
his grades are perfect.
Like it's nothing to, there's not, and yeah, sometimes it does seem like he's slacking or whatever, but it's like, you can't argue with results, right?
Like what there's, there's no higher grade attainable.
There's no higher scores attainable.
Like everything.
So anyway, so what is he doing for summer?
You should be pressuring him to do something or whatever.
It's like, nah.
I feel like if you do really awesome in high school and your parents never have to bug you about it, one of your rewards is you can probably do whatever the hell you want between the summer between high school and college.
I don't know.
I'm going to encourage him to do something or other, but who knows if he will.
And honestly, he's earned the ability to just goof off all summer if he wants.
Hopefully he doesn't listen to this podcast, but he doesn't.
It's fine.
You know, I hear, John, that success hides failure.
No, success has problems.
Come on.
Oh, that's what it is.
Damn it.
I was trying to be smart and clearly I'm not as smart as Alex.
There's more to life than academic success.
That is definitely true.
Oh my God, there's so much more.
That is very true.
But academic success is nice too.
Academic success matters a lot when you're in it and right after you're in it.
And then it doesn't matter at all.
That is also true.
It matters a lot when you're trying to get into college though, just FYI.
That qualifies as the right after you're in it.
As soon as you do the next thing after it, it stops mattering at all.
Well, if you want to go to graduate school, it kind of helps if you do well as an undergraduate.
Yeah, well, then that's the next thing after it.
All right.
Some people just keep doing that forever.
They just never leave academia.
To the extent you're willing to discuss on this You're Not Feelings program, do you have plans for him with regard to a computer to go to college and or automobile to go to college?
Yeah, I'm already excited about those educational discounts.
Yeah, baby.
This Friday, I am ordering him a new M2 MacBook Air.
He chose the boring color.
I tried to push the midnight.
He was just not having it.
So he's picking space gray, whatever.
That's the worst.
I like it too.
It would be my site.
Anyway, that's what he picked, right?
It's his computer, right?
With his educational discount, love those savings.
But then I am going to take advantage of it.
You can go to the EDU store and check out to the point.
You can't actually order it, but you can go through the whole config process and everything.
And one of the, you know, when you scroll down, you configure a computer and it's like, what else do you want?
Do you want Final Cut Pro?
Do you want Logic?
You know, when Apple does that on their sites.
Well, in the EDU store, they said, do you want the student professional something, something bundle?
And I was like, oh, what's this?
For $199, you get Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Motion, and like two other things that I can't remember.
But just like Final Cut Pro itself is like what?
300 200 logic 300 yeah logic is like 100 like there's a lot of savings like yeah it's about it's about a 50 discount i think i'm gonna get that bundle like you can't beat those savings and maybe he'll use them maybe he won't but i want but see i want those apps to be mine like i want the computer to be his but i want those apps to be mine and so i'm like when i buy that are they gonna like give me a promo code that i enter in the app store does that mean i have to buy it on my apple id but then will i get the edu discount so i gotta figure that out you know but anyway friday
In the morning is when the MacBook Air goes on sale, and I'm getting him that for school.
He already has an old M1 MacBook Air.
Wait, hold on.
I think only the 13-inch Pro goes on sale this Friday.
They haven't announced the on-sell date for the Air yet.
But as soon as it goes on sale, I'm getting it.
And he just wants, you know, the M1 MacBook Air is technically this family's, and this will be actually his computer, so, you know.
That's fair.
Is he bringing a car to school or anything like that?
No, there's no car for him to bring.
Well, there could be.
But there's not.
This is why I asked the question.
You can get a renewed refurbished one on Amazon for not that much money.
His tuition costs much more than any car I've ever purchased.
I will never forget my dad telling me, sitting me down before I went to Virginia Tech.
And Tech was cheap, even out of state.
But he sat me down and he said, I just want you to know, because he had just like a year or two before bought himself his second Wrangler of the three that he's owned.
And he said, I just want you to know.
Uh, you going to school is like me driving the Jeep off a cliff and then doing it again next year and doing it again.
Thanks, dad.
That makes me feel real great.
Thanks so much.
Uh, goodness.
All right.
Well, congratulations, Marco, for surviving till 40 and what two days and congratulations, Alex, for, uh, graduating high school.
We're, we're all of, all three of us are very proud of the two of you.
So very well done.
As per tradition, we need to do the follow-up episode since it was just a big Apple event and we need to do what will almost surely be an episode, almost entirely a follow-up.
And let's start with iCloud shared photo library, which unfortunately, but understandably is not in any of the betas, but we have news about this.
understandably I was disappointed not to find it there I was looking around like where is this how do you do it or whatever I had to ask and they're like oh yeah no it's not in the betas they didn't say that on the thing they just did a whole presentation got me all excited about this new feature and they didn't say oh and by the way this is totally not in the beta it'll be in the beta eventually but it's not in the current beta so I was disappointed by that
It's always shady when they do the like, well, if you upgrade this device, everything else is screwed, you know, which I understand why it's like that because, you know, you're doing new things in iCloud and that server side and blah, blah, blah.
But it gets a little squishy, so I can understand it.
By the way, this feature is another reason to have testing Apple IDs, which Apple does not make easy to do and has caused me problems in the past, but I still have a couple of them rattling around.
And yeah, I'm not letting iCloud shared photo library anywhere near my real Apple ID until it is...
Out and tested by somebody who's not me.
In any case, somebody, I guess John, had noticed a tweet from Jason with regard to what happens with the sharing allocations.
And so Jason wrote, if you're sharing with someone in the family, it just uses a shared family allotment once, not multiple times.
If you share with someone not in a family plan with you, I believe the person sharing the images is the one who, quote unquote, pays for the storage.
And then Jason went on to say, I think this is more of Jason.
I didn't put this.
No, that's not me.
This is me clarifying because when I saw it, I'm like, wait a second, you have to pay.
Like if I share a shared library with Casey, I have to pay for that storage.
So I got a clarification.
This is just me interpreting the clarification.
Okay.
And so it, John, apparently I'm reading for John now.
It doesn't subtract it.
It's just using your storage.
So if you share with someone outside the family and you contribute 200 gigabytes and they contribute 200 gigabytes, then you each pay for what you contribute, but it's not double counted.
Yeah.
This is the worry a lot of people have with any sharing thing, especially since I think Dropbox, I don't know if they still do this way, but I think they originally did it the terrible way where it's like, if you do a shared folder in Dropbox, everybody has that storage counted towards their total allotment, which is
just terrible because you know that you're not they're not storing the data 17 times or whatever um but so it seems like uh the iCloud shared forward library works the way you would want it to and that you know you don't double or triple or quadruple count the stuff is only stored once and if you have a shared you know photo library where you contribute some photos and so does somebody else and you're two different family things you just each pay for whatever you've contributed as if it's as if it was in just your own regular library
Copy-paste edits in photos.
According to the iOS 16 preview on Apple's website, you can copy the edits you've made to a photo and then paste them onto another photo or a batch of photos.
I presume that you're very excited about this, John.
This is actually a big deal.
This is something that Lightroom had forever ago.
And I remember that was one of the big life-changing moments when I had a huge set of photos that I just shot and maybe I wanted to adjust the white balance on all of them at once because it was set a little bit wrong or something like that.
Like that's it's really nice to have this kind of feature or, you know, you tweak your photos a certain way and, you know, maybe you want to apply them all to a big batch like it.
It's a really nice feature to have and it's something that that like pro workflows expect and have expected for some for quite some time.
So it's nice to see.
I think Aperture might have had a similar feature.
And one of the things I always remember is like OmniGraffle, where you could copy subsets of styling and then paste that styling with a special tool onto other things.
And so, yeah, this is definitely a useful feature.
But I don't know this for a fact, but I just so the URL that this page is on is like iOS 16 preview features, right?
I checked the Mac OS, you know, Ventura preview, whatever thing, and this wasn't listed there.
So it's cool that you can do this from the iOS and iPad OS photos application, but you can't do it from the Mac one.
I don't know that to be true.
Again, the Mac photos application doesn't have the shared thing in yet.
So maybe it will be on the Mac too, but I really hope because I don't, I don't spend my time doing photo edits on my phone or my iPad.
I do them on my Mac.
So I hope this photo, this feature comes there as well.
Eric DeRieder has some thoughts on Safety Check, which are really, really useful.
Eric writes, Safety Check looks like a great feature, but in the meantime, and for those who can't or won't update to iOS 16, Apple has a guide to do some of these things manually.
And there is a personal safety user guide that we will link to, which discusses how to take care of yourself with regard to your personal safety and your devices, which is pretty cool.
Yeah, that's exactly why this feature needs to exist, because you read that document, your eyes start to glaze over and it's just so much work and expecting someone to do that at a very difficult time of their life and a limited amount of time and do it carefully and do it perfectly is probably too much to ask.
But, you know, worst case scenario, you do have some recourse, even if you don't have iOS 16.
Yep, which is excellent.
All right, tell me about passkeys, John.
This is a question a lot of people had.
There's a lot of misunderstanding about passkeys, but one of the questions is like, how do I share this with somebody?
This came up in this program.
We're like, well, you know, technologically, there's nothing stopping you from doing what you can do in 1Password, which is like put it into a shared family vault or whatever.
As far as I can tell, Apple does not have the concept of a shared family iCloud keychain.
Now that we've got it for photos, it makes me want it everywhere else.
I think on past shows, I said...
Apple should do it with contacts because it's like so much a small use case shared family contacts library whatever shared family iCloud keychain all those things should happen but they don't yet exist but Apple's solution to the idea of sharing a password with somebody like say you sign up for an account with with the passkey.
And, you know, you just send the password to, you know, someone in your family if they want to log in, too.
How do I do that with a passkey?
Well, in Apple's WWDC session about passkeys this year, starting at around 6 minutes and 14 seconds, you can see their answer.
And their answer is you airdrop it to them.
Right.
So you can go into passwords.
Oh.
on your phone and you just airdrop it like you airdrop anything else and why is it airdrop and not like email or messages or whatever i assume they want you to be in proximity so you kind of know who you're sending it to because airdrop doesn't work like you know over hundreds of miles or whatever they don't really talk about that but anyway that is the thing that works you can airdrop a passkey to somebody um and for people who don't uh who are have some misunderstanding about this it's not like you have one passkey and that's it
Every single account on every single service has its own public-private key pair, right?
So you can have 50 accounts on, you know, mycoolsite.com, and, you know, they all have separate passkeys, and you can pass them around.
It's just like a password, right?
Instead of username and password, it's username and passkey, right?
And all the stuff we talked about of how they're unlocked or whatever is, you know, it's the passkey stuff.
But in the end...
There is one of them for every single account.
And there's no limitation that you can, you know, it's not like tied to your Apple ID or tied to your phone and that I can only have one account on this service because it's tied to my phone.
You can have as many as you want.
And you can pass them around with AirDrop just like any other data.
And then how do you recover pass keys if you lose all your devices?
yeah this is apple has a document about this and it's a it's an interesting question like say your house burns down right and it had all your stuff in it it had all like your backup codes and all your ios devices right we were sponsored this week by backblaze yeah i'm just kidding well that well that's the question like so if you have passwords you could say well i put a text document and i put it in backblaze or whatever and so i'll just like if i can just restore from backblaze and i'll see what my password was and i'll get back all my stuff but pass keys the whole point of them is they don't leave your device right
other than apparently how they get airdropped.
And I'm not quite sure how they do that in a secure way, but it's Apple end-to-end, so they figure out some way to do it.
But anyway.
Right, but the private keys are not just sitting in a file somewhere, right?
They're in a secure enclave, and they're in iCloud Keychain, which is end-to-end encrypted.
And if you don't know your Apple ID password, if you lose all the hardware devices and you don't remember stuff, how do you get anything back?
And Apple actually has solutions to this.
One of them that's a big one and a fairly new one that we talked about in past shows is have a recovery contact.
where you can have another person be sort of your backstop and say, if all else fails and everything screws up, this person who I better super duper trust can help me get my stuff back.
And I actually set that up today.
Last time I tried to set it up, it was complaining about like minimum OS versions of devices.
You basically have to kick out any devices that have really old OSs.
Like I had an iPod that was still listed as belonging to my Apple ID and stuff, or my iPhone 7 was still registered for Apple Pay.
right you know you can go to appleid.apple.com and just delete those devices because they're all in the attic and race now anyway so they don't have anything on them right but once you do that you can set up a recovery contact you could also have this sort of like fallback recovery code thing that you can do where you call apple on the phone and they have something in escrow for you and you you prove who you are like read the document put it in the show notes but the point is
Even if you lose everything, you can, there is, there are ways to recover some of your stuff.
Some of it might involve you putting a piece of paper in a security deposit box somewhere or giving it to somebody that's your like, if all else fails thing.
But yeah, and it's a pretty unlikely scenario that you would not only lose every single hardware device you own that is signed into your Apple ID, but also not know any of your passwords.
I guess it's envisioning a world where there are no more passwords, but it's just pass keys.
And what if everything that had that pass key in the secure enclave is gone?
Apple has thought of that.
it is complicated but it is not entirely unsolvable so check out the links in the show notes if you want to see what apple's thinking is on how to deal with that
I'll see you next time.
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All right.
Tell me about the M2.
So we're wondering what's the deal with the M2.
They told us the stats.
Oh, it's like, you know, X percent faster, whatever.
We didn't know anything more about it on last week's show.
Well, now we do know more from this site, Semi Analysis.
I read their big analysis of looking at the die shot and what they say seems to hold some weight to me, assuming these die shots are vaguely accurate.
It's A15 stuff in there, right?
So it's the A15 power cores and the A15 efficiency cores, right?
So if you're wondering, is it just an A14 with an extra GPU core or M1 with extra GPU core?
It's not.
It's A15 stuff inside there.
And the power core is actually bigger than it is.
Well, it's obviously bigger than it is in M1, and it's also bigger than it is in the A15.
It's 21% bigger than in the M1 and 7% bigger than in the A15.
And a lot of that has to do with the L2 cache being bigger than it was in the A15.
But the core itself, computation-wise, is the A15.
The e-cores look about the same.
There is the faster LPDDR6400 memory controller, which apparently costs more money, but that's how you get the extra memory bandwidth.
So...
Like I said last week, it is definitely a worthy successor to the M1.
The M1 had A14 stuff in it.
The M2 has A15 stuff in it.
It's a slightly better 5 nanometer process, which comes with it on its own.
Even if you just fab the M1 in the straight-up M1 with this new process, it would get a little bit of boost in power savings or compute per watt or whatever.
The M2 is looking pretty good.
Like it's not super duper fantastic, but it is definitely, you know, a reasonable successor to the M1.
One thing that I do have a little bit of reservation about that I, you know, we'll have to just see the machines and use them to really know.
We don't know yet.
You know, I kind of alluded to last week, like with the new MacBook Air, again, it's fanless again.
And, you know, presumably the same thing will apply to all the M2-based iPads that are presumably going to come out soon because I just bought an M1 one, so the M2 ones must be coming out like tomorrow.
Actually, it'll come out – what's the return period?
15 days?
It'll come out 16 days from now.
But anyway, is that we don't really know yet.
It does look like it might have a higher thermal load when it's under full load because the die itself got significantly bigger, and the performance cores got bigger, and there was a leaked Geekbench result that came out today that looked like they clothed it up a little bit too.
And so it wouldn't surprise me if this might get throttled more than the M1 did in fanless enclosures.
So again, we will have to see.
Hopefully I'm wrong about that because that was one of the best things about the M1 is that it pretty much never throttled unless you were really crushing both CPU and GPU.
So we'll see what happens with the M2.
But in case you were, you know, waffling over maybe getting an error or the, you know, the Quote Pro, which we'll get to, but...
You know, that decision, we don't really have all the information yet until we learn, like, what is the tradeoff by making the M2 fanless?
Does it get, you know, a little bit hotter than the M1?
Does it have a throttle at some point sooner that you might hit, you know, where you wouldn't have hit it on the M1?
And the answer is we just don't know yet.
Well, the thing with that, the, I wish I had the number on this offhand, but like the, the new five nanometer process, again, comes with it some percentage of better power efficiency is,
if that percentage is around the same percentage as the sort of area increase and the, you know, the clocking increase, if they, if those two balance each other out, it should be about the same as the M1, right?
Because these numbers aren't big.
It's, you know, if you, if you look at how much bigger it is than the M1, it's like, I don't know, 10, 15% bigger.
But if you get 10, 15% more power savings from the new process, it may just be a wash.
Well, you know, we'll, we'll find out for the testing.
And also we don't even know what the, the cooling solution looks like inside the fanless M2 MacBook Air.
You know, you can solve a lot of problems with more heat pipes and more surface area and more little fins and stuff.
So we'll see.
The M2 MacBook Air comes with color-matched MagSafe cables, which makes me very jealous.
This is unlike my MacBook Pro, which just used a, what is it, silver MagSafe connector?
Yeah, no matter what color MacBook Pro you get, you get the plain silver MagSafe connector.
Which supports my assertion that the silver is the best color of MacBook Pro.
So the color match ones, I wish I had a picture of it here in the notes, but I think they're like the cord is colored to match the MacBook Air or something.
And the little metal end.
But no, you can actually, you can buy those separately as of whenever these things launch.
There's a separate listing on Apple's website somewhere where you can actually, so if you want, even though Apple should have given you the color match version to begin with, with your boring space gray laptop, you can now go buy the boring space gray MagSafe cable by itself.
Well, good to know.
Also, the M2 MacBook Air has a 500-nit P3 screen.
Yeah, last week, Marco mistakenly said that it didn't have P3 and that the M2 MacBook Pro also didn't have P3.
They both have P3.
So they're 100-nits brighter.
Well, the MacBook Air is 100-nits brighter than it was, and they are both P3.
Yep, my bad.
Desk view.
What is the situation with cameras and desk view?
talking last week about how it's using the wide angle camera to get a view of you and a view of you know your desk surface your physical desktop well apparently if you are using it and you use the regular camera to see your face it will then also simultaneously use the wide camera to see your physical desktop so we'll use two cameras at once and you know one of them is just using just to look at your fingers or whatever you have on your desk and the other is looking at your face so it's nice that you're not limited to using the
probably pretty bad you know potentially sensor stage powered super ultra wide camera for your face.
You can use the regular camera for that and just use the super ultra wide one to be able to see your desktop.
And then with regard to messages, according to Tobias, you can finally scroll through long messages from the normal UI, no more long press, et cetera.
And also audio recording has been moved to the iMessage app area.
Woo!
That's exciting.
I didn't confirm any of this, but I assume, like, because I don't have, do either one of you have the beta on anything where you can look at this and say, I'm assuming what this means is no more accidentally hitting that little thing that lets you record an audio message because it's not in the message field anymore.
I did have the beta before I gave away my 12 mini.
Yeah.
How was that, by the way, running it on your carry phone?
That's the thing.
It wasn't on my carry phone.
I actually asked on Twitter yesterday, hey, how's the Beta 1 on your carry phones?
It sounds like it's a moderately rough Beta 1 from what people are saying.
It's funny.
People frame this differently.
Some people say, it's pretty rough.
I only got half the battery life.
Other people say, it's not that bad.
I'm only getting half the battery life.
it depends on your perspective on like you know what you're willing to give up but it seems like there's a number of problems um you know things like people say like apple pay didn't work and yeah half the battery life and apparently microsoft teams the app doesn't work which i don't use but you know that's good to know like so it seems like yeah it's beta one and so you're probably better off still not putting it on your carry phones but to be honest i'm probably gonna jump in on beta too
Fair enough.
But yeah, and the other thing is I didn't have this happen often, but it was absolutely infuriating when you got a very long message in messages and you had like long press or whatever the case may be in order to read it.
And so apparently that's not a problem anymore, which is exciting.
Yeah.
You know, we need we need desktop class iPhone apps.
And you know why?
So we can get the stupid attach a photo back to not be buried under the message area thing.
Right.
So we got rid of the audio thing in the text field.
Now there's room for another icon there.
Wouldn't it be great if you could pick which icon is the one that's not buried in the application thing?
And the one I would pick is attach picture from your photo library because I do that all the time.
yeah that's the one that i think people do the most right right and i guess people just leave that little uh app bar visible for people don't know you can you can hold down on whatever button you press and it will hide and show that app bar i don't leave it visible because i don't need to see it there all the time i just want one thing to be accessible and i don't want that one thing not to be record audio message so i really wish they would add a a one slot customizable toolbar to the to the iphone messages app think about it apple
you run with it you're just the idea guy uh all right tell me about stage manager please one quick tip for this uh for people who don't know and don't like the uh the little side thing that shows all all the little window groups on an angle and stage manager uh in ipad os apparently james thompson says you can turn off that sidebar if you long press on the stage manager mode thing and control center uh so you don't have to see that all the time i i
think you can also hide it on the mac too i'm not entirely sure i haven't spent a lot of time in venture though i did install it so i just wanted to give that quick tip for people to think oh i'm not going to run stage manager i don't want those icons you know clogging thing up also i think on the ipad if you make the uh the the app or one of the app windows wide enough i think that it will also hide that thing i have not installed uh ipad os 16 on any devices so i don't over sure have either one of you done that no i did yeah i had to restore that one too yeah
some more experimentation that, but that's, so that's, we'll talk more about stage manager as a one or both of us or all three of us get brave enough to put it on our iPad.
I'll probably put it on mine.
Cause I do have an M one iPad.
I'll put it on mine eventually.
Just maybe not beta one, but, uh, before we dive too much more into that in future weeks, it's time to talk about the, uh,
The controversies surrounding stage manager.
Right.
So let's start with the talk show live, which they did in the Apple Developer Center thing.
John Gruber's live talk show that had Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak as guests.
And here are just a couple of short quotes about what Federighi said about stage manager, how to think about it.
um and this is mostly in the context of the mac right it was on the last show i talked about how on the mac there's tons of different ways to manage windows apple has done lots of different things over the years and pretty much all of them are still there right you've got uh expose you've got the dock you've got minimization you've got tiling windows you've got zooming you've got plain old resizing you've got spaces and now also you have a stage manager and i probably forgot something in there all those things are all in there at the same time
So, Greg Federer, you said, we're not telling you that you're doing it wrong.
Implying, like, if you use one of those features, we're not saying, hey, you shouldn't use minimizing to the dock.
You shouldn't use tiling.
You know, all that is fine.
We're not telling you whatever it is that you're doing is wrong.
And then regarding why stage manager is...
a useful thing to have on the mac is another quote from federighi there's a sense that the mac experience is messy by default that gets into the janitor quote from steve jobs right that if you if you don't do anything like the default experience in the mac is eventually just windows appear everywhere and that feels messy to people um he continues you're constantly either living in the mess or you're cleaning up after yourself constantly as you go so that's like the the impression that some people have about using the mac especially if you're used to a phone or an ipad where
uh and you know especially in the past your options were much more limited and you didn't have to deal with that uh that visual clutter right so that's why center stage center stick i'm doing everyone's doing it that's why stage manager makes sense on the mac um and i think we talked about the last week we'll put a link in the show notes to uh
the purple window widget, uh, from, uh, Mac OS 10 developer preview three and the year 2000.
Uh, the idea behind that was similar.
Yeah.
The idea behind that was similar as it was Steve jobs.
I should have put the link.
Someone had a tweet where they clipped out the little thing from the Steve jobs segment.
We're like Steve jobs seem to feel the same way that, that, you know,
If you're using a Mac, sometimes you feel like a janitor cleaning up all these windows.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could concentrate on one thing at a time?
Steve Jobs, the iPad was truly Steve Jobs' dream computer because it just did everything that he wanted the Mac to do, but it never quite could, right?
In terms of simplicity and elegance or whatever.
Anyway, in Mac OS X Developer Preview 3, there was another window widget that was purple.
You had the stoplights, you know, red, yellow, and green.
And then you had a purple widget.
They were cold and candy colored at that point.
And if you hit the purple one, it went into what they called single window mode, where all the other windows, except for the one you were looking at, would hide themselves.
And you just see that one window.
And if you switch to another one, the window you were working on would disappear and the other window would come in, right?
You can see how that would be limiting.
And you can see why maybe that didn't make it to release because that's
So limiting, like one window at a time.
And anytime I switched to anything else, the window was working on just like the whole point of having a big screen on a Mac.
So you can do two things at once and maybe drag things between windows and see them both at the same time.
So single window mode didn't quite make it.
But that idea of like, I wish the computer would just I wish the Mac would just show me what I'm working on now and hide everything else.
that is sort of you can see that underlying stage manager um and i think a lot of people talked about i listened to all the podcasts talking about wwc including us like how stage manager and we saw that like that looks like a feature that would be appropriate for an ipad because the ipad already does kind of do one thing at once with limited amounts of multitasking and stage manager is a slightly fancier slightly more flexible way to do that still trying to say you're concentrating on
One small set of things at once, and then you switch to a different small set of things, right?
And the other, you know, you've got the stage manager thing where they're along the side or whatever, but the stuff you're working on goes off into its little home and a new set of stuff comes out.
So it's like the purple window widget.
It's like single window mode from 2000.
but handful of window mode.
And it's different sets of handful of windows, right?
And so when a lot of people saw Stage Manager, they thought that looks like an iPad feature, and they just happened to bring it to the Mac because, you know, they're trying to bring everything to all their platforms at once.
Well, it turns out some people in the know, some people who worked on this back in, what, 2006-ish or whatever, said that Stage Manager is actually...
an incarnation of an idea called Shrinky Dink from way back in the day.
We'll put a link in the show notes to something written by someone who's known as Cricket.
And they were working on the Shrinky Dink feature when Apple was transitioning to Intel back in 2006.
They included a screenshot.
It looks a lot like Stage Manager, right down to the little angled groups of windows on the side.
And it never quite shipped because they didn't quite, you know, get it to the point where they wanted to have it.
But it shows, you know...
Good ideas don't necessarily die.
Even if they don't ship, maybe wait 10, 15 more years, and they might see the light of day.
So I highly recommend everyone reading that.
So basically what that shows is this is not a feature that was made for the iPad and eventually brought to the Mac.
It was a feature that was made for the Mac, didn't make it to the Mac, and got resurrected probably because of its applicability to the iPad and then also appeared on the Mac.
I should note that this site or this blog post seems to have been taken down, but we will put a link in the show notes just in case.
Let's see.
Oh, that's sad.
Global security must have gotten to them.
Right.
But one way or another, the screenshot that was there that John was nice enough to put in the show notes, it looks really similar.
It looks really, really similar.
Yeah, I'm assuming that got taken down because this screenshot must have been an internal Apple-only build that never saw the light of day.
Yeah.
I guess.
All right.
So what's the controversy here?
So the controversy is why is, I got to scroll up.
Why is stage manager, why is stage manager only available on M1 iPads?
Last week we talked about it right after the keynote.
We're like, well, you know, they did add a virtual memory swap support.
And that might be required to have all these applications in memory at the same time, because if you're going to be showing four different applications on, you know, two different screens, uh,
you know the ipads don't come with a lot of ram and if you don't have enough ram to hold that amount of applications what can you do it's not like you can just sort of put a checkerboard pattern over some of the applications say sorry this application is not in memory and we don't have swaps so uh if you tap on it basically wait for it to relaunch well and then we'll rip one of your other apps out of memory right so we're like well maybe it's m1 only because m1 you know the m1 ipads have more ram uh
Lots of people seem to be angry that stage manager is M1 only because like you two were just talking about, what if I have like what I think is a fairly recent iPad that I think is perfectly fine, the performance of it's great, like it's an iPad Pro maybe even, and you're telling me I can't do stage manager?
Well, but just for the record, just for the record, I am not upset that my four-year-old iPad cannot do stage manager.
I'm only upset because I'm cheap, not because I think it should.
Yeah, the only reason I was... Look, you know I will jump at any chance to upgrade my hardware.
Any excuse.
Oh, I can't run... I can only run four Windows instead of five.
I have to upgrade my hardware.
The only reason I felt bad about doing this particular upgrade is that I don't really end up using my iPad very much outside of testing situations.
So it was frustrating.
Like...
My kid and my wife both have M1 iPads.
Because they both use their iPads very heavily all the time.
So it made sense for them to upgrade when they were ready.
For me, it didn't make a lot of sense.
And I'm not excited about the upgrade.
So that's the only reason I even resisted this a little bit.
But...
To also be clear, I think it's totally reasonable that my four-year-old iPad Pro does not run this cutting-edge feature.
And I think the reasons they give are valid because when you look at what Stage Manager has to do, it clearly requires a huge jump in RAM to keep way more apps running invisible than were ever running invisible before.
That's why they had to add some memory swap.
That's why this is such a big deal.
And when you think about swapping, like, you know, the old hardware, when we were, when they were designing the, I believe I'm running an A12Z or X, one of those, I think X, I don't know.
You sound like me at an eye appointment.
RSTLNY, maybe?
I think you're on Wheel of Fortune.
Yeah, you're right, you're right, yeah.
Yeah, but anyway, when they were designing my iPad four years ago, this feature of having swap probably was either not on their radar yet or only in very early consideration.
And so to add something that dramatically changes how...
the memory needs are how the storage infrastructure is accessed what kind of flash what rating of storage controller you can put in there like how much wear and tear the flash is designed to take those are all significant hardware constraints that the older hardware has and so it makes total sense that only hardware that was designed to be a laptop as in the m1 that is equipped to do this because laptops always have swap so it made sense like that hardware was made to have swap it was designed to have that kind of
bandwidth and ssds and everything like that and memory in the first place to avoid needing the need to swap earlier whereas you know the four-year-old hardware wasn't it's simple as that
We'll see.
We'll see if it's that simple.
Let's go through the complaints.
So what I was getting at with Casey saying is like the people's impression is that their computers, their iPads don't feel slow, right?
So it's hard for them to understand why they can't support this feature because as old as it may be, it doesn't feel slow, right?
So this thing started, people were complaining the internet.
Early on, Apple gave a statement to Rene Ritchie that said, quoting from a portion of it, delivering this experience, meaning center...
Stage manager.
Stage manager.
Delivering this experience with the immediacy users expect from iPad's touch source experience requires large internal memory, incredibly fast storage and flexible external display.
All of which are delivered by iPads with M1 chips.
OK.
Later, Federighi did an interview with TechCrunch where he said building the M1 was critical as well.
From the start, the iPad has always maintained extremely high standard for responsiveness and interactivity.
that directness of interaction in that every app can respond to every touch instantaneously as if you were touching the real thing underneath the screen.
And I think it's hard sometimes for people to appreciate the technical constraints involved in achieving that.
This gets to what I was saying before of like, if you don't have anywhere else to put that memory and there's not enough memory to have all those apps in memory at the same time, how is it gonna be responding instantly to your touch if you basically need to be relaunching the app behind the scenes, right?
That's why people think, oh, swap is necessary, right?
so federally continues as you add multiple apps into play and large amounts of screen real estate you have to make sure that any of those apps can respond instantly to your touch in a way that you don't have to have the expectation with a desktop app i would argue you should have that same expectation with a desktop app as well but anyway indirect manipulation gives you some slack gives you some slack there so it's a different set of constraints yeah i'm not sure it's that different
And then Stephen Hackett, who was commenting on this post, says, Federi also mentions that older iPads don't have the horsepower to push external displays in the way Apple wants, right?
So that's Apple's side of the story.
Needs to be responsive, takes lots of RAM, external displays, or whatever.
So here's the pushback from the community.
So first, people were pushing back against the M1 requirement, saying, well, look, the Apple Silicon DTK was a Mac Mini with an A12Z in it.
And an A12Z is not an M1.
And the A12Z ran macOS, which can have more than four windows on the screen.
I'm not sure if you're aware.
And, you know, I put more than four windows on the screen of the DTK and it was fine.
So it doesn't require an M1, it seems like.
But the DTK had 16 gigs of RAM.
right yeah and that's so it wasn't an a12z with four gigs of ram it had 16 gigs of ram i don't actually know if the ddk ran swap and obviously i don't have mine anymore to check but so there's that consideration right and then from uh you know this is this bit is from apple's ipad os 16 preview page it talks about virtual memory swap and it says ipad storage can be used to expand the available memory for all apps to deliver up to 16 gigabytes of memory for the most demanding apps and then it has a little footnote
footnote number 19 and if you scroll down the page and see what is footnote number 19 it says regarding virtual memory swap that it is available on ipad air fifth generation with a minimum of 256 gigabyte storage and then it lists a bunch of other ipads it works on right so the ipad air fifth generation
also comes in a 64-gig storage model.
And they're saying, if you get an iPad Air 5th generation... Wait, this is the current model?
Yeah, with 64 gigs of storage, it won't use swap, presumably because it doesn't want to hog any more of the storage space with swap because swap files can get big, right?
But the iPad Air 5th generation...
runs stage manager and it has an m1 yeah yeah as steve strout and smith said stage manager works on the ipad air at all storage sizes but swap only works on 256 gig things so obviously swap is not according to apple's own specifications swap is not technically required for a stage manager because the ipad air can apparently run it without swap so that's a
Then you're like, okay, but what about the iPad Air?
So it's got an M1, right?
It's also got eight gigs of RAM.
So maybe that's what it is.
Maybe, okay, well, even without swap, if you have eight gigs of RAM, they feel like Sage Manager will be able to fit in there.
But the iPad Pro third gen that I think Casey has...
also has 8 gigs of RAM.
And in fact, they made a 16 gig RAM version of that.
But that one can't run center stage.
So if it's not swap... It's a stage manager.
You just did it again.
It's impossible.
It's absolutely impossible.
It can't be done.
It can't be done.
Rename your features, Apple.
We'll just call it Shrinky Dink.
Yeah.
Well, but hold on though.
But my iPad Pro, and I think I might be jumping ahead here, it has really crummy external display support because I have a USB-C port, not a Thunderbolt port.
But the iPad Air also... The iPad Air with M1 also only has USB-C, not Thunderbolt.
Yeah.
So anyway, swap is not required because Apple's own specs say that you can run this without... You can run Stage Manager without...
right and it's not ram because one of the ipads that can run stage manager has the same amount of ram as ipads that can't right and so maybe it's external display report so one other thing that craig federighi said is that stage manager is quote a total experience that involves external display connectivity um you can imagine like being able to drive a big external display and having sort of the you know
The video guts or GPU guts or hardware to do that or whatever might be a feature that only exists on the M1s because the M1s are designed to run at least one external display.
And maybe like an A12Z wasn't, right?
Or maybe that brings over the RAM limit, right?
But that is very different from the idea that, like, look, you can only run on the M1 for a bunch of really good reasons.
And it seems more like to get every single feature that's part of Stage Manager probably requires an M1.
But people might be saying, well, I don't care about external display.
I don't even have an external display connected to my iPad.
I just want to sit on the couch with my iPad and be able to use Stage Manager.
And so we'll see what happens in this controversy.
Maybe Apple will just stick to its guns and say, we'd rather just give you the whole stage manager experience.
And even though you don't have an external display, tough luck or whatever, it could be that there are other things we don't know about because the M1 is not just an A14X.
It's got a bunch of stuff that was added to it basically so it could be a Mac chip.
And maybe there's parts of that that have to do with
variable page size for example is another thing the m1 has that a lot of other the other a series chips don't because it's an expectation of mac os you know there's lots of other things that the m1 could have that these things don't but so far apple hasn't cited them specifically so it's still a little bit of a mystery it may be they just want to have a unified experience um
I'm not sure why people are raring to have stage managers so much.
And maybe they just feel like, you know, my iPad is newish and never feels slow to me.
And what stage manager is doing doesn't seem like it's asking the iPad to do much.
Like, oh, you mean I can see four different apps on the screen at the same time?
Well, I can almost do that with like...
you know split screen and slide over like what's the big deal like you are you telling me my amazingly powerful ipad can't handle a couple windows on an angle when this shrinky dink thing in the year 2006 was able to do it on a machine with like one 15th the power of like an a12 z ipad right because that's what you have to remember like like mac os has been having millions of windows on the screen and expose and all this stuff for years with less ram than an ipad with slower cpus than an ipad and granted it had swap and during that time but like
What's the hang up?
And it swapped like crazy.
I mean, you know, people forget nowadays, you might forget the experience of using a desktop computer in the early 2000s.
It was a lot of swapping onto hard drives.
But no, I mean, you know, it's not that I'm sure that the, you know, the older iPad hardware has no problem compositing the windows on the screen.
It's keeping all the apps in memory.
That's the that's the challenge, because what the apps are doing is very, very different.
But Macs had less RAM than that back then.
Yeah, and apps used less RAM back then.
I mean, now everything's these crazy RAM bloat hogs.
And everything, you have the higher resolution screens now.
All the image assets are bigger.
All the video RAM needs are bigger.
You have higher data assets being stored, images loading and everything.
All that stuff is just bigger these days.
And, you know, apps take up hundreds of megs of RAM routinely now, whereas, you know, back then that was that was significantly less common.
So that's the big difference is like, you know, yes, the old computers that did this, you know, yeah, they could do it just fine.
They can composite the windows on screen today.
The GPUs have no problem throwing those windows around on screen.
But it's it's the it's the massive RAM footprint of these apps.
That's the limiting factor, I bet.
i mean but the apps that are on ipad like i said are apps that have grown up in an environment where where swap is not available so they are actually pretty stingy with ram right when you have one of them but but you can already get like you can already get i think at least two plus two slide overs two plus one slide overs like it's
Oh, center stage.
Stage manager is limited to four apps, right?
Or four windows, right?
So it's not unlimited.
You know, it's not like there's without bound.
There is a limitation on it.
And I think even without stage manager, you can get almost that many different apps visible on an iPad screen at the same time now.
But it's eight if you plug in an external monitor.
right well that's what gets to the monitor thing it's like okay but what do i don't what if i don't have an external monitor let me use stage manager and i promise i want to connect the monitor and if i do it will be disabled but it could be that apple says well we don't want it we just want to give the whole experience we don't want to have the special mode where it's like well if you buy this ipad you can get stage manager but then as soon as you plug in an external display you can't have it anymore or something like that
Well, and also, I mean, I think a big part of the reason is these technical realities, for sure.
I think a smaller part of the reason is market segmentation.
Apple wants the iPad Pro to be pushed higher market, and they want people to pay for Pro features.
You know, there's a lot of features where, like if you look at the iPhone hardware throughout history, you know, sometimes some new feature to iOS would come out, maybe it's a new camera feature or whatever, where the older hardware might be capable of it.
But Apple restricts it to the new hardware for market segmentation and to give people a reason to upgrade.
You know, they do a pretty good job of making stuff available to old hardware when possible most of the time, but not all of the time.
And sometimes they just do it for that reason.
And, you know, that's their prerogative.
You know, when you bought your iPad in 2018...
You know, you didn't know about this feature and you didn't buy this feature.
And, you know, so I don't fault them too much for restricting this to only the newest stuff when there is some, if not much, hardware justification for doing it.
In addition to, you know, this is also a pretty substantial segmentation reason.
I mean, the thing that's because that's that's the underlying thing in this is that the people are angry because they feel like Apple is saying, like, there's no real reason for you to do this.
You're just doing this to make me buy another iPad, which is, you know, the conspiracy theory that doesn't feel good.
Right.
But in many cases, like the boring explanation of basically like from Apple saying we implemented this, we tried it on the iPad that you're complaining can't do this.
And the experience wasn't good.
Uh, and if, you know, you could say, oh, I don't believe you or whatever, but that's entirely plausible because every time anyone implements anything, the experience starts off as not being good.
And it's a question of how much time does Apple want to spend optimizing stage manager to make sure it works on a 12 Z or whatever.
Like at a certain point, you could say, like, do we have to spend the time to say I got to we know these can't handle external displays, but these can or it runs fine on the M1s, but it's not running.
It feels like kind of, you know, stuttery and janky on the A12Z iPads.
So how much time do we want to spend optimizing it to get it to work on the A12Z iPads, even though we know going forward, everything is going to be as fast as the M1 or better.
Right.
Those are the type of decisions that you can't really come out and explain that and say, basically, we made a business decision not to spend our time optimizing this so it works well.
But you have to start from the premise that you believe them when they say we tried it and it wasn't that great on these older iPads.
Now, Apple is responsive to customer complaints and this is beta one.
So it could be that they hear people complaining and what Apple decides to do is, OK, let's spend some time seeing if we can get this to work on non M1 iPads.
Right.
Right.
And so they put some engineering resource into that.
Maybe they put it on those and they say, well, you can't use external displays because they just don't have the extra RAM capacity to push all those extra pixels or whatever.
But at least you can do it locally, right?
But that would be Apple choosing to spend the effort to address that customer feedback.
And yeah, when you bought your iPad, you didn't know Center Stage would appear, but
Apple customers in particular have an expectation that when they buy hardware, it will continue to get updates after a certain period of time.
And it's like, yeah, but if it's old and slow and I feel like it's out of date, then I can't get the newest stuff.
But people look at this and they feel like their iPad Pro from 2018, quote unquote, should be able to do this.
And I have no doubt that Apple could make it work on those iPads.
It just may be way more difficult than they think it was worth the effort to do.
Because, you know, again, something is missing from the A12Z that's in the M1 or something like that that we don't know about.
There's some esoteric detail.
The performance was a little hitchy.
The SSD controller is a little bit slower.
Like it's on the ragged edge of what's possible because of some things we don't understand.
So we'll see what develops in this with the next show.
I mean, the people who are mad about it,
they'll probably get over it.
And honestly, maybe they'll use a stage manager and be like, oh, I don't even like it anyway, so who cares?
But if they remain Apple customers, presumably eventually they'll buy another iPad and that one will support it.
So this will take care of itself with time.
I don't know.
I really think it's a combination of everything that you guys had said.
I think it's predominantly some legitimate problems that – or not problems, but constraints –
that this old hardware has.
And I suspect that in a lot of cases, you know, maybe my iPad would work with it, but you couldn't use an external display or you were only limited to six apps open at once or whatever the case may be.
And I certainly don't think Apple marketing, whether or not the technical side of Apple, I don't think Apple marketing has any interest in saying, well, stage manager works on iPads as long as and if and and well, maybe asterisk dagger, double deck, like
That's just not tenable.
It's just not.
Not for a company like the size of Apple.
And so I really would guess that it's a combination of there are legitimate constraints on older pieces of hardware, but they don't want to muddy the waters and say, well, if you have a 2018, you can do this.
And if you have a 2019, you can also do this.
You have a 2020, you can also do this.
Like, if that were the case, we'd be raking them over the coals for just not making it consistent across everything, maybe.
Yeah.
But I don't think for all the things, for all the gross and slimy things Apple can has and will do, I don't think this is on that list for me.
And I know that makes us just another show for Apple, blah, blah, blah.
But I really honestly, I think anyone who's listened to the show for more than four minutes knows that we will call out Apple when we see them doing something gross.
I really don't think this is one of those times.
And like I said, I feel like it's plausible that they could hear this feedback and say, all right, we're going to spend some extra resources during this beta cycle to get it to work in a limited fashion on lesser iPads.
Because I think it's totally technically plausible.
It's just a question of how much time do you want to spend doing that?
And their original judgment was, let's not waste any time.
Let's just concentrate on making good on the M1.
They can reconsider that opinion between now and the many months.
Or, you know, it could be a point update, 16.1, 16.2.
Like they've done a lot of big things in point updates.
So I wouldn't totally rule it out that Apple won't
do some limited form of this in the future if the feedback continues to be a thing.
It could just be like, oh, there always has to be something people are angry about after WWDC, and this will fade, but we'll see how it goes.
One more final tidbit.
This is from an anonymous source.
Apparently, the virtual memory swap feature
on iPadOS is something the engineering team is very proud of.
In particular, one of the neat things they did is that none of the system daemons or any part of the OS are ever swapped out.
Only apps go to swap, which obviously is not the way it works on macOS.
And macOS, you know, any piece of memory could potentially be swapped out.
There is a concept in macOS, and I think most versions of Unix or whatever, where you can have a page of memory that is quote-unquote wired, which basically means
This page, this piece of memory is not allowed to ever be swapped out.
In particular, lots of parts of the kernel use wired memory because as you can imagine, if the part of the kernel that deals with virtual memory swap gets swapped out, you've got a real problem on your hands.
Most parts of the kernel you probably don't want to swap out.
So I do wonder how they implemented this.
I don't think they're wiring every single page for every app that's part of the OS that's not a regular app.
So they probably did something special for this.
But anyway, it just goes to show the lengths they're doing to try to still sort of eke out the, as Federici was saying, the sort of the responsiveness that people expect from iPads, right?
Where, you know...
I don't entirely buy that indirect, quote unquote, indirect manipulation.
It still grinds my gears when they say that, but I don't know what they mean.
Indirect manipulation with a cursor.
You can put up a beach ball cursor.
We don't love that, but that's part of the experience when something like that happens.
But there is no equivalent of that with touch.
Right.
If you touch something and it doesn't react to your touch, it feels broken immediately.
It's not an expected part of the iPad experience to put your finger on the screen and try to do something, whether you're dragging or tapping or whatever and nothing moves.
You think you think your iPad is broken.
Right.
That is not there.
That's not an expectation.
Right.
So.
And not having swap was one way to do that because, hey, swap takes a big variable out of the equation.
You know what your memory access times are.
You know how much RAM you have.
You have this thing going around killing applications if they use too much memory, so you stay within the memory.
It's much more predictable, right?
Once you involve swap, this...
There's this huge unpredictable performance cliff that you may fall off of.
Right.
So to try to hold on to the essential iPad desk and say, well, let's keep let's not ever let any part of the system be swapped out.
So that is everything that runs presumably like the dock, the Windows server, you know, any OS processes that are in the background, the camera like.
All the demons that run all the various things, talking to iCloud, like, who knows?
Any part of the OS or any part of those demons, they do not get swapped.
What does get swapped is one of your, you know, umpteen apps that you're running, right?
One of your four apps that's being shown in Stage Manager.
God, every time I say that, I have to pause that.
So that's neat.
I'd love to know more technical details on that.
If anyone knows, feel free to tell us.
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All right, so I hear some really, really positive things about system settings in Ventura.
So can you tell me all the good news about that, please?
Yeah, speaking of controversies that happen after we've seen people need something to get mad about, this is, you know, for a different group of people who are mad about this, but a lot of people are mad about it.
And I would put myself kind of in that category.
I mean, it looks crappy.
Yeah.
I think we talked about it in the last show, but at the time we were talking about it in the last show, we hadn't seen, because it hadn't been released yet, the live talk show with Federighi and Jaws.
Did you see that live, Marco?
I did.
Yeah, it was great, actually.
And frankly, I think it was a very, very good live talk show.
You know, I've been to all of them.
I really, really enjoyed all of them.
But this was very much up there as one of the best ones, because...
Sometimes, depending on what's announced and who he has up there and what their moods are, certain years you get more little tidbits out of the Apple guests than other years.
This was one of the good years where you really got a lot out of them and there was a lot of explanation for certain things that clarified certain things.
I really enjoyed this one.
It was very good.
Yeah, so we didn't have all these.
I didn't have those explanations.
I had heard about them secondhand, but of course I didn't get to hear them actually say it.
So this, you know, we'll put a link in the show notes.
It's a YouTube video.
You can watch the whole thing, right?
So regarding system settings, which we complained about a little bit on the last show, and this is system settings on the Mac, previously called system preferences.
People have been complaining about the interface because it has been totally redone to look a little bit more like settings on iPad OS.
and ios and uh more to the point it looks nothing like it used to you know any preference pane if you go into system preferences on your mac right now that's not running ventura none of those preference panes look like that anymore at all like no pixel is shared whatsoever and the app itself doesn't look like it used to right and people have been complaining about it so craig figurey starting it we'll put a timestamp link at 43 minutes and 11 seconds gives an explanation of
why they decided to overhaul system preferences and why it looks like it does um and aside from the obvious reasons which doesn't really go into is like well you know there's consistency across the platforms people know what settings look like on their phone they know what it looks like on their ipad why does it look so weird on the mac mostly for historical reasons right wouldn't it be great if they all kind of look the same
And with SwiftUI, you can actually use the same code for them, yada, yada, like platform unification.
But that's not what he says in this section here.
What he mostly talks about is let's think about system preferences and why it looks the way it did.
And I'll be the first to tell you, the system preferences has never been super great.
Like if you wander through system preferences on your pre-Ventura Mac right now, you'll see some preference pains that look pretty good.
Some of them don't look that good.
A lot of them look very different from each other.
The organization on some of them is...
not great you'll it's kind of like a tour of like old controls like oh they did a custom control for this so like i can i can date them by looking at them and say i remember when they did that that used to look new in you know 2008 but now it doesn't anymore and this one was more recent and this one uses a web view behind the scenes and it looks kind of janky for different reasons right it's not like system preferences was awesome and but you know that's not even what craig says about them what he says mostly is that
It was made in a world where the expectation was that you could put your settings in a single window.
System preferences is a small window, and it does grow, but it mostly just grows vertically, I think.
Anyway, it doesn't grow that much.
But the main point is there's no scrolling, right?
It harkens all the way back to the control panel on the original Mac, which if you went to Apple menu control panel on the original Mac, it brought up a single window in which you had every single control that was part of the control panel, right?
In just that one window, right?
It wasn't until later they started branching out into different sub-settings, one for your mouse, one for displays or whatever.
The original Mac was very simple, right?
But system preferences in macOS 10 and macOS and all that stuff has always just been a single window.
There's no scrolling, right?
If you have more settings that can fit on a single window, you can add tabs, right?
Some of the preference panes have a sidebar, like the relatively new security and privacy one has a sidebar where you can scroll through a bunch of sub-items and you click a sub-item and it changes what's in the detail of you, right?
But
It's not better.
He described them as sort of like hand created like bento boxes.
If you've seen one of those bento box lunches, like a Japanese lunchbox where you have all the little compartments, carefully arranged food that just barely fits in this little box.
And it's very cute.
Lots of I would say some of the best.
System preferences, preference panes have been carefully hand laid out to jam in all the stuff that need to fit in there.
And some of them, it just doesn't fit.
And there's like seven tabs and within each tabs, there's sub scrolling panes or whatever.
But the whole point is the window itself doesn't scroll.
There's just sub regions and sub regions.
And it was overwhelmed, right?
And it shows that the system-purpose interface doesn't really scale.
And I feel this pain because I'm going to talk about this in a little bit.
But my dinky little app, the road I went down with my dinky little app is, oh, I love settings.
I'll keep adding settings or whatever.
But one of the features of my app is that it lets you change how it appears on each attached screen.
And since I didn't have a secondary display readily available using Sidecar with my iPad, and the iPad's not that big,
And so I would bring up my preference window while using Sidecar, and the preference window would fill the iPad screen from top to bottom.
It's like, I can't add any more preferences because my preference window, like system preferences, doesn't scroll.
If I add one more checkbox,
Now my window doesn't fit on the screen.
And one of the controls you want to get at is, you know, it's too big.
And so that's kind of the situation system preferences.
And it was like, well, we don't have any more room for more controls on this preference pane.
It should go here.
It's part of like displays or whatever, but I can't make it any bigger.
So let's add a subscreen or let's add a tab or whatever.
And so it doesn't really scale.
It doesn't support scrolling.
And every one of these things is a beautiful hand created little jeweled box or whatever, right?
So that was Federighi's explanation of like, that's why we need an interface that's more like it is on the iPhone and the iPad.
Because in those environments and in the modern world, we have an expectation that it's okay for a thing to scroll vertically.
Certainly settings on your phone scrolls vertically.
That's all it does is scroll vertically.
In fact, there's a search thing at the top one because it scrolls vertically so far that you can never find anything, right?
And iPad OS has the sidebar that also scrolls and so on and so forth.
And so that was the explanation, right?
that explanation makes some sense to me uh as i think i've you know hinted at in describing this the beautiful hand curated bento box of controls it's kind of nice sometimes actually it means somebody sweated over where every single little thing is in in that uh in that interface like the screenshots one of the screenshots we got up in our notes here shows the dock uh preference pane next to its incarnation in ventura uh one of the things that stands out to me is that
The thing where you pick the position on screen of your dock your choices are left side of the screen right side of screen or the bottom It's done as three widely separated radio buttons The left one is on the left the bottom one is in the middle and the right one is on the right You could do that as a pop-up menu.
In fact, there are other pop-up menus in this form You could have a pop-up menu where you pick left bottom or right but seeing all three options vaguely arranged geometrically like they are on your screen is
is i think a little bit nicer it's kind of like how in my in the app that i'll keep referring to for reasons that will come slightly more clear later in my dinky little app switch glass you can put it on all different edges of the screen and to to show that instead of just having a pop-up menu where you pick north northeast east southeast like you can pick all the cardinal directions instead of having those options in a pop-up menu which i could do
I put a little picture of the screen and then I put little radio buttons all around the screen at all the different cardinal directions.
Because it's just easier graphically to be able to just click where on the screen you want it.
Oh, I see that's supposed to be my screen because I see my desktop picture.
Oh, I want it in the middle of the right side.
So I just click the little thing that's in the middle of the right side.
I don't have to go to a pop-up menu.
I don't have to read text.
You just click where, you know, where you want it to be.
carefully laying out all of the controls and the text to just barely fit in this window and to be nice there's an art to that and i think it makes you know when done well it is part of what makes mac apps great when done poorly it looks terrible and everyone hates it and when you don't have room for any more controls then you add sub panes and it gets frustrating right so there's a
The main complaint that I have and other people have different complaints, but the main complaint that I have about the new system settings app, aside from the name, which we'll get to in a little bit, is not so much that they've decided to overhaul this interface and not so much that like, you know, settings on the phone is crappy or whatever.
but that this this style of interface with little switches and stuff that you see on your phone it looks worse on the mac than it does anywhere else in fact apple even has a screenshot that's from like one of their wwc things or whatever where they're saying look you can write the same code and you know it it can manifest itself on iphone ipad and on the mac the same code in all those different places and in each place it will look appropriate for the platform and do the thing
And there's a screenshot here in our notes document that has a phone screen, an iPad screen, and a Mac screen showing similar type of UI.
And it just plain looks worse on the Mac.
And when I say looks worse, I don't mean like it's not pretty or whatever.
Oh, it's not pretty.
That is a thing, but that's subjective.
You're like, well, what's pretty?
If you look at an old thing with the pinstripes, maybe it doesn't look great, but we thought it looked cool then or whatever.
But from a user interface perspective, you can say, is the text legible?
Is it clear which control goes with which text?
Is it clear which things are controls and what I can click on?
Basic usability stuff.
And the Mac incarnation of this standard control, I forget what they call it.
It's like a standard control, like an inset control or something or whatever.
As deployed on the Mac, it just looks worse.
There's not a lot of contrast.
It's not a lot of visual hierarchy.
The controls seem like they're smaller than they are on the iPhone and the iPad, but you can say, well, that makes sense because on the iPhone and the iPad, you're using your big meaty finger.
And on the Mac, you have a very precise pointing device like a mouse.
But I don't think that's the reason to make the controls smaller.
Like, why not make them at least the same size as they are on the iPad?
No one complained that a control was too big.
There's just so much room.
And then finally, sort of the uniformity, which some people like.
They say, oh, it's so much easier to scan.
But having everything to be left-justified label, right-justified control, sometimes the label is very widely separated from the control such that you feel like you need one of those straight edges that some people read with to put on your screen to say, does this switch go with that item?
But you have to scan back and forth.
I don't think the usability is as good as it is on the iPad or on the phone.
And furthermore, if you look in Apple's user interface, like human interface guidelines, they have a whole section on when you should use these little toggle switches versus when you should use check boxes.
And arguably, in Apple's own interface guidelines, they say you should probably not have a screen full of these toggle switches.
Now, granted, settings is just a screen full of toggle switches.
So obviously, they've been violating that supposed guideline forever.
But if you look at system preferences, when you have a list of things with checkboxes, the checkbox is always right next to the label because you've got the checkbox label right next to it.
You know, no matter how long the label is, you can make the window wide and labels can go long and the labels can wrap and everything.
But the label is always right next to it.
And by the way, if you click on the label in a good Mac app, it will activate and deactivate the checkbox.
All these things are not true of granted.
This is just beta one.
All these things are not true of this stuff in system settings.
And I think the main root problem is
the default standard controls for this stuff and swift ui like whatever this is called i should look up the name but i think it's called like inset form control or whatever that control has poor usability and is ugly and that is not a problem with like oh you shouldn't have redesigned the settings interface that's a problem with the control like we talked about this back in the very olden days of the iphone what if you made an iphone app that just used standard iphone controls back in like 2007 2008
You didn't do any custom controls.
It was just straight up table views, toggle switches, navigation bars, like you just used the default iOS, wasn't even called iOS then, default iPhone controls, and you didn't do anything fancy.
You'd still have an app that had good usability and looked okay, right?
It wouldn't be fancy.
No one would be wowed by it, but it would work well and it would look okay.
That's the job of sort of the OS widgets.
If you say, here's what you should use for a table view.
Here's what you should use for like switches.
Here's what you should use for the equivalent of pop-up menus.
That stuff needs to look good and have good usability.
I, you know, both of those things.
And if you make an app with just those standard controls, it should be okay.
Okay.
That's not true of this Swift UI set of controls on the Mac.
On the phone, I think it's fine.
You look at it on the phone, yeah, settings is probably too long and it's dumb that they have the search field and the organization is crappy, but it's okay.
We get by, right?
On the iPad, you get a sidebar.
It's similar.
It's all right.
On the Mac, it's worse than both of those.
The controls have poor usability and they are ugly.
And that's not really the fault of the team writing the system settings app.
It's the fault of the team writing these controls in Swift UI, not thinking about how they're going to look and how usable they're going to be on the Mac.
Maybe the system settings team should think about, is this the right control if the label is literally four inches from the tiny little switch that supposedly is associated with it?
And there's nothing except for a slightly darker gray line tracing along underneath it.
You have to follow with your eyeballs to find out which label goes with which switch.
so i'm still kind of upset about this redesign because i feel like are you yeah every single one of those redesign preference panes or whatever the hell we're calling them now is worse than the thing it replaces and not necessarily because it's like the wrong direction to be going in but just because it's being failed by the standard system controls and beyond that some of those little beautiful bento boxes
They were really nice.
One of them that a lot of people were highlighting that I also tweeted about is the trackpad control, which had the cool video and everything.
And Craig said, oh, don't worry.
Those video stuff are coming back.
We have an even better idea.
It's going to look awesome or whatever.
Right.
So that's just, you know, again, it's beta one.
Everything's not done yet.
This will be revised.
Right.
But it's not just the fact that there were little videos showing you the trackpad gestures that makes that preference paint awesome.
Look at the visual hierarchy in it.
Look how clear everything is.
Look how beautifully it's laid out, right?
There is an art to that.
And that art is 100% absent from beta one of the Ventura system settings apps.
So I really hope, I really hope someone does sweat over these individual controls.
I hope someone does sweat over the organization of the things in the sidebar and maybe gives us options.
And I hope someone really does think long and hard about whether a long vertical list of short labels widely separated by white space with right justified toggle switches is the right interface to literally every single setting on the Mac.
No, I am with you.
I mean, when you look at screenshots, you've made these great comparisons.
You look at the screenshots of the same screen, old versus new.
A few things are very clear to me.
Number one, you are absolutely right.
Surprise.
You are absolutely right that it's like the default control style that was designed for iOS first, and they ported it to Mac with this SwiftUI cross-platform stuff.
Yeah.
It doesn't look good on the Mac.
All these controls look wrong.
The proportions are wrong.
The way the screen flows is wrong.
Having everything, you know, label on the left, huge gap, thing on the right, that is wrong.
The colors are wrong.
The contrast is wrong.
Right.
And it's very, very clear that the Mac version of these SwiftUI controls is...
Absolutely not a high priority for the design team, or they just suck at designing them.
And I'm assuming that, you know, given that they work for the best design company in the world, generally speaking, like, I'm assuming that it's the former.
And I hope, for their sake, it's the former.
Yeah.
Because it just seems like, you know, when you look at the old UI, it does look dated to a degree.
And I understand why the software designers are trying to, you know, quote, move things forward.
You know, whether it's actually forward is not always the case.
But they're trying to move things in a different direction just because the previous way is dated.
And...
the concerns that Federighi brought up on the talk show about things like, you know, like scaling and adding more preferences and everything.
Those are valid concerns.
Also, the previous system preferences app is not perfect and Apple has had a very hard time seemingly in recent years adding things to it in a way that, that functions reliably and doesn't suck.
Like,
look at the process for approving, uh, you know, apps for security preferences where you have to like, Oh, give the grant this app access to, you know, record the screen or whatever.
And like the process of doing that when a little lock in the corner that you have to somehow see and click and the weird button that appears that sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.
And you got to reboot sometimes like the whole, the old system preferences app is, is not perfect.
And the old design was dated.
However, uh,
The new design direction of Mac OS, even more severely than iOS, is very strongly in the direction of stripping out every design element that makes things usable, really.
What they're going for...
is very much like this layout looks clean, like a clean magazine spread or whatever.
I don't know what they're... That's clearly the aesthetic that they're going for.
But it just doesn't work on the Mac the way they've designed it right now.
And unfortunately, I think what we've seen, like notifications...
uh is that when something on the mac is redesigned that's not safari even then i think i think if like last year's safari design hoopla i think if it was only on the mac i think it would have shipped uh
And the only reason we got that changed was that it was on the iPhone and that was angering the public.
But what we see on the Mac under the current design administration is that they dictate what they think is right and then never touch it.
And so I actually don't think this is going to get better.
What Federighi said was not that the design of the widgets was going to get better as the beta process goes.
It was that some of the content of these panels was going to be more fleshed out or more polished or whatever.
That's very different.
The actual design of the widgets I think we're stuck with for God knows how long.
Because what we also, you know, look, look, the notification design since Big Sur sucks.
It's still very much here in Monterey and appears to be unchanged in Ventura as well.
Why?
You know, if if the design and the usability of these things on the Mac was was being well cared for, that wouldn't have made it out of the Big Sur beta.
But here we are, two releases later, it's still untouched and modified.
It got a little better.
Oh, it did?
Get the show notes, man.
Yeah, Mac Dialogues.
Style chosen automatically at display time based on content.
So if you have a... You're jumping ahead.
That's Dialogues, not notifications.
But anyway...
Oh, I'm sorry.
You're right.
Relevant to notifications, let me hoist up a thing from way down in the show notes.
Speaking of notifications that haven't changed to people complaining about you, I think, what are people complaining about?
It's a little rounded rectangle.
It's in the corner.
What's bad about the Mac notifications?
Well, the two things people were complaining about, which apparently were not important enough for Apple to change, was one, they hit all the controls for a supposedly cleaner look, and you only see them when they mouse over.
And two, and this is the one that kills me.
All right, so it's mystery mouse over stuff.
Nobody likes that, but yeah, in the end, it's not that bad, right?
There are still bugs that have been there since Big Sur.
Please click on Dave Nadian's tweet where he managed to capture a video of a bug that I encounter all the time and drives me up a wall.
And it has been there for two major releases of macOS.
If you're going to make a mystery meat navigation thing where you have a window with no controls on it and the controls appear when you bring your mouse over it for some reason because you want that cleaner look.
When I mouse over it, I have to be able to use the controls.
And what happens to me and what you'll see in this video is you mouse over the notification and you see the little X to close it.
And you see the button that lets you do things like mark a task as completed or reminder or whatever, or snooze it or do one of those things.
By the way, they took out some snooze options too, just to annoy you even more.
Or click on the button, right?
And you go to click the button.
And when you bring your mouse over there, the button disappears.
It's a sick little game that Notifications plays with on the Mac.
Two major versions of macOS, this bug has existed.
And this is not a minor bug.
You can't do the thing that you're supposed to be able to do from the notification if it won't let you click on that button because when you mouse over to it, the button disappears.
two major versions of mac os so when we say oh the notifications on mac are crappy and they need to be done it's not just because we think they're ugly it's not just because we don't like that they hid text until you mouse over it it's like they don't work they don't fulfill the job they're supposed to fill but it's like let me let me mark the reminder as complete let me snooze this task let me click the settings button it's like haha it's i mean i've come up with workarounds where you can figure out a series of mousing gestures that will let you get to the button before it disappears but come on
As much as I love what they're doing with the Mac hardware recently, the Mac software still has a lot of issues like this.
And I think what we see over and over again from Apple is that they're just not putting the resources into the Mac software to really keep it great.
You know, the Mac software...
It moves forward in certain ways, but it also moves back in others, and it seems like it just never has the quality in both bugs and also... Honestly, I think the bug side has actually gotten pretty well improved over the last few releases, but the design side is getting worse now.
But I think ultimately, though, what gives me some hope here
Apple has shown that they have not really been trying very hard with the old way of the Mac doing things.
Using AppKit and using old Cocoa controls and native stuff and the old design styles where things were much more clear and decorated and indicated visually and usable.
However, for Apple to fix all the bugs that we had in those old previous releases, we have to hop on the new train.
And, you know, as I said, like the system settings app is full of bugs in previous releases.
Like there's so many problems with it and limitations and things that are unintuitive.
And so by moving to this new, you know, more unified Swift UI based design...
I don't love the design at all.
I think the design is a hideous step backwards, and I think anybody who designed it whose title includes the word usability should probably be fired.
However, it's also the path that Apple's actually actively working on.
On the Mac, the path to Mac happiness as a user is to stay on the path they're actively working on because everything else is just going to be a train wreck of deterioration and bugs and everything else.
So if this helps them actively work on the Mac more and better and with higher quality...
that's the price we have to pay.
It would be great if we could have both.
If we could have, like, you know, back when the Mac was their only major platform, if we could have the Mac being, like, the thing that got a lot of attention and was good and was moving forward and was pretty, you know, stable and high quality, that'd be great if we can get all of that.
Unfortunately, Apple has shown that we can't get all of that right now.
And that's their fault.
And 100%, you know, that's on them because there's no reason why things need to be that way.
But that's the reality.
So...
As long as they are working on the Mac and continuing to move this stuff forward, if the only way we can get them to keep doing that reliably is to use these terrible new designs that can help them use more cross-platform code, that's just the cost of being a Mac user right now in software.
And it sucks that we have to pay that cost, but we do.
So system preferences, like as it previously existed, like I said, it's kind of like a museum of UI.
Like you can go through it and say, oh, this room was created in 1857.
Like different preference panes are dated by like when someone created them.
A lot of them were clearly created back in the day when maybe there weren't any designers assigned to that preference pane and someone just threw something together as a developer and it's good enough, right?
And that's, you know, the modern one is like, this preference pane is really a web view in disguise because this
This came about at the time.
It's iCloud related and we had web interfaces for it.
So we didn't bother re-implementing this.
So really it's just a big web view and you don't need to know that.
But that's why it looks totally different than this one.
And this one was made before we had a standard control for lists where you can add or remove items.
So they wrote a custom control for it and it's been there for 15 years now.
And like, I'm not holding it up as this paragon of usability, but there are gems in there.
And those gems were beautiful hand-polished things in the old way of Mac user interfaces that had a lot of good qualities.
And the new way, you know, a bunch of standard controls.
These standard controls aren't up to snuff yet.
But, like, I think a lot of it might just come down to disagreements, kind of like the notification thing.
If you ask them, like, why can't I see any controls on the notifications?
Oh, it looks better with no controls.
The controls appear just when you need them, so you mouse over them.
But why should the controls be cluttering up the interface when you just want to look at them with your eyeballs?
The controls will appear when you mouse over them, and then I'll show them the bug and get angry at them.
them but anyway and so an example of a disagreement Craig Hockenberry has a tweet showing he was trying to change the name of his computer which is in the sharing preference pane again I don't know what the hell we call these in a world where it's not called system preferences the file name extension is probably still dot preference pane I haven't actually checked but anyway I'm going to continue calling preference pane so he goes into sharing
And as he said in his tweet, it took me forever to figure out how to change my computer name.
And then he has a screenshot which shows the sharing preference pane with two vaguely different gray colors.
Like there's a gray background and a slightly, very slightly darker.
This is testing like the color calibration of your monitor.
Very slightly darker gray inset area with very,
Very, very slightly darker hairline gray lines on the border separating items.
And on the very left side of the screen, it says computer name.
Then there's three inches of white space.
And then it says Craig's MacBook Pro.
It's just text.
It's just black text on a slightly darker gray background, a slightly lighter gray background within a slightly lighter gray window, right?
And so he says, it's not the edit button because there is an edit button right below Craig's MacBook Pro.
But that edit button does not let you edit the computer name because there's that hairline dividing it telling you, see, this edit button is not for that.
And the text field doesn't highlight until something else in the panel gets focused.
except the edit button so if you click the edit button and it gets focused that thing like what i'm saying is this is a text field but it does not look like editable text it looks exactly the same as the label you can't click computer name that's the label you can't change the label in a in the thing but you can change the text craig's macbook pro but you don't know that until you highlight some other control in the thing like this is not rocket science we're asking for a text field with a label
We should have that technology.
The standard controls for Swift UI for Mac OS have to be better than this.
I'm not saying they have to look exactly like the old ones or work exactly like the old ones, but for crying out loud, you should be like the label shouldn't be three inches from the thing that it controls.
And the thing it controls, if it's a text field should look like a text field.
It shouldn't require me to focus something else.
It shouldn't require me to mouse over it.
Am I going to mouse over every piece of text to see if it's editable?
Like this is not discoverable.
This is poor usability.
And on top of all of that, it's aesthetically ugly.
I don't think it looks nice.
It's got nothing going for it other than the fact that underneath it, it's the same Swift UI code that would run everywhere, which is great.
I endorse that.
But there's no reason like, oh, it's ugly because it's cross-platform.
There's no reason cross-platform code has to be this ugly.
Each platform, the whole point of this cross-platform code is that each platform can choose to implement this declarative UI in a way that looks appropriate for the platform.
The iPhone one looks great.
The iPad one looks okay.
The Mac one looks like garbage.
So that's what they need to work on.
I think at this point, again, I don't mean to keep harping on their poor software design, but for all the great stuff they've been doing in hardware recently and in some of the cross-platform apps and services and APIs and everything, those have all been pretty great, but...
But I don't think Apple is able to design good Mac interfaces anymore.
And that's not even a very recent thing.
I think we've been heading down that path for a while.
We can no longer rely on Apple to design good Mac apps and good Mac UIs and good Mac software.
they they are great at the frameworks they are amazing at that they are great at the hardware again amazing at that but they just don't design good apps anymore and and that's that's not that reason of a thing but it's and it's also not turning around at all like there's occasional bright spots of bright light but that's not the norm for the most part they're not good at mac design they're not good at mac app design and mac ui design
And we have to rely on the community for that.
Windows, the basic Windows design was always crap.
Like Microsoft Windows is always crap.
And as a result, the ecosystem was mostly crap.
But you have occasional bright spots of light in the ecosystem.
That's what the Mac is now.
Apple has lost the will and the prioritization and the ability to make great Mac apps and great Mac UI designs.
And so we're going to have to rely on the community for that and greatly lower our expectations of what's coming out of Apple in those areas, which is a shame.
Again, it doesn't need to be this way.
There's nothing stopping them from getting better people in there and prioritizing this better.
And there's a lot of great people in the company who know how to do this right.
They're not being enabled.
They're not winning the arguments.
There are people there who have been there a long time who really have great sensibilities in these areas.
The reason we harp on it from the outside so much is to hopefully help them win some arguments on the inside.
But it just seems like we're down a really rough path in those areas.
And we just can't, you know, Apple's no longer a leader in UI design.
It's simple as that.
They gave it up.
They walked right away from it.
And whoever is leading the charge there can't do it or chooses not to, especially at the Mac.
But again, they have great strengths in all these other areas, but that's not one of them anymore.
I pulled myself off on a tangent getting angry about this computer name thing, but the point I was trying to make about it being a disagreement is same idea with the notifications.
Why should Craig's MacBook Pro, why should it look like an always visible text box, like a big white box with your text inside it?
When I'm not editing it, shouldn't it just look like text?
And then when I edit it, that's when, you know, the text controls will be and a focus ring will be around it or whatever.
Like that's the thinking, the same thinking with the notifications.
It shouldn't have any of this visual clutter.
I don't need to see those buttons.
I just need the information notification.
Only when I mouse over it does it appear.
That philosophy brought to so many parts of the Mac, you're just very interested in closing this, leads to a situation where you have a label and a text field which look identical to each other that you just have to know, oh, that's not just telling you what your computer name is.
That's editable.
And by the way, don't click the edit button below that because that's not the thing to edit.
You have to mouse over the thing and then suddenly what looked like text on a background becomes text field.
And that's the sort of the – they would say, well, we just disagreed.
It's not bad UI.
We just disagree.
I think visual clutter is the worst sin in the world.
And you think, you know, I should have all these ugly controls and everything everywhere so I know which things are buttons and so I know which things are edible.
We have this argument with iOS 7, right?
Should buttons look like buttons?
How can I tell what I can click on or whatever?
And I feel like we're having all those same arguments over again.
Like, we've got all this screen space.
visually distinguish the elements show me what is a text field what is a button don't put everything in a pop-up menu speaking of pop-up menus the pop-up menus don't look like pop-up menus anymore it looks like text on a background with a little up and down carrot like a v and an upside down v next to it you just have to know by the way that if you click that up and down v thing that the whole thing is is uh you know they look like actually the uh what are they called like the
The controls where you can go like there's a number in a text field and you can hit the up arrow and down arrow to change the number.
A stepper?
Stepper, exactly.
That's what they look at, but it's not a stepper.
That whole thing is a pop-up menu.
It looks nothing like a pop-up menu, right?
I'm not saying the controls need to look the way they used to.
The controls have changed a lot over the years, right?
But it needs to be clear what's a control.
The controls need to have an appearance that makes it obvious what they are.
And it seems like this thing, it's like a golf contest.
How few lines can I draw on the screen?
Yeah.
Like, I just want, like, and you win by just saying gray pixels.
I have gray pixels and I have text.
How many colors gray do you have?
I only got two colors of gray.
Ooh, you're winning.
Do you have any lines?
Very few and they're hardly visible, right?
It's like, that's not, I don't, all right, I need to stop yelling about this.
Move on to the tangentially related topic, which we talked about this a little bit last week.
So this used to be called system preferences, and now it's called system settings, right?
There is a companion to go with that, which is that preferences, which is command comma as the keyboard shortcut traditionally on the Mac, that preferences menu item that is in the application menu.
So if you go text edit, go to the menu that's called text edit.
There's an item in there called preferences by convention on the Mac.
that menu item is now being renamed to settings i think some been rumbling about like if you build against the new sdk your preferences menu item will just be automatically called settings but then you'll have to wander through all your help document and everything like that and change it to settings this you know for the same reason system preferences would change to settings unification with ipad os and ios like it makes some sense but boy this is going to be a short-term headache for people dealing with
Okay, well, if you're on Ventura or later, go to settings menu item.
But if you're on a previous, if you're writing like documentation on your website or something, but if you're on a previous OS, that thing is not going to be called settings and real preferences, or maybe you'll make it called settings everywhere.
Anyway, a naming unification, right?
But last week I was saying, why is the application that was called System Preferences called System Settings, right?
It's just called Settings on your phone.
It's just called Settings on your iPad, but on the Mac it's called System Settings.
One of the attempts to explain this was, okay, well, if you launch like TextEdit on Ventura, right?
there is a menu item in the text edit menu called settings.
It used to be called preferences, but now it's called settings.
But if you go one menu over to the Apple menu, in the Apple menu, there's a menu item called system settings that will bring up the app formerly known as system preferences.
So you've got settings and system settings.
And it's clear the settings menu would be the settings for text edit.
And the one in the Apple menu is the system settings.
Which makes a little bit of sense, except when you say, but the menu is called TextEdit.
So if I go into a menu called TextEdit and there's an item called Settings, it's pretty clear these are the settings for TextEdit.
The literal name of the menu item is TextEdit, right?
Whereas when I go into the Apple menu, you could make the menu item say System Settings, but the app that it launches could just be called Settings, just like it is on your phone and just like it is on your iPad.
So...
The renaming, yeah, renaming is annoying or whatever.
We'll get used to it.
But I would suggest to Apple, perhaps call the app settings, make the menu item called system settings, and then everyone will be slightly more happy.
Again, this is the least of the problems of everything having the system settings.
And I mostly endorse the renaming because system preferences, why was it ever called that?
No one knows what it is.
Everyone just knows setting on their phone.
It makes sense.
It makes perfect sense.
Everyone knows the phone.
Nobody knows the Mac.
Like I understand why they're doing it.
Makes some sense.
But this, you know, I think it could just be called settings.
And now the thing that I have a personal connection to is, again, my dinky little app, Switchglass.
It's got one sort of settings slash preferences window that kind of grew to the point where I can't make it any bigger because it doesn't fit in an iPad screen.
That's my bad, right?
I knew I was doing it, but I'm like, ah, it's a dinky app.
I don't need to have separate windows.
But one of the sins I committed with the UI of my app is that I combine global settings that affect the entire application with settings just for that display because I have separate per display settings or whatever.
And, you know, you can get away with it.
It makes some sense.
The sections are clearly labeled or whatever.
But it really should split it into two things.
And when I was thinking about splitting it into two things, I was like, well, okay.
One menu item will bring up the global things for the app, right?
And that would be, in the old world, called preferences.
And it would be command comma if my app had keyboard shortcuts, but it doesn't because it's in the menu bar.
Anyway.
And the other menu item would be called settings because it's the settings for the app switcher on that screen.
But now that settings has been renamed preferences, what am I going to have?
Two menu items called settings?
Is one going to be called global settings, regular settings, app switcher settings?
Do I have to look through the thesaurus for different words for settings?
This has really thrown a monkey wrench into my planned, you know, 2.0 revision of the UI where I'm going to finally split the global settings from the app palette settings because now I can't use the word preferences anywhere because that's just not a thing anymore in Ventura and future.
So I have to rethink all of that.
Oh, and related to the renaming, by the way, I didn't check this, but somebody said it and I'm inclined to believe it, but this is just going to drive people more crazy.
In system settings, the thing that was previously called the preference pane, whatever we're calling that was previously called security ampersand privacy, is now called privacy ampersand security.
Come on.
Now you're just trolling us.
Can you imagine trying to write documentation and explain to people, go to security and privacy.
I don't see anything called security and privacy.
Of course you do.
It's right there.
I see something called privacy and security.
What are you doing, Apple?
What are you doing?
You just need to be put in charge of this, John.
Yeah.
Well, if I was put in charge of this, I would say... I already said what I would say with the settings renaming thing, but I feel for the team that's working on system settings because they don't control the whole entire SwiftUI framework.
They got the edict, you're going to make this with SwiftUI, which I think is a reasonable edict, which we may or may not get to later in the show.
Probably not at this rate.
But...
You know, they're doing the best they can with what they've been given.
I feel like this needs to be a team effort to make this whole thing better.
Starting with, as Marco pointed out, maybe starting all the way down with the design team who has notions that are not in keeping.
Yeah, there you go.
Thank you.
i i honestly i think i think that might be our show i think we might be good now we need to talk about mac dialogues because you mentioned it before and i think it's worth yeah throw it in oh yes you're right i'm sorry i completely forgot about that uh yeah so the dialogues are ever so slightly less bananas now in certain circumstances
So apparently there are different styles for NS alerts and there's now expanded alerts, which basically instead of centering everything, it makes it look like pros, you know, left aligned and pretty much what you would expect.
And it doesn't look utterly stupid, which is great.
yeah what is it was a big sir when they did this they changed the mac dialog boxes to look like they do on ipad os and ios basically being center aligned a big long skinny vertical window um and they just did that you know system control you just say give me a you know a window modal or app modal dialog box and you just tell it here's the content of the dialog box here's what the button should be back in the old days it would be okay and cancel whatever like a dialog box right
Like, are you sure you want to do this operation?
You know, do you sure you want to do this thing?
Delete or cancel or whatever.
Right.
And that's that's for people to know.
And from the program perspective, that's the API you do.
You just say, put up a dialogue.
Here's the content.
Here's what the button should be called.
Here's the callbacks for them.
You don't like for the most part, if you're doing a good job using standard controls, you don't draw that window yourself.
So when Apple decides, hey, dialogue boxes are going to look different now, instead of them being landscape sort of.
landscape oriented rectangles with text and buttons now they're going to be portrait orientation because that looks kind of like they do on the ipad and the phone and they made this change and a lot of people grumbled and the text was centered and it looked awkward but most importantly usability wise sometimes people had so much text that it didn't fit in the dinky ipad size portrait window anymore because now the text is wrapping more because the window is narrow or whatever so then they would make a scrollable region you'd have to know it was scrollable because if you didn't have scroll bars visible like
if you're lucky one piece of text would be cut off by the invisible gray like margin at the bottom but if you're unlucky you know there would be like a line of text and then empty space like a paragraph break and you wouldn't know that there's more text you'd have to know if you go over there and like swipe on your mouse or scroll on your mouse wheel that you'd see more text it was it was a terrible system and by the way it looked ugly because center line text who wants to read that or whatever
Everybody can complain.
So in Ventura, did they change it back to the way Mac dialog boxes have looked since 1984?
No, they did not.
But what they did do is say, well, if you put a lot of text in a dialog, what we'll do is instead of showing the iOS, iPadOS style vertical portrait mode ones with a scrolly thing,
we'll show a normal looking mac dialogue box but for every other one we're going to the other one because the designers are saying we're actually we're right those other ones do look better but when there's a lot of text we'll show the mac style one and it's like what are you doing because if you're doing this for consistency now you've thrown consistency out the window because half of dialogue boxes are going to be this way and half are going to be that way depending on the content of the dialogue box that's not going to make any sense to users they're not going to know why is this one landscape or why is this one portrait just make them all landscape again no one was confused
by landscape dialogue boxes it fit everyone's apps better it works better for the mac very frustrating i mean i just started as a positive item like yay they they have some concessions on the usability of alerts but the more i think about it it's like why is this a concession like why why are you holding on to the old style no one is confused by mac dialogue boxes just make them use the format where they were fewer layout concerns and the text was more readable
Yeah, that's the thing.
The design team cannot accept that their new design from Big Sur is actually worse.
They won't accept that.
And so instead of reverting back to or changing to a different design where things are wider again and left-aligned text or whatever, all the old style of doing things...
They're insisting, oh, no, no, no, we're only going to do that when we need to.
But other than that, our awesome new centered bold text iOS design, that's totally great.
This is why I don't have high hopes for this changing.
It's exactly this kind of thing that tells me that whatever design elements you don't like in the beta are not going to be fixed by the time this is released.
Because the design team is misguided right now, and also they don't think they are.
And that's the issue.
Yeah, that's the rub.
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode, and Collide.
Thanks to our members also who support us directly.
You can join and become a member at atp.fm slash join.
We will 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 Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A
So last week I went on a little bit of an adventure, which I didn't want to tell you two about because I thought it would be fun to just kind of drop it on you tonight.
I would like you to look at the chat room and click the link that I just pasted there because last week...
Why are you standing on a white Rivian?
Because it turned... Well, first of all, the white just happened, and it really did.
But second of all... Second of all, that is not my Rivian.
I do not have that kind of money.
But as it turns out, there's a Rivian dealer in Richmond.
They have dealers?
Yes, which I didn't know either.
But yes...
There is a Rivian dealer in Richmond and a very kind listener, Shaheen, put me in contact with the local people, including most particularly my new friend Peebles who works at Rivian.
And Peebles took me around and showed me the dealership as it is today, which is not a whole lot, but apparently it was previously owned by some other company.
The building was and Rivian had like an office area and little else.
But then the previous company left, and so Rivian is now taking over the rest of the building and building it out and so on and so forth.
And so I got to spend about half an hour, maybe 40 minutes, touring the building as they're doing construction and so on and so forth.
And then I spent about 20 minutes driving a Rivian.
Oh my God.
How is it?
I don't like pickup trucks.
I really don't like pickup trucks.
I want one of these so freaking bad.
I cannot even tell you.
It is so cool.
It is so freaking cool.
I loved it.
Again, I was predisposed to enjoy this because I was getting a little bit of, not early access in the strictest sense, but not a lot of people can just roll up to a dealer and get this kind of treatment.
It was very kind of Shaheen and Peebles to do this for me, but I loved it.
I felt like I was so overwhelmed by the whole experience,
it was just, you know, it was a guy showing me around.
He was super awesome, but it was a guy showing me around.
Like, there was nothing that should have been overwhelming, but I was just bowled over by the whole thing, and when it got to the part of the tour where, you know, I was looking at the truck and messing with it, it is so cool and so well thought out.
Now, again, I don't really care for pickups.
I think they're silly in most circumstances.
There are definitely people that use them and actually put things in the bed from time to time, but
So many times I feel like pickup trucks are more of look at me and my sweet truck than they are I need a utility vehicle with which to transport things in the bed of this truck.
You know what I mean?
Oh, yeah.
It's very much a like, you know, I want a large thing to show off my largeness kind of.
Yeah, exactly.
Far be it for me to complain about someone buying a thing just because they like it because that defines my entire computer hobby, right?
Yeah.
But that is why the vast, vast, vast majority of pickup trucks are purchased in the United States.
And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it.
You want a pickup truck?
We have them and we'll sell them to you.
And there's no reason you need to justify that other than saying, I like pickup trucks.
Why do I have a stupid computer?
I like big, fancy computers.
That's the only reason.
I get a little bit angry when someone says, oh, I got this pickup truck because it's really practical.
And it's like, no, come on.
Just say you like trucks.
Like, it's fine.
Like, nothing wrong with liking trucks.
Like, other than the fact that, you know, they're killing pedestrians because they keep getting taller and taller.
Like, that is wrong with it.
You should think about that.
And Rivian is probably destroying the roads because it weighs 6,000 pounds or whatever.
But, you know, hey, no CO2 emissions.
So give a thumbs up there.
Or fewer CO2 emissions.
Anyway.
Relocated CO2 emissions.
Right, exactly.
But reduced overall, net-net, right?
But like, yeah, if people don't understand, if you're coming from like, if you're listening to this in Europe or maybe in Canada, you don't understand.
Like the Ford F-150 has at various times to be the best-selling vehicle in America for consumers, right?
So many people buy pickup trucks here, and there's lots of weird cultural reasons for doing that, and people just like trucks or whatever, but practically speaking, just like my stupid Mac Pro is not practical in any sense of the world and is worse than if I had gotten a computer that is more appropriate to my needs, people buy pickup trucks and then try to use them like minivans.
And so you end up with these monstrous vehicles that are incredibly impractical and inconvenient.
And they have this huge amount of car before this tiny little stupid bed at the end.
And they jack the thing up.
And it's just like, this doesn't make any practical sense whatsoever.
But again, aside from the pedestrian killing and the gas mileage and the road damage, people just like trucks.
And so if you think, oh, well, you know, it's a pickup truck, but only a few people buy them.
It's the default car in America, essentially.
Just like the default car in many European cities is like a small, you know, a tiny little hatchback that Americans can't even fit inside.
The default vehicle in many places in America is a pickup truck.
And so that's why Rivian is relevant.
That's why we're even talking about this, because this is not an obscure sideshow.
Like pickup trucks are the show in America.
And also, this is a major market segment that is, to date, unserved by electric vehicles.
I know there's some coming out or whatever.
The Ford Lightning is the other big one in the conversation here, which is no joke, because the Ford F-150, the Ford Lightning, Ford is selling as many of those as they can make.
Right.
But the reason this is a big deal is we're trying to get electrification of vehicles as much as we can.
And there's been these segments where people will say, well, I can't, quote, I can't buy electric because I have need X, Y, and Z. And once you get good electric pickups, that solves a lot of those previously unsolved needs.
And that gets us closer to major vehicle electrification.
And that's a very, very good thing.
Yeah, so I spent a little time walking around, you know, the outside of the vehicle, you know, with guidance.
So, you know, press this, look at this, check this out, et cetera, et cetera.
So the picture that's in the show notes that I've shown Marco and John is me standing on the, what do they call this?
The gear tunnel.
Yeah.
So the gear tunnel, if you're sitting in the back seat, well, behind your back, there's basically empty space.
And so with the Rivian, with the R1T, which is the actual name of this model, there's a door on either side and you can store a bunch of gear, whatever it may be, or luggage or what have you, in this tunnel, this gear tunnel.
And the doors that flop down when you open them up, they support, like, 250 pounds of weight in and of themselves.
Now, you wouldn't drive down the road this way, you know, because that'd be extremely dangerous.
It's, you know, way outside the edge of the body of the truck.
But just as, like, a step, it was perfectly legitimate.
And so, again, the super nice guy who was showing me around, his name was Peebles, and he said, okay, here, stand here, give me your phone, I'm going to take a picture of you.
I was like, yes, yes, let's do that.
So that's the picture that I'm showing you.
But, you know, so much about the Rivian,
It did not strike me as a beta test kind of vehicle.
Like, so many things were really, really well thought out.
Like, the button to release the tailgate, which is to say, you know, the thing that closes up in the back of the truck, it's a very subtle button that's on the, like...
I guess the top side rail of the bed of the truck in our little super secret private channel.
I've just dropped a few more pictures for you guys privately.
And you can see the button very, very faintly on the left-hand side of that picture behind like a little tie-down mount.
And...
You press that and then the tailgate lowers.
And then the way they've set up the tailgate is such that there's like another panel that slides down that kind of lands in between the main bed and the tailgate to kind of bridge the gap.
So if you have a piece of like lumber or what have you that's longer than the very, very short bed, then it'll sit cleanly on the area between the bed and...
that well that in between area and the tailgate itself that's a very hard thing to describe verbally but hopefully that makes some amount of sense and by the way you mentioned the very very short bed why is the bed very very short well because rivian knows that despite the fact that people want a truck what they need is a car uh and so this thing has four doors a front seat and a back seat big enough for big people and there's not too much room left for a bed and yeah they could put a full-size bed in there but now the vehicle would be so long that people wouldn't be able to
park it anywhere and so they have to they have to do what everyone has done which is basically make a gigantic jacked up luxury sedan for eighty thousand dollars and put a thing on the back that's big enough so that people see it's recognizable in a truck and distract them from the tiny little bed in the back by putting a huge grill in the front and knobby tires and you know making the thing be 70 feet off the ground and don't bother looking at that bed that's only four feet long
Hey, you can lower the tailgate and now you can fit four babies of plywood in it as long as you don't mind the fact that it's sticking four feet out of the back of your truck.
I will say all of that stuff does to our purposes, though, they're just, you know, specialized.
Like, for instance, my beach sand driving vehicle needs.
This would be amazing because it has better ground clearance and way better off-roading capabilities than almost every vehicle out there.
but you would get the r1s like they make an suv version of this which doesn't even pretend it's it's a suv right and it's like well make is generous they advertise the ability to make one i don't know how many have actually gotten into customers hands but i mean but the great thing about it is that the r1s is basically the r1t without pretending to be a pickup so the part that is the bed it's like why don't we just make that the rest of the inside of the like a
It's the same platform, and the platform is so much better suited to being an SUV because it's clearly not particularly well suited to being a pickup truck, but people don't really want a pickup truck.
They just want to say they own one, but they want a sedan that's really jacked.
Anyway, again, I'm not faulting people for this.
I'm just saying that it's been interesting to watch the bed portion of pickup trucks shrink and shrink and shrink to the point where it is just barely big enough so you can make sure that people still know it's a pickup truck.
It's true.
The R1S, according to Peebles, is getting delivered, but not a ton of them at this point.
I'm pretty sure that's what he said.
I might have that wrong.
Coming back to the experience I had with it, in the bed on the left-hand side, if you're looking at the back of the car, you're standing behind the car, you're looking at the back of it.
On the left-hand side, there's a panel that has an air pump so you can inflate and deflate not only the tires on the truck itself, but if you had a
motorcycle or bicycle or something like that, you can inflate or deflate the tires with the onboard air pump, which also has a pressure gauge on it, which is super cool.
And then again, I haven't put this in the chat room.
I probably won't bother putting this in the show notes, but for the two of you guys, if you look underneath the air pump, it's hard to see, but there's like two round rect areas that if you look very closely, have little like padlock logos on them.
And what those are, and there's matching ones on the other side that
They give you these special cables, like really, really strong cables, like bike lock kind of cables.
And you can put... And they have like special ends on them.
And you stick the ends into these little portholes that have these padlock logos on them.
And when the truck locks...
it locks those cables in place.
And when the truck unlocks, you can yank those cables right out and remove, you know, your bicycle, motorcycle, whatever the case, or whatever it is you have locked in the back.
And it was such a satisfying feeling, you know, the little chink to put it in and take it out.
The Kensington lock, if you remember those, the Kensington lock, remember, like all Macs, you start to come with this little thing.
Like, what is this all for?
That's for the Kensington lock.
Yeah.
It's much fancier, but yeah, it's the same basic idea.
On the other side, I didn't send you this picture, but on the other side, I had two standard US house outlets, 120-volt outlets just hanging out.
On the inside, it has, as it's been publicized, it has a Bluetooth speaker that lives under the center console.
It has a flashlight that you can actually see in the picture that I shared with everyone.
There's a flashlight in the side of the driver's side door that, if I recall correctly, is made out of an individual cell of the main battery unit, which is pretty neat.
The inside... Honestly, my only regrets in the time I spent with the car is I didn't really mess with the infotainment at all.
I could tell you the stereo sounded really good to me, but I didn't spend any time...
pointing and clicking and scrolling and whatnot which i i regret i should have done that to see if the lag was real bad but i just i really wanted to spend time driving a car uh if you'll notice again for the two of you guys that i put a picture of like the the dashboard which to my eyes very very big tesla energy in terms of the oh there's a car over here there's a car over there etc um it looks very very similar to me but
What's cool about this is it has different ride heights and different modes, and so you can lower and raise the truck while you're in the truck, which is kind of neat.
But I don't know the number as to how many bazillion pounds this thing weighs, but I'm sure it's about 11 trillion pounds.
Did you know, I think I'm mostly talking to Marco here, did you know that electric vehicles can kind of overcome the fact that they weigh more than the entire planet Earth?
And can even electric vehicles this large can actually be relatively sprightly?
I, in fact, did know that.
Did you?
It turns out I've been driving around a giant heavy brick of batteries for the last five years, and I've also greatly enjoyed it.
So the funny thing is, so obviously it's an automatic as almost every electric vehicle is.
But I would, I would, there were a couple of times I did a standing start and I would, you know, I would stand on the brake and then I would move my right foot over to the gas and floor it.
And it, it's like getting shot out of a cannon.
I don't care how many times, and I've driven electric cars, I don't know, 15, 20 times in my life.
Like this is not the first time I've driven an electric car.
It's the first time I've driven a Rivian, but not the first time that I've driven an electric car.
And I'm not just driven Teslas, although I've driven many Teslas.
It's still just intoxicating every time and doing it in a truck that, that weighs more than my house.
Like it is, it is, it's bending the laws of physics, how fast this thing is.
But at one point, right before we were done, people said, no, okay, okay, just trust me on this one.
This time I want you to use your left foot on the brake.
Stand on the brake, stand on the gas, then pop your left foot off the brake.
I think we would call this power braking back in the day, if I'm not mistaken.
But basically, stand on both pedals and then pop your left foot off the brake.
I got shot out of a cannon, my dudes.
I thought just sidestepping onto the gas was fast.
Oh, no.
I got shot out of a freaking cannon in this 80 gazillion pound pickup truck.
It was unreal how fast this thing was.
I'm going to guess at the weight, by the way.
I looked it up because I was wrong in my humorous estimate when I was prattling on about this thing before.
7,000 pounds.
Yeah.
It's 7,148 pounds according to Wikipedia.
Oh, look at me.
That was pretty good.
I thought another article said it's like 8,000 because it's got a huge battery pack in there.
I think it's 180 kilowatt hours for the big battery.
That's, I mean, it's like almost twice as big as Marco's battery.
I mean, because, you know, it's a truck.
It's supposed to be able to haul big things.
It itself is heavy.
And I think the 060 is four seconds-ish.
So that's what you were feeling there, Casey.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it was bananas.
um and also you know i took it on an interstate or highway or freeway whatever your local parlance is and and i didn't i wasn't being ridiculous but you know on the off-ramp or the on-ramp this thing handled surprisingly well and yes i know it's got a huge ass amount of weight way low in the car like i get that but i i if i'm not mistaken they do some like really aggressive auto leveling with the suspension to keep it from feeling like you're about to roll over
It was stunning how well this thing handled, again, given the fact that it's a pickup.
I'm grading on a curve.
I'll tell you right now, I'm grading on a curve.
But, you know, it's a pickup truck.
It's in the air.
It weighs 11 zillion pounds.
It's stunning that this thing handled or went as quickly as it did.
The stereo sounded great.
I mean, I'm not an audiophile, really, but it sounded surprisingly good because, you know, I'm still COVID paranoid.
You know, when we were riding around, I insisted on having the windows open and
And even still, the stereo sounded great.
It's quiet, I mean, because it's an electric.
This thing was so nice.
And there's so many really nice touches that were clearly well-designed, like the way the buttons for the tailgate and things are hidden, and they're satisfying to click, and the way the tailgate flops down, you have that little intermediary thing that comes down automatically.
So much of it was so well done.
I would absolutely buy one of these tomorrow if I was looking to get rid of my car and had way more money to spend on a car than I actually do.
And they were available, which none of those things are true.
And if you could actually get it tomorrow.
Yeah, exactly.
Nobody can.
Quinn Nelson got his.
It's possible if you pre-ordered it back in the day.
Yeah, I mean, it's possible.
Predictably, I've seen about a bazillion – I watch car review videos all the time, so I've seen a bazillion –
previews, reviews, everything you can imagine.
So I know like almost every inch of it.
But one of the new videos that came out recently that I think is actually relevant to like wondering what the deal is with Rivian is from the, what is it called?
The Monroe channel.
They take apart cars and talk about how much they cost to manufacture and
And what techniques they use.
They spend a lot of time on Tesla because Tesla obviously does lots of things very differently than traditional car makers.
And it's fascinating for these veterans of the car industry to look at how Tesla does things and scratch their head and be impressed by some things and horrified by others.
Anyway, they took apart the instrument panel of the Ruvian R1T recently in a video.
We'll put a link in the show notes.
And it's fun looking at, you know, a new car company, Rivian, with its very first car.
Yes, it's electric, but we're looking at the instrument panel here.
So it's not, it shouldn't be that much different.
It's got a screen on it and stuff, but we're not looking at the drivetrain, right?
What does the instrument panel look like?
And they constantly reference Tesla, which is their other oddball, which is like a brand new car company doing cars in an unconventional way.
The most interesting thing that I found was when they were pulling it apart, they were comparing it to how Tesla constructed stuff.
Obviously they're talking about, oh, you know,
They probably use some expensive materials here.
They're probably losing money on this.
They got a little bit fancy or whatever.
But one of the things I talk about is the top of the instrument panel.
Like if you put your hand right on the dashboard, that piece, right?
They peel that piece off and they say, so there's an industry standard for most things in the auto industry that you have to have a fastener every 150 millimeters or something for panels like this.
And but like on the Tesla, on the Model S, there's like five screws for that entire piece.
Right.
And what the theory was, the people were taking this part is that Rivian hired a lot of people from the traditional automotive industry, like poached people from, you know, Ford, Chrysler, all the other, you know, Honda, whatever, like.
people in the industry and said, hey, you come to this company, we're going to make a new cool electric pickup truck.
And those people, because they've been in the industry so long, were just going to be like, oh yeah, fastener every 150 million years.
That's how you build a car without really questioning it.
Whereas Tesla was not burdened by that and said, but why do you need a fastener every 150 million years for this piece, like the top of your dashboard that's like, it's not a structural member.
Why do we need to have so many things?
So the Rivian has- Is it for NVH?
No, I mean, what they were saying is like,
If you dig into this and say, who came up with that rule?
Why is that there?
You just keep asking down the chain, down the chain, and eventually you realize no one actually either knows or remembers why that's there.
It just becomes part of the lore of being a parts manufacturer for the auto industry that it's like, nah.
don't know if you really need it and they were saying like when you're a parts maker it's kind of annoying because you'll push back and say do we need to do this and say oh yeah it's part of the spec and you'll say but like but why and they're like i don't have a reason it's just part of the spec but then you'll be like well the part's going to be too expensive then so you'll just willfully ignore the spec and do it in a more sane way and just not say anything and they will silently accept your non-spec compliant thing and
until unless there's a problem then they'll say oh you just didn't follow the spec but anyway tesla chose not to put those screws in there and it's probably fine right but you can tell based on how the thing is constructed in the rivian that there are more people from the traditional audio and auto industry in this company because of things like how closely spaced the fasteners are because it's just that's just the way you do things i don't know which one of those things is better or worse but it's fascinating to be able to sort of
read the signature of the makers by tearing it apart and looking at you know how it was constructed and in both cases in both especially early Tesla and also these Rivians there's a little bit of a kind of a handcrafted nature to it like I know what the inside of a lot of Hondas look like and you know Hondas and Toyotas it's like
how you know how inexpensive how few pieces how reliable like it's just honed down to the bare essence of like if i can do something with one piece of plastic instead of two i'm going to do it i'm going to refine this this arrangement over the course of 50 years to try to get it to be three cents cheaper right or five percent stiffer or whatever like just so ruthlessly minimal and these things it's like
It's an $80,000 electric truck.
I'm not quite sure how to do it, but just let's just throw materials at it.
Let's use this expensive exotic material.
Let's put these things on it.
Let's put these five screws.
Let's do this thing.
And in other places, they'll end up saying, oh, we didn't know how to do this.
So we have these four air ducts.
How do we hold them together?
How about we just drill a hole in them, put a wing nut on there and just twist it together?
Yeah, that'll do it.
Ship it.
Right.
There's so much of that mixed in.
Like the Rivian, the inside of the Rivian and the inside of Tesla's do not look like the inside of like established car brands.
And especially they don't look at the inside of cars that cost, you know, $20,000.
Right.
Because, you know, in the end, these are very expensive vehicles.
And part of that expense is, yeah, they use exotic parts and there's a big battery in there.
But also part of that expense is.
We didn't have the time or the research budget to figure out how to make this car economically.
So we're going to sell it to you for 80 grand.
And, you know, we did.
The company would have gone out of business if we had spent the next 20 years figuring out how to manufacture this car for $10,000 less.
So we're not.
And we'll just pass the cost on to you.
Well, that being said, and I think this particular example was something like $80,000.
There is no way this truck should cost $80,000.
It should cost easily $100,000 to $110,000 from what I could tell.
Maybe I've been price reset by Tesla.
It might cost that much.
Did you ask them how many options were on the car that you were looking at?
No, I asked him, how much is this one?
And I am pretty sure he said like 80-ish.
Maybe even a little bit less.
You really can't get it in time soon.
Well, I'll tell you what, though.
I have good news for you, Casey.
If you want the review to cost more, go try to buy one now.
Here, I'll send you a link.
Here's one right in Richmond, right near you, Casey.
It's only $141,000 for a used R1T.
My goodness.
I mean, honestly, I think this thing should cost closer to that, although I wouldn't go quite that far.
But no, it was amazing.
Like the frunk was huge.
It had a drain spigot or spout or whatever, so you could make it a cooler and then just drain it at the end of the day.
Like a lot of this stuff, it was just really well thought out.
It was very comfortable on the inside.
Some of the stuff was a little bit silly.
Like, you know, you can't just twist the air vent.
You have to go into the computer and ask it where, you know, I want to point it right here.
Because they want them to be controlled by the touchscreen.
But if they can be controlled by the touchscreen, you can't have manual stateful controls.
And so that's like that.
The stuff like that is a little bit whatever.
But by and large, I freaking love this thing.
If I had my druthers, I would have already put in a deposit for an R1 Asper to replace Aaron's Volvo one day.
But
I don't know that she would be quite as keen on this idea as I am, but I loved it.
Again, I only spent like 20 minutes with it, but I can think of no reservations.
If I was spending somebody else's money, I would do it tomorrow.
Again, you can't get them.
It's impossible to get them.
I wouldn't get a white one.
There's a couple of blues that were really lovely.
There was a deep, deep gray.
I want to say it was called Granite or something that was really, really nice.
They had a bunch of them there.
Ooh, there's a yellow one.
uh yeah i think there is a yellow one uh i can get it right now for only 135 000 in connecticut there you go uh no there's lightly used i'm telling you marco you would really really like this thing like it was amazing and apparently they're getting like i asked the the i asked peoples and the two guys that he was you know working with at the time uh the the other two i think were more on the delivery side of things and they said they're getting trucks like every day and they're delivering them to north carolina to virginia
I think as far up as Maryland.
Of course, they're flatbedding them on internal combustion flatbeds because they're going to like North Carolina and stuff.
And they don't want to just drive the truck because then you're getting a truck with like 300 miles on the clock.
But anyways, but no, they're getting them daily from what I understand.
And it was...
It was such a cool experience, and it was so kind to them to spend an hour with me.
Nobody cares who I am, but nevertheless, they spent an hour with me and never were upset about it, never checked their watches wondering when it would be done.
It was such a lovely experience, and the truck was so nice.
I would absolutely buy one tomorrow if I thought I could get away with it.
It was...
So looking at their configurator, it's kind of like when you add a RAM to the Mac.
So you go to the configurator and you're like, it comes with eight gigs of RAM, 16 gigs of RAM, add $400, you know, 24 gigs of RAM, add $600 or whatever.
Well, so you go to the Rivian and so you got the standard battery pack.
And then if you want the large packets add $6,000.
And if you want the max packets add $16,000.
So if you're wondering why these cars cost so much money, it's not because they're using exotic materials and fancy stuff on the inside.
It's because they have a huge battery in it and those batteries are really expensive.
So yeah, add $16,000.
That's a hell of an option.
Still not Porsche option because probably $16,000 gets you like the cool black paint on the Porsche, but you know.
Yeah.
Different strokes.