Pebbles on the Scale
Marco:
So I have a minor HomePod update.
Casey:
Oh?
Casey:
Did you source a new-to-you big-ass HomePod?
John:
Or did you do a factory reset?
John:
Because a lot of people suggested that.
John:
Hey, just factory reset those suckers.
Marco:
They'll be good as new.
Marco:
I have done that before.
Marco:
I did it, I think, about two months ago, actually, recently.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I have done that before and it seemed to last maybe a week or two before it reverted back to the old buggy behavior.
Marco:
And so I think it was probably just coincidence or like, you know, some other, you know, anyway.
Marco:
And I have yet, I've so far as yet not gone through the route of trying to get replacement big home pods because my theory is that the problems are partly, you know, my physical units having problems and flaking out and dying.
Marco:
But also, partly, I think there's a major, you know, software neglect going on.
Marco:
And those old HomePods were slow as crap to begin with.
Marco:
And so, clearly, they were, like, struggling to run the software they came with, let alone whatever it's been updated to now.
Marco:
So, anyway, I did, as I mentioned, I had briefly tried a B&O product.
Marco:
It was kind of embarrassing because I started playing the music from it.
Marco:
And I was like, okay, well, you know, this thing, it looks fantastic.
Marco:
And, uh...
Marco:
It sounds okay, but it doesn't sound the way it should, especially for its price.
Marco:
Sounds like small speakers.
Marco:
And I'm like, just for comparison, let me see.
Marco:
So just for comparison, I put next to the expensive product a HomePod Mini.
Marco:
And the HomePod Mini sounded as good in most ways and better in some ways.
Marco:
I see the landscape now.
Marco:
I now see what those kind of products are for.
Marco:
Again, they looked great, but they are not for sound.
Marco:
And the HomePod Mini, for how poorly it fills a large room...
Marco:
it actually does sound better than almost anything else that is reasonably small and for this purpose i want it to be and need it to be reasonably small because this is going like on my kitchen counter with other stuff that has to share the counter with it and so i set up a stereo pair of home pod minis that i happen to have already for various rooms in the house i get moved in there
Marco:
And so far, it's fine.
Marco:
It definitely is way faster to respond to things like touch controls, seat controls, airplay sources being sent to it.
Marco:
Siri itself is no worse.
Marco:
It might even be slightly better in its response time.
Marco:
And so far, the stereo pair of HomePod minis has not broken itself.
Marco:
So, so far, it kind of seems like maybe I'll just deal with the HomePod minis until some kind of large HomePod comes out again that will fill out the room better.
Casey:
I wouldn't hold your breath on that.
Casey:
I know.
Marco:
Why can't the rumor mill be about all that?
Marco:
I haven't heard anything from the rumor mill that's credible about new, bigger HomePod coming at some point, but...
Marco:
In certain areas, especially if, like I, you care about the mid-range of sound.
Marco:
This is like, you know, how clear and distortion-free and energetic do vocals and, say, electric guitars sound?
Marco:
You know, that's things that... It's surprisingly hard to get speakers and headphones that sound good, like really good and smooth and undistorted in those ranges.
Marco:
I don't know why.
Marco:
I'm not enough of an engineer to know.
Marco:
But there must be some reason why that's difficult.
Marco:
And Apple has really nailed that.
Marco:
in almost all of their recent audio products you know like i even even the airpod pros these little tiny things that go in your ears sound better than many other things that are their size or even slightly larger the airpod maxes even though i don't like their comfort it doesn't work for me but their sound is amazing for what they are like it's really really great and the airpod max is
Marco:
is one of the best sounding pairs of headphones I've ever heard.
Marco:
And that's saying a lot.
Marco:
I've heard a lot of really nice headphones, and that is up there with some of the best ones.
Marco:
But the speaker market, the countertop self-powered speaker with some kind of voice assistant, ideally, so you could yell things at it from across the room,
Marco:
homepod's still the best and even the homepod mini is better than most of what's out there and that's really saying something because the homepod mini is fine but like you know compared to like other speakers like regular speakers that are not smart and self-powered and standalone and generally much larger the homepod mini is not super special but for its size it's great and
Marco:
and compared to its competitors it's great the reason i keep bringing it up here is partly because it's going on in my life and it's technical and therefore it belongs in the show um but also i want all of you to keep buying home pods so that apple will keep making better ones so please go out there respond to the people apple please go out there buy a home pod mini it's it costs less than some of the some of the dongles they've sold in the past like just go go out there and get a home pod mini and uh and yeah we'll see we'll see how this how this industry goes but so far
John:
uh they even the mini is better than most of what's out there you know with this big home pod you've got like a product that apparently has like inherent flaws that make it eventually die over time but you really like it uh but they don't sell it anymore what does that sound like to you uh it sounds like your uh spatula
John:
No, cheese grater.
John:
Cheese grater.
John:
Cheese grater.
John:
The OXO cheese grater that they no longer make that has a fatal flaw that causes it to crack over time, but I really like it.
John:
I haven't found one that's better.
John:
So I feel like this is an appropriately Marco scaled version of the cheese grater.
John:
You just need to...
John:
What you need to do is set up a persistent search like I have for this OXO cheese grater.
John:
And every time one comes up for sale, you just buy it and put it into a storage facility in your house.
John:
And then what you do is you factory reset your home pods.
John:
You set them up.
John:
The second they turn flaky, you chuck them in the garbage, pull up another pair, plug them in and go from there.
Marco:
I know this is partly a joke, but I would actually reasonably consider that if I could get a decent amount of factory wrap ones for a reasonable price if they were standalone objects like your cheese graters.
Marco:
The problem is these are devices that exist in a software ecosystem.
Marco:
And so if, as I suspect, part of the problem is software...
Marco:
no no new hardware is going to solve that they're going to be just as flaky or maybe almost as flaky no matter what i do and then if i happen to you know have a good week here and there maybe that'll be fine but like how much am i willing to tolerate for the occasional good week when so far the homepod mini granted it's only i've only had this setup with these particular homepod minis for a few days um but that setup is better and so
Marco:
I'll see how it goes over time.
Marco:
I hope it's better over time.
Marco:
And I hope Apple doesn't abandon that product line as well.
Marco:
But we will see.
Casey:
It is funny to me that the HomePod Mini is, what, $100?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Something like that?
Casey:
And you are not kidding.
Casey:
My favorite USB-C digital ADV multiport adapter, $70.
Casey:
It's not that different.
Yeah.
Marco:
it's so ridiculously expensive gosh yeah like for for all of you know yes i know you can get a little crappy echo whatever for like 50 bucks trust me the home pod mini sounds way better than that we even we have one of the like the ball shaped mid-range echoes like the like the what used to be the only echo at that product line spot like what's like about 100 bucks we have one of those the home pod mini sounds better than it
Marco:
And two HomePod Minis for $200 sounds better than lots of things that are much more than that.
Marco:
Again, not as good as the big HomePod.
Marco:
And this is why I'm so sad.
Marco:
But considering what it is and what it costs, the HomePod Mini might be one of the best values Apple has produced in recent history.
Marco:
It's so good compared to other things like it.
Marco:
And for, quote, only $100, even though that is expensive for the crap home speaker market, this isn't a crap home speaker.
Marco:
This is like a mid-range home speaker, and it's quite good at that.
Marco:
I was kind of surprised.
Marco:
I tried two different B&O things.
Marco:
One of them was about as good as a HomePod full size.
Marco:
Not even as good as it, just about as good at it.
Marco:
It cost more than a laptop, and it was like four times the size.
Marco:
That just shows you how good the first HomePod was, that it could be like a quarter the size of that thing, something like an eighth or sixth, whatever it is, of the price, like way less money, way less size, and sounded actually slightly better.
Marco:
Apple's audio engineering is really good recently.
Marco:
They've been pumping out some really great speakers and headphones recently.
Marco:
And it's great in the areas that they are in as much as I am, like the AirPods.
Marco:
And the areas that they started and then pulled out of are just making me so sad.
Marco:
I just go back in, please, because, man, Apple speakers are really, really good.
Marco:
Just please make more of them.
Casey:
It's tough because you are the one guy that wants the big HomePods and nobody else.
Casey:
I remember when they came out, I was super interested in them because in principle, it sounds like something I would really like because I hate silence.
Casey:
I always have to have something on, typically music, but I don't like it when the house is quiet, which I know is probably the antithesis of John.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And I couldn't justify it for $350.
Casey:
One, let alone two of them.
Casey:
And I'm not saying that you're wrong to have bought them.
Casey:
I'm just saying I think this is a product that in many ways is for me, but I couldn't get over that price tag, man.
Casey:
It was just so expensive.
Marco:
Yeah, and this is the kind of thing like – and I've talked about this before.
Marco:
I'm not going to go into great length here, but –
Marco:
If you can somehow justify and afford and have the space for a stereo pair of any of these things, whether it's HomePod minis, big HomePods, you know, rest their souls, or like Amazon Echoes, most of these things support stereo pairs now.
Marco:
get the stereo pair even if like if there were if there was a model for 200 bucks and a model for 100 bucks you're better off getting two of the hundred dollar ones and put them in a stereo pair with a bit of space between them than getting the one 200 one when you have that amount of space between them and you can actually create stereo separation physically not just relying on hey we're gonna have some drivers pointing to the side and bounce things off walls and hope that sounds good like if you can actually have space between them
Marco:
It sounds so much better.
Marco:
Even if each one has to be like a smaller or lower end model, you're generally better off doing that.
Marco:
And again, like the HomePod minis in stereo pair, not bad, not bad.
Marco:
Like not amazing, but for 200 bucks, amazing.
Casey:
oh let's do some follow-up ipad pros 2018 edition like my beloved one which i am really trying to resist throwing away figuratively speaking and getting a new one but that's neither here nor there how much ram does it have john does not have eight gigs i was misled by one of the uh higher up google results for trying to find out this information we'll put a link to the bogus link that uh
John:
the bogus page that misled me but also put a link to the wikipedia page which i did check first i usually do but they have like that sidebar on wikipedia where they have the specs right and the sidebar didn't have the ram unlike some other ipad pages so i just gave up and did a different google search but the wikipedia page does say the answer in the body of the text
John:
Of course, it would be nice if I could have just gone to the official Apple site and looked it up, and I probably could have if I had dug way into the tech specs.
John:
I'm sure it's on something.apple.com somewhere, but it certainly isn't on the product page because they don't like the list of the RAM.
John:
Anyway, this is relevant because we were talking about why only the M1 iPads support stage manager.
John:
Good job.
John:
You got it.
John:
I'm working on it.
John:
All that practice, and I still almost fumbled it the first time.
John:
And it was like, OK, well, this one, you know, this iPad Air with 64 gigs of storage, it'll run it without even using swap.
John:
So obviously it doesn't require a swap.
John:
Maybe it requires RAM.
John:
And it's like, well, it doesn't require RAM because that has eight gigs, but so does this old iPad.
John:
But no, the old iPad had either four gigs or six gigs of RAM, not eight.
John:
So...
John:
The leading theory now that we kind of poo-pooed last week is that it seems like it's the RAM because all of the iPads that support Stage Manager have 8 gigs of RAM or more and the ones that don't support it have less RAM.
John:
There was a little bit of stuff lying around the internet about the sort of Apple internal developer mode to enable Stage Manager on lesser iPads.
John:
uh you know obviously that exists because as the correct fitter you said and and you know some of the statements from apple like they tried it on the other ipads and they found it unsatisfactory and again see last week's episode about where apple can choose to spend its money to try to should we try to get it to work on the old ipads or should we just you know plow bravely forward and eventually it will work on all of our future ipads so anyway our bad ipad pro 2018 does not have eight gigs of ram
Casey:
John, you've been on a journey.
Casey:
You've been on a journey trying to get some cheap software.
Casey:
What's the latest?
John:
A lot of feedback from people about their experience using Apple Educational Discounts, and in particular, this software bundle that comes with a bunch of fancy Apple Pro applications for a very low price.
John:
Um, some people said that, uh, they bought it and what they ended up getting was like a PDF sent to them in the email and via email after that purchase that had a bunch of promo codes that you would redeem.
John:
And in which case, you know, obviously you can redeem them on whatever Apple ID you wanted.
John:
They're just promo codes, you know, they're, so that's kind of weird that they come on a PDF, but anyway, a lot of people have that experience.
John:
Um,
John:
Other people said that if you buy it with a Mac, the software comes pre-installed on the Mac and it'll be licensed to whatever Apple ID you first set up on the Mac.
John:
And that sounds weird to me, especially if they don't warn you about that.
John:
And apparently you can also buy this bundle separately from a Mac.
John:
So you don't have to, you know, it's offered as sort of the...
John:
whatever they call it, the come on at the end of configuring your Mac.
John:
When you go through all the configuration, pick the RAM, pick the storage, it says, Hey, do you want to add this?
John:
Right.
John:
But it's also a separate product.
John:
It's called the pro apps bundle for education.
John:
It is $200 and it includes final cut pro logic pro motion compressor and main stage.
Uh,
John:
So if you do want to buy it separately, that eliminates the possibility that they're going to pre-install it on some Mac or something, in which case probably they're sending new codes to redeem.
John:
But this is all moot because if you go to the Apple educational store, we'll actually put a link to it in the show notes.
John:
I'm not sure how they confirm that you're a student, but I think anyone can get to the store page.
John:
At the very top of the store page, it says save on a new Mac or iPad with Apple education pricing.
John:
Great.
John:
I think I will.
John:
And then the subheading is available to current and newly accepted college students and their parents, as well as faculty, staff and homeschool teachers, blah, blah, blah.
John:
So it's available to students and their parents.
John:
So I don't need to involve my son in this at all.
John:
I am a parent of a newly accepted college student.
John:
I get the discount.
John:
Another thing, though, I've been going through this saying, oh, discount, it'll be cheaper, right?
John:
These discounts do not look like what they were back in the day.
John:
And when I say back in the day, I'm talking about when I pulled off the fairly amazing feat for which I feel like I'm not adequately recognized of convincing my parents...
John:
Convincing my parents to use my sister's college educational discount.
John:
My sister is four years older than me.
John:
She left for college just as I was entering into high school, right?
John:
She's off to college.
John:
She gets an educational discount.
John:
And I convince my parents, hey, you should buy a new Mac from the college computer store using my sister's discount.
John:
Give that Mac to me and then let her use our Mac 128K upgraded to a Mac Plus that we've been using in the house.
John:
And that's what they did.
John:
And so I got an SE30, right?
John:
And the SE30, I think, like, the regular retail price, starting price was, like, $4,300 in 1989 or whatever.
John:
Do the math on that and be terrified, right?
John:
But the educational discount was, like – educational discount, I think, was, like –
John:
12 13 1500 off it was huge i think the educational discounts now are like oh you save 100 bucks on a macbook air you save 50 bucks on a macbook air like it's not what it used to be obviously the prices aren't what they used to be either now i'm curious did someone look that up yeah i mean even when i was when i was like you know in the starting in the mac market in the early 2000s i remember the educational discount being something like 15 which is substantial when you're looking at some of those larger you know higher end models
Marco:
And that was always like, you know, the first couple Macs I bought, I was only able to buy because I was getting discounts like that.
Marco:
Because that made a big difference for me.
Casey:
Yeah, when I bought my first Mac, my Polybook, I had Erin buy it because she was a K-12 teacher at the time.
Casey:
And if memory serves, we saved like $150 on the Mac.
Casey:
And we did it during WWDC week.
Casey:
And so the back-to-school sale had started at that point, which I don't think it does during WWDC week anymore.
Casey:
But anyways, the back-to-school sale had started.
Casey:
So she ended up getting a free iPod Touch out of the deal.
Casey:
And that was the first Mac and first iOS device that we had in the house.
John:
because they gave you an entire ipod touch and like 150 bucks off what was one of the cheapest macs you could buy at the time like it was bananas and it is not that good anymore yeah i should probably actually look to see if it's even less than the friends and family discount because i have friends and family discounts that i could get uh i mean it's not that far as a macbook air that i'm getting like who cares but i'm just curious what the discounts would be uh i finally did look it up so uh four thousand three hundred and sixty nine dollars was the base price for the se 30 on launch that is ten thousand two hundred ninety eight dollars in today's dollars
Casey:
You've been buying $10,000 computers.
Casey:
And by the way, it didn't come with the keyboards.
John:
If you wanted to get the Apple extended keyboard, that was, let's see, like $200 in 1989, which was like $471.
John:
Can you imagine paying $471 for a keyboard?
John:
It was a hell of a keyboard.
Casey:
Well, the floaty iPad keyboard's like $350, isn't it?
John:
I was going to say, how much is the iPad Magic keyboard?
John:
But that holds the whole thing, and it has all, you know, it's like, it's more, it's an apparatus.
Marco:
Although, truly, the Apple, I bet your keyboard lasts longer.
John:
Yeah, the Apple Extended 2 probably outweighs it by a lot, too.
John:
And you could use the Apple Extended 2 to fend off a mugger, but you couldn't do that with the other thing.
John:
Anyway, so my plan now is I'm going to buy the Pro Apps Bundle for education because that really is a pretty big discount.
John:
It's like half off, more than half off, maybe.
John:
um even though i don't really care about main stage and probably don't care about compressor but i'll buy that for myself separately uh because i'm a parent and then just buy the mac for my son when i can order that's the other thing to follow up on last week it's like oh i'm gonna get the i'll order the new m2 macbook air on friday and marco was like i don't think it's on sale on friday i think it's just the the one with the fan in it and yeah sure enough it was it was the macbook 13 inch macbook pro with an m2 in it which i do not want and i did not order and i think the m2 macbook air is going to go on sale what
Marco:
next month july who knows i am so glad first of all to be right because you know everyone looks being right i'm so glad though that all the reviews are basically panning that computer saying like look the m2 is amazing but why are you shipping it in this ancient enclosure with these ancient ports and the ancient touch bar and no mag safe all the reviews basically say you shouldn't buy this just wait for the macbook air
John:
The good thing that the reviews say, I feel like it's kind of like the people who like the Mac Mini or you with the Homebots, like, look, if you really love the touch bar, better get it while you can, because, you know, it's only going to be around for the next seven years as Tim Cook continues to sell the same computer for seven years.
John:
But anyway, this is probably the last one, right?
John:
Like, it is gone from every other newer model, so...
John:
You know, if you like the touch bar, that's the reason to buy this because you can't get the touch bar anywhere else.
John:
It's only going to be on this model, we assume.
John:
And, you know, again, Tim Cook may sell this model for another five years, but we'll see.
Marco:
I just, this model makes me so angry.
Marco:
And what makes me angry is... Oh, no, don't get me started.
Casey:
Don't get me started.
Casey:
I will fight you over who is more angry about this stupid computer because I am...
Marco:
So angry.
Marco:
What makes me angriest about it is not the touch bar.
Marco:
You would expect, based on my past here, you would expect I would be super mad that they're still showing me a touch bar.
Marco:
I'm not.
Marco:
What makes me angriest about this computer is how many people buy it because they're swayed by the marketing of the name Pro.
Marco:
When they would actually be better served by the air.
Marco:
That's what drives me nuts.
Marco:
Like, because I've so many people buy this computer because they think, oh, well, I'm a pro.
Marco:
I'm going to run, you know, I'm going to be editing podcasts.
Marco:
Therefore, I'm a pro.
Marco:
No, you don't.
Marco:
You don't understand.
Marco:
You don't.
Marco:
need it like this will benefit you nothing at all and it will and you're missing out on these other good things with the air like that's what bugs me about it is like the people who buy it mostly are buying it because of a marketing benefit that they perceive that's not actually there at the expense of things they actually would enjoy more about the air that's why it bugs me so much
John:
I don't know.
John:
That's a pretty narrow definition of people.
John:
I'm not sure anybody both cares enough about the pro name to be attracted to this and also doesn't know what the deal is with this computer.
Casey:
John, how quickly you forget what corporate buying looks like.
Casey:
Oh, these are professionals.
Casey:
I must get the pro.
Casey:
What's the cheapest pro?
Casey:
Oh, here we go.
Casey:
That looks fancy.
Marco:
This one's enterprise ready because it says pro.
Marco:
We're an enterprise.
Marco:
We're pros.
Marco:
We need this computer.
John:
The other thing that is, you know, if you want a touch bar, this is probably the last one.
John:
This is, I am assuming, the last Apple laptop that will have the old design in terms of the shape of the case.
John:
And you may be thinking, what do you mean shape of the case?
John:
It's just one of these rectangular ones.
John:
It's not a shape at all.
John:
It is.
John:
So when they redid the 14-inch and the 16-inch or whatever, the new ones with the little round feet and everything, that's the new design.
John:
This is the last of the old design, which had kind of a long taper and then a sharp edge on the ends that, you know, all of Apple's laptops were shaped like this for many, many years.
John:
And this is the last one.
John:
And I have to say this design, you know, whatever you want to call it, the Johnny Ives special.
John:
I'm not sure how much he was involved, but we always attribute this design to him.
John:
The one with, you know, just the USB-C shaped holes on the sides, no MagSafe, no HDMI, no so on and so forth.
John:
The shape of that computer is,
John:
is more attractive than the shape of the current computers.
John:
That doesn't make it a better computer, but if you really want to get the last of this design, you know, they'll all be the more utilitarian-looking design once this one goes away.
John:
So...
John:
Yeah, if you want to get the last of a bunch of extremely questionably valuable attributes like the touch bar, the lack of ports, and the shape.
John:
Although I have to say, I think the shape is more attractive, but that's just, you know, it's kind of a blessing and a curse every time you see the more attractive shape.
John:
Yeah, but you weren't useful.
John:
Where was your SD slot?
Casey:
Where was your MagSafe?
Casey:
this computer makes me so irrationally angry like it is in service of no one except apple and i guess the three people that like the touch bar like it's it is not useful it is old nobody should be buying this thing i mean i know it's not old on the inside but like the design is old living the only usbc lifestyle is no fun like it's doable but it's no fun if you're going to get a pro get a 14 inch macbook pro
Casey:
Or, like Marco was saying, most people can probably just get an Air and they will be fine, and at least the Air has MagSafe.
Casey:
Like, this is such a stupid freaking computer, and it makes me so unreasonably and irrationally angry that it exists.
Casey:
I don't know why it upsets me so much, but it gets me so mad that this is still a thing.
Casey:
Like, just kill it.
Casey:
kill it from the lineup it is in service of no one it is not it is not good for anybody all people are going to do is buy it and be disappointed like just no at least with the macbook adorable which was a piece of garbage when it was brand new and i love that thing even though it was a piece of garbage it was good at being thin and light it was good at nothing else but it was very good at being thin and light and frustrating you over having only one port it was good at those things and
Casey:
This is good at nothing.
Casey:
It makes me so mad.
John:
Well, as Marco said in past episodes, we don't actually know that yet until we get the M2 MacBook Airs and can stress test them because the stress testing is maybe the M2 MacBook Air throttle, thermal throttles more than the old one did, in which case the Pro would be better for sustained performance, which is what Apple said about it in the...
John:
their presentation oh if you want sustained performance get this one right were they hinting at the fact the m2's throttle more or did they just say that for the hell of it and the second thing is the m2 macbook pro has a bigger battery how much of a difference does that make in battery life we won't know until we get the m2 macbook air and people test the battery life on it so it is possible that the function this serves is shoring up some deficiencies in the m2 macbook air that didn't exist in the m1 macbook air but we don't know that yet
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Casey:
Tell me about system settings and system preferences.
John:
Bart Reardon actually tried taking system preferences from Mac OS 12 and putting it on Ventura.
John:
Like the application, I mean, the little icon.
John:
You can do that?
John:
Yeah, I didn't think you could.
John:
Interesting thing about that I'll get to in a second.
John:
But anyway, if you do that, system preferences runs just fine on Ventura and everything works on it.
John:
He says...
John:
You could even have them both open at the same time and changing setting in one updates in the other.
John:
That's bananas.
John:
I mean, it makes perfect sense because that's just a GUI.
John:
It's a GUI wrapper for underlying functionality.
John:
And from Monterey to Ventura, the underlying functionality has not changed so much that...
John:
you know the old one won't work anymore like the new the new system settings it's a new gui it's a new gui wrapper but it's not like everything underneath that has been ripped out and replaced it's just the gui wrapper over it so it makes sense that they would both work obviously that's not going to hold true over the long term because things do change under the covers and the gui has to be updated to talk to different subsystems or whatever but apparently right now it does work uh in both and what i was going to say about copying it all right
John:
You can take, you know, system preferences for Monterey and just grab it and make a copy of it and then just put it over on your, you know, on your Ventura Mac.
John:
But what you can't do with it on any recent Mac, on a Mac running Ventura or Monterey, is you can't put it in the same place as system settings.
John:
Because system settings, I believe...
John:
is probably like under system library core services, something or other, right?
John:
It's in the read-only snapshot of the system volume that boots the OS.
John:
I think we talked about this many, many shows ago, but modern versions of macOS boot from a read-only snapshot
John:
of a cryptographically sealed volume so it can be assured that nothing can modify the running operating system there are parts of the operating system that are outside that read-only snapshot because they have to be written and they want to be updated you know more easily without rebooting and stuff like that but i think system preference is not one of those things i think it is part of the os and so you can't put system preferences in the same directory you may be thinking who cares where i put it i'll just put it in the applications folder i'll put it on my desktop i don't care where it is but
John:
ventura adds a new security feature that does not allow system applications to be run from a play any place other than where they're supposed to be which is you know this is like a malware type of thing it says hey system settings shouldn't be out there like if you know it was a malware could somehow extract system settings from the read-only volume and like modify the binary and then run it again because you may have like a binary that has some kind of privilege or uses a private api or whatever and
John:
If you could modify that binary, you know, some malware can find a way to exploit the system by, like, modifying the executable of some part of the OS.
John:
But you can't modify it when it's on a read-only snapshot.
John:
So you'd have to copy it off of the read-only snapshot, then modify it, but then you can't run it anymore.
John:
And this is part of a larger framework.
John:
I forget what it's called.
John:
I think I'll put a link later in the show notes about it.
John:
What does it call it?
John:
AMFI?
John:
Something like that?
John:
oh god i'll find it and like it's somewhere but anyway it's a generic system for putting more constraints on executables that run and one of the constraints you can put on it is this executable can only run from this directory that's really cool john tell me about copying and pasting edits and adjustments and things like that in photos
John:
i was excited about the the newly announced feature to for photos uh for apple's photo system where you can take an adjustment kind of like in lightroom and then apply it to a bunch of photos at once and that feature was listed on the ios features page on the ipad os features page
John:
But I couldn't find it on the Mac's Photos page, so I wondered, is this not coming to the Mac?
John:
Well, first of all, it turns out it is on that page.
John:
It's just farther down than I had gone.
John:
I found the Photos, what I thought was the Photos section that was talking about the shared family photo library thing.
John:
But that wasn't the only section about Photos.
John:
So it is coming to the Mac version of Photos, which is good.
John:
But second, a feature very much like this exists in the current version of Mac Photos.
John:
But you might not know about it.
John:
And in fact, a lot of people reported that this existed.
John:
And I said, where is that menu item?
John:
And I launched photos and I saw it.
John:
I'm like, why is it always disabled for me?
John:
The menu item is copy adjustments and paste adjustments.
John:
I'm like, well, it's right there in the menu.
John:
How have I never seen this?
John:
Why have I never used it?
John:
And more importantly, why is it always grayed out?
John:
How come I can't copy adjustments?
John:
So I went, I would like edit a picture.
John:
I'd make adjustments.
John:
And then I'd, you know, go back to the main screen where all the photos are.
John:
I'd click the photo and I'd say copy adjustments.
John:
But no, it's grayed out.
John:
and like maybe you have to crop it so i crop it go back to the main screen try to copy adjustments like no it's still grayed out what does it want me to do i made so many adjustments turns out you can only copy adjustments when you're in the edit mode i have no idea why like what you have to literally be in the edit mode so you edit it you go into the edit mode where you get all the sliders on the right hand side then you can copy adjustments but from any other view that even if it's like zoom full screen if it's the little tile mode if you're looking at the library if you're looking at um you cannot copy adjustments
John:
Doesn't make any sense.
John:
All right.
John:
So that's the first silly thing.
John:
Second thing is you can only paste adjustments when you are in the edit mode on a photo, which means you can only apply the adjustments to one photo at a time.
John:
So that's why they're touting this feature.
John:
Oh, now it works sanely.
John:
You can, I'm assuming, copy adjustments from other views and then paste them into multiple photos at the same time.
John:
Instead of having to go into edit mode, copy adjustments, go out of edit mode, go into edit mode, another picture, paste adjustments.
John:
i still maintain that the the mac photos app seems to have been designed by people who never use the mac photos app i mean can you imagine like you can select an item like there's so much ui to select a photo and it knows which photos are have adjustments because they i think they put a little badge on the thumbnail showing like little lines with sliders or whatever it knows that there are adjustments there and there's a menu item in the image menu saying copy adjustments like no you can't use that unless you go into edit mode it does not make any sense
Casey:
You know how Apple came up with the pro workflows team or whatever it is, where allegedly they brought people like actual professionals from like Hollywood and places and like, you know, music professionals and brought them in house, either hired them or just asked them to do their work in, you know, at Apple so they could understand what they're doing a little bit better.
Casey:
I feel like we need to have like adopt an Apple designer day or something where you have somebody from Apple come into your home.
Casey:
No, no, Tim, Susie, whatever your name may be, come into the home.
Casey:
Why don't I show you exactly how I use the home app and why it is a pile of shit.
Casey:
Like, let me show you exactly what I'm talking about.
John:
They just redid the whole home app.
John:
You got what you wanted.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
Okay, maybe that wasn't the best example, but you know what I'm saying?
Casey:
Like, oh, I would like to edit six photos in the exact same way.
Casey:
How would you do that?
Casey:
Oh, look, there's no way to do that right now.
Casey:
I feel like sometimes Apple just lives in this fantasy world where everything is always their stuff.
Casey:
They're on these phenomenally fast internet connections that are six feet from the home office.
Casey:
I'm mostly snarking, but I kind of wonder if they really need to have somebody adopt designers or something and just be like, look, look, look.
Casey:
This is how actual people use your software.
Casey:
Like, real, honest-to-goodness actual people.
Casey:
Not you folks.
Casey:
Like, actual people that use it in the real world, in mixed environments.
Casey:
I just don't think that they have the awareness that they should in that regard.
John:
I would just take someone from the photos team and I'd give them like 100 photos.
John:
And I would say, these photos are taken, each one of these photos is taken in one of seven locations.
John:
Use the info pane to set, use whatever you want.
John:
Use any features of this application to set the location for these photos.
John:
But they're not in any order, so you can't do them in batches.
John:
So you have to do them one at a time, right?
John:
So you click on a photo and then you go to the info pane and you type in the address.
John:
And I'd give them the 10 addresses.
John:
Here are the 10 addresses.
John:
And as you go through each photo, I'll tell you which one is which address.
John:
And by like the 15th one, they'd be like, huh, there's only 10 addresses and they all begin with separate letters, but I have to type out the whole address every time.
John:
Oh, that seems suboptimal.
John:
And half the time when I'm trying to type in the address, it deselects the text field and it's no longer focused and my character's going to nowhere and I have to click it again.
John:
And after they'd done a hundred of those, I would say, how do you feel now about your location setting feature in this application?
John:
Like, does it help you in any way whatsoever?
John:
What have we learned today?
John:
Yeah, because it's really just, you know, very hostile.
Casey:
I need to go back and rerecord that section about the home app.
Casey:
What I should have said, and HeyUDVD is reminding me in the chat, I should have used the music app as my example because all my great googly moogly is that thing, a pile of turds.
Casey:
Oh, it is so bad.
Casey:
I hate it so much, but that's okay.
John:
uh speaking of things that are pilot turds hey john tell me about gaming on the mac this is something i think it was in the keynote even right um or federighi was oh no he was on he was on a talk show right it was talk show live um which we linked to last week and we linked to again everyone federighi was touting as part of his like let's talk about gaming on the mac the uniformity of the graphics architecture across mac ipad and the iphone
John:
saying you know hey we have a great solution for developers if you develop your application using your game using our fancy graphics apis you basically get all these platforms for free because they all use the same gaming now that the macs are on apple silicon have the same gpus and metal is everywhere so on and so forth so yeah it might be weird to use our apis but our apis are actually really good and if you do that work once you get access to all these apple platforms isn't that great
John:
And when he said that pitch, obviously what I was thinking of, it's what everyone was thinking of, right?
John:
I was thinking of the Mac Pro.
John:
What does this mean for AAA gaming?
John:
And the thing we've talked about so much is like the Mac Pro, how much GPU is going to have in it?
John:
Is it going to support third-party GPUs?
John:
Making this pitch makes me think either the Mac Pro is not part of the gaming pitch, which kind of makes sense because who's going to buy a Mac Pro to play games?
John:
I mean, what kind of person would do that?
John:
It's ridiculous.
John:
Or this is a hint in the direction that Marco was always saying is that the new Mac Pro will absolutely not support third party video cards.
John:
because you can't make this pitch about unified gaming architecture and then ship a mac pro and say oh and by the way you can put uh amd and i guess nvidia is not gonna happen but you can put these amd graphics cards in there that's not a unified graphics architecture the whole point of this is they all use these apple gpus with the features that apple gpus and when apple revs their gpus it's like across the whole system so i just thought that was interesting and it it puts you know one or two more pebbles on the scale saying new mac pro does not support third-party gpus at all
Marco:
Yeah, I just... I don't see how anything is pointing that direction because so much of the Apple Silicon architecture is really looking like, yeah, there's not going to be third-party GPUs.
Marco:
Like, we'll be lucky to get...
Marco:
expandable gpus on cards or something like that even that i think is in question for the for the new mac pro i wouldn't even that i wouldn't assume we will get um but third party gpus i think are even a greater step past that of unlikelihood i think we're just we're not going to see that no part of the architecture points to that at all
John:
I mean, this statement would make it say that potentially it's a thing that Apple wasn't going to support.
John:
But if you put in slots, third parties can sell a card for it and third parties will make a driver for it.
John:
And like Apple can't really control that, you know.
Marco:
Well, can Apple Silicon even support GPU drivers?
Marco:
I mean, it already doesn't support eGPUs.
John:
Yeah, I don't know.
John:
I mean, I think it can support GPU drivers.
John:
We'll see.
John:
We'll see what they do there.
John:
I wouldn't know how to rehash this, but the reason it's coming up is because it seems like you won't be able to match the GPU grunt that you can fit in a 2019 Mac Pro by any stretch of the imagination with just the GPUs that are integrated into any kind of Mac Pro system on a chip, right?
Yeah.
John:
Just because you can put more than one of them into them.
John:
You can put four very big, very hot GPUs inside a 2019 Mac Pro.
John:
You can't match that with System on a Chip.
John:
You just can't.
John:
And so it's either Apple doesn't care that you can't match it.
John:
So what?
John:
Tough luck.
John:
Who cares?
John:
Because the benchmarks of the applications that we care about are actually faster without it.
John:
Or that Apple has some kind of external GPU solution, which could be an Apple GPU on a card where the Apple sells you four of them for the price of a few cars.
John:
Or it could just be no GPU support at all for the slots, and the slots are just there for something else.
John:
Or it could be no slots.
John:
Anyway, see many months of past episodes.
Casey:
Yeah, given that the Apple Silicon architecture is so intimately about unified memory shared between the GPU and the main CPU, I'm not saying it's impossible.
Casey:
I mean, it's certainly possible, but I would be very surprised if any sort of external GPU is supported.
Casey:
Anything is possible, but I would be very, very surprised.
Casey:
All right, so macOS Ventura has dumped, dropped and dumped at the same time as apparently dumped, has dumped a whole bunch of hardware.
Casey:
And I will go through the list as per Mr. Macintosh.
Casey:
It has dropped the 2015 through 16 MacBook Pro, the 15 through 17 MacBook Air, the 2016 12-inch MacBook...
John:
too bad the 2014 mac mini the 2013 mac pro and the 2015 iMac all no soup for you so sorry yeah so christina warren says that the most egregious one that they dropped and i disagree with this but it is funny the most egregious one they dropped is the 2013 mac pro that they sold until december 2019
John:
that they should have stopped selling in 2017 you could have active apple care and no os updates so like if you if you bought if you were one of the poorest suckers who bought a trash can mac pro in december 2019 your apple care is still good and you can't get any more os updates but i mean honestly that computer was you know it's a 2013 computer that basically never changed aside from like some different configuration options right so all right maybe they read the gpus once i don't remember
Marco:
Nope, they sure didn't.
Marco:
They just dropped the low-end configurations.
Marco:
Oh, yeah, there you go.
Marco:
That's right.
Casey:
When was it connected live that you presented, Stephen, with the Mac Pro?
Casey:
What year was that?
Marco:
It was our show.
Casey:
Oh, it was our show.
Marco:
Yeah, that was 2019, I think.
Casey:
Was it 2019?
Casey:
There you go.
Marco:
There it was.
Marco:
It was still for sale.
Marco:
I got it.
John:
I got it from Apple.
John:
This computer was a joke gift on a live podcast.
Casey:
Oh, I know.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
I'm just saying, though, that is an example.
Casey:
If you got AppleCare for Stephen, then he is that guy.
Casey:
He is the one.
Marco:
I did not.
Casey:
Oh, how cheap?
Casey:
How cheap are you, man?
Casey:
Come on.
John:
I actually kind of like one of those for my museum, but I was never going to pay the prices.
John:
They were still going for it.
John:
Anyway, dropping support for these.
John:
I feel like the one that probably hurts the most, maybe surprisingly, are the MacBook Pros.
John:
The MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, maybe.
John:
A 2016 MacBook Pro doesn't feel so old that it shouldn't be getting OS updates.
John:
I know 2016 was a long time ago, because the MacBooks didn't change for so long.
John:
There was that dark time, and you're like, well, I have one of the...
John:
Isn't the 2016 the one where they fixed the keyboard?
John:
I forget.
John:
2019 was the...
John:
I think has hastened the demise of a lot of these computers just because kind of like the 32 to 64 bit thing dropped a lot of support.
John:
It's like you just want to get on the other side of this sort of discontinuity.
John:
And so, yeah, this, you know, these older Macs are having support dropped.
John:
That is a thing that usually routinely happens.
John:
I just think we've been in a, we were in a period for a while where macOS wasn't dropping a lot of old hardware.
John:
And I think we're still in a period where iOS isn't dropping a lot of old hardware.
John:
What does 16 drop?
Marco:
So 16 is the first version to drop anything since... So 14 and 15 both didn't drop anything.
Marco:
16 is the first one that's dropped things in three releases.
Marco:
And it's dropping everything up through the 7.
Marco:
So the iPhone 8 and above is supported.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So anyway, sorry for all you trash can owners and sorry for all the people who've got not sold Intel Max 3D drop, but architecture transgressions will do that to you.
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Casey:
This is an example of something that I swear was mentioned in either the keynote or the State of the Union, but if you asked me to find where specifically it was, I would come up blank.
Casey:
But apparently the iPhone is creating head-related transfer functions for you?
John:
We first discussed this back when we were discussing the PlayStation 5, I think maybe before it was even released, talking about the way the PlayStation 5 did 3D audio.
John:
And there was the concept of the head-related transfer function, which basically defines, based on the shape of your head and your ears, how does sound out in the world bounce off of your head and the insides of your ears to hit the things that sense sound, your eardrums, right?
John:
Everyone's got different head and got different ears.
John:
And so sounds in the world are always filtered through your weird little ears and head and stuff.
John:
And when you hear something to your left, to your right, a little bit above, a little bit below, your brain has been trained to identify that sound based on how sound hits off your head and ears.
John:
So your brain is, you know, wired up a little bit differently than someone else's brain because their brain has been wired up to detect sound based on the shape of their head and ears.
John:
Right.
John:
Just over time, like you learn where sound is.
John:
So if you're going to do 3D audio, the best way to try to do it is to define a personalized head related transfer function for each person based on the shape of their head and their ears.
John:
Because you can't just play the same sound out of speakers like in modern Apple parlance for spatial audio.
John:
You can use sort of an average head-related transfer function that will work okay for most people.
John:
But if you personalize it, it sounds even better.
John:
And there was something that the Sony presentation for the PlayStation was saying, oh, well, we scanned 100 ears and averaged them in a computer and blah, blah, blah.
John:
And like maybe someday you'll be able to scan your ear.
John:
and get personalized 3d sound in your playstation 5 i'm not sure whether it is on the playstation but apparently ios 16 has a feature like that where they ask you to use basically the facetime camera uh and you do the facetime thing but they also say now please take the phone and show it your ears show it your left ear and then show it your right ear
John:
And it scans both your head and also your ear and tries to, I'm assuming, use the depth camera to come up with a model of the cragginess of your ear and the size of your head to come up with a personalized head-related transfer function.
John:
Now, we'll link to Josh Hunt's tweet where he shows himself doing this.
John:
And it's supposed to put like a little bracket around where it sees the ear and has real trouble finding Josh's ears.
John:
And it's not because he has big, long, wavy hair that's blocking them.
John:
His ears are clearly visible.
John:
It's kind of like one of those things where they ask a human, find the ears in this picture.
John:
I can find them.
John:
They're right there.
John:
A little kid can find them.
John:
I see his ear.
John:
But the phone is having real problems.
John:
But anyway, it's like beta one.
John:
So we'll see how this goes.
John:
I also, like Casey, have a vague recollection of this being mentioned, but I have no idea what this functionality is.
John:
And I haven't installed iOS 16 yet.
Casey:
All right, so last week we were talking about CarPlay and this new system that Apple's announced wherein they basically take over the entire car.
Casey:
And I wanted to bring up a couple of things that Jan-Just van der Hoef brings up, and I'm mad because I never thought about it, or I never actually said it during the episode, but...
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
A friend of the show, Jelly, just took delivery of a Pulse Star 2, and I've been talking to him about it, and I knew that the Pulse Star was using Android Automotive, and I completely didn't get a chance to, or slipped my mind to bring it up.
Casey:
And I'm actually going to skip forward just a little bit, because the other thing I meant to talk about, which I didn't mention last week, Matt Volk points out
Casey:
And Matt writes, there's an interesting article from Ars Technica a while back that says that the gauge cluster display cannot be run by a non-real-time OS.
Casey:
So reading from that article, supporting a car, especially an Android car, also means needing support for virtualization.
Casey:
Android can run the infotainment system, but something else needs to run the gauge cluster display behind the steering wheel.
Casey:
You know, because good cars have clusters behind the steering wheel.
Casey:
Never mind.
Casey:
Safety regulations mandate that the gauge cluster cannot run Android.
Casey:
Android isn't a real-time OS, meaning it can lag if the processor's too slow, and that's not allowed for critical driving components like the speedometer.
Casey:
This is bananas to me, but apparently this is what they did.
Casey:
The solution is to have the Snapdragon 820 processor run two OSs via virtualization, with Android running the center infotainment screen and some other OS running the gauge cluster display.
Casey:
Android can still send the gauge cluster a UI overlay for things like media info and Google Maps information, but the speedometer is off-limits.
Casey:
And also in that article, it talks about how they were using Qualcomm processors, and apparently since that article has been written, Matt tells us that Polestar has dumped Qualcomm and is instead using NVIDIA for the Polestar 3 that is coming out soon-ish.
Casey:
Before we talk about what car companies are going to do with this, any thoughts on all of those things that we just spoke about?
Marco:
so there's a bunch of cars that use android auto like as their os um but the thing about that that hold on there's two different things that this is this confused the crap when i was researching this there's android auto which is basically like what we think of as carplay then there's also android automotive yes they have a product called android auto and a product called automotive there are two different products yeah automotive sorry it's it's yeah
John:
What I mean is that like a car manufacturer decides, hey, we don't want to do our entire infotainment system ourselves.
John:
Well, it turns out there's an Android variant that we can run on our internal car stuff that will do that for us.
John:
It ships with the car, right?
John:
But kind of like Android everywhere on phones, the beauty of Android, if you choose to look at it that way, is that it can be customized.
John:
So you buy a Samsung phone and it runs Android, but Samsung customized the heck out of it.
John:
When you use Android, you get the source code to Android and you can customize it.
John:
And that's what car makers do.
John:
They use Android Automotive as the foundation for the OS that's going into their car, but they can make it look and feel however they want and customize the heck out of it.
John:
They're just not starting from zero, right?
John:
That doesn't apply to CarPlay.
John:
Apple's not going to give you the source code or whatever the car OS is and say, oh, yeah, just change it.
John:
Put your logos on it.
John:
Change everything around.
John:
You know, we don't care.
John:
Go ahead.
John:
No, that's not how it's going to work with Apple.
John:
Although it is true that many manufacturers do base their in-car infotainment systems on Android, it's because Android is Android and is open source and they are able to modify it that they are willing to do that.
John:
Because if you look at these various cars that use Android automotive, they don't all look exactly the same.
John:
You can kind of tell they're all running Android automotive, but they're customized in ways that Apple basically wouldn't let you do.
John:
Now, that said, that doesn't mean that Apple isn't pitching these people on, hey, take our new CarPlay thing and build it into your car.
John:
No phone needed.
John:
Just you start up the car.
John:
We don't care what kind of phone you have or if you have a phone of any kind whatsoever.
John:
car play will be running on your car it'll be in your car and it will control you know all the stuff maybe they have a real-time os for the gauge cluster if that's a requirement they run all the screens all that stuff that could definitely happen but it's not going to be like it is with android automotive because apple is not going to give you the source code and they're not going to say go ahead put your logos all over it and change everything about it
Marco:
See, the most interesting part of this to me is this distinction of like that the gauge cluster must run a real-time operating system.
Marco:
So as a very quick reference for those of you who don't know, a real-time operating system, the main difference between real-time OSes and pretty much every other OS that we think of that we use every day, like iOS and macOS and everything else, Windows, Linux, Android...
Marco:
Those have non-deterministic performance under certain characteristics.
Marco:
They can have very complex performance characteristics.
Marco:
Real-time OSs are made to be extremely predictable and able to service their basic needs.
Marco:
Whatever the IO needs, whatever the cycle is, whatever they're managing, they're able to service those requests in a defined, known, deterministic amount of time.
Marco:
That way, if you have something like a speedometer, the OS will...
Marco:
be guaranteed that this speedometer will update x times per second no matter what so even if some app is running that's like you know trying to allocate a bunch of memory or take a bunch of cpu time or whatever like that that can't happen on real time os like that can't slow it down it will always always service those requests exactly on schedule or within a very very small you know variance and you know depending on how good it is that variance can be smaller
Marco:
But that's the gist of it.
Marco:
And so the design of RTOS is totally different than other ones because you have to do a lot of things that you wouldn't think of such as like memory allocation can be non-deterministic.
Marco:
It can slow down or it can result in problems or failures.
Marco:
So like
Marco:
Real-time OSs usually have a lot of statically allocated memory.
Marco:
That's one of the biggest things.
Marco:
Static, time-slice-based scheduling or other complex scheduling needs.
Marco:
And so this is so different from the way that our usual computing OSs are built and are optimized.
Marco:
And so I think... So knowing that the Gage cluster must run a real-time OS...
Marco:
My guess, I know this is a little bit out there, is that this is either what's left of or what we will first see from Project Titan.
Marco:
That real-time OS to run that part of what we saw in the CarPlay demo at WVDC.
Marco:
That's my guess, that Project Titan either was scaled down to just this...
Marco:
Or this is going to be the first thing we see from that project.
Marco:
But that what it is, is some kind of real-time OS to run those gauges that they showed off in the keynote on these car screens.
Marco:
So that way, Apple can literally take over the entire display of all of that and be up to date with all the safety regulations and everything and somehow be running two OSs.
Marco:
Now, there's some ways they can do that.
Marco:
So this article mentioned virtualization.
Marco:
Well, Apple's modern, you know, Apple Silicon chips all support that.
Marco:
The chips in the iPhone probably do as well.
Marco:
They support it on the Mac, so I would imagine they support it on the iPhone at the hardware level, or at least they could fairly easily.
Marco:
And so maybe the iPhone runs two OSs in parallel.
Marco:
Maybe one of them is a little real-time OS to run this CarPlay feature, and the other one is, like, the rest of iOS.
Marco:
Or maybe there's some kind of minor hypervisor under both of them.
Marco:
I'm not sure.
Marco:
I don't know the details of how that could work.
John:
Wait, why is an iPhone involved?
Marco:
Because the iPhone, oh, well, hmm.
John:
Like, it was going to be built into the car.
John:
Like, obviously, Project Titan wasn't going to require you to have an iPhone to drive the car.
John:
Like, you know, and if they're, Apple was doing, you know, was rumored to be doing self-driving stuff for Project Titan.
John:
And if they were going to do an entire car, you need some kind of, you know, real-time system to run the car parts of the car.
John:
It doesn't have to be fancy, but presumably Apple would make it fancy.
John:
So surely some kind of,
John:
more restricted, you know, better real-time guarantee type operating system or application environment was part of Project Titan, right?
John:
But they wouldn't require you to have a phone with you to drive the car, so there has to be silicon in the car and software in the car to run the car.
John:
So I would imagine that would be running the real-time OS for the real-time systems, and that would be running, maybe using virtualization, the non-real-time OS for the other parts of the car.
Yeah.
Marco:
But would they want a car to have basically like a built-in iPhone hardware that presumably could never be updated?
John:
It wouldn't be.
John:
It would be like the A13 and the studio display, right?
John:
Right.
John:
In all these cases, like even these cars that run Android Automotive, right –
John:
They're running it so you can, like, oh, I can change the fan speed on the climate control, and I can turn the wipers on, and I can do all those things.
John:
And then there's the, you know, the sort of, I forget what it's called, like the CAN bus or something, but the real-time system that does, like, stability control and anti-lock brakes, and that's separate from the Android automotive, right?
John:
But in all these systems, there's also the flash-style thing that I referred to last time, which is, like, and on top of all this, hey, there's a rectangle that we'll cut out of our entire OS and CarPlay will display there.
John:
or Android Auto will display there.
John:
So like that is the third layer on top of this.
John:
There's the real-time OS, there's a thing that runs all the infotainment and maybe lays stuff over the gauge cluster.
John:
And then there's a system that says, hey, your phone can display stuff here.
John:
Because you are gonna wanna have apps on your phone and run down the newest version of Waze or whatever.
John:
That's going to get a chunk of that screen where whatever phone you own, whether it be Android or an Apple phone, can put apps on that phone, display it into part of that screen.
John:
But that's on top of the stuff that's built into the car.
Marco:
Hmm, that's interesting.
John:
All right, I could be convinced of that.
John:
I mean, that's what modern cars do.
John:
You buy a car with Android Automotive and it supports CarPlay, you're seeing your iPhone's crap being displayed in a rectangle on top of Android Automotive.
Marco:
yeah because because you know this to me like this sounds like apple's answer to android automotive like this is like they want they want their slice of this they think they can do a better job of it they probably might be able to i don't know it depends on how much effort they put into it um but to me like this sounds a lot like project titan or you know what's left of it yeah
John:
If they have this, they had to have had the system if they were planning on making a car.
John:
How far along did they go?
John:
How many dead ends did they go down?
John:
Is this the same as what they were doing or did they scrap all that and start over?
John:
We don't know.
John:
The other thing, and we'll get to what the car manufacturer said in a second from this Verge article, but the other thing that a bunch of people point out is...
John:
multiple years ago maybe last year maybe the year before that uh apple one of the things apple touted about carplay is hey carplay now we can display stuff in more than one place right now carplay shows your stuff in a little rectangle on your dashboard but the new version of carplay can show stuff in two rectangles on your dashboard so car manufacturers could support letting your phone show some stuff in the gauge cluster
John:
right yeah that's been true for a year or two now yeah i think that's a multi-year-old feature but how many cars have you seen that in none so it seems like either apple hasn't gotten a lot of uptake on that feature which again is not this thing that we saw in the keynote but just simply like oh i can just show stuff in two rectangles so either car makers didn't pick up on that feature or it just takes so long for the car industry to do anything that everybody jumped on it instantly and we're only going to see it in cars that come out two years from now
Casey:
It could be either.
Casey:
I do want to go back a half step, though.
Casey:
I strongly agree with you, Marco, that this is the first evidence we've seen or the first effort we've seen that came out of Titan.
Casey:
I mean, I have no inside knowledge.
Casey:
I could be dead wrong about this.
Casey:
But I think you're right that this is the first bit of fallout in the happy sense from their car project.
Casey:
And it wouldn't surprise me if it started as let's build a physical car and ends up as this is what you were saying a minute ago.
Casey:
that this is all we get from that entire humongous project is, you know, a car play automotive, if you will, for lack of a better name.
Marco:
Well, and this lines up perfectly with, honestly, with all the rumors that we heard about it.
Marco:
So, you know, a lot, they tried a bunch of things, a lot of turmoil, a lot of changes in direction and leadership and everything else.
Marco:
And if you remember the most recent, you know, reasonably credible or strong, at least rumors we heard about Titan was,
Marco:
was about a year or two ago when the rumor was they had pivoted to, quote, making software for other automakers.
Marco:
And we all made fun of that because we were like, that's not something Apple would do.
Marco:
They want to make the whole widget.
Marco:
And it's interesting, even in the live talk show at WDC this year, John Gruber...
Marco:
almost directly asked them you know like why they were doing this kind of new carplay thing when the apple way of doing things normally is to make the whole widget and the the very long smiling pause from the apple executives to that question with no real response um kind of suggested that they were still planning to make the whole widget as in make the whole car make the whole car but um so you know that's that's one small data point against this theory um or that maybe this isn't the only thing they're doing but
Marco:
looking at the current landscape, if car makers, even if one or two car makers, you don't need a lot to start, but if car makers are willing to give Apple full access to giant screens to control the vast majority of the experience...
Marco:
That's a really good position for Apple to be in because it lets them keep focusing mostly on their high profit iPhone business.
Marco:
It's massive lock in to iPhone owners because then like, you know, everything in their life will start working totally differently and possibly worse if they ever switch away from the iPhone.
Marco:
And it's something that lets Apple focus on the parts they like and take profit from the sources they already have without entering the giant, messy, expensive, complicated world of the physical car design and sale and maintenance.
Marco:
Like that whole world is incredibly messy, as we discussed before.
Marco:
I see no reason for Apple to make their own car.
Marco:
I also see no reason for Apple to get into the self-driving business in a major way.
Marco:
Because even that, that has also shown to be big and messy and possibly not actually working for a long time and things like that.
Marco:
Whereas this is something Apple can get into today.
Marco:
They can start doing this, and they are, by all means, they are starting to do this today.
Marco:
They can start taking control of things and prevent or at least stave off competition from Android that's literally doing a very similar thing here.
Marco:
So, you know, they kind of have to do it on one level defensively there against Android.
Marco:
And it has all these pluses for them and for their users.
Marco:
So I think this is Project Titan.
Marco:
And if they eventually make their own car down the road, okay, I was wrong.
Marco:
I think this is it.
John:
I think they'd have to support Android Auto, though, because all the cars support both things now.
John:
It supports CarPlay or Android Auto, right?
John:
And granted, the whole stat that has 80% of new car buyers are iPhone owners, just because if you're buying a new car, you probably have a lot of money, which probably means you buy a fancy iPhone, right?
John:
But 80% is not 100%.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
I don't see them not supporting Android Auto in the way, in the dumb window today that CarPlay is for other things.
Marco:
I see this as a replacement for Android Automotive, not Android Auto.
John:
Right, but what I'm saying is it's pretty weird for Apple to be making an OS that has a feature where it carves out a portion of the screen so that an Android phone can display stuff from its apps there.
John:
But it's the price of entry.
John:
And that gets to this final section here.
John:
This is an article in The Verge where they called a bunch of car manufacturers right after the WWC keynote and said, hey, Apple had this thing today where they showed Apple software running across the entire dashboard.
John:
Are you going to support that?
John:
And the car manufacturers predictably said, you know, no comment or like a bunch of words saying, oh, we believe in the full car experience and we're interested in what Apple does.
John:
And we're very happy partners with Apple and blah, blah, blah.
John:
There was very few like enthusiastic.
John:
Yes, totally.
John:
Our next car is going to have Apple across the whole dashboard.
John:
The closest we got is from Polestar, which is a quote from Polestar's PR representative.
John:
Apple CarPlay will come to Polestar 2 as part of an over-the-air update later this month.
John:
We're also thrilled to announce that the next generation of CarPlay will be coming to Polestar cars in the future.
John:
That is so vague.
John:
It's like, well, does that mean the thing they showed on the screen?
John:
Because there is going to be a next generation of CarPlay, but it might just be the regular CarPlay?
Casey:
I don't...
Casey:
No, no.
Casey:
So I can I can translate this for you.
Casey:
No joke.
Casey:
So again, you know, our friend Jelly just got a Polestar 2 and it does not have CarPlay until literally today.
Casey:
He sent me a text just a few minutes ago saying that that update has finally landed.
Casey:
So as of today, his car will have what we think of his CarPlay, you know, the standard CarPlay experience.
Casey:
I read this as we are thrilled to announce that the next generation of CarPlay, this new fancy thing where it takes over the dash, et cetera, et cetera, will be coming to Polestar cars in the future.
Casey:
So that's a yes.
Casey:
Additionally, Volvo, which is effectively the same as Polestar, except not really, said at this time, we don't have anything to share beyond that.
Casey:
We plan to support this next generation of Apple CarPlay in future vehicles.
Casey:
So Volvo and Polestar seem to be in on it.
Casey:
Everyone else that they talked to seemed extremely wishy-washy or heck no.
John:
And they put a bunch of logos up there.
John:
Like, they called a lot of the people from these logos.
John:
Actually, the Decoder podcast, this related to The Verge, talked to, I think, the CEO of Mercedes-Benz or somebody fancy from Mercedes-Benz and had a longer discussion about, like, part of the discussion was, hey, this Apple thing, are you going to support it?
John:
And Mercedes kind of said the same thing that you'd imagine BMW would say.
John:
Both these companies, both Mercedes and BMW, have spent a lot of time and money and resources trying to come up with their own
John:
os to run their dashboards because both mercedes and bmws have really leaned heavily into screens uh across their new dashboards mercedes going the heaviest where it's like screens from edge to edge top to bottom like just the whole dashboard not just like a giant tablet shoved into the middle of it like a tesla bmw's new dashboard it looks like an extremely unimaginative very long skinny screen from from in front of the driver all the way over past the midpoint of the car
John:
But they're all running... I mean, maybe they are Android-based or whatever, but they're very adamant that their OSs look like whatever a BMW OS or whatever a Mercedes OS looks like.
John:
I can't imagine any of the current BMW or Mercedes designs having that all replaced by Apple stuff because, you know, if you look at the Keynote...
John:
You look at what they showed on the dashboards and it looks like an Apple UI and, you know, see previous episodes of my complaints about what an Apple UI looks like, but it looks Apple-y, right?
John:
It would be out of place in any of the interiors of any current cars from these car makers because these car makers make the OS match what their interiors look like and their interiors mostly don't follow that same minimalist Apple aesthetic, right?
John:
They follow usually worse or maybe uglier anyway, aesthetics, and they make their dashboard graphics and infographics and diagrams and instrument clusters match that.
John:
And so I think, you know, Polestar, if they're gung-ho and Volvo, presumably the cars that they put this in will be designed so this Apple look and feel
John:
matches the interior of the cars.
John:
And I think actually a Polestar is pretty close to that aesthetic already.
John:
But Mercedes, BMW, GM, Toyota, Ford, these makers, their car interiors do not look aptly, let's say.
John:
And neither do their OSs, neither do their screens, neither do their internet clusters, neither do their infotainments.
John:
And a lot of these car makers don't want the inside of their car to look aptly.
John:
The Apple aesthetic that they showed, again, there could be more than one aesthetic, but what they showed at the
John:
that doesn't match certain kinds of cars sometimes you want a car to be think of like a big mean truck we just talked about people who love their big trucks you don't want a delicate appley ui in your big mean truck it just doesn't match or like a fancy sports car that's look racy can i tell you guys a secret what i just don't tell anybody i honestly didn't like the look of the car play gauges they showed off
John:
that's what i'm saying like they're apple apple strength has not been the ability to convey information in a clear way it's all been about low contrast text that nobody can read hiding things that they think you don't need to see like i think their strengths their current strengths are not well suited to do an instrument cluster like because an instrument cluster is like show me the information in a clear way that i can see at different times a day and whatever i'm like we can't even read anything on our uis on our phones that we can position any it's like
Marco:
You have to hover over the transmission stick to see what you're in.
Marco:
Oh, my gosh.
John:
Don't even.
Marco:
Am I in drive?
Marco:
Am I in reverse?
Marco:
Let's see.
Marco:
Let me just hover my hand over here.
Marco:
Oh, there it popped in.
Marco:
There we go.
John:
We'll do pupil tracking.
John:
When you're not looking at the speedometer, we'll hide the numbers.
John:
Just turn it off.
John:
Only when you look at it, we'll make the numbers beautifully fade into view.
John:
But what if they don't fade into view?
John:
Well, try looking at it a little bit longer.
John:
Why don't you show the numbers all the time?
John:
We feel like the numbers are distracting.
John:
The numbers are distracting you from your content.
John:
We want to let the content be fried.
John:
Oh, gosh.
John:
Stop.
John:
I'll only show the numbers when your pupils land on the speedometer.
Casey:
Oh, my gosh.
Casey:
It's so bad because it could be true.
John:
i i love the idea of apple of apple designed stuff and when i saw the reality of it or when i think about like the reality of you know modern mac design i'm just like oh no maybe maybe that's not what i want i don't know yeah but but even but setting that aside even if it was really good cars have a different have styles that for each model within a make and for for entire manufacturers have a different sort of style and not all of them match apple like i said pole star i think does actually match apple's vibe but you know
John:
Mercedes and BMW don't.
John:
Volvo arguably doesn't.
John:
Toyota and Honda certainly don't.
John:
So that's the beauty of Android automotive.
John:
These car makers can take that and, you know, make it look however they want, just like Android phone makers can take Android and make it look like whatever ugly thing they think they want to make their Android phones look like.
John:
That is a feature of Android Unmotive that I assume will not be a feature of anything like that from Apple, because Apple does not really, the modern Apple, as in the last several decades, does not want you to skin their OSs.
John:
Back in the day, they did, and it was super cool, but not lately.
Marco:
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Casey:
I wanted to briefly talk about the WWDC State of the Union and one particular part of it.
Casey:
There's a bunch of little things that may be worth talking about another time, but there was one piece that I thought was really fascinating that I wanted to call out, and I wanted to hear what you guys had to say about this.
Casey:
Uh, early on in the presentation, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
So let me back up.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
I have steps.
Casey:
So the platform stay, the union is like the nerd keynote, right?
Casey:
So the one o'clock in the afternoon, Eastern time, uh, keynote keynote is for everyone.
Casey:
It's for nerds.
Casey:
It's for non-nerds.
Casey:
But the platform State of the Union, which is typically in the afternoon of the first day of WWDC, that is the nerd's keynote, where they talk about code, where they talk about nerdy things.
Casey:
And one of the first things that they spoke about, you know, so Susan Prescott was the emcee.
Casey:
She did a brief thing about Xcode Cloud.
Casey:
And then they brought up Josh.
Casey:
I can never remember if it's Schaefer or Schaffer, and I apologize.
Casey:
But Josh S. came out.
Casey:
and said a couple of interesting things.
Casey:
But one of the things he said was he stood in front of a big white screen that on that screen said Objective-C, AppKit UIKit, and Interface Builder.
Casey:
These are all the technologies that you use to write iOS or macOS apps up until SwiftUI existed.
Casey:
And he stood in front of the screen and he said, and I don't have the exact verbatim quote in front of me, but he said in so many words,
Casey:
These are all legacy.
Casey:
They will exist for a long time.
Casey:
But this is not the way forward.
Casey:
The way forward is Swift and Swift UI.
Casey:
And then following that, it was Ben Cohen who did a feature on Swift specifically.
Casey:
And Ben, and I believe this is a verbatim quote, said, Swift is absolutely the best language to build apps across our devices.
Casey:
And then they leaned into SwiftUI as well heavily throughout the rest of the presentation.
Casey:
And I thought this was interesting because one of the things that all of us griped, not only the three of us on the show, but all of us as developers griped about after last year and maybe even a couple of years prior, but especially after last year, was what is the way forward, Apple?
Casey:
If I'm developing a new macOS app today, am I doing that with AppKit?
Casey:
Am I doing it with Catalyst, which is basically UIKit on macOS?
Casey:
Am I doing it with SwiftUI?
Casey:
What is the right answer?
Casey:
And it seems extremely clear that Josh and Ben and the rest of the team at Apple are saying the right answer is Swift and SwiftUI wherever you can and then fall back to these other things if you can't use Swift and SwiftUI.
Casey:
And on the one side, I deeply appreciate that they have put a line in the sand or a flag in the dirt or whatever analogy you want to use, and they've said, this is the way.
Casey:
That being said, they're having SwiftUI write a bunch of checks that I'm not sure SwiftUI can cash, and I'm...
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I'm a little concerned.
Casey:
Marco, let me start with you, since you are the most developy developer on Apple platforms of the three of us.
Casey:
What do you think about this?
Casey:
And if you wouldn't mind starting by just very, very briefly reminding us, what is your Swift and Swift UI journey as of today?
Marco:
As of today, I am writing as much new code as I can in Swift.
Marco:
I'm not going back and rewriting working Objective-C code in Swift.
Marco:
However, I'm making grand plans in my head that I may never actually achieve of larger moves like that.
Marco:
So that's Swift.
Marco:
SwiftUI, I use 100% on the Watch app because, again, the alternative was garbage.
Marco:
in the iphone app i'm using very little swift ui so far um and there are various reasons for that but uh very little of it so far i have done other little like toy apps like you know little utilities i've made for myself i've done those in swift ui so i've used a little bit more there um but not not a ton um so i think with this we have to separate a few different things so first of all you have to see versus swift as the language we are using um
Marco:
That is very clear.
Marco:
Swift is very mature now.
Marco:
That is the way forward.
Marco:
It has been the way forward for quite some time now.
Marco:
So the language you should be using for almost all code in your app, as long as you can, is Swift.
Marco:
Especially if you're writing a new code, it's a no-brainer.
Marco:
Use Swift.
Marco:
That's simple.
Marco:
That is well-supported.
Marco:
And that's a totally reasonable chance for them to take.
Marco:
And they've been taking it for many years now.
Marco:
and so that that that i think set that aside okay objective c as much as much as i love objective c and i still write some of it you know in parts of my app that use it um swift is the way forward and that's that's that's a done deal that that fight is over you know we've moved on okay
Marco:
So then the question becomes, which UI framework?
Marco:
Are you using SwiftUI or are you using UIKit or AppKit?
Marco:
That's a much more difficult question to answer.
Marco:
That's really what we're talking about here.
Marco:
It's not about the language.
Marco:
It's about the framework and what you can do in the framework and what's hard and what's easy and what's buggy and what's mature.
Marco:
Swift UI in releases before 16 and Mac OS Ventura, because I don't have any experience with the new ones yet in that way, but Swift UI before this beta cycle has been...
Marco:
Very interesting, very bumpy of a ride.
Marco:
It has a lot of value when you're on the happy path, as we talked about before.
Marco:
And when you hit a wall, you hit it hard.
Marco:
And it's often so frustrating that you have to basically go back and rewrite the whole thing in UIKit or do ridiculous levels of hacks in order to work around some limitation of SwiftUI.
Marco:
Based on what I've seen so far with the new stuff, it seems like they are making progress towards removing more and more of those needs for those hacks, but there are still a lot left.
Marco:
And some of them, I think, are inherent to SwiftUI and just the architecture that it has and the whole idea of declarative UI framework.
Marco:
Like, some of that, certain hacks are necessary just to fit into that paradigm.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
that is that's going to be a problem to some degree forever and so the question is when will we when will we hit a point where and or have we already hit a point where we can mostly use swift ui and not have to dip out of it very often and not have to hack around problems or limitations in it very often to the point where we can say all right this is this is what we're using by default and you know most of the time we'll be fine doing this
Marco:
And I don't know that we've reached that point yet.
Marco:
Swift UI is still very, very early.
Marco:
Still, you know, it's what, about four years old, something like that?
Casey:
I believe that's right.
Marco:
In public, at least.
Marco:
You know, I know it was on the watch in development for a few years before that.
Marco:
But it's very, very young in the public world.
Marco:
And it's not evenly aged and evenly mature on all platforms.
Marco:
For instance, as we talked about last week, what you get with SwiftUI code is worse on the Mac than it is on iOS.
Marco:
And what you get on iOS is worse than what you get on watchOS.
Marco:
Clearly, there's a hierarchy of maturity here.
Marco:
WatchOS is at the top.
Marco:
WatchOS, SwiftUI, done.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
Just use it.
Marco:
ios swift ui well it's okay it most of the time but you know you start hitting problems in certain edge cases or you know certain specialized needs or certain customizability that's not possible or performance problems with certain types of collections or certain types of structures so you know there's there's issues like that and then you go to the mac and it's even more of those like well you have more problems more bugs more limitations more subpar implementations or subpar behaviors um or looks and so
Marco:
I think this is a very optimistic slide for Apple to say, this is the way forward.
Marco:
This is the best way to build apps today.
Marco:
Because it might be the best way to build their demo apps, like the Ice Cream Stand or whatever, their demo WBC session kind of apps.
Marco:
It might be good for that, but it still seems to hit a lot of need for hacks and walls and problems when it hits the real world.
Marco:
And it especially has a lot of those problems when you're interacting with legacy code bases or the Mac.
Marco:
And so until they can really develop a lot of that, just with, you know, metration over time, basically...
Marco:
I don't know if they can necessarily declare this.
Marco:
They're declaring this more as a wish than a reality.
Marco:
And they might make it a reality.
Marco:
I'm sure they intend to keep going down the path that will make it a reality.
Marco:
Whether they can achieve that is a different story.
Marco:
Whether they are able to give it the quality and attention it needs in areas like the Mac, where it's not quite the number one priority, that remains to be seen.
Marco:
Right now, if I were writing a brand new app today, I would absolutely no doubt try to do it this way.
Marco:
And wherever I run into problems, rather than trying to dump SwiftUI and go back to UIKit or AppKit...
Marco:
I would attempt to do the various mechanisms where you can drop out a SwiftUI and use AppKit or UIKit wrapped in a SwiftUI view for certain parts of your view hierarchies or whatever.
Marco:
So I would totally do this if writing new today.
Marco:
And in fact, I am very tempted to try to rewrite large parts of my AppUI this way because I think being on the happy path here is going to make certain things easier in the future.
Marco:
Already, my app is a huge pile of burdensome technical debt because my app is a huge pile of Objective-C UI kit code that has some Swift here and there but is mostly still old Objective-C UI kit code.
Marco:
Because there is so much UI in a podcast app.
Marco:
You have no idea.
Marco:
You think a podcast app has three screens.
Marco:
I'm telling you, it's so much more than that.
Marco:
There is so much UI in a podcast app.
Marco:
And so I'm feeling a great burden of all this legacy code.
Marco:
And I would love...
Marco:
To move towards the ideal of Swift UI, which is like, wow, I can probably collapse a lot of this code that is thousands of lines of Objective-C for UIKit into hundreds of lines of Swift UI instead.
Marco:
That is hopefully cleaner and easier to maintain and possibly avoid certain bug behaviors or certain inconsistent states and things like that.
Marco:
I would love to do that and I'm going to probably start attempting to do that like later this summer to see like, hey, can I actually do this or not?
Marco:
Like kind of do like a feasibility study of just trying some things and see what happens.
Marco:
But the reality is I don't see any evidence yet that we're near that point where that actually is that easy.
Marco:
That it seems like we are going in that direction, but there are still so many walls and limitations and hurdles that
Marco:
And we'll see what happens.
Marco:
They are making progress.
Marco:
Every year, they add a bunch of stuff and fix a bunch of stuff and improve a bunch of stuff to SwiftUI.
Marco:
And so they are making progress.
Marco:
But these are big shoes to fill.
Marco:
Like, you're asking people to...
Marco:
throw away all of the old frameworks that they know and everything they know about them for a totally different, not only a totally different library for making UIs, but a whole different paradigm of how you make UIs and how data flows through apps.
Marco:
And that's really hard, complicated stuff for all of us, for them to implement and for us to learn and to change our mental models and behaviors and architectures for.
Marco:
That's a huge thing.
Marco:
And that's not going to happen in a few years.
Marco:
It's going to take a decade to really move the industry over that way in a big way.
Marco:
And they have been smart about it in the sense that they have made these little escape hatches where you can do things in parts.
Marco:
And that's very, very smart.
Marco:
Because if that wasn't the case, this would be nowhere near where it is today in terms of adoption and usefulness.
Marco:
But
Marco:
i still think this is optimistic because again also keep in mind that if you want to use swift ui with all of its new stuff you know you want to use the navigation tree stuff great that solves your problems i look forward to trying that um but i can only do it when my app requires ios 16 or mac os ventura you know and so even then it's like if you're if you have a need to support even one or two os versions back
Marco:
you know, this stuff, you can't quite use it yet.
Marco:
So you might not be able to use Swift UI the way you want to, or you might have to have even more hacks.
Marco:
So again, like this is a process.
Marco:
This takes a lot of time.
Marco:
We are not that far along this process yet.
Marco:
In the grand scheme of things, Swift UI is not mature yet.
Marco:
You can't use it for everything yet.
Marco:
You shouldn't use it for everything yet.
Marco:
And for Apple to say you should use it for everything, or you should probably use it for everything, I think is still optimistic.
Marco:
But I think we're getting there.
John:
Let's give a brief review of a capsule summary of when we talked about this in the past.
John:
The analogy we used then was like Mac OS X when it first came out.
John:
Mac OS X was based on the Next Step OS, but it had a bunch of Apple classic Mac APIs thrown on top.
John:
And you had two groups of developers and two groups of apps meeting there.
John:
There was all the Next Step apps that were ported to Mac OS X, and they used what came to be known as the Cocoa API.
John:
it's app kit and all that stuff and objective c this weird language and there were all the classic mac applications that ported to mac os 10's carbon api which was like a cleaned up version of the classic mac api and for many many years in the early days of mac os 10 apple supported both carbon and coco coco they had to support carbon because the os they tried the next step based os they tried to put out before that based on rhapsody was a non-starter because basically microsoft and adobe said yeah we're not rewriting our apps in objective c i don't know what you're talking about so
John:
you either let us run our existing apps pretty easily on your new os or it's not going anywhere so that's why mac os 10 exists and that's why carbon exists because they had to make an os so that essentially adobe and microsoft could port their important applications with a minimum of fuss and all those applications use the classic mac os api not the next step api right so you had carbon and coco and you had to keep carbon around because all your important apps were in it and then there's these weird little developers writing things and coco with this weird language objective c but
John:
and those two frameworks existed together for a long time and apple do wwc presentations and they would add a new control and it would come to coco first and then carbon would get it later or they'd add a new api and it would only be in carbon it would come to coco later and coco people were writing app kit apps with coco and they would be annoyed that they had to drop down into carbon to do something and vice versa and then there was the years where the apple would say and we're bringing this feature to
John:
both carbon and cocoa at the same time and the crowd would go wild and they'd be like yeah we don't like the we don't like the fighting we don't like it when the other api gets it sooner because the next people had big objective c code bases and the classic mac people had big even bigger legacy code bases for their applications like photoshop and office right and you know there was some cross-pollination happening there
John:
But at no point in these early years of Mac OS X did Apple say, by the way, just so you know, Objective-C and AppKit, that's the future.
John:
And yeah, we had to do Carbon because we kind of need Photoshop and Microsoft Office.
John:
But even though those people say they're not going to ever rewrite their apps using AppKit...
John:
Don't worry about it.
John:
If we're successful in 10 years, they won't be using Carbon anymore.
John:
But if they had said that, people would have been like, are you kidding me?
John:
No one's going to rewrite Photoshop in Objective-C or to use AppKit or Office in Objective-C.
John:
That's not going to happen, right?
John:
So you better keep carbon around forever.
John:
But it turns out through confluence events, one, Apple was extremely successful starting around 2001.
John:
Fast forward to today, I'd say Apple's done pretty well for itself.
John:
It's been successful with its various platforms to the phone came out based entirely on an Objective-C based API that looks a lot like AppKit called UIKit.
John:
And that made that skill set very popular and valuable.
John:
And then three, big applications ended up being written in these weird-ass cross-platform UI things anyway.
John:
Like, what the hell is Photoshop?
John:
Like, I'm sure under the covers, it's probably got a bunch of Objective-C, AppKit-y stuff, but their UI framework is not standard AppKit controls, and it certainly isn't Carbon anymore.
John:
And that's the little, you know, cherry at the end of this.
John:
Hey, whatever happened to Carbon anyway?
John:
Okay.
John:
Well, after years and years of Apple saying, we support both Carbon and Cocoa, you know, they're both great APIs.
John:
Use the one that's best for your code base, blah, blah, blah, blah.
John:
It came time to do the 64-bit transition.
John:
And despite developing, promising, and I believe even maybe shipping to some developers a 64-bit version of Carbon, actually someone made the call, the very difficult call inside Apple to say, yeah, we've changed our mind.
John:
Carbon is not coming to 64-bit.
John:
We're choosing this opportunity, this bittedness transition to say, yeah,
John:
you're not going to be able to write a carbon app for 64 bit not for technical reasons because we've got it it's here it's working but here's here's how we're kind of it's like someone who breaks up with you by just being a jerk to you constantly until you break up with them right like instead of actually having the conversation to say we've decided objective cnf kit is the future i know this is hard to hear but that's the future instead of doing that they just said uh carbon's not coming to 64 bit
John:
We still support Carbon.
John:
It's great, but it's not coming to 64-bit.
John:
And you know that's the end of Carbon because eventually all apps are 64-bit.
John:
Eventually you can't even run 32-bit apps anymore, right?
John:
Like the writing was on the wall.
John:
So everybody who had a Carbon app, it's like, we didn't know how to tell you this, but Objective-C.
John:
Remember that weird thing with the square brackets?
John:
Yeah, you better learn that now.
John:
That's your future.
John:
And I think that that legacy of like how they handled that
John:
I think they learned from that because this presentation was them trying to say in a nice way, this is the direction we're heading in.
John:
Before we're there, we're not there yet.
John:
As Marco amply pointed out, we are not there yet, but we're saying directionally, we're headed that-a-way.
John:
And that away is Swift and Swift UI.
John:
And again, Swift is fairly well settled.
John:
I think they did that pretty well, too.
John:
Like the first year Swift came out, all the WWDC slides had all their examples in both Swift and Objective-C.
John:
But three years after that or whatever, the writing was on the wall.
John:
It's going to be Swift.
John:
And now Objective-C, what's that?
John:
It's the code that's in the parts of your application you haven't touched in a while.
John:
Swift is very well established.
John:
But the API question was an open one, especially on the Mac.
John:
This is where we've talked about it a lot.
John:
Because the Mac had this weird thing where you had AppKit.
John:
and then you had catalyst which was ui kit on the mac and then you had swift ui on the max you had three apis like how the hell am i supposed to write a mac app which one of these am i supposed to use because you know app kit and swift ui would be bad enough but now there's ui kit so does that mean like app kit is going away but it's being replaced by ui kit and catalyst is the way forward but then what the heck is swift ui or am i just am i supposed to be mixing swift ui and ui kit on the mac and ignoring app kit or is app kit the one true way to do it and just mixing swift ui into that
John:
This slide answers that question.
John:
Directionally, where we are going on every single one of our platforms is Swift and Swift UI.
John:
And unlike with the Carbon thing, where they just said, oh, and by the way, AppKit won't be supported next year.
John:
They had, what they said on this slide, they didn't say any of this was legacy.
John:
That's the subtext.
John:
But the text was, Objective-C, AppKit, and UIKit, and Interface Builder are
John:
Great technologies.
John:
They brought us to where we are today, and they will be supported for many, many years in the future.
John:
Because remember, all these things, Objective-C, AppKit, UIKit, Interface Builder, they're all 64-bit.
John:
There's no big transition coming up on the side.
John:
And Apple itself has huge amounts of code written in Objective-C, AppKit, UIKit using Interface Builder.
John:
They are probably the biggest legacy code base of this stuff, especially now that like, you know, Photoshop and probably Microsoft or whatever using whatever weird OS framework, you know, in-house things that they've built.
John:
Right.
John:
Apple is the largest, probably has the largest, most important code base using these quote unquote legacy technologies.
John:
So Apple can't get rid of any of this stuff until and unless they support all those apps.
John:
And that's not going to happen for freaking ever.
John:
So don't worry about an app you wrote using AppKit not working in two years.
John:
or UI kit or, you know, Objective-C not running anymore.
John:
Like those apps will continue to function.
John:
You'll be able to continue to build them.
John:
You have to be able to.
John:
But directionally, we are going to Swift UI and Swift.
John:
And we are very far from that.
John:
This is just a big directional sign.
John:
But I think it is a sign of maturity to say, to solve the question that we kept having, which is like, I don't know what I'm supposed to do.
John:
I have all these APIs available to me.
John:
What is the path forward?
John:
Because the Apple in all past years was like, look, you can mix and match them and you can use them where appropriate.
John:
And if your app has this, you can use that and you can use this.
John:
And it's like, OK, but but where do we go from here?
John:
Like, I don't know where to put my effort.
John:
Should I continue to build, you know, 50 percent of my app and UI getting 50 percent in Swift UI?
John:
Or should I just make it a pure app kit app with dollops of Swift UI sprinkled in it?
John:
Or you'd say, I can't make my app 100 percent Swift UI.
John:
So what am I supposed to do?
John:
Knowing that essentially AppKit UIKit and Interface Builder are not going to be the way forward is clarifying for everybody involved.
John:
And it's great for them to say that before those technologies are dropped, because I don't think they're going to be dropped for like a decade, right?
John:
So now there is clarity on both sides.
John:
Apple can continue to do what it was doing, but now we actually know which direction they're heading.
John:
What they were doing is every year will make SwiftUI better.
John:
And hopefully, eventually, you'll be able to use it to do everything your app can do.
John:
But we're so far from that now that even my dinky, stupid little app that has one thing on the screen, I can't even implement Switch Glass in pure SwiftUI today.
John:
And I thought, like, I started messing with it again.
John:
I'm like, maybe I can, you know, let's see if I can add some more SwiftUI to this.
John:
And then one of the first things I saw in, like, one of the WDC Lounge channels, it was the SwiftUI channel.
John:
Someone asked a question.
John:
Because just this year, they said, hey, you can do a menu extra in SwiftUI.
John:
The little menu icons that you have in your menu bar, it's called a menu extra.
John:
You can now do them using SwiftUI.
John:
Previously, you couldn't.
John:
You had to use the AppKit APIs to do that or the Catalyst APIs or whatever.
John:
But now you can do it in SwiftUI.
John:
So someone was messing with this, and they asked a question in the WDC lounge, hey, can I have something different happen when I option click the menu bar icon?
John:
And they said, no, that feature doesn't exist yet.
John:
Oh, my gosh.
John:
That's a feature of my app.
John:
You option click on things and it cycles the favor.
John:
And the answer was not like, oh, here's a workaround or you got to capture the keystroke yourself or whatever.
John:
It's like you literally can't do that.
John:
And that's the nature of declarative UI.
John:
If you don't have a way to declare, that's the thing you want.
John:
There is no I'm just going to drop down to AppKit and then catch the mouse events and look at the modifier keys.
John:
which is essentially how I do it, right?
John:
But once you've dropped down to that level, you're not in SwiftUI anymore.
John:
You're in AppKit.
John:
Where is all that stuff?
John:
That's in AppKit, right?
John:
That's before we get into all the other things we're talking about.
John:
And Marco mentioned like having to bump the OS version.
John:
So I'm in the midst of adding a major feature in my dinky app that has no features.
John:
But anyway, a pretty big feature to my app.
John:
Already to add this feature to my app, I've had to bump the minimum OS requirement from like 10.15 to 12.
John:
I'm not going to release this one until 13 is out because I don't want to require the latest OS for my stupid thing.
John:
And it kind of annoys me that I can't have both of them out at the same time where I continue to bug patch the old version and do the new one or whatever.
John:
But this dinky app that has no features, it's a Swift UI feature.
John:
I have to bump the minimum OS version to 12.
John:
When I was adding features, I was like, oh, I'm going to have to bump it up.
John:
Oh, now I have to bump it up to 11.
John:
And now I have to bump it up to 12.
John:
I'm hoping I never have to bump it up to 13.
John:
But I'm just like saying, what more can I implement in SwiftUI in my dinky little app, right?
John:
That's how far SwiftUI is from being a full solution.
John:
It is so far away from it that you can't even do the most trivial application if it wants to be a well-behaved Mac application, which my thing tries to be.
John:
Like having sort of
John:
some depth of features it's not just like a you know the food truck application or whatever some depth of features like oh who would ever want to option click on the menu bar icon on the mac apple's own menu bar icons on the mac let you option click and do stuff it's not an obscure feature good mac apps do stuff like that and it's like oh no sorry there's literally no way to do that can i get mouse events like no
John:
well tell us why you want mouse events and we'll implement it's like no sometimes you need to intercept events sometimes i need to like have access to the responder chain or see what modifier keys are held down or whatever why would you ever need to do that just tell us and we'll make a swift ui modifier for it it's like you're never going to be able to you'll be chasing your tail forever there needs to be some sort of underlying way to do that but anyway
John:
The clarity of this presentation of the state of the union was directional.
John:
Apple is headed here.
John:
Now developers, you know what we're trying to do.
John:
We haven't done it yet.
John:
We're not saying we've done it yet, but you know what we're trying to do.
John:
And so if you're going to make decisions based on what Apple is trying to do, which is, you know, good thing.
John:
Like Apple doesn't tend to give you roadmaps, but if you know what they're trying to do, then you can make much smarter decisions about what you want to do in your app.
Okay.
John:
doesn't make it any more possible for you to make your app using swift ui entirely from top to bottom today but it lets you make decisions about the future and i think this is this is a very mature thing for apple to do and i think you haven't seen a lot of people yelling about it because we're glad to get some kind of roadmap and unlike the carbon and cocoa era right it's they're not saying like every all your hard work from before
John:
throw it in the garbage and rewrite everything, right?
John:
That I think we're all kind of used to the way Apple does things in the more modern era to say, I feel secure in my investment in my giant application that's based on AppKit or UIKit or whatever, that Apple is going to protect that.
John:
But in the meantime, I know for all my future work, here's the direction I'm going to be going in.
John:
And I will continue to struggle to use SwiftUI as much as I can, falling back to UIKit or AppKit when I need to.
John:
giving feedback to apple about the shortcomings and together we will continue that cycle but now the directionality is clear now i know that we're not going to perpetually have swift ui layered on top of another more full featured api that's like the real thing under the covers
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
I'm a bit of a Swiss UI apologist because I do think there's a lot to like there.
Casey:
But it's been quite frustrating because the two or three things that have been delivered in this release, at least at a glance—and I've only spent a little bit of time looking at it so far—but at a glance—
Casey:
None of these things work for Masquerade.
Casey:
They're exactly what I need for Masquerade, but for various uninteresting reasons.
Casey:
They just don't get me 100% of the way there.
Casey:
So for all of these two or three things that I'm looking at, I'm probably going to have to continue to use my god-awful hacks.
Casey:
This is sounding familiar, Marco.
Casey:
I don't mean that to be insulting.
Casey:
I'm just saying...
Casey:
I have my own pile of god-awful hacks, and I don't want them there.
Casey:
I'd rather use the hashtag blessed way of doing things, but for whatever reason, it just isn't 100%.
Casey:
I have my own you-can't-right-click kind of scenarios and situations, and it's
Casey:
It's frustrating, even though so much about SwiftUI, I really do like quite a bit.
Casey:
And I really do admire what they're trying to do with it.
Casey:
But like both of you have said, they're not quite there yet.
Casey:
And I don't know how long it's going to take, but we're certainly not there yet.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I think there's going to be a long tail of like, you know, if, if we, if the goal state is, Oh, there is no sort of low level API.
John:
There is no app kit or UI kit under there.
John:
It's like, you know, eventually if those APIs will eventually go away and it'll just be Swift UI.
John:
Right.
John:
But if it's just Swift UI and if Swift UI is declarative and if it doesn't have a way to do the thing, you're stuck.
John:
Like there's lots of weird things you can't do.
John:
Like give examples from switch glass, which is a little, a little palette of icons lets you switch between applications and,
John:
I have a bunch of weird ass invisible windows floating around there.
John:
So like when you move the pallet off the edge of the screen, you can still slam the cursor against the edge of the screen and click and you look like you're missing the pallet, but you're actually hitting like the empty space between it and the edge of the screen.
John:
That's an invisible window that I own.
John:
And I transfer that click to the icon that you didn't click on.
John:
Same thing with activation, like with the auto-hiding thing.
John:
There's an auto-hide region and a bunch of invisible windows sized and shape a certain size that when your mouse enters them, the thing slides out.
John:
All that stuff, like being able to have a low-level API to make invisible windows and to take events that happen in those invisible windows, like to sort of intercept low-level events that happen in those invisible windows and chuck those events to a different responder chain and have it be as if you had clicked on the button in a whole different thing.
John:
SwiftUI has no facility to do that.
John:
SwiftUI doesn't let you take controls and let them span multiple windows.
John:
It's just like...
John:
That that plumbing is obviously under their sort of events tracking and everything, but you don't have access to that plumbing or at least you don't in any sort of, you know, reasonable way.
John:
Whereas AppKit is based on that plumbing.
John:
Everything you do in AppKit is like that.
John:
The AppKit has fundamental, you know, major building blocks that are all about capturing, you know, NS event, capturing event, the responder chain.
John:
instantiating windows styling those windows moving them around like that is how app kit is built and that is not how swift ui is built so using app kit
John:
to run a big swift ui view with a bunch of app kit crap around it i can do that because of the interoperability but if you took away app kit my app just doesn't work anymore right or it's worse like oh sorry you can't do that because swift ui can't you know take events from one window and chuck them into another in fact we don't have events at all you just have to tell me some state that's changing and then you know it's like i i do worry that they'll sort of get to the 90 solution
John:
Where normal regular apps, even the ones that let you option click on menu bar icons, those you can do in SwiftUI.
John:
But if you want to do something a little bit outside that, tough luck.
John:
We don't want your apps on the Mac anymore.
John:
Kind of like it is on iOS.
John:
Not to slam iOS here, but there's a whole bunch of apps that are possible on the Mac that are not possible on iOS.
John:
Because Apple's decided we don't want that kind of app on our phones, right?
John:
Sometimes it's for good reasons, but sometimes it's just like, oh, we don't want that.
John:
Like system extension type applications or applications that...
John:
you know jailbreak type applications to put a little floating thing on your screen like apple's accessibility controls why can't a third-party app do that no that's not something we want in the same way that for a long time apple didn't want third-party keyboards on the phone so it's not like this we don't progress in that area but i do worry that the switch to swift ui five ten years from now will further narrow the types of applications that are possible on the mac and that will be sad for me
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Memberful, Green Chef, and Trade Coffee.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
We will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arman, S-I-R-A-C, USA Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Tech podcast so long.
John:
So you know my deal with my Microsoft mouse where it wasn't working and I bought a backup one and I got my old one replaced or whatever.
Casey:
Do you have more mice or more keyboards or more cheese graters?
Casey:
I'm assuming cheese graters?
John:
Cheese graters, for sure.
John:
this mouse though goodness like i like this mouse but i have two of them now and both of them have something wrong with them that annoys me and i don't know what to do about it i don't think i can keep buying this like 99 mouse but it annoys me right so i can't at this point i don't even i can't even keep track of which is the one that was replaced and which is the one that i bought brand new as a backup but it doesn't really matter one of them the uh the scroll wheel
John:
which used to be dead silent, now it goes, like, you know, starts making noise.
John:
Some scrolls always make noise, but this one isn't supposed to make noise.
John:
One of the things I liked about it was they're very smooth and very quiet and now it makes noise.
John:
So that's one mouse's problem.
John:
And, you know, it's like, all right, well, why don't you just use the other one?
John:
The other mouse, boy, it does this thing.
John:
Here, I'll put a link in the chat.
John:
This is obviously massively amplified for you to get this noise, but it is the weirdest thing ever.
John:
And I think this is the brand new one.
John:
I can't be entirely sure.
John:
So play that and you can listen to it.
John:
So this sound that hopefully Marco just put into the show so you could hear it, here's what it is.
John:
I have a keyboard tray.
John:
It's actually a metal keyboard tray.
John:
It's very sturdy.
John:
And the mouse is on the right side of the keyboard tray on a mouse pad, right?
John:
When I type on the keyboard, or when I tap my fingers on the keyboard tray, but obviously the way I encounter it is when I type on the keyboard,
John:
Every time I hit a keystroke, yes, there is the sound of the keystroke.
John:
Thump, you know, my finger hitting the keyboard, right?
John:
The keyboard that came with my Mac Pro, right?
John:
But also, something inside my mouse rattles.
John:
So the audio you heard, that low frequency thump, that is my finger pressing on the keyboard tray.
John:
That's the low frequency.
John:
Every other frequency you hear, that high-pitched rattle thing, that's coming from my mouse.
John:
With every single keystroke, that mouse makes like a death rattle.
John:
And it's driving me up a wall.
John:
It's like having key clicks on your phone, right?
John:
So these are my choices.
John:
Noisy scroll wheel.
John:
So every time I scroll, it's...
John:
Or every time I type, something inside the mouse rattles.
John:
And I spent so long trying to figure out what the deal with this thing was.
John:
Here's what I finally tracked it down to, which doesn't really help me much.
John:
I can eliminate the sound by unplugging that mouse from the USB cable.
John:
so it's not like a physical like rattle it's it is but i think it's a physical rattle having to do with the connector you know what i mean like the connector is loose or something oh my god so if i unplug it from the usb cable no noise but i need it to be plugged into the usb table one because i want a wired mouse and two because the bluetooth in these things is terrible and it's incredibly jumpy and the bluetooth my mac is too far away from whatever so i need it to be plugged in i can't it's not an optional thing it's the whole one of the reasons i like this mouse is it has a nice cord and a tiny little connector and everything like
John:
it's a wired mouse i have a desktop computer it's a wired mask no you know no interference perfect responsiveness wired mouse great but it makes that terrible noise so i have two i keep swapping back and forth i'm like which noise is annoying me more and now i don't know what to do because this is the mouse that i like after trying tons and tons of different mice i don't want to buy a third one what's going to be wrong with the third one i did look up youtube videos of how to crack these things open
John:
Cause I'm like, if something's rattling there, I'll find it.
John:
You know, I'll shove a piece of gum in there or whatever.
John:
I'll like, I'll find the rattle and I'll fix it.
John:
But like, it's a bunch of plastic clips.
John:
It doesn't look like it's easy to open.
John:
I haven't gotten to the point where I've torn the thing open, but I'm getting real close.
John:
So I just wanted to update everybody though.
John:
And our situation is pretty grim over here to mice, both of which make annoying noises.
John:
And I don't know what to do.
Casey:
I'm so sorry, John.
Casey:
That is very sad.
Casey:
If you'll permit me, I'd like to do a brief public service announcement that is going to be slightly relevant for people who do not live in Verizon land, but is mostly for people who live in the United States, particularly people who can have Verizon Fios, which I know is a vanishingly small amount of people.
Casey:
So I went to AT&T from Verizon when the iPhone, not when it first came out, but when the 3GS was new.
Casey:
Um, we ported our numbers, which at the time was a very odd thing to do in America.
Casey:
Like it was just starting to become popular.
Casey:
And we ported our numbers from Verizon to AT&T so we could get, so I could get an iPhone and Aaron had some sort of ridiculous phone and then quickly got an iPhone thereafter.
Casey:
Um, and that was in like 2008 or thereabouts.
Casey:
And we've been on AT&T, uh, for years and years and years ever since.
Casey:
Uh, we were, we were on a grandfathered plan where we still had metered data.
Casey:
So we had a limit to how much data we could use in a month.
Casey:
But it rolled over from month to month, like minutes used to do back in the day with how much time you spent on the phone.
Casey:
You would get like 100 minutes or whatever, and then if you didn't use them all, maybe your minutes would roll over.
Casey:
Our data rolled over.
Casey:
However, because it was a grandfathered plan, they refused to give us 5G access.
Casey:
Then out of the blue, and supposedly they told us this was coming, although I don't think they did, out of the blue they raised our prices by $12 a month.
Casey:
basically as a stick to get us off of the grandfathered old plans and get us on their new fancy unlimited plans.
Casey:
Cool.
Casey:
And I'd already been contemplating switching to Verizon, switching back to Verizon for a couple of reasons.
Casey:
First of all, I'd like 5G access.
Casey:
Second of all, I'd like that super sweet millimeter wave or whatever it's called, super high speed access, which we'll talk about a little bit more and will be interesting for those of you who don't live in America.
Casey:
And I really thought I could save money.
Casey:
And so I'd been getting physical mailings over the last few months that, hey, you're a Fios customer.
Casey:
This is Verizon's internet service and cable service.
Casey:
You're a Fios customer.
Casey:
If you jump your cellular to Verizon Wireless, you can legitimately save $30 a month.
Casey:
if you bring your cell phone stuff over to Fios.
Casey:
Like it's $20, I think it's $10 or $20 by default if you have a gigabit internet, which I do.
Casey:
And then there's like a bonus right now of an additional $20 a month.
Casey:
So I am saving, and I just received my first Fios bill since this happened.
Casey:
I'm saving 40 bucks a month by having Verizon Wireless and Verizon Pios, which is super cool.
Casey:
The other interesting thing is some of their packages that they have now include Disney Plus, which I was paying for separately for like eight bucks a month or whatever it is.
Casey:
And what they don't really make clear on the website is that you can mix and match their different unlimited plans.
Casey:
And so there's the plan that has Disney Plus and also has Hulu and ESPN Plus and Apple Arcade, which I'm already paying for separately.
Casey:
But I wasn't getting Hulu or ESPN Plus, so now I get that, which is kind of cool.
Casey:
But they also have a different plan that doesn't have all the entertainment stuff, but you get half off on a watch or a tablet or what have you.
Casey:
And if you remember, I whined and moaned for like six years about how I was paying for my Apple Watch, like $15 a month because of fees and taxes and so on and so forth.
Casey:
Well, because I don't really run anymore, I thought, well, I don't really need my Apple Watch to have service.
Casey:
But my iPad, it would be cool if that had service.
Casey:
And so I'm getting that for only like $10 a month, I think, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
So all told, I am once the initial bill where they absolutely fleece you with connection fees and activation fees and so on and so forth.
Casey:
I'm going to be saving a whole pile of money.
Casey:
And then if you do it right now, they're giving you $500 gift cards per phone that you bring if you bring your own phone.
Casey:
So hypothetically, I'm getting $1,000 of Verizon gift cards that I can use for my service.
Casey:
So I'm getting like a year of service for free.
John:
We are sponsored this week by Verizon Wireless.
Casey:
Right?
Casey:
I'm saying.
John:
This is like that keynote thing where you two are all angry because they kept saying Verizon.
Marco:
Verizon 5G.
Casey:
Verizon 5G.
Casey:
Apparently it worked, man, because I'm saving a pile of money and I'm super excited about it.
Marco:
Did you save it extra quickly thanks to Verizon's new 5G ultra-fast wireless network?
Well...
Casey:
It's funny you bring that up because there are... So I've looked into a little bit what this millimeter wave thing is that they did talk about, I think, that same year that you're referring to.
Casey:
Mmm, wave.
Casey:
Yeah, that's going to be the new name.
Casey:
I wish you hadn't said that because now I cannot unhear it.
Casey:
So as it turns out, don't be creepy, there's what appears to be a couple of mmm wave towers in downtown Richmond.
Casey:
One of the places that I would occasionally park my body, which happens to be a park...
Casey:
Poor choice of words there.
Casey:
But one of the places I would go to work that was not my home is a park that is within eyeshot of the mmmwave-enabled tower.
Casey:
And one of the things about mmmwave is that you really don't get mmmwave service unless you can literally see the tower from where you're standing.
Casey:
Well, with all that said...
Casey:
Because I'm a nerd and I have too much time on my hands, I decided to go before I even tried working there.
Casey:
I tried to go to the wave tower and do a speed test just to see, OK, is this really as fast as people say?
Casey:
And I'm not going to be able to dig up the link.
Casey:
But like when Gruber reviewed what was the iPhone 12, maybe maybe it's the 13.
Casey:
He found an wave tower in Philly and he said, no, really, it's bananas fast.
Casey:
I've done two different tests against this tower, once when I was legitimately working and once when I just drove there because I'm a nerd.
Casey:
Both of these tests, I was getting over two gigabits down.
Casey:
My fiber optic cable going to my house, a physical cable going to my house, tops out at about 1,000 megabits per second.
Casey:
I'm looking at my speed test results, 2,086 megabits per second from the freaking air.
Casey:
How amazing is that?
Casey:
That is bananas.
Casey:
If I really want to download something, leaving aside the fact that there is eventually a cap on how much data I get, despite it being called unlimited, I could probably do that faster through my telephone in a park outside of Richmond than I could at my house with a gigabit Fios connection.
Casey:
How bananas is that?
Casey:
And by the way, the upstream is 200 megabits per second.
Casey:
But nevertheless...
Casey:
How bananas is that?
Casey:
That is so freaking cool.
Casey:
Now, granted, there are about three spaces in the greater Bridgman area where this works, but if you're willing to drive to one of those three spaces, I just think that is freaking amazing.
Casey:
That being said, despite all that, they limit you to 720p streaming because reasons.